Published: 8 September 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
RAMI: I MET BASSAM for the first time in 2005 at the birth of Combatants for Peace, the organisation he co-founded with my son Elik. His story amazed me: a Palestinian freedom fighter who from the age of 17 spent seven years in an Israeli jail and became a prisoners’ leader. The most extraordinary thing for me, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, was the way he changed to non-violent resistance after watching the movie Schindler’s List in jail.
On January 16, 2007, I was driving with my wife to pick up her mom from Jerusalem’s airport when I got a phone call telling me that Bassam’s daughter Abir had been shot in the back of her head outside her school in Anata [a town in the West Bank]. We turned around and went straight to the hospital; we spent two days by her bed.
Abir was the third of his six children, and she was born in 1997, the same year my daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing by Palestinian terrorists in Jerusalem. Smadar was the third of my four children. What happened to Abir, for me, was like losing my daughter a second time.
BASSAM: Rami’s family name is Elhanan; in Arabic it means “mercy” or “love”, so a special name. From the beginning I knew he was very special. I can say I fell in love with this man, very human, very noble. I knew I could work with him: he supports the Palestinian cause, he could represent my case, my people.
I will never represent his side as someone who belongs to the oppressors but I can represent him as a human being: he wants to live in a moral place, not occupying anyone. This is the importance of a personal relationship: if I know an Israeli, then I know that they are not all the same.
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Photo: Bassam Aramin, left, and Rami Elhanan (Sarah Lee/Eyevine/AustralScope)
