On the Purim Holiday in 1996, our lives were transformed……
Our daughter, Bat-Chen, was born on the Jewish holiday of Purim and murdered on her 15th birthday as a result of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on March 4, 1996. Since then, our lives have never been the same. Holiday and birthday celebrations have turned into a day of memories and sadness. Instead of holiday cakes, friends bring food for memorial ceremonies.
This tragedy has transformed our lives forever. We have turned into peace activists and are trying to use words instead of bullets.
I am Ayelet Shahak, born and raised in Jerusalem. During the Six Day War in 1967, I was a teenager.
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, my uncle Yitchak Ben-Shoham, was killed fighting on the Golan Heights, where soldiers bravely sacrificed their lives in order to prevent the Syrians from conquering the northern part of Israel.
After the war and completion of high school, I began my army service in the Israeli Navy --where I met my husband, Tzvika Shahak. During the Yom Kippur War, Tzvika—who was an officer in the Navy—made brave and courageous decisions while being in dangerous and hostile waters during ferocious navy battles on the southern front. He was awarded a medal of bravery.
We married in 1978, and I began working as a teacher after completing my studies. Our first child, Bat-Chen, was born in 1981. Yaela, our second daughter, was born in 1983 and our son, Ofri, was born in 1987.
In 1996, Bat-Chen was murdered on her 15th birthday. Only after her tragic death did we discover a treasure—Bat-Chen's diaries in which she left us her legacy. There were two central themes emphasized in her diaries:
*to be a poet: "For me, writing is wonderful and it makes me a happy person" (from her 6th grade diary).
*to live in peace with our Arab neighbors: "Everyone has a dream. One person wants to be a millionaire and the other wants to be a writer. I have a dream for peace."
Bat-Chen's legacy for peace:
Bat-Chen's concern for peace began at an early age. In third grade, when asked what she would like from God for the new year, she wrote: “My first wish is that my grandfather return from the dead and second, that there be no wars and third, that we live in peace with all countries."
Right before Independence Day, in third grade, when asked what she would like to bestow to her country, she wrote:
It's a beautiful good country that has everything.
It has flowers and trees and butterflies…lots of them.
You can find almost everything you would want in this wonderful country.
But one thing is missing…and that is peace.
It is really missing and every day I get up and hear on the radio about the "intifada"… I get a bad feeling in my heart, I ask my mother, "when will there be peace?"
I am waiting for it every day and I call out, "come on, peace…come on already!" but is hasn't come.
We, Bat-Chen's parents, were particularly amazed to read the following text which was written when Bat-Chen was only 12:
For some of us the word "Arab" brings to mind a knife in the back, death, rocks, murders, Molotov cocktails, burning tires, terrorists, the Hezbollah.
Some of us make a distinction: there are Arab murderers just as there are Jewish ones.
Every country has good and bad people and there are some who will say "the Arabs are our good friends, they too have rights."
There is a lot of unrest in our little country. There are three opinions about Arabs: the settlers and the "radical right" hate the Arabs; the "left" makes a distinction and the "radical left" demands rights for the Arabs too!
It is very hard for me to make up my mind-- which position to take. One moment I'm for the "left" then suddenly the radio newsreader says, "Jews have been murdered, the terrorists have been captured" and I say, "It could have been one of my family."
All this hatred has lasted over 2,000 years. We and the Arabs all live in fear.
I always say that there are good Arabs too; but I only hear about the murderers.
I want peace and believe that it will come in the end because peace is vital for the continuation of life…
DURING 8TH GRADE, in 1994, after the Peace Agreement with Jordan was signed, Bat-Chen decided to write a paper for school entitled, "War and Peace in my Family". She interviewed her maternal grandmother, who was invited by Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin to attend the Peace Agreement Ceremony because she was born in Rabat Amon, Jordan. She also interviewed her father and emphasized details about the heroic battle which he led during the Yom Kippur War. She succeeded in capturing a vivid description of the times:
A Summary of War and Peace
There is not much left to say; We're in a halfway spot.
There isn’t real peace in the Middle East,
Nor is there real war.
And for us, we're marching forward towards peace
Ready to understand the others; prepared to make changes
With one clear goal—to be rid of the hatred buried deep inside us for so long
And with the understanding that it's easy to make enemies
But that the wiser thing is to make friends
We come as a people who know a lot about war but very little about peace.
From now on we'll begin to change that.
That same year, Bat-Chen decided to participate in a pen-pal project with teenagers from the Israel-Arab village, Kafer Kassem. We found in one of her notebooks a draft letter to one of her friends:
Hello Nida. My hobbies include reading, writing, watching TV and horse-back riding. I was happy to receive your letter and sorry for sending this late. I look forward to our meeting. My birthday is on March 19. I support the peace process; I hate mathematics. I live in Tel-Mond.
While in 9th grade, on November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated. A week later, she wrote to the widow, Leah Rabin:
Three shots and it’s all over –
Now one talks about him in the past tense.
Suddenly, the present becomes the past,
And the past is only a memory.
We are standing, crying,
We want to believe it never happened,
That it is all a nightmare,
And when we wake up the next morning – it will not be so.
Instead, we wake up to a warped reality,
Where pain is laced with hate.
We cannot digest the enormity of this loss,
And we cannot comprehend its severity.
How can we understand such a tragedy,
In a civilization and not in the jungle?
Each one of us holds an opinion,
Yet, we do not have to agree.
We cannot turn the clock back,
But we can stop for today and remember……
It is like that first fallen domino,
That provokes a chain reaction.
We were beheaded, in every sense of the word,
And now it all crumbles.
As though he were the head, and we the body,
And when the head does not exist – the body dies!
It is impossible to build with parts that do not fit,
It is impossible to build with mismatched bricks.
It is an art to build a straight tower,
But a single kick can shatter it all.
And then,
Once can destroy a State!......
I think we are all guilty for not showing how much we loved him…..
…Maybe I am too naïve.
But I cannot understand,
How people take the law into their own hands!
How can we take the best gift ever given –
Life.
We are all one.
We share the same fate,
Old and young,
We stand grasping each other
And we cry…
In 1997, the Association for the Commemoration of Bat-Chen Shahak was established by Bat-Chen's parents—Ayelet and Tzvika. Its mission is based on Bat-Chen's legacy: to encourage literacy and to strengthen co-existence with our neighbors. The activities of the Association have grown and developed and include all age groups and cultural groups, as well as people from different religions. The association organizes and facilitates learning seminars on diary-writing as a genre, writing competitions and workshops, support groups, meetings with wounded Palestinian children and families in Israeli hospitals, encounter groups with Jewish Israeli women and Arab Israeli women, along with meetings and presentations in the USA, England, Uzbekistan, Germany and Italy. The Association works closely with its Palestinian counterpart, Al Tariq. The activities have bloomed in response to current events, such as the recent hostilities in Gaza.
We are proud to say that the Bat-Chen Diaries have been published in Hebrew, English, Arabic, Dutch, Italian, German and Japanese.
In closing, even though we have lost our precious daughter as a result of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, we still believe in peace and strive to actualize Bat-Chen's legacy through dialogue and building bridges to peace, understanding and co-existence.
