YITZHAK
It was July 7, 1994 when the body of 19-year-old Arik Frankenthal, an IDF soldier and Orthodox Jew, was found dumped in a village near Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the Central West Bank. His body was riddled with bullets and stab wounds. While hitchhiking home on leave Arik had been kidnapped and murdered by Hamas. Arik was the eldest son of Yitzhak Frankenthal.
Most expected Yitzhak, a self proclaimed religious Israeli Zionist, to seek revenge, to extract retribution, to make the murderers pay. It was the way of the Zionists.
Instead, Yitzhak pored over decades of old newspapers, searching for the names of other Israeli parents whose children had been killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1995 he brought these bereaved Israeli families to Gaza to meet with their grieving Palestinian counterparts.
From this initial meeting the Parents Circle – Families Forum was born. The only requirement is to have lost a loved one in combat or in an act of terror.
All are welcome, even if the one lost was a suicide bomber. This unprecedented openness is not always accepted by outsiders. Yitzhak is used to being called a traitor.
But, as he says, “My son was not murdered because he was Jewish but because he was part of the nation that occupies the territory of another.”
“Arik’s killer was born into an appalling occupation, into an ethical chaos. Had I myself been born into the political and ethical chaos that is the Palestinians’ daily reality, I would certainly have tried to kill and hurt the occupier; had I not, I would have betrayed my essence as a free man.“
But Yitzhak is quick to add that we must “be free of vengefulness and rashness. It is unethical to kill innocent Israeli or Palestinian women and children. If to hit Arik’s killers, innocent Palestinian children and other civilians would have to be killed, I would ask the security forces to wait. For them to kill innocent Palestinians, they would be no better than my son’s killers.”
RAMI
Rami Elhanan, son of an Auschwitz survivor, felt it his duty to defend his country. And so, in 1973, on the eve of Yom Kippur, he found himself immersed in a war more horrifying than anything he could have ever imagined. He emerged from that war a beaten and battered young man.
Angry and cynical, he divorced himself from all things political and renounced Zionism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
The disillusioned Rami became a dedicated pacifist like his father-in-law, the revered General Matti Peled, hero in Israel’s war of independence and the Six Day War, who now disavowed the Israeli occupation of Palestine and supported an independent Palestinian state.
Rami readily admits he and his family were living in “a bubble, completely detached from the outside world.”
That bubble burst on September 24, 1997 when Youssef Shouli, Bashar Sawalha and Tawfig Yassine, blew themselves up on Ben Yehuda Street in the center of Jerusalem. They killed five people that day. One was 14 year old Smadar, daughter of Rami Elhanan, granddaughter of Peled.
But, like his father-in-law, Rami knew the futility of revenge. As he puts it, “…and the dead one, naturally, has an uncle or a brother or a cousin or a wife who wants to kill you back and then you want to kill them back again, another ten times over. Revenge. It’s the simplest way. And then you get monuments to that revenge, with mourners’ tents, songs, placards on the walls, another riot, another checkpoint, another piece of land stolen. A stone leads to a bullet. And another suicide bomber leads to another air strike. And it goes on and on. And on.”
It was not long before Rami met Yitzchak Frankenthal, who invited him to a Parents Circle meeting.
Rami now readily admits, “I’m ashamed to admit it, (that first Parents Circle meeting) was the first time ever in my life I’ve met Palestinians as human beings, not as workers on the streets, not as terrorists, not as bad people, but as human beings who carry the same burden that I carry, who suffer exactly like I suffer.”
“In a very gradual, complicated way (I) came over to the other side: (I) started asking what happened to her, and why? It’s difficult, it’s frightening, it’s exhausting. How could such a thing take place? What could cause someone to be that angry, that mad, that desperate, that hopeless, that stupid, that pathetic, that he is willing to blow himself up alongside a girl, not even fourteen years old? How can you possibly understand that instinct? To tear his own body apart? To walk down a busy street and pull the cord on a belt that rips him asunder? How can he think that way? What made him? Where in the world was he created? How did he get that way? Where did he come from? Who taught him this? Did I teach him this? Did his government teach him this? Did my government?”
“I know it will not be over until we talk to each other. Joining with others saved my life. We cannot imagine the harm we’re doing by not listening to one another. I mean this on every level. It is immeasurable. We may have built up our wall, but the wall is really in our minds, and every day I try to put a crack in it.“
BASSAM
At 17 Bassam Aramin was an idealistic rebel, clandestinely flying the Palestinian flag and throwing rocks at IDF soldiers.
Once during a demonstration he had seen a Palestinian boy shot dead by IDF forces. “The boy’s arms went up in the sky, he took his last breath, he keeled over a few yards from me. From that moment on I developed a deep need for revenge. Except I didn’t think of it then as revenge, I thought of it as justice, for a long time they were the same thing to me, justice and revenge.”
One day Bassam came upon a small cache of hand grenades. He later surmised they must have been planted for him to find since they were all duds. He had no way of knowing this and one day he threw one at an IDF jeep. No one was hurt but Bassam was captured and sentenced to 7 years in prison.
While in prison he and the other prisoners were routinely stripped naked and beaten by guards and IDF soldiers. It seemed to him it was like a training exercise for the IDF soldiers; to learn to beat them void of all emotion, with no empathy, no compassion. Like dogs, or worse.
“As I was being beaten, I remembered a movie I’d seen the year before about the Holocaust. At the time I’d been happy that Hitler had killed six million Jews. I remember wishing that he’d killed them all, because then I would never have been sent to prison. But some minutes into the movie, I found myself crying and feeling angry that the Jews were being herded into gas chambers without fighting back. If they knew they were going to die, why didn’t they scream out? It was the first time I felt empathy.“
Bassam decided to try to understand who these people really were, how they suffered, and why it was that in 1948 they had turned their oppression back on the Palestinian people again and again, stealing their houses, taking their land, giving them their Nakba, their catastrophe. The Palestinians became the victims of the victims. He wanted to understand more. Where was all this coming from?
Bassam began to pick up a few words of Hebrew, even Yiddish. One day he had a conversation with a guard who explained how the Palestinians were settlers on his land, not him on theirs. He truly believed the Palestinians were the settlers, that they had stolen land that rightly belonged to Israel.
It was the start of a dialogue and a friendship. From then on Bassam was treated with respect.
Eventually Bassam was released from prison and in 2005 he and three other Palestinians began meeting in secret with former Israeli soldiers. For Bassam these were criminals, killers, enemies, assassins. And for the Israelis, Bassam and his compatriots were the same. But they had a common bond; they were tired of fighting and now merely wanted to talk.
At first both sides were selfish and neither really cared about the other. The young Israeli soldiers were refusing to fight in the West Bank and Gaza, not for the sake of the Palestinian people, but for the sake of their own people. Likewise, Bassam and his friends were not acting to save Israeli lives, but only to prevent Palestinians from more suffering.
It took more than a year before both sides came to feel a responsibility for each other’s people.
“We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it’s crazy.”
This was the beginning of Combatants for Peace.
One of those Israeli soldiers was Elik Elhanan, Rami Elhanan’s son. This serendipitous meeting was what eventually brought Rami and Bassam together.
Then, on January 16, 2007, two years after Combatants for Peace was founded, Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, walked out from her school early in the morning. She was standing by the school gates, talking to her friends, when she was shot by a member of the Israeli border police. There was no violence or Intifada going on. She was just a random target, shot in the head, a rubber bullet shattering the back of her skull.
At Abir’s funeral Bassam declared he had no place for revenge. He didn’t crave a gun or a grenade. For him, there was no return from nonviolence. Not for a split second.
He joined the Parents Circle just days after Abir was killed.
It was 10 years between Abir and Smadar’s deaths, but Bassam is certain it is the same killer that took the lives of both girls. “It’s the occupation,” he says. ”It’s the hatred. It’s the victimhood mentality on both sides.
“In the end, there is no difference between the victim who killed my daughter and the victim pilot who is bombing civilians in Gaza,” says Bassam. “Killing more and more people only brings more killing. It is our job to tell people to stop.
“Abir’s murder could have led me down the easy path of hatred and vengeance, but for me there was no return from dialogue and non-violence. It was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter, but it was one hundred former Israeli soldiers who built a garden in her name at the school where she was murdered.”
Bassam says. “It’s up to (each of us) to make a choice. Invest in hatred and revenge and suffer again from the sad circumstances. Or look forward to the future and try to use this pain as a power to create more bridges instead of more graves.”
In 2019 Bassam became the Palestinian Co-Director of the Parents Circle – Families Forum, joining his friend, Rami Elhanan, who was the Israeli Co-Director.
Rami says, “We lost sight of our ethics long before the suicide bombings. The breaking point was when we started to control another nation. Let all the self-righteous who speak of ruthless Palestinian murderers take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves what they would have done had they been the ones living under occupation.
“I do not mean to absolve the Palestinians and by no means justify attacks against Israeli civilians. No attack against civilians can be condoned. But as an occupation force it is we who trample over human dignity, it is we who crush the liberty of Palestinians and it is we who push an entire nation to crazy acts of despair. ”
Despite the enormous obstacles facing the Parents Circle – Families Forum, Yitzhak, Rami and Bassam are determined to stay the course and somehow stem the cycle of hate.
As Rami says, “These activities give us reason to get out of bed each morning. Since that day, I have dedicated my life to one thing only: to go from ear to ear and from person to person and to shout in a loud voice, to all who are prepared to listen, and also to those whose ears are blocked: This is not our destiny! It is not a decree of fate that cannot be changed!!!
Nowhere is it written that we must continue dying and sacrificing our children forever and ever in this difficult horrible holy land. We can –and once and for all must – stop this crazy vicious circle of violence, murder and retaliation, revenge and punishment. This never-ending cycle, that has no purpose. With no winners and only losers.”
Bassam, like Rami, says avoiding violence is “the only way.” Because even if all Israelis and Palestinians on Earth were killed, “you will never reach your daughter or your beloved one again.”
“Peace is a fact. A matter of time. Look at South Africa, Northern Ireland, Germany, France, Japan, even Egypt. Who would have believed it possible? Did the Palestinians kill six million Israelis? Did the Israelis kill six million Palestinians? But the Germans killed six million Jews and look, now we have an Israeli diplomat in Berlin and we have a German ambassador in Tel Aviv. You see, nothing is impossible. As long as I am not occupied, as long as I have my rights, so long as you allow me to move around, to vote, to be human, then anything is possible.”
“Today, high walls of fear and hatred separate the two nations. We, in our activities in the forum of bereaved families, with the little remainder of our meager strength are trying to break down this wall, to open and widen cracks in it until it falls.
“We, the bereaved families, together from the depth of our mutual pain, are saying to you today: Our blood is the same red color, our suffering is identical, and all of us have the exact same bitter tears. So, if we, who have paid the highest price possible, can carry on a dialog, then everyone can!
Parents Circle advocates peace and coexistence through the promotion of tolerance, dialogue and compromise. They are a movement that is spearheading social and political alternatives to the cycle of violence that has controlled their land for so long. Their bold aim is to resolve the deadly conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and terminate the senseless loss of human life.
Since that initial meeting in 1995 Parents Circle – Families Forum has grown into an organization of over 500 Israeli and Palestinian families.
For more information go to: https://www.theparentscircle.org/