WUNRN
Palestine
& Israel - Mothers' Pain - One Son Dead, One Missing - Lives
Caught in the Crossfire
Ayda
Abdel Aziz Dudeen was startled awake by a gunshot, then banging on her
door in Dura,in the
In a
confrontation with Israeli soldiers, her son Mohammed had been killed. Rina
Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Rachel
Fraenkel, an American Israeli with two of her children. She is searching online
for information about
Naftali, her missing son. Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
“I was praying maybe he did something stupid and
irresponsible,” Ms. Fraenkel recalled, “but I know my boy isn’t stupid, and he
isn’t irresponsible.”
It was almost exactly a week later, just past 5 a.m.,
that Aida Abdel Aziz Dudeen was startled awake by a gunshot, then banging on
her own door in the West Bank town of Dura. Her family had locked the door the
night before to keep her 15-year-old son, Mohammed, from confronting the Israeli Army
after days of house-to-house searches and arrest raids. The key was still under
Ms. Dudeen’s pillow.
“I didn’t imagine he would jump out the window,” she
said. “I saw a cousin at the door shouting, ‘Mohammed is a martyr!’ I said,
‘Mohammed who?’ He said, ‘Your son.’ He showed me a shirt with blood. I wanted
to know who died because I still believed my son was inside the house.”More
than two weeks after the abduction of Naftali and two other Israeli teenagers,
Israel’s security crackdown has raised questions about the asymmetry of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the value of lives on both sides. Mohammed,
who witnesses said was among a crowd of youths who hurled stones at Israeli
soldiers storming their neighborhood that morning, is one of five Palestinians
fatally shot by soldiers in the West Bank; three more have been killed by
airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.
Most Israelis see the missing teenagers as innocent
civilians captured on their way home from school, and the Palestinians who were
killed as having provoked soldiers. Palestinians, though, see the very act of
attending yeshiva in a West Bank settlement as provocation, and complain that
the crackdown is collective punishment against a people under illegal
occupation.
Ms. Fraenkel and Ms. Dudeen share little aside from deep
religiosity and empty beds where their sons should be. But both have been
thrust into conspicuous roles in their side-by-side societies, reflecting the
conflict’s human costs.
Ms. Fraenkel, 45, is now the most visible of what are
being called the “Three Mothers,” the latest in a series of Israeli parents
symbolizing the sacrifice generations of Israeli children make growing up amid
enemies. She has become an international public figure, traveling to Geneva to
speak to a United Nations committee, giving television interviews, meeting
Israel’s president and prime minister.
Ms. Dudeen, 39, is the mother of yet another of the
thousands celebrated as martyrs in the decades-long struggle against Israel.
She has hardly left home since Mohammed’s huge funeral. She has been comforted
by his classmates bringing sweets, but is still seething over the Palestinian
prime minister’s failure to offer sympathy in person.
“My son has died for his homeland,”
said Ms. Dudeen, who is three months pregnant with her seventh child. “The
flames in my heart are huge. I’ll keep crying for him all my life.”
Ms. Fraenkel, studiously avoiding political issues like
whether Palestinian prisoners should be released in exchange for the teenagers,
as in previous abductions, has begun to consult experts about a long-haul
campaign to maintain momentum.
“Patience is a very hard thing. At some point at night I
say, ‘Enough, I just want him home,’ ” she said of Naftali, the second of
her seven children. “I feel bad wording it like this, but if God forbid, God
forbid, God forbid a child of yours would be in a similar situation, would you
say to do any less than the utmost?”
Ms. Fraenkel was at her laptop in the kitchen, searching
for photographs of Naftali’s sandals, the latest request from investigators.
Her youngest, 4-year-old Shlomo, burst in from nursery school. “I made a heart
for Naftali!” he said, unfurling a fluorescent-green poster.
Shlomo climbed onto her lap, thrilled at snapshots of his
last birthday party, of the children in Purim costumes, a family camping trip.
“If you see a picture of Naftali, tell me, we’ll look at his sandals,” Ms.
Fraenkel told the little one. Then, to her 14-year-old daughter, “Ayala, you
know all these details — are Naftali’s sandals black or brown?”
It was Thursday: two weeks after the abduction, two days
after her appeal to the United Nations. Things had
started to slow down.
Close friends visited in the morning, along with two of
Ayala’s teachers, though Ms. Fraenkel spent much of the time on the phone with
a German journalist. There was a long session with social workers, a meeting
with the speaker of Israel’s Parliament, a synagogue service in which Ms.
Fraenkel’s were among few dry eyes.
“Do I believe this is going to end in a positive way?
Absolutely,” she told the German reporter, though there has been no ransom
demand or proof that the three teenagers are still alive. “Not that I don’t
consider other things. I’m not in denial. If I have to fall apart, I’ll have
time to do it later.”
Born in Ramat Gan, a Tel Aviv suburb, to Americans who
immigrated to Israel in 1955, Ms. Fraenkel, like Naftali, is a United States
citizen. She stressed that Nof Ayalon, which spills slightly over the 1949
armistice line dividing Israel from the West Bank, is not a settlement.
Married nearly 22 years to Avi, a lawyer, she is part of
a vanguard of Orthodox women teaching Jewish texts and using them to answer
queries on a hotline and website.
“I have a spiritual world, but it doesn’t lessen any pain
and it doesn’t promise me anything because God doesn’t work for me,” she said.
“It’s not some kind of trick that if I pray hard enough, he’ll just show up.”
Between interviews, meetings and prayer rallies, Ms.
Fraenkel went to 6-year-old Naamah’s ballet-class party and Shlomo’s
end-of-preschool celebration. “Supper tries to be normal,” she said. Normal,
except that it is provided by a neighborhood committee that delivers still-hot
tin trays three times a day.
A soldier left the family his beret.
American immigrants noticed Ms. Fraenkel likes to wear purple, and brought a
piece from their jewelry box. Most strangers are kept outside, where a notebook
collects their messages.
“Everybody gives a piece of his
heart,” she said.
There are no colorful banners or graffiti commemorating
Mohammed outside the Dudeen home in Dura, only a clothesline filled with six
black abayas, after a mother’s week of mourning.
Hundreds have come here, too — neighbors and strangers,
Palestinian cabinet ministers, the governor of Hebron. Prime Minister Rami
Hamdallah of the Palestinian Authority sent his deputy on the fourth day, and
on the eighth there were faxes from Mr. Hamdallah and President Mahmoud Abbas.
“Our prime minister can’t come to offer condolences?” she
said. “Shame on you. I say to Mahmoud Abbas, I voted for you to sit on the
president’s chair, but you did nothing to make me feel like I’m the mother of a
martyr.”
She quit school at 15 to marry, and is proud that her
20-year-old daughter, Ashwaq, is now studying at Polytechnic Institute in
Hebron.
Her husband, Jihad, has for 10 years been doing
construction in Israel, now earning about $45 a day in Modiin, not far from Nof
Ayalon. They worry he may lose his permit. “We have breakfast, we’re not sure
we’ll have a lunch,” she said. “I remember I had no milk for Mohammed, so I
gave him water and sugar.”
Mohammed was something of a troublemaker, his mother
said, but had never been arrested. He loved to ride his bicycle, and sold corn
on the street to earn money for the family. He did only O.K. in school, she
said, “but he was big in his dreams.” The night before he was killed, he
promised his father he would rise early to bring bricks to the rooftop, where
they planned to build so the family would no longer have to cram into three
second-floor rooms.
Ms. Dudeen said her family was not affiliated with Hamas
— which Israel says is behind the kidnapping — or any other Palestinian
faction. “I want my homeland to be liberated from Israeli colonialism,” she
said, her grief mixed with a bit of pride. “When the Israeli soldier picked up
his rifle against Mohammed, he did not turn his back, he did not fear.”
Asked what she would say to the mothers of the abducted
Israelis, Ms. Dudeen started with, “If there was a kidnapping,”
reflecting the rampant Palestinian suspicion that Israel staged the whole thing
as a pretext for routing Hamas from the West Bank. Then she said, “My son is
gone forever, he will never come home — their sons might still be alive.”
Ms. Fraenkel said she was “extremely upset” when she
heard what happened in Dura. “I really don’t want any Palestinian to get hurt,”
she said. “So what am I supposed to do? Let the kids rot there? We’re just looking
for the children.”
Pressed on the question of freeing prisoners if the
kidnappers demand it, Ms. Fraenkel said that when Gilad Shalit, an Israeli
soldier held by Hamas for five years, was exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian
prisoners in 2011, “I was happy to see Gilad Shalit — it doesn’t mean I think
the whole thing was wise.”
“I think parents should not be taken into account,” she
added. “The state of Israel cherishes life, but it has to cherish the next
kidnapped kids, too.”
Ms. Fraenkel said she had “discovered there are sleeping
pills in this world” during the crisis, but hardly ate. Ms. Dudeen forces food
down because of her pregnancy, but sleep does not come as she curls up on the
mattress that was Mohammed’s.
If she has a boy, she plans to name him Mohammed. “All
pregnant women in the neighborhood,” she said, “will name them Mohammed.”