Worst Possible Role Model
August 11, 2005
Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian suicide bomber, is the last person real feminists should want to emulate
The Gaza Center for Culture and Arts recently named its folklore course after the late Wafa Idris, who holds the dubious distinction of being the first Palestinian female suicide bomber.
Wafa almost killed me. She came closer to murdering my cousins. I have a hard time calling that culture.
From Sept. 11 to Sbarro
My cousins Mark and Rena Sokolow and their daughters had come to Israel to express their gratefulness to God for Mark's surviving the mass murder of Americans on September 11th.
Mark, 46, is a lawyer and his office was on the 38th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center before Wafa's fellow genocide bombers flew into it. Fortunately, after the first plane hit, my cousin was walking down the stairs and didn't hear the reassuring announcement that it was safe to return to his office.
He was already in the lobby when the second plane hit, and took the subway home.
Shopping and celebrating
The family planned a January trip which would dovetail the celebration of their youngest daughter Jamie's Bat Mitzvah. On the last day of a wonderful visit they decided to buy sandals in downtown Jerusalem. We'd made up to meet when they finished shopping. I especially wanted to give them a family Holocaust manuscript I'd finished editing.
My office is on Harav Kook Street, perpendicular to Jaffa Road, where they were shopping across from Sbarro Pizza, at the Freiman and Bein shoe store. They'd noticed Wafa come into the shoe store. When they called, I hurried towards them. I was behind a building but they were on the sidewalk when Wafa blew herself up. Rena, with complex fractures, saw Wafa's head roll by.
Wafa, 28, worked as a paramedic for the Red Crescent. All of us know just how bitter has been the criticism of Israel's policy of checking ambulances for terrorists and explosives. Wafa is the unhappy proof that a so-called paramedic can be a murderer carrying explosives.
Exploding role-model?
Ashraf Shawil, director of the Gaza Center for Culture and Arts, said the program was named for Wafa Idris to emphasize the role of women in the struggle against Israel.
He was following the example of the Union of Palestinian Women, who chose her as a model for Palestinian feminism. Summer camps have been named for her so that little girls can grow up to be the next Wafa Idris.
Wafa wasn't particularly poor or disadvantaged. She did, however, have an allegedly unhappy personal life�one that reflected her culture.
According to her mother, finding a good husband for Wafa was impossible because they weren't rich enough to come up with the impressive dowry, a necessity in Palestinian society.
Early marriage
So the family decided that the next best thing would be to marry her off at age 16 to her cousin, 26-year-old Ahmed. He later divorced her, possibly because she was childless, declared unable to bear children by her family doctor when she gave birth prematurely to a stillborn daughter.
According to extensive family interviews by eminent British journalist Barbara Victor, Wafa didn't pursue fertility treatment or see a specialist, easily available in the region. Wrote Victor in the Observer, "During an interview with Ahmed later, he explained how he had been disgraced by the tragedy.
"At first my family blamed Wafa, and then they blamed me,' he says. "They said that I was too weak to provide an infant that would survive in her womb."
Ahmed went for counseling with a local iman and later decided Wafa fit in the category of a disobedient wife. And, as her mother confided to Victor, a divorcee in Palestinian society is tainted forever.
From divorcee to killer
But Wafa had one way of gaining back her self-esteem. She could become a murderer.
Hence, an abject Palestinian woman, unable to control anything in her society would prove herself by dying herself and murdering others. What a grotesque distortion of feminism.
I rode with my little cousin Jamie, 12, in an ambulance with genuine paramedics, from downtown Jerusalem to Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Kerem.
Sirens blasting, we raced by Yad Vashem, where Jamie had visited several days earlier to see the tree planted for Maria Nichols, a Christian woman who had saved her family's lives under Hitler's nose in Berlin during World War II. Now there's a role model.
A fitting example
Jamie's eye was terrifyingly swollen and distorted. In the Hadassah Emergency Room the ophthalmologist who took care of my cousin with gentle professionalism introduced herself as Dr. Amar. I felt the irony immediately. Blown up by a Palestinian woman, she would be healed by a Palestinian woman� but one a fitting role model.
Dr. Ragonde Amar also grew up in Palestinian society, but she overcame cultural and political obstacles and used her mind and heart to help save the sight of every sick person who came her way. She fulfilled her dream of becoming a physician, and then earned a position in the prestigious ophthalmology department of Hadassah Hospital.
Like the hospital itself, nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the doctor maintained her high ethical standards throughout the Intifada. Thank God, Jamie, her sister Lauren, Rena and Mark have all recovered and they've remained idealistic and kindhearted despite their experience.
There are positive role models in this world. If I were a Palestinian, Wafa Idris is the last person I'd want my children or grandchildren to grow up to be.
