At my daughter’s grave

We are the involuntary members of a select group – families whom Hamas struck twice: first in the Second Intifada and again in the current war against Gaza.

Few are aware that Hamas was targeting Jewish children in 2001. Yet on the 20th day of the Hebrew month of Av in that year, our child, Malki was one of eight children murdered by Hamas’s first female operative, Ahlam Tamimi, a Jordanian studying journalism at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.

Another detail that has escaped publicity is the fact that during the hours preceding the massacre, Israel’s leaders knew of the grave threat to Jerusalem’s residents. They knew that a terrorist was strolling the city’s streets. They forewarned the city’s hospitals of the likelihood of multiple casualties. But they kept that a secret from us, the public.

Instead our government, led by prime minister Ariel Sharon, approached the Palestinian Authority’s then-leader, Yasser Arrafat, pleading for information that might thwart the attack. He refused. Big surprise.

The result was that 16 innocent lives were brutally ended.

I know all this because our then-minister of justice, Meir Shitreet, appeared on TV some time later and shared the above information with us, the pitiful, “inconsequential” public. He did so without a hint of shame or remorse for the egregiously unforgivable conduct of our leadership to its constituents. That abandonment by our leaders, once viewed as unimaginable, is, after the horrors of our abandonment on October 7, shocking, but also conceivable.

That fresh betrayal by a myriad of leaders also struck our family directly. It enabled Hamas to massacre innocent Jews again, in astronomical numbers triggering  the Gaza War that is raging 10 months later. On October 7, our son-in-law, Naftali Gordon, left to join his fellow reservists minutes after he learned that Hamas terrorists had invaded us. I was there to witness his departure. Naftali, without a trace of fear, hesitating only for several moments to ask our daughter Pesi whether she supported his decision.

She bravely did so wholeheartedly.

Then for two months, he awaited the launch of the ground operation and subsequently fought in it. On December 7, he fell to a Hamas RPG attack that struck his tank.

Typing these words, there is no light at the end of this tunnel. Whatever hope we have is vague, amorphous. We can only pray for better times. But if there is a lesson to be learned, a harsh one, it is that we the public must never trust our leaders implicitly. We must prod them and we must do whatever we ourselves can to make this a safer home for ourselves and our families.

Naftali did precisely that. He gave his life so that the evil that has plagued our lives for decades and that robbed us of Malki and her friend Michal, in the adjoining grave, would be eradicated.

May the memories of all those taken by our enemies be a blessing: יהי זכר כל הקדושים ברוך