The stories told here are breathtaking also in their horror and shock. Israelis are deliberately attacked at the times when the largest numbers of people can be killed and in the most indiscriminate manner possible, in the name of eradicating Jews from the Middle East. A flier from the Ezzedeen al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, shows a drawing of an ax destroying the word al-Yahud, meaning Jews, and says, “We will knock at the gates of Paradise with the skulls of the Jews in our hands.”
There were sixteen million Jews in the world before the arrival of Adolf Hitler; now there are thirteen million. The extinction of European Judaism took place amid the complete and tragic failure of European culture. Today in the West there is a faulty conscience—indifferent to the parade of young Palestinians putting on explosive belts, the daily demonization inflicted on Jews in the Arab world, the crowds delirious over the lynching of two Jewish soldiers who had lost their way and whose dismembered bodies were displayed as trophies. This faulty conscience has obliterated the fate of thousands of Israelis murdered because they were Jews; it has erased one of the reasons for Israel’s existence.
Who in the West still remembers that eighty-six Israelis lost their lives during the First Gulf War, killed by Iraqi missiles, by the panic, by suffocation? Linda Roznik, a ninety-two-year-old Holocaust survivor, was buried under the rubble of her home. The same thing happened to Haya Fried, another Holocaust survivor. During the fighting, the Jews of Israel took gas masks with them everywhere they went. Saddam Hussein had come up with a monstrous idea: people could be gassed in Israel just as in a gas chamber, without being able to lift a finger to defend themselves. For this reason, the Jerusalem Post proposed nominating as “person of the year” the sixty-nine Holocaust survivors living in the south of Israel in run-down apartments without any underground shelters or security exits, bombarded by Palestinian rockets after the Iraqi ones stopped falling— people such as Frieda Kellner, from Ukraine, who had survived the Holocaust but was killed by Hezbollah rockets.
The terrorists have always selected their targets in Israel very carefully, to cause as much destruction as possible. One suicide bomber in Rishon Lezion massacred a group of elderly Jews who were enjoying the cool air on the patio, where they had no protection. And then there are the shopping malls like in Efrat, pedestrian areas like in Hadera, bus stops like in Afula and Jerusalem, train stations like in Nahariya, pizzerias like in Karnei Shomron, nightclubs like the one in Tel Aviv, buses full of students like at Gilo, or of soldiers like at Megiddo, bars and restaurants like in Herzliya, and cafes like in Haifa. The reserve soldier Moshe Makunan had just enough time to ask his wife, “Tell our girls that I love them.”
Two brutal sets of murders took place in November 2002 within a few days of each other. Twelve Israelis were murdered in Hebron; and gunmen entered Kibbutz Metzer, killing five people. Terrorist bullets didn’t differentiate between religious settlers in Hebron and dovish liberals in Metzer. The victims in Hebron were all adults; in Metzer, a mother and her two young children were murdered in cold blood. In Hebron, many of the victims were soldiers; in Metzer, the victims were all civilians.
There is a long, heartbreaking list of teenage Jewish girls whose lives were cut off in a moment by a suicide bomber. Rachel Teller’s mother decided to donate her daughter’s heart and kidneys: “That is my answer to the hyena who took my daughter’s life. With her death, she will give life to two other people.” Rachel wore her hair very short and had a wistful smile. Her friends remembered the last time they saw her. “We said ‘Bye-bye,’ a little bit bored, like it was nothing. Instead, it was the last time we said goodbye to Rachel.”
Abigail Litle was returning home when she was killed. “She loved humanity and nature,” her family said. Abigail was part of an Arab-Jewish project for peace. Her family comes from a community of American Baptists who hold their worship services in Hebrew and call themselves Jewish, but believe in Jesus Christ and practice baptism. Their existence is one little tile in the great Israeli mosaic. “For Abigail it was always important for a person to be valued as a person,” her father said. “She never looked at persons as objects that have to be defined according to their nationality. Now she is in a better place.” Her brother added, “She knew that God loved her, and she loved him, too.”
Shiri Negari’s mother had just taken her to the bus stop when she heard a loud boom. She went back and saw only the smoking remains of the bus her daughter had boarded. Shiri’s sister Shelly was in training at the emergency room that morning. She saw the ambulances arriving but didn’t know that her sister was in one of them. Shiri had long blond hair that she refused to have cut; it was like her trademark. She was a teacher in the army, and she signed her e-mails “Shiri Negari—Voyager in the world.”
Noa Orbach had just left school and was chatting with two friends at the stoplight. A man dressed in black approached them and opened fire on the teenagers. Her teacher said, “Noa was the first to start singing on field trips, the first to help a friend in trouble, the first to raise the level of discussion in class. I knew her for three years, and I was looking forward to the satisfaction of seeing her grow up, seeing what she would make of her life. I can’t believe that tomorrow I won’t see her sitting at her desk.” The newspaper published a card she had created, which said: “Getting angry means punishing yourself for someone else’s stupidity . . . ,” with a drawing of a heart and Noa’s signature.
In almost all the attacks on buses or markets or bar mitzvah celebrations, soldiers have died. The terrorists have never distinguished between “civilian” and “military” victims, because the Israeli army is at the heart of the Jewish state, with its permanent exposure to the Islamist war. There is compulsory military service of three years for men, almost two for women, and reserve duties lasting to age fifty. There are no officer academies, so generals are made by rising up through the ranks. Young men come from all over the world to fight in the Israel Defense Forces; they are called haial boded, lone soldiers. They arrive with no money but plenty of idealism, and are taken in by the kibbutzim, eating with adoptive families on Friday evenings, or they share an apartment to save money. These young men have also died by the hundreds at the hands of terrorists.
“The Israelis were soldiers before they were athletes,” noted Abu Daoud, the architect of the Munich massacre in 1972. “Joseph Romano, the weightlifting champion, participated in the Six-Day War in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.” Soldiers before they were athletes; soldiers before workers; soldiers before scholars of the Talmud; soldiers before craftsmen; soldiers before husbands, brothers, sons. At the funeral of Afik Zahavi-Ohayon, a child who was killed by a rocket, the former Russian dissident Natan Sharansky said, “You must have dreamed of being a hero; you must have dreamed of being a soldier. Here every child becomes a soldier, and the entire country is a front. You fell as a soldier.” Those who have fallen are Israel’s human shield.
Corporal Ronald Berer had arrived from Russia fourteen years before he was killed. His mother didn’t want to see him in uniform; she was afraid. He told her, “Mom, they’re killing women and children. Someone has to protect them. If I don’t do it, who will?” That’s what almost all the soldiers say. Benaya Rein’s mother recalled of her son, “The last time he said goodbye, I said ‘Be careful,’ and he replied, ‘You and Dad have taught me to give everything. But you have to know that sometimes everything really does mean everything.’”
The truth about the broken destinies of these Jewish martyrs is reincarnated in the combination of a name and a place, in a life that continues on the ashes and embers of suffering, in the recollections of the parents and siblings and spouses that I have gathered and presented in these