Published: 23 May 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Visiting Australia on a The Jewish Independent tour, BASSAM ARAMIN and RAMI ELHANAN, who both lost daughters in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, spoke intimately with MICHAELA KALOWSKI about loss and listening.
“It’s an open wound forever … it will never heal …because you never forget your heart.”
At a sold-out event in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, the two shared details of their grieving processes after Rami lost his daughter Smadar, 14, in a Palestinian suicide-bomber attack in 1997, and Bassam lost his daughter, Abir, 10, to a bullet from an Israeli soldier as she was on her way from school in 2007.
The memories of their daughters are what drives them to spread their message, sharing their experience for the first time in Australia on a peacebuilding tour hosted by The Jewish Independent.
“I have a feeling that every time I tell my story that Smadar is standing at my back, pushing me forward. This is a way to give meaning to a meaningless killing of an innocent child," Rami said.
“Time does not heal anything. This is a burden you have to carry. It’s 59 seconds out of every minute. You go to sleep with it, you wake up with it. You can use the energy to bring darkness and destruction, or you can use it to bring light and hope, and this is the essence of what we are doing.”
“Our message is for everyone,” Bassam added. “We can look at our pain in a different way. When you decide to give up your victim mentality, when you decide to make peace with yourself, you have no enemies. But the struggle continues because you live under the same conditions, the difference is that you are more determined … I don’t want my kids to grow up as victims.”
Rami and Bassam became fast friends – “brothers”, as they put it – as soon as they met in 2005 through joint Israeli-Palestinian NGOs that work on reconciliation.
