some are heroes, the Jewish victims are almost always defenseless people. Massoud Mahlouf Allon was an observant Jewish immigrant from Morocco. He was mutilated, bludgeoned and beaten to death while giving poor Palestinians the blankets he had collected from Israelis. The disabled Simcha Arnad was blown up in the seat of his motorized wheelchair in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market. Nissan Cohen was a teenager when he fled from Afghanistan. His neighbors called him “a saint,” noting that “When he heard that people had died in an attack, he wept. He visited the sick and prayed for them.” Nissan opened the synagogue in the morning, and in the evening he went back to turn off the lights. During the daytime he helped handicapped children, and at night he studied the Gemara, the commentary on the Law. A bomb killed him at the entrance to the Mahane Yehuda market.
“The great majority of victims are poor or close to the poverty threshold,” explains Yehuda Poch. “Generally they are people who use the bus instead of a car, they shop at the market instead of the supermarket, and they live here in the poorer neighborhoods or downtown instead of in the nicer suburbs.” Poch works with the One Family Fund, the association that for years has taken care of the victims of terrorism.
The stories of these martyrs speak of something that does not emerge from the brutal statistics on the numbers of victims. The International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, the most important center for analysis in Israel, has calculated that only 25 percent of the Israeli victims have been soldiers; the majority have been Jews in civilian dress. Europeans believe that Israel is the stronger side in the conflict, with the military, the technology, the money, the knowledge base, the capacity to use force, the friendship and alliance with the United States—and that before it stands a pitifully weak people claiming its rights and ready for martyrdom in order to obtain them. But the stories of these victims prove otherwise.
And still, the Israelis have shown that they love life more than they fear death. The buses circulate even if they leave burned carcasses here and there, and the stops are always crowded. The supermarkets stay open. Every time a bomb explodes, the signs of the blast are quickly removed; windows are repaired; bullet holes are patched. The places that were blown up reopen after two days. The terrorists of the “road without glory,” as the Jew and French Resistance member Bernard Fall called it, have killed hundreds of teachers and students, but the schools have never closed. They have killed doctors, but the hospitals have continued to function. They have massacred 452 uniformed Israeli soldiers and policemen, but the list of those who volunteer has never shrunk. They have shot up buses of faithful, but the pilgrims continue to arrive in Judea and Samaria. They have committed massacres at weddings and forced young people to wed in underground bunkers, but life has always won over death. When a terrorist began to shoot and throw grenades into the crowd at Irit Rahamin’s bachelorette party at the Sea Market restaurant in Tel Aviv, Irit threw herself to the ground, and from under the table called her fiancé and told him that she loved him—amid the screams and the dying.
The Jewish martyrs are common people with an identity that exposes them to the slaughter of many centuries. It is a story inhabited by people whose names have been lost or forgotten, as if there were nothing left of all those lives. Every time I encountered difficulty in telling their stories, I remembered the wonderful “iron mama” Faina Dorfman, whose grandfather, a rabbi, was burned by the Nazis in Russia. She lost her only daughter in a nightclub in Tel Aviv, but continues to believe in the Jewish saying Yihye besseder, “Everything will turn out well.” She thanked me for “bringing the truth to the world.” For me, pronouncing the names of Israel’s martyrs was an act of piety—accompanying them to the end, dying with them, so that they remain among us.
The Beginning
There is no difference between the terrorism that kills Jews in Israel and the terrorism that strikes them abroad. In Rome, in 1982, the little boy Stefano Tachè was murdered by Palestinian terrorists. In Entebbe, in 1976, the Jews were selected on the basis of the names on their passports. On the ship Achille Lauro, in 1985, an American Jew in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, was picked from among all the other passengers and thrown into the ocean by Palestinian terrorists. In 1980, in Nairobi, a bomb devastated the Israeli-owned Norfolk Hotel, killing fifteen people. Five years later, in Sinai, an Egyptian policeman fired wildly on a group of Israeli tourists, killing seven of them, four of whom were children. Then there were the attacks on the airports in Rome and Vienna, with more than twenty killed. In 1986, in Istanbul, twenty-two faithful were killed in the Neveh Shalom synagogue. Between 1992 and 1994 in Buenos Aires, more than one hundred died in the Jewish schools. In Mombasa, in 2002, at a hotel used by Israeli tourists, guests were killed by a bomb in the hall. That same year, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the ancient Tunisian synagogue of Djerba. And the list continues with the barbaric killing of Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, in her fifth month of pregnancy, in Mumbai in December 2008.
Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew who worked at a cell phone shop, was kidnapped in 2006 in the heart of Paris and taken to a suburb where he was tortured and murdered. The neighbors heard him screaming, but no one intervened to stop the slow execution. The den where Ilan was held hostage resembled a “homemade concentration camp.” Until the trial, the French government pretended that nothing serious had happened. Almost thirty people participated in the torture of Ilan, who was seized in plain sight, passed from one tormentor to another, starved and then given nourishment, and killed slowly, over a period of three weeks. The killers, young Muslims from the banlieues, stabbed him, broke his fingers, burned him with acid, and finally set him on fire. Ilan did not wear a long black robe, or the ritual tassels, or even the kippah. The name he bore was enough for Ilan Halimi to be a marked man. It was the most serious episode of anti-Semitism in France since the Second World War.
Thousands of French Jews vanished in Nazi death camps with hardly a murmur of protest from their Christian country-men. Sixty years later, the chief rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, advises Jews not to wear yarmulkes in the streets due to rampant anti-Semitism. It’s the same in Norway, where Jews are advised not to speak Hebrew too loudly on the streets. For the first time since the war, French Jews are afraid. Shmuel Trigano, professor of sociology at the University of Paris, has openly questioned whether there is a future for Jews in France. Sébastien Sellam, a young disc jockey at a Parisian nightclub, was killed in 2003 in an underground parking lot by a Muslim neighbor, who slit his throat twice and mutilated his face with a fork, even gouging out his eyes. The assailant announced to Sellam’s horrified mother, “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven.”
Anti-Semitism—and not only in the guise of anti-Zionism—is in vogue again at European universities, in labor unions, in newspapers, among the political and cultural elite. Shouts of “Death to Jews” have filled the streets, and the crocodile tears spilled for Jews killed during the Holocaust make it much easier to demonize the living ones in Israel. The Dutch leftist parliamentarian Harry van Bommel attended a demonstration in Amsterdam where Muslims shouted, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!” Anti-Semitism in the Netherlands is stronger today than it has been during any other time in the last two centuries except for the Nazi occupation. The percentage of Germans who hold unfavorable opinions of Jews has climbed from 20 percent in 2004 to 25 percent today. In France, which has the third-largest Jewish population in the world, after Israel and the United States, 20 percent of people view Jews unfavorably—up from 11 percent four years ago. In Spain, where all Jews were expelled in 1492 and synagogues are historic monuments, the figures are even more striking: negative views of Jews climbed from 21 percent in 2005 to nearly 50 percent this year. January 2009 was the most intense period of anti-Semitic attacks to have been recorded in Britain in decades. Anti-Semitism in Western Europe in 2009 was the worst since World War II, according to the Jewish Agency. In recent years, there have been thousands of attacks specifically aimed at Jewish targets outside Israel, and the attack on the United States has been connected by the terrorists to the war against the Jews. The Israeli national
