Two grieving fathers who hold key to ending horrors of Gaza

IT is hard to think of much beyond the unspeakable suffering being inflicted on the people of Gaza at the moment.

Relentless sorrow builds with every news report, every phone scroll. It is unimaginable to think of children, just like my own six- and eight-year-old, living through such terror and trauma.

For the past few weeks, I have been thinking about Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin. Rami is an Israeli graphic designer turned peace activist, Bassam Aramin an ex-political prisoner and academic turned peace activist. They are part of a club that nobody ever wants to belong to, their daughters were killed by the violence that has defined the Israel Palestine region for decades.

Rami’s 14-year-old daughter Smadar was killed in 1997 by a Hamas suicide bomber while she shopped in Jerusalem. Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter Abir was shot in the head and killed in 2007 by a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier as she stood outside her school with friends.

Both men have refused to allow their daughters’ senseless deaths to create further revenge and retribution. Instead, they have tried to use the pain of their loss and the story of their friendship to break the cycle of violence and halt the bloodshed.

After his daughter’s death, Rami ed The Parents Circle, an organisation of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families that s peace, reconciliation, and tolerance.

The first meeting between bereaved Palestinians from Gaza and Israeli families took place in 1998. Bassam ed the sad club a few years after Rami and their shared grief helped them recognise that all human beings want and deserve to live in peace without oppression, and only when both sides talk to each other will peace ever be achieved.

I first encountered Bassam and Rami as the central characters in Irish writer Colum McCann’s 2020 book Apeirogon, which is a semi-fictional of their lives, their daughters’ deaths and many other messy interconnected facts that define the Israel and Palestine conflict.

The title is taken from the mathematical term for an object of an “observably infinite number of sides’’.

The book has been both lauded as an imaginative and evocative way of telling the complex story of the region, and criticised as a smoke and mirrors distraction of what is actually a very simple story that has played out across the world throughout history - powerful people colonised a land and slowly tried to eradicate the indigenous people.

For me, the book succeeded in underlining the complete futility and madness in thinking that oppression and occupation can result in happiness and freedom, and that behind ideologies or political beliefs are real people who pay the ultimate prize - the sacrifice of their children.

Since the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, I’ve been following Bassam and Rami’s interviews and looking to them as guides for the unfolding atrocities. They know the damage that is being done to people and children in that region is deep and profound and will take decades to undo, unless brave political leadership stops the madness.

The Parents Circle said: “We express our deepest and heartfelt condemnation of the ongoing violence in the region. It is a time of great sorrow, knowing that countless families now bear the burden of emptiness in their hearts and the heavy weight of grief due to the tragic loss of their loved ones.”

It is 25 years since Rami ed The Parents Circle and sadly his message of peace and reconciliation is needed, and ignored, more than ever.

Both Rami and Bassam’s mission has been to use the pain of their daughters’ pointless deaths to say there is another way. They want their daughters’ lives to stand for something positive and they tell the stories of Smadar and Abir in the hopes of changing hearts and minds to halt the cycle of violence.

As they say: “You can’t build a country on the ruins of our children.”

Rami and Bassam believe that the end of the Israeli occupation is the only way to peace, and that eventually Palestinians and Israelis will have to share their corner of the globe as one state, two states or 10,000 states; otherwise, they will have to share it as two huge graveyards.

An international agreement for peace that allows people to share the land and live side by side in mutual respect and tolerance is the only option, according to these men who have dedicated their lives to advocating for peace.

At the moment, given the scale of devastation, it seems like an option that might only ever exist in a work of fiction.

Wounded Child No Surviving Family, or WCNSF, is an acronym coined by medics in Gaza, short-hand for a life-long sentence of grief. From the inhumane conditions that doctors are trying to mete out care, they are calling for an end to the bombardment. Humanitarian aid to feed and water people before you drop more bombs on them is no good.

World leaders need to mine all the pragmatic humanity they possess to find a way to bring about a ceasefire. Retaliation, oppression, retribution is not the path to peace and freedom.

As soon as the grown-ups realise this, the sooner they will really honour Smadar Elhanan, Abir Aramin, the almost 4,000 children who have been killed in the past three, weeks and the thousands more who have needlessly lost their lives during this conflict.