The profile photos with names and ages neatly printed underneath, the kids who will never grow up, the broken families, the melancholy songs, the hugs.
Another suicide attack in Israel, another memorial service.
I was sickened by what I witnessed today at a memorial service in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood Gilo. I was sickened by how many times the wheels have turned, how many times I have listened to announcements for funerals of eighteen-year-olds on the radio, how many times I have heard about children becoming fatherless, how many times we hear about her unforgettable smile and his kind heart and inspiration to us all.
We live in a sick world; or more precisely, I live in a sick world.
Because I have only been living in Jerusalem for eight months, I am still new to this cycle. I still get upset when I see the images of the mangled buses, the hysterical siblings, the befuddled children, freshly orphaned.
So, naturally, I reacted to the memorial service today in Gilo, which is why I could not write this as a straight news item. It pulls at my heartstrings too much.
I am still trapped in the absurdity of yesterday: waking up to ambulance sirens, then the routine barrage of phone calls from my relatives in Tel Aviv — Jerusalemites don’t call each other anymore unless they know that you take that bus or were going to pick up your dry-cleaning in that mall –, and finally trying to get the news to my mother as gently as possible when she awakes to a peaceful Sunday morning in Montreal.
“You should call your parents,” I said to my boyfriend.
“We don’t do that.”
“What, check that you’re all alive?”
“What, I’m going to call everyone I know every time this happens?”
In a twisted way, he is right.
“Even though we may appear normal to you, like many of the people you see around you here, nothing is the same,” Avi Zana told me at the Gilo ceremony. Avi’s 18-year-old son Ariel was killed by Palestinian terrorists at his school in the Gaza Strip two years ago.
But none of us here are “normal”. As another mourning father pointed out, citizens of no other country have to live in constant fear of not coming home from a routine night out with friends, trip to work, or shopping outing. This includes Palestinians.
Though this ceremony was piqued with politics — the International Court of Justice trial on Israel’s security buffer opens today at The Hague –, it did not discount the skewed suffering we are all subject to, too often.
Israelis largely ignore the suffering on the other side of the fence — the reality that was blatantly obvious from across the sun-drenched hilltop at the edge of Gilo.
The perpetrator of yesterday’s bombing entered the city via the same hilltop from the shabby huts of neighboring Bethlehem. He traveled through an area where Israel’s security buffer has not yet been built. Proof, buffer advocates claim, that it is a life-saving mechanism.
Palestinians endure daily death as well and the disparity in quality of life with our neighbors is striking. I cannot ignore the Palestinian sacrifices of this insane war whenever I look at the faces of Israel’s victims.
I see human beings. Most Israelis see terrorists.
At the ceremony in Israel, I also saw people, though maybe a little bit closer up than the former. Across the wadi in Bethlehem, they see occupiers and murderers.
Our hate blinds us.
While judging the motives behind murder, and perhaps its consequences, is subjective, death is not. It’s painful and final, at least to those of us left on earth.