At Camp Koby, Israeli kids beat back loss by Sherri Mandell
Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2003
We refuse to let the terrorists win by becoming bitter, angry, hating
people. The writer is the author of Writers of the Holocaust and co-director
of the Koby Mandell Foundation's Healing Retreat, a therapeutic program
for bereaved mothers and widows of families stricken by terror.
I don't know which is worse - when Hollywood ignores us here in Israel
(which has been the case these past two years) or when it supports us.
The problem is that while Israel could use some of Hollywood's expert
image enhancement, Hollywood's tendency to reduce truth to a two-hour
play or movie can lead its practitioners to become instant experts in
negotiating peace in the Middle East.
Eve Ensler, Hollywood's latest Jewish crusader for justice, claims she
came here to "listen and learn," but wasted no time last week
in condemning Israel for the occupation. Ensler, writer of the popular
play The Monologues, brought along Jane Fonda, thus ensuring maximum
publicity.
I haven't seen The Monologues, and the play may well be brilliant.
But because one can write a play does not mean that one can analyze a
difficult and complex political situation.
What I wonder is this: If hers was indeed a trip of learning, why did
she come here with her political agenda already inscribed? If she was
here to listen and learn, why did she meet only with left- wing activists
instead of with a wider range of Israelis?
Ensler claims, "The challenge is to find that language that will
allow us to listen to each other." If she were really listening to
the Palestinian side she'd hear, whether in politics, education or religion,
a language of hate the world has not seen since the Nazi regime. It is
the job of every civilized person to condemn this language that glamorizes
suicide bombings, spouts anti-Semitic vitriol, and encourages parents
to send their children to be human bombs. Those who espouse, support,
encourage and permit terror should not be given voice and listened to
with an open heart and ear.
Ensler, who claims her understanding of suffering comes from her childhood
as the victim of childhood abuse, should know that some things should
not be understood. A father who abuses his child, for example, should
not be listened to, but condemned and stopped. The Catholic Church in
America learned all too late that understanding and feeling sympathy for
the plight of the abuser only encourages further abuse.
In Ensler's hypothesis, the Israelis are the powerful ones and the Palestinians
are the weak ones. Surely Israelis like my son Koby, stoned to death at
the age of 13 by terrorists, cannot be considered powerful.
"Israelis have the power, and the suffering of the powerful is different
than the suffering of the weak," she says.
I wonder how she would rate Koby's suffering. Or my own.
Ensler doesn't understand that suffering is not correlated with power.
In fact suffering, especially grief, is most easily managed if the griever
can ascribe a sense of meaning and purpose to the death.
In this, the Palestinians have succeeded, albeit, in a perverse sabotage
of human rights, in propagating a propaganda line of honoring the deaths
of their children. Thus we hear Palestinian parents of suicide bombers
saying they would be proud to send their other children to murder Israelis.
Israelis, on the other hand, don't glorify their children's deaths, and
don't speak of meaning in one voice. We have no uniform narrative of consolation
at our children's death.
The terrorists who murdered my 13-year-old son and his friend Yosef Ish-Ran
did so in the context of a learned language of hate, revenge and evil
that permeates their society. Even now, I do not speak of revenge. Nor
do the women at the healing retreats that we run in memory of my son.