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COURT proceedings fascinate me. Nearly 40 years ago, as a teenager on
holidays in a Victorian country town, I sat spellbound through the first
day of a murder trial. I walked out convinced of the need to become a
lawyer.
From my home in Jerusalem, I traveled to The Netherlands to take part in a
hearing of a different sort. The two decades I spent practicing law left
me considerably less awestruck by what I saw.
Israel is building a long and expensive security barrier. The UN General
Assembly voted to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The
Hague to consider the legal implications of “illegal Israeli actions”.
I wondered, when I read these words in the court papers, how some of those
UN delegates managed to vote without giggling.
Malki, my daughter, was murdered in a Palestinian terror attack in 2001.
She was 15. Since then, my wife Frimet and I have grown more and more
involved in speaking publicly.
I joined a group of Israelis who, like us, are experiencing murder by
terrorism (the use of the present-continuous tense is appropriate) and
went to The Hague, not to participate in the ICJ hearings, but to speak to
the media scrum that had assembled there.
EVEN before our El Al flight rolls to its gate at Amsterdam’s airport, the
ritual pulling of Israeli mobiles from pockets is in process. Everyone on
board knows within seconds of still more Egged passengers incinerated in
Jerusalem while we have been crossing the Mediterranean.
Our children are safe and well, thank heavens, but eight passengers on
that bus will never reach any destination again. A teenage girl who lived
on our street until her family moved to one of the newer Jerusalem
neighborhoods is among the injured. For Israelis, it’s always close.
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The faces of 927 Israelis murdered in the 30-something months of this
ghastly Arafat war are arranged in no apparent sequence, a tremendous
number of them teenagers, children and infants.
Every one of us climbs onto the dais and begins searching for our child,
our wife, our brother, sister, boyfriend. For some of our group, this
takes a little longer since they need to locate every member of what had
once been a living, loving family.
Avi finds his two little sons and their mother, killed at point-blank
range by a machine-gun-toting “activist” who broke into their kibbutz
home. Rachel takes longer; her husband’s picture is at one end; those of
her only two sons are at the other. Meir needs to find his father, his
mother, his two sisters and his baby brother.
Someone adds eight fresh blank squares to the display. None of us needs to
hear the explanation. A few minutes later, the Israeli ambassador, taking
a call, looks shaken as he announces that his commercial attache has
learned his brother-in-law was killed on that Egged bus.
If you set aside what binds us - the murder of people we loved - our group
is diverse. Most are Jewish, but we include Druze and Christians. We speak
French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Russian and English. We
include managers, professionals, shopkeepers, students, unemployed and a
retired IDF officer (who happens to be a Druze).
I don’t know about our politics because we don’t discuss it. We rarely
speak about the security barrier or our ideas on how peace can prevail.
We’re your idiosyncratic Israeli cross-section, in The Hague to speak
about terrorism and little else. We are united around the idea that no
matter how you try to justify it, there’s no possible argument in favor of
terror — and everything is justified in stopping it.
The media is present in numbers. Most of us have multiple opportunities to
stand in front of cameras and say what we came to say. The questions we’re
asked by the BBC, New York Times, Associated Press, Al-Jazeera and others
tend to be superficial and repetitive. It’s hard to keep track of how
many.
I lost count after my 25th interview. All the members of our delegation
give testimony to a silent, overcrowded hall — an “alternative hearing” of
some three hours, the answer of Israel’s friends to the proceedings across
the way in the Peace Palace.
The demands of being on the front-line of the media’s attention meant we
didn’t come to cry in public. But there were difficult private moments
when the tears forced their way through. I shared breakfast with a woman
whose only child, a beautiful teenager slightly older than my Malki, was
blown apart in a discotheque.
Her quiet dignity and understated manner made her a more eloquent and
powerful speaker, even with her non-native English, than any of the
politicians who elbowed their way onto Dutch TV or into the papers.
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While there’s consensus among Israelis that the security barrier is, on
balance, necessary, criticisms are not hard to find. The internal debate
in Israel, as on most issues, is vigorous.
I found it constructive to mention to journalists that Israeli society on
all levels is sensitive to the problems created by the construction. The
flexibility shown by Israel’s official arms, including its military and
the courts, is not well known outside Israel. They gain Israel few points
in the battle for public opinion. This hurts. Israelis, it seems, are
again being held to a standard that’s neither fair nor logical. |
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IN the week before the hearings, I was interviewed twice by television
journalists at the security barrier. I was taken to Jerusalem’s Abu Dis
neighborhood, close to where a wailing Palestinian Arab woman had been
widely photographed a few days before, her arms reaching skywards, despair
expressed in every element of her body language.
The odd thing was that, standing there, I could see that the security
barrier - a cement wall in that particular location - was unfinished. It
comes to a complete stop some meters away. Far from preventing free
movement, it’s just a line of unaesthetic concrete that blocks out the sun
for home-owners unlucky enough to have it pass close to their properties,
and then it ends.
It locks no-one in; you can walk around it. Precisely where the gates and
cross-overs are to be built is an open issue; the path is under constant
revision. But you’d have a hard time appreciating this from the news
stories and published images.
No-one pretends Israel’s security barrier is a perfect bulwark against
terrorism. To paraphrase Churchill’s comment on democracy, the security
barrier is the worst form of protection - except for those others that
have already been tried. The ICJ proceedings will not produce an answer to
terror, or an end to the deaths of children. No solution to the conflict
will be found in The Hague. But for the first time in a long while, the
voices of the Israeli victims were heard. |
