Two fathers co-joined in Parents Circle through common loss

MOIRA SCHNEIDER

Rami’s 14-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers in Jerusalem in1997. Bassam’s 10-year-old daughter, Abir, was killed by an Israeli border policeman in front of her school in East Jerusalem in 2007.

“This was the beginning of a journey,” Rami, a seventh-generation Yerushalmi, reflects of that terrible time. “The bubble that I was living in blew up and I had to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning.”

A year later he was invited to join the Parents Circle. This was a meeting that would change his life. “I was 47 years old and it was the first time ever in my life I have met Palestinians as human beings, not as workers in the streets, not as terrorists, not as transparent people,” he remembers. Today he describes Bassam as “my brother and my light in the darkness.

“This meeting was so powerful and dramatic that it really changed everything. It made me understand that without the ability to talk to each other, it will never stop. The death of my daughter would be just a link in a chain of violence that would never end because every brutal activity brings another brutal activity in an endless cycle of violence.”

Both girls were born and died in the same hospital, on a Thursday afternoon, Bassam notes. “I said it’s the same killer, the same criminal – the hatred that killed our daughters.”

So, instead of descending further into a never-ending cycle of revenge and violence, the two have resolved to direct their pain towards reconciliation between the two sides. “We teach people that you need to wake up before your bubble blows up – we don’t want you to join us,” Bassam says.

They were on a week’s visit to South Africa as part of spreading their message internationally. 

The Parents Circle is a grassroots organisation consisting of around 600 families, each of whom has lost a close family member to the conflict, going back 100 years to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Rami, PCFF co-director, explains: “We deeply believe that without reconciliation between the two sides, any peace agreement will be only a ceasefire. Without reconciliation, we won’t be able to touch the roots of the conflict and we won’t be able to make people understand the narrative and the pain of each other.

“We are not a political organisation. What unites us is our pain, the reason we lost our children and the firm understanding that a basic condition for peace is the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and creating a free and independent Palestinian state,” says Rami.

“We are not a psychological support group, we are not there to hug and kiss each other and eat hummus together. We are there to make a political difference.”

The group’s main educational project for youth, sees them targeting Israeli learners in high schools and Palestinians in their community centres. This involves bereaved parents from both sides telling the youngsters their story. They also explain their choice of non-violent resistance and working together for reconciliation and peace.

“We choose to talk to youth that are pre-army service in Israel or young Palestinian adults. We also talk to young students, young adults on both sides and young adult groups,” says Efrat Tal, director of grants and finance of the organisation, who is accompanying the two men.

The Israeli government allows it. “We are the only organisation of Israelis and Palestinians that are allowed into mainstream Israeli schools to talk and it’s because of the special status of the members of the organisation,” Efrat explains.

The Israeli government also sees the place for the Narrative Project, an adult education project, which tries to get both sides to acknowledge the other side. “Each side sees his own history in his own way – we have a radical disagreement between both sides,” Bassam points out.

This involves bringing together 15 Israelis and 15 Palestinians from the general public, who usually have something in common, such as educators, health professionals, grandmothers or the bereaved, to explore each other’s personal and national narratives. Over 1 000 individuals have been touched in this way since 2010.

“They’re not supposed to agree on a mutual narrative, they’re not supposed to accept each other’s narratives,” explains Efrat. “They’re supposed to learn of each other’s narratives and to acknowledge that there are two narratives on the table when we talk about Palestine and Israel.”

“So, we bring a Palestinian historian and an Israeli historian and they tell the story of their national narratives,” Bassam says. “We bring the whole group to what was a Palestinian village before 1948 and then we visit Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, not to compare, but to understand how each side received his own narrative.”

Bassam adds: “In the end, we can see the result – they want to understand each other, they want to create a kind of third narrative.”

Rami appeals to the South African Jewish community to be more active. “Talking as a Holocaust survivor’s son, I’m saying that ruling, oppressing, humiliating and occupying millions of Palestinians for so many years without any democratic rights is against the very basic values of Judaism and being against it is not anti-Semitism.

“We expect Jews all over the world – but especially here – to stop saying: ‘My country right or wrong’ about Israel and to understand that the Occupation is killing us, it’s ruining the moral fibre of the State of Israel. Every Jew on earth feels that something terrible is happening in Israel and they are afraid to say it.

“Being against it is not a sin, you’re not a traitor, you’re a true Jew. We are all victims of hooligans, of bullies, of criminals – it’s time to stop it.”