Nation IN BRIEF / VIRGINIA

At a time when being a peacenik is a lonely vocation in Israel, Yitzhak Frankenthal remains a true believer.

Frankenthal weathers the public ridicule, the angry crowds--even the death threats--to push ahead with an unlikely campaign to bring together Israeli and Palestinian parents whose children have been killed during the long years of Arab-Jewish conflict.

For Frankenthal, 50, the mission is personal. His eldest son, Arye, was a soldier hitching a ride to his base in southern Israel in 1994 when he was picked up by Palestinian Hamas terrorists posing as Jews. When they went for his gun, Arye struggled and managed to injure one of his captors before they overpowered him. They shot three bullets into Arye’s head. He was 19.

Most parents might be expected to translate the killing of a child into a quest for revenge or into a bitter isolationism that favors toughness over forgiveness. In Israel, many veer to the hard political right. But Frankenthal has turned the stereotype on its head. Tragedy did not poison his heart; instead, it became a catalyst for change and action.

Even today, when voices of moderation are being drowned out by cries of hatred and explosions of warfare, Frankenthal adamantly insists that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is reconciliation, dialogue and peaceful coexistence.

“Peace will come. There can be no question about it, and no one can stop it,” he said. “The only question is how many people will have to die to achieve it.”

Bombers’ Relatives Can Be Partners

Frankenthal’s life as he knew it ended with the loss of his son. Dropping his business in ice cream manufacturing, he became an ardent crusader for peace. He joined and eventually led an organization that Arye had belonged to, Netivot Shalom, a religious peace group. Then he formed the Parents Circle/Families Forum.

The Parents Circle is made up of 190 Israelis and 140 Palestinians, all of whom have lost a relative, usually a child, to terrorist attacks, clashes or war. The dead on the Palestinian side include suicide bombers who killed Israelis. That doesn’t matter, Frankenthal said--and he doesn’t ask.

The common bond comes in being parents and in sharing a pain that others wouldn’t have to suffer if the conflict could be brought to an end. Their loved ones died because there is no peace.

“If we can sit together, if we don’t want revenge, if we can open a new page,” he said, “then anyone can.”

A bear-sized man with thick gray hair, Frankenthal is also deeply religious. He is an Orthodox Jew who always wears a kippa--a large gray one--and observes the Sabbath, kosher dietary restrictions and other laws of traditional Judaism.

Seated the other day in a comfortable chair in his home in Kiryat Ono, a suburb of Tel Aviv, Frankenthal took phone calls from the U.S., dashed off faxes and planned a fund-raising tour of California and New York, which begins this week. A large photograph of Arye hangs over his desk and computer. Rows of religious texts, including several volumes of the Talmud handed down from his grandfather, line the opposite wall.

But is Frankenthal’s mission futile? The kind of reconciliation he advocates is simply not on anyone’s agenda these days. In fact, his whole project could well be threatened by the escalating spiral of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed that has claimed more than 450 lives in the past 6 1/2 months.

Just a year ago, he was holding hopeful meetings that were extraordinary simply because they were taking place: Bereaved Israeli parents ventured to Gaza City to meet with their Palestinian counterparts; the Palestinians came to Tel Aviv for the same reason. The two sets of parents spoke of both anguish and idealism and the need to end the violence.

Those meetings are virtually impossible today. The Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip, for example, cannot easily leave Gaza to enter Israel, and Israelis are banned from traveling to Gaza or the West Bank.

Moreover, some of the parents have been attacked by their communities for meeting with “the enemy” at a time like this.

“I have received telephone threats from people over my contacts with Israelis,” said Adib Mahana, a Palestinian from Gaza who has become Frankenthal’s partner in organizing the bereaved families. “They told me I was a traitor. ‘Look at what is happening,’ they say. ‘How can you talk to them?’ But I knew going in that anyone choosing this path would have to endure these kinds of reactions. I remain convinced there is no other solution.”

But, he said, this is not the time for reaching across the divide. Everything that had been gained has perhaps not been lost altogether, he said, but it has certainly been shelved.

Somehow, Frankenthal remains determined. At the height of the Palestinian uprising in December, he led a group of Israelis--with special governmental approval--to Gaza to meet with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Some Palestinian parents returned with the group to Tel Aviv for a meeting with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Then it was Frankenthal’s turn to be blasted as a traitor and criminal for consorting with “murderers and terrorists.” A right-wing group publicized his cellular telephone number, and the threats poured in. An angry letter he wrote to a local newspaper, blasting what he sees as the absurdity of risking young Jewish lives to defend tiny settlements in the Gaza Strip, drew more fire.

Also late last year, Frankenthal and the members of his organization set up a protest tent in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, named for the slain prime minister who was an inspiration to Frankenthal. They erected 300 white plastic figures meant to represent the death toll in the Israeli-Palestinian fighting that was claiming victims on a daily basis. To Frankenthal’s dismay, the effort met with little public interest. Only a “trickle” of people bothered to stop by, he said.

Accusations of Exploiting the Dead

The next step in Frankenthal’s controversial strategy was a series of large, emotionally charged newspaper ads that ran early this year. Each one showed a picture of a youth who had been killed, with a printed plea from a parent of the dead person for an urgent resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The young people were killed, the ads said, “because there is no peace.”

Frankenthal was attacked anew for exploiting the dead, a charge he rejects.

“The alternative facing us today is totally clear--either peace or war. The chance of reaching peace is so great and so close, and the danger of war so palpable, that we must take off the kid gloves and use all legal means available to us, and above all the emotional tools,” Frankenthal told the liberal newspaper Haaretz.

Frankenthal’s vision for peace is not touchy-feely or utopian, he says; he is no cockeyed optimist, just a realist forced to balance the emotions of an aggrieved father with the logic of a peace-seeking pragmatist.

“I do not love Palestinians. They killed my son,” he said. “My sympathies are 100% with the Israelis. But I have respect for Palestinians as a people and give to them the dignity that I would give to an Israeli.”

Encounters Sometimes Come With Tensions

Frankenthal has also stood up to Palestinians every bit as angry as his Israeli critics. Last year, during the fateful Camp David summit whose eventual collapse foreshadowed today’s chaos, Frankenthal had an especially tense encounter in Gaza.

He waded into a tent of former Palestinian prisoners, many of whom had served time for terrorist attacks, to admonish them for mistaking violence for an effective way to achieve results. “Terror,” he told them, “is the weapon of the weak.”

The Palestinian who was translating for Frankenthal in that meeting became so alarmed at what he was saying that he deliberately left out some of the harsher words. When Frankenthal realized this, he insisted that his full message be delivered.

Many in the crowd became enraged. “Zionist, get out!” they shouted. “Free Palestine!” As the crowd grew more surly, several friendly Palestinians had to surround Frankenthal and whisk him to safety.

For all his energy, however, there are hints of sadness and not-quite despair in his voice. He laments the fact that neither Israeli nor Palestinian society is ready to make the kinds of concessions that will be necessary. Transformation and reconciliation, he allows, could take a decade or more.

Although he doesn’t readily admit it, the work is taking a toll. Two months ago, he and his wife divorced. It was an amicable split-up, he said, acknowledging that his full-time commitment to his work had become all-consuming.

Frankenthal says he is ready to pay any price because nothing can be worse than putting a first child in his grave.

“If it takes 20 years, God forbid, to make peace,” he said, “then today we are closer than yesterday.”

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Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.