To Die in Jerusalem

I watched the HBO Documentary “To Die in Jerusalem” over the weekend. The special is about the efforts of the mother of a seventeen year old Israeli girl, killed in a suicide attack, to arrange a meeting with the mother of the seventeen year old Palestinian girl that carried out the attack.

The attack was a cover story on Newsweek and got coverage on 60 Minutes II when it occurred in 2003. The HBO Documentary follows the attempts of the Israeli girl’s mother to set up a “mother to mother” dialogue.

They finally met, not face to face but via a satellite TV hookup. I wish I could say that the meeting was a success, and that at least the two mothers managed some degree of closure and solidarity, but that wasn’t the case.

The divide there is so deep that even two mothers, both of which had lost teenage daughters, couldn’t find any common ground.

This was a very depressing experience. The two girls were the same age as my youngest daughter. They should have been mall hopping with their friends and giggling about boys, clothes and music, not dying in a Jerusalem supermarket.

If you look at their pictures side by side, they could have been cousins. It sounded as if they had similar personalities and perhaps even similar interests. If they had met under peaceful circumstances they might even have been friends. Perhaps working together they could have helped heal the wounds. Instead they both lie cold and still in the damp earth, their laughter silenced forever, and whatever they may have accomplished lost to the world.

I can see no road leading to a solution in Palestine. In Iraq there is a road, it may be a bloody one, but it’s still a road. In Iraq the U.S. pulls out and the Iraqis fight their civil war. Hopefully it will be short and localized. Once it’s over, the Iraqis can rebuild and, eventually, move on.

In Palestine, I have no idea what you do. How do you solve the problem of two people trying to occupy the same space?

I’m not even sure you could solve the problem by carving out a Palestinian state. I suspect there would be so much disagreement over which parcels of land went to who that it would never be accomplished.

Then there’s the whole religion thing.

I don’t think religion is the root cause, land is the root cause and the Palestinians claim that they are the victims of an occupation by a foreign power. They don’t view the suicide attacks as terrorism, they view it as resistance. Allow me to suggest that the Palestinians consider the idea that men should be fighting their battles against other men and not children against children, and they also consider directing their “resistance” at the Israeli military and political structure rather than at a 17 year old running an errand at the supermarket.

When you attack an Israeli Humvee and armed soldiers, you can call it “resistance” and “courageous;” when you attack a supermarket and an unarmed teenage girl, I call it “terrorism” and “cowardly.” When you use a teenage girl to perform the supermarket attack, I call it “contemptible.”

If Allah exists, how do you think he would view a contemptible and cowardly act of terrorism against a child? I know that Saladin would weep for both girls.

This is not to say that all the blame rests at the doorstep of the Palestinians, far from it. They are victims, victims of the world not getting off its collective butt and helping to work out a solution for this problem.

Just because I don’t see a solution doesn’t mean there isn’t one. There are lots of people in this world a lot smarter than I am. I blame the international community; I blame the United Nations; I blame the so-called superpowers for not having helped to solve this problem twenty years ago.

It all comes home to roost. If the world had solved the Palestinian problem, there would be no Al-Qaeda, the World Trade Center would still stand, there would be no war in Iraq and perhaps Iran’s nuclear ambitions would be more clearly focused on peaceful usages.

In other words, I suspect that when all is said and done, history will identify the troubles in Palestine as the great failure of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Hopefully that failure won’t lead to catastrophe, but after watching this show, I’m not all that optimistic.