LOOKING AROUND: These are mothers?!

By Barbara Sofer
Jun. 20, 2002

We Jerusalemites have acquired an intimacy with terror over the past nearly two years. A chance encounter with a recovering terror victim is cause to rejoice.

That's how I felt recently when I spotted Tamar Eladi in a large Jerusalem supermarket. Shot by a terrorist on Jaffa Road on January 22, Eladi reached for her cellphone to call for help. The terrorist saw that she was not dead, stomped on her head, and shot her two more times.

But there was Tamar, on a crowded Thursday night. I wanted to have the store manager make an announcement over the public address system about a "heroine walking among us." Remarkably not bitter, she was filling a cart with groceries for Shabbat.

Then, last week, I met up with Edna Shkalim. You may recall Edna, a beautiful young mother who was selling shoes on Jaffa Road a year ago. A customer requested a certain pair, and when Edna returned with them, the woman took what looked like a water bottle from her bag. The liquid was an acid so caustic that it burned through Edna's face. Even army veteran burn specialists were horrified.

Over a year later, Shkalim still wears a half-mask. One ear has fallen off. Her attacker was never apprehended.

I had a question I needed to ask Edna. On January 27, I was a block from my cousins who had just finished shopping for sandals at a shoe store adjacent to the one where Edna worked. Before I could get there, a woman who'd come into that store blew herself up, injuring 100 - including my cousins - and killing one man. Could Edna's terrorist be the now infamous Wafa Idris?

Edna had wondered, too. She'd looked hard at the photos.

"I thought of it immediately. She was about the same age and coloring but I couldn't be sure. I was surprised no one made the connection and came to question me."

An obsession with shoes? Oddly, a woman recruited by Hamas whom I'd written about in a novel five years earlier had exactly that.

I went back to the many photos of Idris on the Internet but I couldn't find any of her shoes. There are, of course, many photos of and articles about Idris. There are portraits of her with her mother, who praised her daughter's "heroic" act.

Rarely had such a brutal act been so romanticized by the press - not only by the Arab press, but by the Western press, as well. Wistful eulogies speculate on the cause of her suicide. Childless and rebuffed by her ex-husband, she was supposedly "taken care of" by three brothers who happened to be members of Fatah.

In death, she won the applause of none other than Saddam Hussein. The Egyptians were ecstatic.

Last August, a week before the Sbarro pizza-shop attack, the Saudis (those inventors of peace plans), granted permission for women terrorists (properly garbed, of course). Only Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin expressed reservations: A woman shouldn't be unaccompanied in the street, even if she is a potential suicide bomber.

Several European filmmakers arrived to do her story. Other reporters sought out "Wafa Idris terrorist victims" so they could show off her handiwork.

Talk about obscene.

THE PUBLICITY motivated other women, such as the murderers at the supermarket in the neighborhood of Kiryat Hayovel and in the outdoor Mahane Yehuda market. Just last week, two additional women were arrested as wannabe Wafa Idrises. A teacher, 23, was arrested in El Aroub just south of Gush Etzion on suspicion of planning an attack in Israel. Imagine - a teacher - a middle-class Palestinian who educated the next generation, becoming a human bomb. A teenage girl was arrested in El Khader - a village, not a refuge camp. She was only 15.

David Zangen, a pediatrician in his civilian life, served as chief medical officer of Jenin for Operation Defensive Shield. He has expressed despair at finding family albums full of studio portraits of young children, girls and boys both, posing as future suicide bombers.

What could the Palestinian mothers who dressed up those kids for such photos be thinking? Who are the mothers who cheerfully send their eight-year-olds to summer camps that train suicide bombers? How can the mothers allow classroom bulletin boards to laud murderers, and school textbooks to perpetuate hatred? How can Wafa Idris's mother think of her daughter's head rolling across Jaffa Road without recoiling in horror?

Can they really be the same women whom we've all met for decades in parks and doctors' waiting rooms, seeking recreation and health for their children? How can Palestinian women bear the shame? "Palestinian mother" has become synonymous with "the world's worst parents."

The same day's newspaper that reported the capture of the latest women would-be bombers also brought additional stories of the suppression of Arab women in Saudi Arabia. Is this the sort of society Palestinian mothers are sacrificing their children to create?

Once, as a guest of Aish Hatorah Yeshiva, I had breakfast in Jerusalem with celebrity lawyer Allan Dershowitz. He objected strongly to the phrase "women and children" being used as a description of the weak and powerless.

Children indeed needed protection, he said. Women, he rightly pointed out, were adults and had a right to decide their fate. If they took part in dangerous demonstrations, for instance, they should be old enough to face the consequences.

Indeed, women can protest even in the Arab world if the issue is important enough. At the beginning of this intifada, teachers were routinely recruiting kids to go out and take part in violent riots as shields for terrorists with guns.

Their mothers wouldn't allow it. Such street demonstrations, as you may have noticed, have disappeared.

Seventy percent of the families in Gaza reportedly need food handouts. How demoralizing it must be to stand in line to get enough flour to make your family's pita. The nihilistic violence is leading to a hungry, desolate world, not a paradise, particularly for women.

Women need to express their courage, not by becoming the next kamikaze or by throwing their sons and daughters into a sacrificial fire. Throwing acid in a shoe store doesn't make you a heroine, nor does strapping TNT to your heart.

Women need to stand up to those within their society who are leading their people astray.

This is a dangerous choice, of course, in their repressive culture. But courage is what the suicide bombers are forever boasting about.