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A Tender Ray of Hope

The graduation ceremony of the class of 2002 at Jerusalem's Anglican International School was a heartbreaking experience.

Most of the graduates, sons and daughters of Jerusalem's diplomatic and foreign community, were on their way to Europe or the US, leaving behind Israeli and Palestinian friends engulfed in raging violence, which at the time seemed endless. The school is located on Hanevi'im Street. It connects East Jerusalem with the center of West Jerusalem. During the Second Intifada, the street was known as "suicide alley." Several Palestinian suicide bombers walked up the street to downtown West Jerusalem to blow themselves up. In one case, a suicide bomber detonated the explosives he strapped to his body just outside the neighboring French School. Body parts flew over the fence into the schoolyard.

The tears and the trauma were omnipresent at the graduation ceremony. Emotions peaked when a young Palestinian-Israeli graduate, George Khoury, took the stage to speak on behalf of the senior class. Handsome and charismatic, a gifted pianist and an outstanding athlete, George spoke about the school being a sheltered island of sanity and peace in a sea of war and enmity. The strong bonds between the students and staff - mostly foreign, some Palestinian and a handful of Israeli Jews - helped them cope with the brutality that surrounded them. George depicted the school as an oasis of love within the darkness. I wept along with the crowd of hundreds that listened to his speech.

George went on to study at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. In 2004, while jogging in East Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood, he was gunned down by Palestinian terrorists who mistook him for a Jew.

His death was more than a tragedy. Many saw it as a bitter metaphor of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - and the senselessness of it all. George was an Israeli who lived among Palestinians, in a Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem. In high school he participated in interfaith projects with fellow Christians, Muslims and Jews. He was a proud Palestinian Christian who went to an Israeli university, and was murdered because fellow Palestinians thought he was a Jew.

After his death, his bereaved father Elias, a prominent lawyer, dismissed an apology by Fatah's al-Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, which carried out the attack, and rejected its offer to declare George a martyr. Elias Khoury, who lost his father, Daoud, to a Palestinian terrorist attack in downtown Jerusalem in 1975, when a booby trapped refrigerator exploded among a crowd of shoppers, lambasted both the occupation and Palestinian terrorism after his son's death.

Elias decided to commemorate his son in a special way: he funded and dedicated the Arabic translation of Amos Oz's seminal novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness, to George. Oz, a long time peace activist and one of the spiritual leaders of Israel's Peace Now movement, says he views the translation to Arabic as the most important of all 27 translations of the book.

Here is a story from Wednesday's Yedioth Ahronoth about the project. In the sea of dark and sad news from Israel and Palestine, here is a tender ray of hope:
 
A Tale of Love and Light

Yedioth Ahronoth, March 3

by Noam Barkan

Terror struck Elias Khoury twice.  Six years ago, his son George was shot to death by terrorists who thought he was Jewish.  Elias's father Daoud Khoury, George's grandfather, was murdered 35 years ago in the "refrigerator bomb" terror attack in Zion Square in Jerusalem.  Despite the double tragedy suffered by his family against the backdrop of the conflict between the peoples--the family chose to commemorate its son through an attempt to bring people closer together.

   This week, an edition of Amos Oz's autobiographical book, A Tale of Love and Darkness, was published in translation to Arabic, at the family's initiative and with its funding.  The book is currently being distributed in Lebanon by a European publisher.  The Arabic translation will soon be distributed in Israel as well, and then in Egypt and Jordan.  Meanwhile, A Tale of Love and Darkness has already received a positive review in the major Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat of London.

   In the difficult days after losing his son, Attorney Elias Khoury searched for the best way to commemorate him.  His brother, Attorney Muein Khoury, suggested that he dedicate to George's memory the translation of Amos Oz's book, A Tale of Love and Darkness, into Arabic.  Elias agreed immediately.

   "I thought this was a wonderful way of commemoration," he says.  "Literature can truly bring people together.  Only if we know each other can we reach reconciliation between the peoples.  If we don't understand each other, there will always be suspicion and unbridgeable gaps.  I also thought that through Oz's book, we will be able to learn how after everything it went through, the Jewish people managed to revive itself, get out of the camps and reach Israel.  To be united.  Through the state, we can learn what we have to do before we have a state.  In order to build our nation, we have to uphold all values, first and foremost the value of human life."

   The choice of Oz, Khoury adds, is not only related to the content of A Tale of Love and Darkness.  "I like him very much," he explains.  "I've read a lot of the books he wrote, and heard him on many occasions, even before the tragedy.  This is a story and work of art of the highest order.  The way Amos Oz weaves words and paints a picture for the reader is wonderful."


   A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz's autobiographical book, was published in 2002 by Keter.  The book describes Oz's childhood in Jerusalem's Kerem Avraham neighborhood, against the backdrop of the British Mandate period and the Arab-Jewish conflict.  The book follows the establishment of the state and ends in the early years of the state.

   The initiative to translate his book and distribute it in the Arab world was very exciting for Amos Oz.  "For me, the translation into Arabic is the most important of all 27 translations of the book," Oz says.  "I believe that A Tale of Love and Darkness can build bridges.  It's very touching that this is the way that George's family chose to commemorate him."

   The idea of translating Oz's book into Arabic arose a few weeks before the terror attack in which George was murdered.  The person who proposed the idea was Attorney Israel Kantor, a close friend of Attorney Muein Khoury.  "Kantor told me that he needed a donation for translating the book into Arabic and distributing it in the Arab world," Muein relates.  "A few weeks later, the tragedy happened to us.  I suggested to my brother to dedicate a page in George's memory in the translated book.  My brother accepted the idea favorably and happily.  He wrote a dedication for the book, and I donated the money."

   The book was translated into Arabic by writer Jamil Ghanayim.  It was published by the Munasharat al-Jamil publishing house.  In order to finance the translation and distribution of the book, Attorney Kantor also approached Dov Eichenwald, CEO of Yedioth Publishing.  In the end, the Khoury family covered part of the translation expenses, and the other costs were covered by Yedioth Publishing.

   "The book is now in the final stages of proofreading and preparation," Eichenwald says.  "In the coming Book Week, we intend to publish the Arabic edition in Israel, and distribute it in other neighboring countries such as Egypt and Jordan.  This book has immense importance from a historical and cultural standpoint.  This is not only a biography of the writer, it is a biography of the State of Israel and its capital Jerusalem.  This is the reason that we mobilized for the project of publishing it in Arabic."

   On the day his son was murdered, a wound that had not healed was reopened in Elias Khoury's heart.  His father was murdered when he was 24, a young law student, a few days before he was about to travel to England to continue his higher education.  "When I was informed that my son had been murdered, it was a trauma on top of a trauma.  It brought me back to that tragedy, and I asked myself what I had done to have fate strike me twice the same way.  It was terrible pain." [...]

Q: Is there a political statement in the means of commemoration you chose?

   "There is a political statement and a significant moral statement that we advocated before, during and after the tragedy.  There is a statement that we have to respect human life and become familiar with each other in order to bridge the gaps and reach reconciliation.  We were very glad to read the review published in Al-Hayat, this is one of the most widely-read and important newspapers in the Arabic press.  The review was very positive.  There is a political overtone in the review, because it is a book translated directly from Hebrew into Arabic, but the book itself receives very positive reviews."