The Living Fight Over Honoring the Dead in Israel

When Israel honors the dead today, there will be two ceremonies.

In one, soldiers who were killed in Israel’s wars will be remembered. In the other, two hours later, homage will be paid to people who died in terrorist attacks.

Keeping the two ceremonies separate has been the source of bitter recrimination, legal wrangling and a discomfiting debate here over the nature of heroism and sacrifice.

Israel’s national identity is in many ways shaped by the battles the Jewish state has waged to ensure its existence, so honoring the soldiers who gave their lives makes Memorial Day an especially solemn occasion for Israelis.

But in the last couple of years, there have been informal attempts to include others who lost their lives--the victims of terrorist bombings and shootings--in Memorial Day ceremonies. In March, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak voted unanimously to include such victims officially in this year’s national commemoration on Mt. Herzl, a military cemetery on the western edge of Jerusalem.

That has not sat well with some families. An association of war widows and orphans went to court earlier this month to bar terrorism victims from ceremonies honoring the fallen fighters.

There is a difference between dying on the battlefield--having made the conscious decision to risk one’s life for one’s country, the widows argued--and dying because a bomb goes off on the bus in which one happens to be riding, or in the cafe where one is having a drink.

Countering that idea, Israelis whose children or parents were killed in terrorist attacks responded that those people too were victimized because they were Jews, even if the circumstances of their deaths were different. And, in the end, the court rejected the widows’ petition.

Anger and emotions have been running high on all sides. The court hearing late last week erupted in furious shouting matches between opposing bereaved, and the debate continues.

“Memorial Day should, in fact, be everybody’s memorial day, those who died in uniform and those who died in [the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in] Munich or other hostile actions,” Shula Shorshan told Israeli radio Monday.

Shorshan, whose husband, Doron, was killed in a 1992 bombing near a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, added: “This has been turned into some sort of war, so that now we have first-class bereaved families and second-class bereaved families.”

She said she would boycott today’s ceremonies.

The controversy nags at an Israeli self-definition that disdains the role of victim. Victims should not be grouped with heroes, with those who died in the line of duty, said Raya Harnick, whose 26-year-old commando son, Guni, was killed in one of the first battles of Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon.

“One of the building stones of the Jewish state and of its Zionist ideology is the idea of taking our fates into our own hands,” Harnick, 67, said in an interview. “We turn our backs on being victims.”

It is inappropriate, she said, to include victims “in the saga of Israeli heroism,” not because that inclusion diminishes her son as a fighter but because it diminishes Zionism.

Other Israelis are altogether sickened by the debate. Sharing anguish over its fallen sons and daughters was meant to be the one experience that could unite all Israel, argued columnist Eitan Haber, formerly a senior advisor to assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Military cemeteries are full of men and women, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, religious and secular.

“If there is anyone or anything that testifies to the extent of the rift in Israeli society, it is this case,” Haber wrote this week in the Jerusalem Post. “We are even fighting over the tears! We can’t even cry together anymore!”

Memorial Day officially began Monday at nightfall, with a brief observance at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site. President Ezer Weizman led the service, whose start was signaled by a minute of siren wails that brought Israelis everywhere to a halt. Dozens of military men and women, dressed in the colors of their units and standing at attention before the stone wall, tilted their heads in deference for the full minute.

All television channels Monday night were dedicated to interviews with families recalling their fallen relatives. Some channels simply ran names and dates of death.

According to official statistics, 19,109 soldiers have died since 1947 in Israel’s wars against Palestinians who claim this land and against neighboring Arab states. By the same official count, 1,980 Israelis have died at the hands of Arab extremists.

Israel’s Memorial Day follows Holocaust Remembrance Day by one week and dissolves into Independence Day tonight.