MIDDLE EAST: The last rays of late summer sunlight filtered through the pine trees of Israel's national cemetery as David Grossman, one of the country's greatest novelists and a powerful voice for the cause of peace, intoned the Jewish prayer of mourning for his son.
Staff sergeant Uri Grossman, two weeks short of his 21st birthday, was killed last Saturday when his tank was hit by a Hizbullah missile in a Lebanese village only a few miles from the Israeli border.
His death came less than 48 hours before a fragile ceasefire took hold - and days after his famous father had spoken out publicly against the war.
The sobs of Uri's younger sister Ruti rang out in the still air on Tuesday evening as she, her father, her mother, Michal, and the Grossmans' elder son, Yonatan, slowly climbed rough-hewn stone steps behind the coffin draped in the blue and white Israeli flag.
"I'm not saying anything about the war right now," Grossman, pale and slight in a baggy T-shirt and khaki pants, told the crowd of hundreds of mourners at Mount Herzl, many of them figures from Israel's literary and artistic aristocracy. "We, our family, have already lost this war."
Grossman (52), whose novels and nonfiction have been hailed for their sensitivity, emotional complexity and historical resonance, has long been regarded by many here as something akin to a national conscience.
He took up that public role again last week, when he joined two of Israel's other best known authors, Amos Oz and AB Yehoshua, in issuing a manifesto urging the government to seek a negotiated settlement to the conflict with Hizbullah rather than waging a large-scale ground war in south Lebanon.
Like many Israelis, Grossman believed Israel was justified in retaliating for the abduction of two soldiers and the deaths of eight more in a cross-border raid by Hizbullah. But as the conflict dragged on, he concluded that peril and suffering on both sides outweighed possible gains.
"Force, in this case, will fan the flames of hatred toward Israel in the region and the entire world, and may even, heaven forbid, create the situation that will bring upon us the next war and push the Middle East into an all-out regional war," Grossman told a news conference last Thursday in Tel Aviv.
In typically self-effacing fashion, he spoke eloquently of the national interest without mentioning his private fears for his son, already serving on the front line.
Uri Grossman, friends and family said, shared his father's view that Arabs and Jews must find a way to live together.
But like his father, the son of refugees from Europe, he had an unshakable commitment to Zionism and believed that army service was his duty.
The family was worried when he chose to enter the armoured corps, but accepted his determination to become a tank commander: "From childhood you were always like this, with strength from inside you," Grossman said in his eulogy.
In a painfully prescient op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times six days after the start of the Lebanon conflict, Grossman wrote that "events of the last few days have shaken everyone awake". The war has reached their doorsteps," he wrote; and on Saturday it reached his. For Israelis, it was the conflict's bloodiest day, with 24 soldiers killed in the fighting.
Many in the crowd were moved to tears by Ruti and Yonatan Grossman's tributes to their brother, in which they described a sweet-natured, deeply principled but fun-loving young man. "My sweet, my soldier, my joy, my brother," Ruti said in a tear-choked voice. "I miss your hugs, your smelly uniform . . . I never believed that I would be burying you."
Mourners stood in silence but for murmured "Amens" as Grossman recited the kaddish, or prayer for the dead.
"I can't even say out loud how much you were 'someone to run with' to me," he said in his eulogy, speaking in a strong but sorrow-cracked voice. "Your short life was good, and I hope I was a worthy father."
In the closest he came to politics, he concluded: "I wish we could all be more gentle toward one another - that we could heal ourselves from violence. Harder times are to come."