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Frimet Roth is a New York-born Israeli whose daughter Malki, 15, was murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists in the massacre at the Sbarro restaurant on August 9, 2001.
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By Frimet Roth
August 23, 2005
Thursday is the one day a year I visit my Malki's grave. I cannot bear to see the tombstone and epitaph -- beloved daughter, sister, granddaughter and devoted youth leader -- more often than that. But on the 20th of Av, the anniversary of her death, I will go, read a few chapters of Psalms and say a few words about her to our friends. Then it will be back to the daily struggle: groping for something -- a thought, a diversion, a Torah lesson, a joke, a child's hug -- anything to get me through another day without her.
Right now the struggle is particularly tough. I hear a triumphant Hamas proclaiming to the world that it will press on after the disengagement. They warn me that they will resume, ever more fervently, their bloody efforts to acquire more land -- actually all land -- from Israel. I watch Mahmoud Abbas thanking the "martyrs," including my daughter's murderer, for their role in achieving the disengagement. He has assured his people that he will not relent until Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the right of return are won as well.
But I don't hear a response from my own leaders. I wonder what newspapers they read, which broadcasts they listen to. Can they have missed these promises?
No. They are just otherwise engaged. Their shrill cries of foul play toward the national religious camp drown out everything else. Israeli politicians and columnists are lining up to have a go at the new villains. Every ill under the Israeli sun is now their fault: Palestinian poverty, Israeli poverty, religious coercion, secular indifference to religion, the second intifada, fringe fanaticism. You name it. Genuine Palestinian threats evaporate into thin air.
But there is another reason they don't engage our government's or media's attention. Most Israelis have done such a thorough job of forgetting what terrorism felt like.
This effort to forget has disturbed me almost from the moment my Malki was murdered. I allowed that my personal pain heightened my sensibilities. But in her recent Jerusalem Post column Barbara Sofer, an objective observer, noted the tendency and was as alarmed by it as I've been. "Worried about jinxing future plans or discouraging tourism," she wrote, "we're eager to put the Palestinian violence... behind us... Forgetting is a fearful foe," she cautioned.
I would add another worry behind Israel's amnesia: ramming through more one-sided concessions to a Hamas-dominated people. Memories of murdered Jewish children can thwart any campaign to win public approval for gifts to the Palestinians. Toward that end Prime Minister Ariel Sharon exhorted us, months before the disengagement: "We must forget our pain."
Sharon erred. We must never forget our pain. Any wrenching concessions we make must be done with victims and grief vividly recalled.
Malki suffered through 10 months of Palestinian violence before she perished in the suicide bombing at the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem in 2001. During that period she would note in her diary the details and victims' names in every terror attack the day they occurred. In one entry she explained: "I experience it [the war] on my flesh."
Malki was only 15 when she felt that empathy with her people. If only our elderly decision-makers could demonstrate her maturity. If only they could remember the pain of their people and "experience it on their flesh."
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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