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.
After attending a meeting of the Parents Circle Families Forum that he and Bassam would later become co-directors of, Rami admitted, “I was 47 years-old, and it was the first time in my life that I met Palestinians as human beings. This meeting changed my life. Ever since then, I am on a journey towards him, towards his pain, towards his narrative.”
Bassam had already been working in the reconciliation space before becoming a bereaved parent himself.
“Men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other. They don’t know each other because they are separated from one another,” he said on the importance of reconciliation.
He pointed to Australia’s own experience with First Nations people. “That is the same fear you face here in Australia. Why are you scared of … a reconciliation process to admit what happened here. Because it happened.” He said that future generations are not responsible for atrocities perpetrated by their ancestors but are responsible for telling the truth about what happened.
The speakers also provided a universal lesson on how to communicate in unreceptive environments, such as when Rami and Bassam speak to Israeli and Palestinian high school students.
“You can teach yourself how to listen. Only after you listen to the others’ pain can you expect the other to listen to your pain,” Rami said. Bassam added, “When they listen to us, we try to listen to them.”
Rami and Bassam also spoke about the political directions of their own communities.
“What’s happening in the demonstrations in Tel Aviv today – more and more people are holding signs that there is no democracy with occupation, which was unheard of a year ago,” Rami explains. “There will be no freedom for Palestinians without security for Israelis and there will be no security for Israelis without freedom for Palestinians.”
“If you are pro-Israel, it’s not going to help. If you are pro-Palestinian only, it’s not going to help us. You need to be pro-justice. Why do you need to only support one side? Both of us will continue to exist and will not disappear,” Bassam said.
Rami and Bassam’s peacebuilding tour “We Need to Talk” continues from Sydney to Canberra to Melbourne, until May 30.
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All photos: Daniel Katz
