When The War Hits Home

By Matt Rees

TEL AVIV The Mother of the Bride RACHEL DAGAN, 50/three children

Rachel Dagan had been up all night when she entered the flower shop and asked for a bridal bouquet. The florist smiled and said, "Happy news! Mazel tov to the bride and groom." Dagan hesitated. She didn't want to speak. She didn't want to force her misery on others. But she couldn't hold back. "I'm going to put it on my daughter's grave," she said. The florist burst into tears. Dagan's daughter Danit was only 12 hours dead, killed by a suicide bomber who blew himself up beside the young woman and her fiance in a crowded Jerusalem cafe.

Dagan laid the garland on the shoveled earth that day, but a month later she still can't believe her beautiful daughter, 24, who had studied sociology and wanted to become a travel agent and who had kept a worn Alf doll on her bed, won't be celebrating her wedding next month as planned. Dagan leafs through Danit's datebook, recovered from the wreckage in Cafe Moment; she rereads text messages from Uri, Danit's fiance, on her daughter's red Nokia cell phone. "Uri loves Danit," says one. Then the last message: "Tonight at Moment. Uri."

It is a time for mothers to suffer, helplessly, desperately. When Palestinian and Israeli societies are being ripped apart by the testosterone and machismo of wartime, mothers are struggling to keep alive their nurturing role amid the loss, grief and fear. "In the stricken faces of mothers--Palestinian mothers and Israeli mothers--the entire world is witnessing the agonizing cost of this conflict," President Bush said last week. It is a time when children can't be sent to school without the worry that some bomber or soldier will take their lives. It is a time for a woman to relax only when all her family is inside the home in front of her eyes. It is a time of struggle not to succumb to the hatred all around. As the menfolk kill and talk of necessary sacrifice, these women must fight battles of their own.

Rachel Dagan feels she has lost the struggle to keep her hopes alive. In her daughter's death, she blames everyone and everything: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for supporting terrorists; Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for failing to bring the peace he promised in his election campaign; the U.S. for urging restraint upon Israel for months and now for wanting Israel to cease its efforts to hunt down bomber cells in Palestinian towns. A few weeks after the bombing, Dagan went to see the dress her daughter had picked out at a shop on a Jerusalem street that has repeatedly been targeted by suicide bombers. Danit had told her it was going to be like Princess Diana's wedding dress. As Dagan scurried along the sidewalk, her pulse raced; she thought of dying in a bombing right there. "I don't care if I live or die," she remembers thinking. "I want to see her dress." That was one battle she won.

HEBRON The Islamic Principal FATHIYEH QAWASMEH, 39/six children

Every day Fathiyeh Qawasmeh, principal of the all-girl Islamic Charitable School, allows her students to choose a subject for a lecture at the 9:30 a.m. assembly. Yesterday's address was about the importance of statistics in science, and the day before was a lesson from the Koran. Today three girls talked to their classmates about a woman in Gaza and her four children, all of whom had been killed when their donkey cart rolled over an Israeli mine near an Israeli settlement in the dunes south of Gaza City. Qawasmeh knew she had to help her 735 elementary and high school students understand. "Nobody is excluded, even a mother and her children," Qawasmeh told the assembly through the polyester veil that covers her nose and mouth. "We have to bear the situation, because God will reward our patience."

The school is funded by a charity that is linked to the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, a group responsible for innumerable attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. In the lobby, the custodian keeps a Karl Gustav machine gun in his desk drawer. Two of the girls in Qawasmeh's school have been injured in the fighting that broke out 1 1/2 years ago. Shireen Rajabi, 8, has a scar above her right eyebrow; she says a soldier hit her with his rifle butt at a checkpoint.

When Qawasmeh isn't taking care of the girls at school, she is ministering to her own six children at home. At night they wake her with their nightmares. Last month she calmed her 11-year-old, Doa, the most fearful of her brood, when the girl awoke crying. "What's the worst thing that could happen to you?" Qawasmeh asked. "To be martyred," Doa sniffled. "What happens to martyrs?" her mother asked. Wiping her eyes, Doa thought a moment. "They go to heaven," she said, and then she smiled.

BEIT HANINA The Unsilenced Woman MAHA SHAMAS, 51/two children

The sheet music for a Brahms intermezzo is open on the Russian-made Rathke grand piano that rests in the salon. Wearing a gray sweat suit and teddy-bear slippers, Maha Shamas is fretting about how people view Palestinian women. First, it is the way foreigners interpret the ululating jubilation of Palestinian mothers whose children have died as "martyrs." To a Westerner, it looks like an unconscionable celebration of the death of a child. "Palestinian women have been dehumanized so much that people are willing to believe this," she says. "It's the ultimate racism. It assumes that Palestinian mothers don't love their children." This apparent elation at the sacrifice of a child, she says, is a ceremony forced on mothers by a society in which men decide for their women. "It's the result of so much pressure within society for a mother to fall into this ritual even if she has to eat up the grief she feels for her son."

For 10 years, Shamas has headed the Women's Center for Legal Aid and Counseling. Two years ago, the powerful sheik of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque condemned her in his Friday sermon for demanding that Palestinian courts stand up against tribal traditions that favor husbands and trample women's rights. Since the latest conflict with Israel began in the fall of 2000, the Women's Center has registered an increase in reports of family violence. With Palestinian men facing new financial pressures from the loss of jobs in Israel and suffering constant humiliation at the hands of Israeli soldiers, Shamas explains, "they take it out on the people closest to them."

Shamas fights the impulse to hate Israelis, but she has cut back on her contacts with Israeli human-rights activists, because, she says, they won't recognize the decades of Palestinian suffering. "They want to keep their national legends, but they want us to give ours up," she says. Her fear is that her children's generation will harbor an unrestrainable hatred for Israelis. "There's more anger in them," she says.

The daily degradation that feeds that anger can be witnessed right outside Shamas' window. Across a patch of dirt stands the A-Ram checkpoint, a set of concrete roadblocks and a guardhouse manned by twitchy Israeli soldiers. It's a place of humiliation and occasional brutality as Palestinians line up their cars to enter East Jerusalem.

Last month Shamas' husband, a Brooklyn native of Lebanese descent, failed to pick up on a soldier's signals as he crossed the checkpoint and suddenly found the red laser dot of the Israeli's rifle sight dancing on his face. He was saved by his American-accented English and the U.S. passport he slowly pulled out of his pocket. "My God, it hit me," Shamas says. "Nobody is safe. Think of the ease with which that soldier could have decided to kill." Every day her daughter Diala, 17, crosses the checkpoint to go to school. "Not every day do I have the inner strength," says Shamas, "to think about that."

JERUSALEM The Disappointed Peacenik DORIT SEIDEMAN, 40/three children

Dorit Seideman's daughter Yael, 7, had been learning about the biblical Pharaoh before the Passover holiday earlier this month. Yael's schoolteacher assigned her to write a letter to Pharaoh. "Dear Pharaoh, please come over for coffee," she wrote. "I'd like to ask you to bomb the Palestinians." Seideman was appalled. "Do you really want to kill them all?" she asked. "No," said Yael, "only the bad ones." Right now Israel's official policy is in line with Yael's letter, and that's disturbing to Seideman, who campaigned for the Peace Now movement until the birth of her three daughters left her with no time for activism.

These days Seideman's concerns are focused on her own family. Her daughters go to more slumber parties, since the fear of suicide bombers discourages their band from loitering as they once did in crowded malls. After a bombing, Seideman knows she has less than 10 minutes to make sure all her loved ones are safe, before the cell-phone network crashes under the weight of panicked calls. She is worried that her daughters will leave Israel when they're old enough, fleeing the violence. A suicide bomb exploded outside her daughters' youth club last month.

Most Israelis have shifted their political views rightward during the recent violence, and many have concluded that the Palestinians will never make peace with Israel. Seideman still maintains her conviction that a negotiated settlement is the only way to ensure the safety of her children. "We all know the solution is political, not military," she says. But for now it seems to Seideman that the Palestinians--even the liberal ones who built ties with Israelis--keep insisting on concessions without being prepared to compromise themselves. "I'm trying not to feel hatred, and I see that they are so desperate," she says. "But I don't feel any reciprocity."

MAALEH EPHRAIM The Unsettled Settler NITZA TZAMERET, 48/three children

The funeral cortege drove north toward the Israeli settlement of Itamar to bury a resident killed by Palestinian gunmen in an ambush. Nitza Tzameret was in the third car in the procession, behind an army-jeep escort. When the vehicles approached the Palestinian village of Kafr Khalil, shots rang out. The cars halted, and the terrified mourners poured out. Tzameret and her husband lay in a ditch at the roadside as Israeli soldiers returned fire up into the olive groves. The gun battle lasted 30 minutes. Since then Tzameret has slept no more than two hours a night, fearing intruders in the settlement where she lives, which has no perimeter fence. Each time she leaves the house she fears that she too might be ambushed on the winding desert road from her home in the Jordan Valley up to Jerusalem. She puts on clean underwear in case she's injured and hospitalized; she fills the refrigerator so that there will be enough food for her family during the week they might spend mourning her. "Every day I bury myself," she says.

Tzameret's son Idan, 23, is a lieutenant in an army platoon involved in the current incursions in the West Bank. Before he goes on a mission, he calls her cell phone. "I love you very much, Mom," he says, then hangs up. Tzameret, a trained masseuse who practices the Japanese natural healing art of reiki, lights a candle next to Idan's photo and sends out energy to protect him. She draws Sanskrit symbols in the air and puts out telepathic lines to her son. Then she knows he's all right. But the reiki alone doesn't work for her. On her hip, she carries a small .22-cal. Beretta pistol in a black holster. There's a spare clip of tiny bronze bullets with copper tips in her handbag.

GAZA The Faithful Mourner WAFA FRANJI, 40/six children

The day he died, Abdullah Franji, 14, was fasting in accordance with the rule followed by religious Muslims to forswear food on a Thursday. Before dawn that day last November, he sat before his mother to recite the chapter of the Koran his teacher had assigned him to memorize. "If two parties of the believers contend with one another, do ye endeavor to compose the matter between them," he recited, rocking back and forth as an aid to memory. Abdullah stumbled, and Wafa Franji, a teacher of the Koran herself, told him, "It's a little weak, Abdullah." The boy kissed her on the cheek. "This afternoon I'll recite it for you perfectly," he said, and he went off to school.

His friends went to Franji in the early afternoon. One of them pushed Abdullah's bicycle up the sandy alley to her front door in Gaza's poor Sabra neighborhood. They had heard that Abdullah was dead, shot by masked policemen from Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority after he joined a rally by Hamas students that had passed by his school. The policemen fired into the crowd, and Abdullah took a round in the head. But none of Abdullah's friends wanted to be the one to tell Franji that the long battle for power between Arafat and the Islamists had taken the life of her son. They told her only that he was at Shifa Hospital.

Franji found Abdullah laid out in the emergency room. She counted three stitches where doctors had sewn up the hole where the bullet had entered. There was blood all over. Someone had perfumed the boy's body, but she believed his sweet smell was, she later said, "a sign of Abdullah's acceptance by Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, who applies the scent of paradise." Recalling that Abdullah had still been fasting when he died, she says, "He broke his fast with Allah." The boy's family filed a suit against the Palestinian police, but Franji has no hope of justice in Arafat's corrupt legal system. Her comfort is the scent of paradise. --With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Hebron and Aharon Klein/Tel Aviv

With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Hebron and Aharon Klein/Tel Aviv