The Bottle-Brushes
The other month, I was invited to a very special ceremony that was held at the Kibbutz Beeri cemetery.
The new Australian ambassador to Israel came with the entire Embassy staff to plant ten mature, native Australian bottle-brush trees outside the cemetery in memory of the only Australian victim of October 7th: Galit Carbonne, a 66-year-old grandmother and member of the kibbutz.
After the ceremony, I was speaking to Galit’s brother Danny, himself a survivor of the massacres.
We talked about the Royal Commission into the Bondi massacre and anti-Semitism that was being held at the time in Australia.
We both have friends who are survivors of that horrific terror attack in Sydney, and Danny and I had both been following the testimonies and witness accounts, many of them from people we know, with a sense of both horror and awe.
Horror because of testimonies about the effect that the aftermath of the October 7 massacres has had on the Jewish communities abroad and the dramatic increase in antisemitism in the Diaspora communities around the world.
And in awe because of the efficiency and the depth of the Commission that was held before even the first anniversary of attack.
Danny said to me a sentence that struck me like an icicle to the heart.
He said, “There is just one thing that I hope and pray for: that I won’t die before we know why this happened to us.”
At this moment, I think I understood for the first time, the great travesty of the fact that 3 years after the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, we still don’t have any answers.
There has been no official committee of inquiry, not a national commission nor even a political one.
When we go to the polls in a couple of weeks’ time, we are asked to choose our leaders.
Many people regard elections as a referendum on the performance of the government, but how can we possibly make our vote without knowing how this government has performed, what it did and what it didn’t do, with whom the responsibility of what happened to us lies.
As an Israeli, but also as an Australian who has seen the importance of the national inquiry into the Bondi attack and in some ways, the healing enclosure is given to people who were present on that horrific day at the beach, I will vote for a party who has its top priority to give us answers. And in doing so, be able to work to prevent this ever happening to us again.
Bottle-brush trees bloom in late spring to early summer with magnificent, deep-red flowers.
My hope and prayer is that by the next time I am in Beeri, I will get to see those ten majestic red trees blooming in Galit’s memory and that by that time, we will start to have some answers and maybe then, healing can begin.