hands of terrorists.
“The Israelis were soldiers before they were athletes,” noted Abu Daoud, the architect of the Munich massacre in 1972. “Joseph Romano, the weightlifting champion, participated in the Six-Day War in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.” Soldiers before they were athletes; soldiers before workers; soldiers before scholars of the Talmud; soldiers before craftsmen; soldiers before husbands, brothers, sons. At the funeral of Afik Zahavi-Ohayon, a child who was killed by a rocket, the former Russian dissident Natan Sharansky said, “You must have dreamed of being a hero; you must have dreamed of being a soldier. Here every child becomes a soldier, and the entire country is a front. You fell as a soldier.” Those who have fallen are Israel’s human shield.
Corporal Ronald Berer had arrived from Russia fourteen years before he was killed. His mother didn’t want to see him in uniform; she was afraid. He told her, “Mom, they’re killing women and children. Someone has to protect them. If I don’t do it, who will?” That’s what almost all the soldiers say. Benaya Rein’s mother recalled of her son, “The last time he said goodbye, I said ‘Be careful,’ and he replied, ‘You and Dad have taught me to give everything. But you have to know that sometimes everything really does mean everything.’”
The truth about the broken destinies of these Jewish martyrs is reincarnated in the combination of a name and a place, in a life that continues on the ashes and embers of suffering, in the recollections of the parents and siblings and spouses that I have gathered and presented in these pages. Telling the victims’ stories as one indissoluble chain has been, for me, the only way to keep them from slipping away. Reading these stories is an act of solidarity against the abandonment and dereliction of these thousands of victims, young and old, children and infants, women and men. They were coming from work or from school, going to the cinema or shopping when they passed into the next world, pulverized by an explosion. They were Jews whose only crime was that of “living ordinary lives in an extraordinary country,” in the words of the friends of Motti Hershko and his son Tom, militants of the pacifist left who were blown up on a bus in Haifa.
Gadi Rajwan was an Iraqi Jew who employed seventy Arabs and came from a prominent family known in Jerusalem for its wealth and generosity. He went to the factory every day at six o’clock in the morning and was well liked by his employees. Gadi didn’t even have time to look up before being shot in the face by a young Palestinian who had worked there for three years. At the funeral, Gadi’s father, Alfred, kept shaking his head: “How could it have happened to us, to us who have always worked to do so much for everyone?”
Jamil Ka’adan, an Arab who taught Hebrew and worked as a supervisor in the Arab schools, was blown up in Hadera. “He had never believed in violence. He was a man of peace, and I’m not just saying that because he’s gone,” one friend said. Shimon Mizrachi and Eli Wasserman were killed in an industrial area where many Palestinians worked. Mizrachi’s daughter said that “he helped all the workers; he loved to build and create things.” Every morning he met with his Arab employees. Shimon’s wife recalled that “he had a special relationship with the workers.
He believed in coexistence, and he liked to help people.” His dream was to open a kitchen for the needy.
For a parable of Israel’s condition in the Middle East, you can look to the exchange of one innocent boy, Gilad Shalit, an inexperienced Israeli army corporal held in cruel confinement by a gang of thugs, with 1,400 Palestinian prisoners condemned by the most rigorous processes of justice. Among them were at least a hundred life convicts, murderers, serial killers of women and children. Israel, so small and abandoned to itself, is deeply united around the value of life.
Until now, there was not one book devoted to Israel’s dead. This book is written without any prejudice against the Palestinians; it is motivated by love for a great people in its marvelous and tragic adventure in the heart of the Middle East, and through the whole twentieth century. Every project to exterminate an entire class of human beings, from Srebrenica to Rwanda, has been commemorated in grand fashion; but this does not seem to be allowed for Israel. Throughout its history, a quick scrub has always been made of the blood of the Jews killed because they were Jews. Their stories have been swallowed up in the amoral equivalence between Israelis and Palestinians, which explains nothing about that conflict and even blurs it to the point of vanishing. This book is intended to rescue from oblivion an immense reservoir of suffering, to elicit respect for the dead and love for the living.
Every day in Israel there are memorials for victims of terrorism. It wasn’t possible to tell about all of them. Many families, like the Rons of Haifa or the Zargaris of Jerusalem, enclosed themselves in a dignified silence. In four years of research, the most beautiful gift was given to me by the Israelis who opened their ravaged world and laid bare their sufferings to me, a stranger, a non-Jew, a foreigner. They shook my hand and spoke about their loved ones—the families of Gavish, Shabo, Hatuel, Dickstein, Schijveschuurder, Ben-Shalom, Nehmad, Apter, Ohayon, Zer-Aviv, Almog, Roth, Avichail, and others. I wanted to tell some of the great Israeli stories full of idealism, suffering, sacrifice, chance, love, fear, faith, freedom, and the hope that Israel will triumph in the end.
Lipa lost his entire family in the gas chambers, and then lost a son and granddaughter in terrorist attacks. The English-man Steve, after saying goodbye to his wife, learned to live in a wheelchair along with his daughter, and then built a family larger than before. David lost everything, his wife and four little daughters, and is still heroically able to reveal what it means to be Jewish. There is something contagious about his compassion. After the death of his son, Yossi kept his memory with the wisdom of the psalmist. There is a woman, the wonderful Adriana Katz, who heals civilian victims at the most heavily bombed place in the world, Sderot.
Also among the survivors are the doctors who worked beside Dr. Applebaum, who lived with a defibrillator under his bed, and was killed together with his daughter the day before she was to be married. Arnold, the living testament of two families decimated in the concentration camps, lost his daughter in a restaurant bombing and has honored her memory through acts of “true kindness.” There are incredible people like the obstetrician Tzofia, who lost her father, a rabbi, her mother and her little brother, but today helps Arab women give birth. There’s Ron, whose grandfather escaped from the Nazis and whose daughter was killed on a bus. There’s Yitro, a Torah copyist who converted to Judaism and whose son was kidnapped and executed by Hamas. There are the farming settlers Elisheva and Yehuda, whose family had been lost in Auschwitz, and whose daughter Yael was killed by remorseless terrorists simply because “she wanted to live the Jewish ideal.”
Many victims were settlers, the “colonists,” people who pay a very high price for that kind of life—from political antagonism to an extremely intense relationship with death, but above all a pervasive solitude. The settlements endured hundreds of deaths during the Second Intifada, with the days full of fear, the nights spent standing guard in the isolated houses, the sudden massacres of families, infants and unborn babies, the drives through darkened streets in helmets and bulletproof vests, which offer little protection. The settlers’ lives are simple, faithful, centered on lots of children. Their story is a tragic embrace of religion, compassion, toughness, honor, and fanaticism.
“When ‘settlers’ were killed, it was intolerable to read in the newspapers, stuck in a corner of the page: ‘Settler woman killed,’ or worse, ‘Settler child strangled,’ as if the twofold stigma of Jew and settler made the murder understandable, justified it and dismissed it from our attention,” wrote Claude Lanzmann, the director of the monumental film Shoah. “When the ‘martyrs’ blew themselves up, practically every day and several times a day in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya, Haifa, in the nightclubs, in the markets, on the buses, in the wedding halls and in the synagogues, the event rapidly became routine. This time, it was not the ‘settlers’ who were being attacked, but all of Israel. All of Israel had become a ‘settlement,’
