When The War Hits Home

TEL AVIV
The Mother of the Bride
Rachel Dagan, 50/three children

Rachel Dagan had been up all night when she entered the flower shop and asked for a bridal bouquet. The florist smiled and said, "Happy news! Mazel tov to the bride and groom." Dagan hesitated. She didn't want to speak. She didn't want to force her misery on others. But she couldn't hold back. "I'm going to put it on my daughter's grave," she said. The florist burst into tears. Dagan's daughter Danit was only 12 hours dead, killed by a suicide bomber who blew himself up beside the young woman and her fiance in a crowded Jerusalem cafe.

Dagan laid the garland on the shoveled earth that day, but a month later she still can't believe her beautiful daughter, 24, who had studied sociology and wanted to become a travel agent and who had kept a worn Alf doll on her bed, won't be celebrating her wedding next month as planned. Dagan leafs through Danit's datebook, recovered from the wreckage in Cafe Moment; she rereads text messages from Uri, Danit's fiance, on her daughter's red Nokia cell phone. "Uri loves Danit," says one. Then the last message: "Tonight at Moment. Uri."

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It is a time for mothers to suffer, helplessly, desperately. When Palestinian and Israeli societies are being ripped apart by the testosterone and machismo of wartime, mothers are struggling to keep alive their nurturing role amid the loss, grief and fear. "In the stricken faces of mothers--Palestinian mothers and Israeli mothers--the entire world is witnessing the agonizing cost of this conflict," President Bush said last week. It is a time when children can't be sent to school without the worry that some bomber or soldier will take their lives. It is a time for a woman to relax only when all her family is inside the home in front of her eyes. It is a time of struggle not to succumb to the hatred all around. As the menfolk kill and talk of necessary sacrifice, these women must fight battles of their own.

Rachel Dagan feels she has lost the struggle to keep her hopes alive. In her daughter's death, she blames everyone and everything: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for supporting terrorists; Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for failing to bring the peace he promised in his election campaign; the U.S. for urging restraint upon Israel for months and now for wanting Israel to cease its efforts to hunt down bomber cells in Palestinian towns. A few weeks after the bombing, Dagan went to see the dress her daughter had picked out at a shop on a Jerusalem street that has repeatedly been targeted by suicide bombers. Danit had told her it was going to be like Princess Diana's wedding dress. As Dagan scurried along the sidewalk, her pulse raced; she thought of dying in a bombing right there. "I don't care if I live or die," she remembers thinking. "I want to see her dress." That was one battle she won.

HEBRON
The Islamic Principal
Fathiyeh Qawasmeh, 39/six children

Every day Fathiyeh Qawasmeh, principal of the all-girl Islamic Charitable School, allows her students to choose a subject for a lecture at the 9:30 a.m. assembly. Yesterday's address was about the importance of statistics in science, and the day before was a lesson from the Koran. Today three girls talked to their classmates about a woman in Gaza and her four children, all of whom had been killed when their donkey cart rolled over an Israeli mine near an Israeli settlement in the dunes south of Gaza City. Qawasmeh knew she had to help her 735 elementary and high school students understand. "Nobody is excluded, even a mother and her children," Qawasmeh told the assembly through the polyester veil that covers her nose and mouth. "We have to bear the situation, because God will reward our patience."

The school is funded by a charity that is linked to the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, a group responsible for innumerable attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. In the lobby, the custodian keeps a Karl Gustav machine gun in his desk drawer. Two of the girls in Qawasmeh's school have been injured in the fighting that broke out 1 1/2 years ago. Shireen Rajabi, 8, has a scar above her right eyebrow; she says a soldier hit her with his rifle butt at a checkpoint.

When Qawasmeh isn't taking care of the girls at school, she is ministering to her own six children at home. At night they wake her with their nightmares. Last month she calmed her 11-year-old, Doa, the most fearful of her brood, when the girl awoke crying. "What's the worst thing that could happen to you?" Qawasmeh asked. "To be martyred," Doa sniffled. "What happens to martyrs?" her mother asked. Wiping her eyes, Doa thought a moment. "They go to heaven," she said, and then she smiled.

BEIT HANINA
The Unsilenced Woman
Maha Shamas, 51/two children

The sheet music for a Brahms inter-mezzo is open on the Russian-made Rathke grand piano that rests in the salon. Wearing a gray sweat suit and teddy-bear slippers, Maha Shamas is fretting about how people view Palestinian women. First, it is the way foreigners interpret the ululating jubilation of Palestinian mothers whose children have died as "martyrs." To a Westerner, it looks like an unconscionable celebration of the death of a child. "Palestinian women have been dehumanized so much that people are willing to believe this," she says. "It's the ultimate racism. It assumes that Palestinian mothers don't love their children." This apparent elation at the sacrifice of a child, she says, is a ceremony forced on mothers by a society in which men decide for their women. "It's the result of so much pressure within society for a mother to fall into this ritual even if she has to eat up the grief she feels for her son."