In my previous post about the Combatants for Peace speaking tour, (”A lot of dismay, a little bit of hope, and two great guys”) I mentioned that the Israeli combatant, Elik Elhanan, had lost his sister, Smadar, in a suicide bombing. Elik’s mother, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, has written an enormously moving piece for The Electronic Intifada on the death of Abir Aramin, daughter of her son’s colleague Bassam.
I had said in my post that it didn’t matter whether a bullet fired by Israelis or a rock thrown by Palestinian kids killed Abir: the ultimate cause of her death was the Occupation. In some sense that is true, but Peled-Elhanan makes the point that Israelis do not go to jail for killing Palestinian children. At least, she says, the Palestinian killer of her daughter blew himself up too — and if he hadn’t, he most certainly would have been imprisoned, if not killed, by the Israelis. Justice should be done. To mete out punishment to the perpetrator is to acknowledge the seriousness of the crime, and killling Palestinian children is generally not a crime in Israel: it is all too often simply “collatoral damage.” Says Peled-Elhanan, “The soldier who killed Abir is probably drinking beer, playing backgammon with his mates and going to discotheques at night. Abir is in a grave.”
Of course none of this will bring Abir — or Smadar — back. I say this as a mother who has lost a child: my younger son Gil died in his 30’s of cancer. He was not a victim of violence, and I cannot imagine what it must be like to live with the terrible added burden of the moral and political ramifications of your children’s deaths. But a loss is a loss is a loss, and I can only say to these other mothers — to Nurit and to Abir’s mother Salwa — I DO know about your grief. I DO know what it is like to live with the “if onlys,” the “what ifs,” the business of a young life left unfinished. There are far too many of you, Israeli and Palestinian parents alike, who are living with that grief.
But there is this: almost none of the Palestinian children who have died because of the Occupation are considered newsworthy enough (in America, at least) to be anything more than part of an occasional statistic. “Three children killed..” “A young boy died after…” “Seven children were killed when…” They are nameless numbers at best. Bassam’s role as a Combatant for Peace gave his daughter a place in the news that very few other Palestinian children have had. She has a name. Abir. Abir Aramin.
I will be saying kaddish next week on the 7th anniversary of my son’s death. I will say it also for Smadar, and for Abir.
There is something very moving about the Kaddish prayer. It offers a blessing to God and an affirmation of oneness (I choose to read it as the oneness of all people) with no specific mention of death. It’s a call to return our gazes and our voices to the world of the living.
Saying Kaddish reminds me to care even when it’s painful and to act even when action seems hopeless.
Its wonderful that you are saying Kaddish for Smadar. It makes me think that it would be a worthy project to collect the names of Palestinians and Israelis killed each month, and say Kaddish for them all.