How Many More Coffins? Parents Ask

More than 1,000 wooden caskets, each draped with an Israeli or Palestinian flag, filled the block-long plaza outside U.N. headquarters Tuesday, as parents of victims on both sides of the Middle East conflict joined in a plea for peace.

“Whoever has lost his son has lost his future,” Khaled Mohammed Abdel Khadir, a West Bank schoolteacher, said in halting English to a knot of reporters and passersby who paused at the plaza.

His 21-year-old son, Firas, was killed by Israeli forces last month in circumstances that remain unclear, Khadir said. He said he had traveled to New York to urge the United Nations and the United States to get Israelis and Palestinians negotiating again.

“We lost, but we do not want anyone else to lost his sons,” Khadir said, looking at the rows of empty coffins.

The symbolic depiction of the deaths from the last 18 months of conflict was organized in part by Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace, a group dating to the first intifada against Israeli rule, which ended in 1993.

As vocal partisans of nonviolence and reconciliation, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis here are representative of their broader communities--an estrangement they painfully but readily acknowledge. A joint Israeli-Palestinian peace demonstration might be possible in New York, but it is almost unthinkable in the current climate in Tel Aviv or the West Bank city of Ramallah, they say.

Israeli’s Daughter Killed in 1996 Suicide Bombing

But the Israelis and Palestinians here say they believe that the majority on both sides accepts that the conflict can be resolved only by the mutual recognition of two peacefully coexisting states, Israel and Palestine.

“We know what will be the end, but the question is, how many coffins we will be until that time?” said teacher Ayalet Shahak, whose daughter, Chen, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in Tel Aviv six years ago.

Chen would have celebrated her 21st birthday Tuesday, Shahak said as he pulled out a book of “peace poems” his daughter had written shortly before her death. “This is the day she was born,” he said. “It is so symbolic we are carrying out her will.”

Demonstrations for one cause or another are common outside the United Nations, but Tuesday’s protest was received more formally and respectfully than most. The U.N. undersecretary-general for political affairs, Kieran Prendergast, addressed the group and delivered a message from Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was in Mexico.

“The sight of these coffins brings no solace, and perhaps fresh sorrow, to the families of the victims,” Annan said in the message. “But the symbolism and the loss they represent should bring wisdom to the two communities and their leaders, and spur the rest of us to do all we can to bring an end, once and for all, to this long season of tears.”

And although this was an event staged for cameras, the tears and embraces of the Israeli and Palestinian parents were real. The backdrop of long rows of caskets kept the mood subdued and somber.

“It was a devastating sight,” Prendergast said later. “It was quite poignant.”

There were precisely 1,050 mock coffins in the plaza--250 covered with Israeli flags and 800 with Palestinian banners--in a count that approximated the confirmed death toll from the conflict when the demonstration was planned.

By now, the number of victims in the fighting since September 2000 has climbed to 353 Israelis and 1,215 Palestinians, by Associated Press estimates.

The Israeli and Palestinian parents signed an open letter to Annan and President Bush on Tuesday imploring them to intervene in the conflict. “It is too late to save our children,” they said. “But please do everything in your power to bring our leaders to the negotiating table. Tell them they must stop shooting and start talking.”

Israeli, Palestinian Flags Intermingled

But their real audience, organizers admitted, was not in New York or Washington but back home.

Israelis and Palestinians rarely see people from both sides standing together cordially, and it is rarer still for them to be heard pleading together for peace.

The most startling image of the day, however, was that of the hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian flags intermingled, symbolically, in death, as they rarely are in life.

“The most important thing is for this to be seen on Israeli television, or at least on CNN, and [pan-Arab network] Al Jazeera too,” said Yitzhak Frankenthal, director of the Parents’ Circle, the Israeli co-organizer of the demonstration. “We have to get people’s attention, make them stop and think.”