Kfar Shmariyahu, Israel — Double child murder in Israel last week pushed all else off the Israeli press. The intifada, next month’s elections, the souring economy and soaring poverty levels — all were forgotten by a country obsessed with the almost simultaneous disappearance of two little girls Saturday, Dec. 7, in Jerusalem — one Jewish, the other Arab. Massive manhunts by police and thousands of volunteers dragged throughout the cold winter days and colder nights.
By Tuesday the body of Hodaya Kedem Pimstein, the 22-month-old Jewish toddler, was discovered in a shallow grave in the Jerusalem woods.
On Friday police planned to distribute 15,000 flyers with a picture of 5-year-old Nur Abu Tir to Arabs arriving for Friday prayers; the flyers were rendered redundant by Nur’s corpse found at the bottom of her village drainage pit.
There was no connection between the murders. But in Israel nothing is free of the interface between Arab and Jew. In a society where hundreds of Arab and Jewish children have lost their lives, killed at the other’s hands in the last two years of the intifada, this case created pockets of cooperation between the warring nationalities.
The disappearance of Nur while playing outside her East Jerusalem village home galvanized a search by thousands of Israeli police and volunteers. A police helicopter scanned the terrain near Nur’s village, but it hovered close by lest it unwittingly wander into a nearby area controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and risk being shot down by Palestinian snipers.
Israeli policemen, in the last two years perceived as enemy intruders, converged on Nur’s village, scouring the streets with specially trained German shepherds sniffing for her traces. Suspicions for Nur’s murderer center on the child as a victim of a feud between family clans.
Identical misfortune
A Palestinian laborer working illegally in Israel gave police the key tip that led to finding Hodaya’s body — and to catching her killer.
On Dec. 7 a distraught father reported his toddler missing. The child of separated parents, she was spending the weekend with him. He reported that he had left Hodaya in the living room watching television; when he came into the room a few minutes later, she was gone.
During the ensuing four days of intensive manhunt, the father gave numerous interviews to the media, appearing on television in tearful appeals to find his beloved child.
Hodaya’s photo and photos of her parents plastered the front pages of every newspaper and television broadcast in the country.
A Palestinian laborer whose work permit had expired saw those pictures. The previous week, walking through a wooded area, he had noticed a man digging a hole between the trees. On Tuesday he identified the father as that man, and after receiving assurances he would not be penalized for being in Israel illegally, led searchers to the site.
Within hours Hodaya’s body had been dug up. Her arrested father confessed to drowning the girl in the bathtub and then burying her, a murder plotted a month beforehand to “hurt” the child’s mother.
So far separate are the two nationalities that their identical misfortune prompted no connection between the girls’ families. This lack of identification illustrates the huge gap between people who live just hundreds of yards apart.
A newly published survey of Israelis and Palestinians by the well-respected international dispute resolution organization Common Ground reveals an amazing finding: the main gap between the two groups is not ideology — it is mistrust. Although 70 percent of both groups would be amenable to a political compromise, neither Palestinians nor Israelis give the other side credit for goodwill.
But the parallel child murders did bring forth some exceptional, if small, gestures. Perhaps a drop of mutual trust has been an offshoot of the two tragedies. While both girls were still missing, Hodaya’s mother said tearfully to the press, “Maybe Nur and Hodaya are together now, a symbol of two peoples who must finally end their hostility.”
Nur’s family received a solidarity visit by a Jewish father whose own daughter perished this year in a Palestinian terrorist incident. Bearing sandwiches and commiseration, the man said, “I know what it is to lose a daughter.”
The Palestinian governor of the nearby Bethlehem region appealed to Arab residents and Palestinian security officials to aid in the search for Hodaya. And the Palestinian worker who solved Hodaya’s murder said he sought no reward: “If I need to get any paycheck, I will get it from God.”
In life there was no connection between Hodaya and Nur. Had they lived out their days to mature, have families and grow old in Jerusalem, the girls almost certainly would never have met. Only their untimely brutal deaths created a bond between them.
In this society torn apart by hatred, can the loss of two innocents make both peoples recognize each other’s common kinship?
Helen Schary Motro is a lawyer and freelance writer living in Kfar Shmariyahu, Israel.
Loading ...