At the home of the only Israeli woman to be killed during the three-week war with Hamas, some words of hope emerge from the family’s raw grief
THE LAST ACT of Orith Shitrit’s life was to dial her husband Herzel’s mobile phone number. “I heard only screaming. I hung up and dialled back, and there was no answer,” the tall, thin, construction company manager recalls, one month to the day after his wife was killed by a grad missile fired from the Gaza Strip.
It was 9pm on December 28th. Herzel Shitrit drove to the gym where his wife had been working out with her sister, Eilelit. When he saw police cars with flashing lights, and his wife’s car, he knew something terrible had happened.
“She was driving home when she heard the alarm siren,” explains Hen (19), the eldest of the couple’s four children. “My aunt and mother ran into the bus station. It wasn’t very safe, but it was the closest building. The grad hit them. Eilelit was slightly wounded. My mother’s stomach was ripped open, and she was wounded in the neck and leg. She died half an hour later in hospital.”
ORITH WAS THE only Israeli woman to die in the three-week war with Hamas, and possibly the only Jewish civilian. (There are conflicting reports as to whether a 58-year-old Russian immigrant from Netivot died before or after the war started.) Orith’s death marks the first time Hamas has struck Ashdod, Israel’s main port, 40km north of the Gaza Strip. Missiles also reached the outskirts of Be’er Sheva, the same distance to the east.
The Shitrit family have until now refused to speak to journalists. When I ring the bell of an apartment in a high-rise overlooking the harbour, Herzel (41), opens the door, ashen-faced, with deep circles under his eyes. In the family’s grief, Hen is looking after her father, sisters Gal (17) and Eliya (12), and brother Tal (10).
A photograph of Orith with Tal is prominently displayed in the living room. While we talk, Herzel pulls a plastic bag filled with family photographs from a cabinet and begins looking through them. He thinks of Orith every moment, looks through the pictures several times a day, is unable to sleep without medication. From time to time a ghostly smile flickers across his face. “They are happy memories,” he whispers. “Here we are on holiday last summer. We went to Holland, Belgium, France. This was two years ago, in Thailand . . . ” There are photographs on Paris bridges, at Disney World with the children, beneath the Eiffel Tower, Orith and Herzel embracing. She was 39 years old when she died, after spending more than half her life with Herzel. The couple met at summer school and married when she was 18, Herzel 20.
“My mother was amazing,” says Hen. “She worked as a secretary at Gal’s high school, and she went back to college and had almost completed her bachelor’s. She took the two youngest kids to school and picked them up every day, cleaned the house . . . She was happy, funny, full of life. She had . . . a lot of friends.” Ten thousand people attended her funeral.
A Ner Neshama (“soul candle”) burns on the kitchen counter. “Jews mourn for one year,” explains Hen. “For a year we will wear dark clothes, attend no parties, listen to no music. We burn a candle for one month, then one day each month, then one day each year.”
Orith Shitrit was one Israeli civilian, compared with more than a thousand Palestinians killed in the three-week war. I broach the subject gently, for the Shitrits’ grief is raw. “The Palestinian families are suffering as we are,” says Herzel.
HEN, WHO IS doing her military service, believes Israeli claims that most of those who died in Gaza were Hamas militants, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. “You cannot not react for years and years,” she says, referring to Hamas rocket attacks. “You have to hit them. This is the price.”
Was it worth her mother’s death? The young woman pauses for a fraction of a second. “No,” she says. “Nothing was worth it.”
Then Herzel Shitrit speaks up, and the grieving widower’s words provide more hope than anything I have heard in Israel or Gaza. “Peace is the only solution,” he says. Yes, but how does one reach it? “If each side will compromise a little, we can reach peace.” But Israeli politicians say it’s impossible to deal with Hamas, that Hamas is the devil incarnate. “They said that about Arafat too,” says Herzel. “They said, ‘We cannot talk to Yasser Arafat. He’s a terrorist and he wants to destroy Israel.’ Now they say the same about Hamas . . . Orith thought the way I do. She wanted peace. There are many Israelis who feel this way . . . Our family made a huge sacrifice; we hope our sacrifice will be the last one.”
The pundits are not optimistic. “There is no hope whatsoever as long as Hamas is in power,” says David Horovitz, editor-in-chief of the right-wing Jerusalem Post newspaper and a former correspondent for the Irish Times. He implies the Palestinians of Gaza must be punished for voting for Hamas in democratic elections three years ago. “I don’t know of a precedent of a terrorist organisation being voted into office,” says Horovitz. “The Palestinians of Gaza chose to be led by people whose adamant platform is to destroy the people next door.”
Conciliatory statements by the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who lives in Damascus, fall on deaf ears. “The problem is not that there is an entity called Israel; the problem is that there is no Palestinian state,” Meshaal said two years ago. Last October, he added: “The Muslim Arab world has always welcomed Jews and let them live in peace. Hamas has clearly given its accord for the foundation of a free and independent Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, on the territory of Gaza and the West Bank. It is up to the occupier to respond to our legitimate demands.”
So why not take Hamas at its word? I ask Horovitz. Hamas has “an ideology of suicide bombing and ending Israel’s existence,” he insists. The Islamist movement has close ties to Iran, and in 2007, a few months after creating a unity government with Fatah, Hamas overthrew Arafat’s old movement in street-fighting in Gaza. “If that’s what does to his own people, why on Earth would we trust him?” says Horovitz. “There is no way that Israel is going to risk national suicide by taking Hamas at its word.”
NOMIKA ZION, THE director of the Centre for Social Justice at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the founder of an urban kibbutz in the frontline town of Sderot, opposed the Gaza war from the outset. “I am a mute voice, silenced by Israeli media and a monolithic, violent, public discourse,” she says. “I heard an Israeli say on television: ‘The bombing of Gaza is the most beautiful music I have heard in my life.’ The euphoria and glorification of the war were frightening. It was very difficult to ask critical questions like: is this really necessary? How far can we go?”
Any solution to the Gaza problem must include the opening of crossing points, so that Gaza can interact with the outside world, and an international force, says Zion. “When you suggest only brutal, violent options to people, it narrows their minds and they can no longer think clearly. That’s how they created the myth that there was no choice but to wage this war.”
I talked to Maayan Sabton while she waited for a lift outside Sapir College in Sderot. The 24-year-old woman left Israel in 2005, after her best friend, Dana Galkowicz, a pretty redhead with freckles, was killed by a Kassam rocket while she sat on a balcony with her boyfriend. “I would have gone abroad anyway, but Dana’s death was the trigger,” Sabton told me. She spent three years in Australia, India and South Africa.
“I came back three months ago, and the war started again. It’s never-ending,” Sabton sighed. “When I was in South Africa, I realised it’s not normal to live with bombs falling on top of you. It’s not normal to have to go into the army when you’re 18, two years if you’re a woman, three years if you’re a man.” Though she loves her country, Sabton intends to leave it. The numbers of Jews who “make Aliya” – immigrate to Israel – has fallen 80 per cent in the past nine years.
Sabton lives in a kibbutz next to the Erez crossing into the Gaza Strip. When the war started on December 27th, “I thought, ‘Cool. It’s about time.’ But when I saw how many civilians were being killed, I changed my mind.”
Two stories marked her most: the deaths on December 28th – the day Orith Shitrit was killed – of five daughters from the Balousha family while they were sleeping, and the grief of Ezzedine Abu al-Aish, a Palestinian doctor whose three daughters were killed by a tank shell on January 16th. “Last week, my friend Hadas and I collected seven lorry loads of food, clothing, blankets and baby products for Gaza,” says Sabton.
Before Israel and Hamas can even begin to work towards Herzel Shitrit’s dream of peace, they must establish a modicum of mutual trust. While she was living in South Africa, Sabton heard Nelson Mandela speak. “He was asked how he forgave the Afrikaners, who killed his eldest son, and he said: ‘As soon as I decided to trust them, everything became possible. I realised that if I wanted to make peace with them, I had to trust them’.”
The editor of the Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz, cited above, insists he has been misquoted by Lara Marlowe. Read his letter here:
[ http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2009/0204/1232923385223.html ]