When The War Hits Home

Monday, Apr. 29, 2002 By MATT REES
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TEL AVIV The Mother of the Bride RACHEL DAGAN, 50/three children

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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."

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