The Family that Stones together

By Barbara Sofer
Mar. 17, 2004

As author of Kids Lve Israel, Israel Loves Kids, a family travel guide, I'm always eager to get updates of new tourist opportunities in the region. Hence, a recent report forwarded to me by Tom Gross was of particular interest. The Lebanese Daily Star newspaper, in a report by Mohammed Zaatari, described 90 Iranian tourists who had arrived for a family trip to Syria. Among them were lawyers and university professors, their spouses and children.

The rule for success in family tourism is to get the kids involved. That usually means limiting lectures and maximizing activities: crawling inside an ancient tunnel instead of hearing about its construction features. And so it was on this family tour to Syria.

In an act of ultimate togetherness, the Iranian parents and children gathered to "pelt Israeli positions with stones at the Fatima Gate border during a visit to the Southern region." What fun!
Family trips engender strong memories, cherished stories told and retold at family gatherings. I cringe to imagine Iranian families sitting on a couch with their albums, reminiscing about the day they all stood together and stoned the Jews.

Among the most frustrating aspect of our conflict is our enemies' eagerness to infect their next generation with hatred and scapegoating. Instead of solving problems, everything that goes wrong in their countries is our fault. We understand that indoctrination is a goal of rigid, totalitarian governments, but the stone-the-Israelis tour didn't take place in a regime-run elementary school. It was a family vacation, with well-healed, university-educated parents. How much more potent is the hate-message when it's inculcated in the family.

Even before the current three and a half years of violence, a Venezuelan plastic surgeon who'd arrived in our area on a humanitarian mission to Gaza reported on this indoctrination of hate. The doctor had arrived with a medical team that traveled the Third World to repair cleft palates and disfiguring facial injuries. In Gaza, they'd seen facial scars typical of burns caused from tipped cooking pots in crowded kitchens. But there was one difference. When the surgeons asked how the injury was caused, in every other country the kids reported spilled cooking kettles. In Gaza, even the smallest child claimed that "the Israeli soldier pushed me," even though the scars clearly came from home accidents. The plastic surgeon wondered if the kids had been coached or if they suffered from group hysteria. I've never discovered the answer.

WITH THE sad history of Palestinian parents' encouraging their children to dress up as terrorists, their family album portraits of children in the garb of bombers, the summer camp chants of hate, and the ubiquity of posters honoring mass murderers, need we be surprised that an 11-year-old was dispatched on a murder mission this week?

French author and psychiatrist Daniel Sibony, speaking recently at a Jerusalem conference, claimed that terrorists' effective strategy is first to attack brutally, and then to make the West feel guilty for trying to protect itself. We have, for instance, the poor Palestinian syndrome, which excuses terror as justifiable frustration.

British MP Jenny Tonge expressed this attitude, saying she understood Palestinian frustration and suffering, and might blow herself up on a bus if she were a Palestinian. This strategy transforms murder into a legitimate form of protest.

Even the most vehement espousers of this dangerous doctrine would be hard-pressed to paint those affluent Iranian tourists as the oppressed masses. What they do share with the Palestinians is their determination to pass on anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism as a tradition to their children.

It's time to realize that poisoning the minds of children is not an unhappy side effect but another goal of the enemy. It guarantees the continuation of the conflict.

In contrast, several times in the last few weeks I have heard worries expressed, by Israeli psychiatrists and social commentators, that our own children, exposed to terror, will become rigid in their positions and therefore unable to maintain the balance between defending ourselves and maintaining a respect for human life, which is so much a part of our value system.

It's good that we're paying attention, but I'm not worried about the mind-set of our next generation. First, take a look at our own family tourist sites. We feature water slides, donkey rides, jeep desert adventures, honey making, and historical reenactments that never glorify war. Our parks are playgrounds, not make-believe battlefields.

Tolerance is strongly rooted in our tradition.

More than any other ceremony, the family-based Passover seder focuses on transmitting memory from one generation to the next. When we retell the biblical 10 plagues, we spill wine to temper any feelings of celebration we might experience at the fate of the Egyptians, not once but 10 times. Like it or not, we are compelled to look at the other side.

I can't help remembering Golda Meir's old adage, that only when our enemies love their children more than they hate us will we have peace.