Tales of Tel Aviv - Democratic Underground

pistoff democrat

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Tue Dec-02-03 10:07 AM
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Tales of Tel Aviv

Me, Yosi Mendelevich, I was considered to be a very protective father. But there was a hole in my plan, I let my son take buses. I'm going to show you everything that happened on the last day of my son Yuval's life which was March 5 2003, when he was 13 years old, so you will understand the banality of the atrocity. At 6.45am I woke him up, he hugged me and said, 'Give me some strength for the morning', so I hugged him strongly. He got up, he washed his face, brushed his teeth, ate Cocoa Pops and milk for breakfast and put a cheese sandwich into his schoolbag for his lunch.

While he was waking up, his murderer, Mohammed Kawasma, was travelling back from Hebron, where he had gone to pick up the bomb, through Abu Dis where they are now building the fence, but there was no fence there then and no one stopped him at the checkpoint. Around 11am, when Yuval was finishing maths, the murderer was arriving here in Haifa. He decided to wait until 2pm when all the kids from school were going home and the buses were more crowded. At 2.05pm, Yuval got on the 37 bus here, at the stop by his school, sat down in the fifth row from the back, on the right, directly behind the murderer, and at 2.07pm the bus started moving.

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When the phone went dead, I thought it was only a disturbance in the cellular system and I didn't get suspicious. Then I got a call from a friend who said, "How is Yuval?" I said, "Why?" He said, "You heard there was a suicide bomb in Moriah Avenue?" I was shivering, a cold sweat was on my skin. I drove down the street and saw the bus. The other bodies were on the road in body bags but Yuval was still there, under a blanket, too burnt to be identified. His left arm with the stopped watch was blown off from his body and was hanging out of the window on the other side of the bus. The air smelled of scorched flesh and I thought of Yuval's great-grandparents who were wiped from the earth in Poland in 1941. That was their holocaust, this is his. Moriah, by the way, is the name of the mountain where God tested Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, but no one called from the sky to save my boy.

Now I want to show you the wall here behind the bus stop, where the blood of our children was spilled. Seventeen people were massacred that day, a Druze, a Muslim Arab, a girl of the Bahai faith. Exactly two weeks before Yuval was murdered he participated in a co-existence project in an Arab village. This was binational Haifa. My barber, our butcher, our grocer are all Arab. Seven thousand people came to our house in the days of mourning, but no Arabs came. That is a devastating issue for me. Meanwhile, in Abu Dis, the family of Mohammed Kawasma were holding three days of celebration. He was not a refugee, his house was not demolished. He was a computer student in the Islamic Polytechnic of Hebron. Nothing brought him to that deed but religious ideology.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,1097737,00.html