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To Abd’s Mother, Rahmeh.
It‘s been 22 years. It‘s been two years.
It’s been 22 years since your son, Abd, committed an act of terror against civilians. He was 18 years old and had his whole life ahead. On June 11, 2003, news articles say that Abd was studying for an English exam when he said goodbye to you and left home. He boarded a bus in the center of Jerusalem, then bombed it, killing himself and 17 other people – innocent civilians. One of those people was my mother, Genia Berman.
I was 19, just a little older than Abd, when I lost my mother so horribly, so brutally. I have missed her every single day for 22 years.
It’s been two years since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023; unimaginably horrific attacks that mark the beginning of unprecedented terror on Gaza and it‘s people. As I watch from afar, the cruelty and suffering are too much for me to bear, but I watch. I cannot begin to imagine the suffering you must feel to be so close, or worse, for those living and dying there.
The attacks of October 7 mark something else, something more personal and unexpected for me. They woke my pain and trauma of my mother’s murder and also threw me into a frenzy of researching the attack that killed her. For the first time, I researched the person who killed my mother: your son, Abd Al-Mouti Shabaneh. For twenty years, all I could think about was my own grief, my own loss. I was consumed with the loss of the mother I never got to have an adult relationship with, the grandmother missing for seven beautiful grandchildren.
On the horrific day of October 7 and on every single day since, the media has been showing us humans devoid of humanity. There is no humanity in the attacks carried out by Hamas on October 7. There is no humanity in the attacks carried out by the IDF on civilians in Gaza ever since. There is no humanity in starving an entire population. Yet these are all humans. Each of the tens of thousands of innocent people being hurt and killed is human, and each and every one of the people doing the hurting and killing is human. These are humans who have forgotten their own humanity. These are humans who have been taught to believe that the people they are hurting and killing are less than human.
Suddenly, over 20 years after the bombing that killed my mother, I find myself seeking out the humanity of the person who caused me endless pain: your son, Abd. He was a human being. He is said to have been a good student, a friendly person, a kid who enjoyed playing soccer. He wanted to study medicine, to help people who needed healing. He was a human being with dreams, hopes, and a family who loved him. He was not a monster, just a person. Did he know that the people he was killing were not monsters? Did he know that every life lost that day had hopes, dreams, and a family that loved them? A family that, probably like your own, will never stop hurting, will never stop grieving?
I am assuming he didn’t think of such things. I am assuming he believed that every Jew, every Israelis, every Zionist is less than human. How could he possibly do what he did otherwise?
Maybe I am wrong, but we cannot ask.
Today, I live in Germany. I had moved at age 19, just months before my mother was murdered. I had to be told over the phone that she had died and fly back on my own, barely more than a child myself, a child without a mother. I haven’t moved back to Jerusalem; I have built my life here in Germany, as a Jew. I have good German friends and a German partner with whom I am raising my three German and Jewish children. My friends here, including my partner, are descendants of Nazis. They are descended from humans truly devoid of humanity, but they were humans nonetheless. I am a descendant of holocaust survivors. The Nazis murdered the entire families of both my maternal grandparents, the sole survivors of their families. Today I live here in Germany and share my life, my love and dreams and hopes with the grandchildren of Nazis. I can live here freely, among free people who know their own and my humanity.
I wish with all my heart that someday, my grandchildren and Abd’s grand nieces and nephews can live and raise the next generation together in freedom, equality, and peace. Humanely. I truly believe this is possible.
I have met some bereaved Palestinians and Israelis over the past two years, and we are shared our stories of bereavement and grief in video meetings. We all feel the same pain, the same agony of the violence and the loss. In these meetings, different people on both sides tell their stories of bereavement. One Palestinian told us of how his wife was murdered by settlers, sitting right next to him in the car. One Israeli woman, about my age, told us how her mother was killed, like my own, in a terrorist attack during the second intifada. A Palestinian mother told us how her baby boy was killed by inhaling toxic tear gas; Israeli soldiers held her back for hours and would not let mother and child through to the hospital, resulting in her beloved son’s death.
We all feel the same pain. I wish I could have hugged each and every one of the speakers through our screens. After one meeting, I crawled into bed with my then 12-year-old son and told him a little about the meeting. I told him everyone there went through something similar or even worse to what happened to me, and that it was hard and moving and empowering. He looked at me, surprised, and asked genuinely, what could possibly be worse than losing a mother?
Being a mother myself, I know the answer to this. Living in this world I know, unfortunately, that there are many horrible answers to this question. But he does not need to know, not just yet.
But you know, Rahmeh, don’t you? You know what it is to lose a child. And all I can say from twenty-two years later, is that I am sorry for your loss.
Vered Berman
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