Tuesday, May 12, 1998
Making peace with tragedy
PEOPLE: After losing his son to Palestinian extremists, Israeli
father finds forgiveness
By Hannah Miller
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Like most fathers, Yitzhak Frankenthal was slow to take his
son’s advice.
Arik Frankenthal, 18, started chatting his father up about a
group called Oz VeShalom-Nevitot Shalom in 1994. The group’s
philosophy is just like yours, said Arik, a student in his last
year of secondary school in the small town of Gimzo Village in
Israel. They promote making peace with Palestine, Arik said. But
his father was a businessman and not active in politics.
A year later, Arik was kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian
terrorists. And in response, his father finally joined the peace
movement in earnest.
Frankenthal is at the center of pain, where the Middle East
crisis becomes incomprehensible, where the bloodlines of religion
and war cross. Not only has he managed to forgive, not only has he
called for peace in the Middle East, but he has also called for it
through a means few other Israeli leaders approve.
"For the sake of peace," he says, "we need to support the
Palestinian state. It is possible to be religious and support the
peace process."
Frankenthal has always felt this way. But it wasn’t until Arik’s
murder in 1994 that he sold his successful business and threw
himself wholeheartedly into the peace movement. He is now executive
director of Oz VeShalom-Nevitot Shalom, which means the "ways of
peace" in Hebrew, after a Torah verse that reads, "the ways of the
Torah are the ways of peace."
Oz VeShalom got its start about 20 years ago, when dovish
religious leaders grew frustrated with the militant and vocal
religious right-wing.
"At the time, the religious community in Israel felt that the
extreme was representative," says Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller of
UCLA’s Hillel. "Oz VeShalom was formed because of the need for a
moderate voice."
Under Frankenthal’s aegis, the organization has grown from a few
hundred left-wing intellectuals to 4,000 members, encompassing a
wide breadth of Israeli society. And it has garnered the attention
of Israeli leaders, drawn to the human truth of Frankenthal’s
story.
Arik was a bright boy, irreverent, always asking questions. He
liked to take walks in the desert outside Gimzo Village and planned
to become a history professor.
He and his father were exceedingly close. "It wasn’t a
relationship between a father and a son. He said that I was his
best friend," Frankenthal says.
After graduation, Arik went off to fulfill his military service
requirement. "I never thought anything would happen to Arik," his
father says. "Never."
Arik would return home to his family on weekends, his father
dropping him off in Tel Aviv on Mondays to take the train back to
the army base. But one Friday while he was hitchhiking home, Arik
was kidnapped by Hamas, the extremist wing of the Palestinian
movement.
When Arik realized that his kidnappers were Hamas, he tried to
fight them. In the gunfire that ensued, Arik was killed by a bullet
to the head.
It was around 8 o’clock in the evening when the five army
officials arrived at Gimzo Village in a taxi. As they walked up the
steps to the Frankenthal’s front door, his wife Hannah looked out
and saw them. She froze under the shadow of memory. Twelve years
earlier, army officials had come to her home, to tell her that her
husband had been killed. It was Hannah’s first husband, in fact,
whom Arik had joined the army to honor.
After his mourning period, Frankenthal came to certain
conclusions. For one, he "accepted what God had done." For another,
he realized that a political murder was not personal but a cost of
the ongoing conflict.
"Arik was not murdered because he was Arik. He was killed
because there is no peace with the Palestinians," he reflects. And
that, he felt, was something he could change.
In 1995, he went to work. Looking for bereaved families, he
spent hours in the public library in Tel Aviv, thumbing through
newspaper obituaries. He took down names of families who had lost a
son or daughter, all the way back to 1977. He found 422 and urged
them to join Nevitot Shalom.
He began the slow, complex work of spreading an idea, the idea
that peace and religion could co-exist. He garnered the attention
of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and eventually formed a
close friendship.
Although it is a "whole way of thinking" that has to altered,
Frankenthal says he is "realistic. Sometimes I’m pessimistic,
sometimes I’m optimistic," he says.
The people of Israel can bring peace, he believes, but "only if
people realize that to make peace is not against Judaism.
"To continue war," he says, "is to continue the loss of our
children."
JAMIE SCANLON-JACOBS/Daily Bruin
In the years after the 1994 murder of his son, Yitzah
Frankenthal has grown increasingly active in calling for peace
through the recognition of the Palestinian state.