ISRAEL: Two child murders in Israel this week pushed all else off the Israeli press, writes Helen Motro in Jerusalem
The intifada, next month's elections, the souring economy and soaring poverty levels, all were forgotten this week by a country obsessed with the almost simultaneous disappearance of two little girls last Saturday in Jerusalem - one Jewish, the other Arab. Massive manhunts by police, using thousands of volunteers, dragged throughout the cold winter days and colder nights.
By Tuesday, the body of Hodaya Kedem Pimstein, a 22-month-old Jewish toddler, was discovered in a shallow grave in the Jerusalem woods. Police planned to distribute 15,000 flyers yesterday with a picture of five-year-old Nur Abu Tir to Arabs arriving for Friday prayers; the flyers were rendered redundant when Nur's body was found at the bottom of a village drainage pit.
There was no connection between the murders. But in Israel nothing is free of the interface between Arab and Jew. In a society where hundreds of Arab and Jewish children have lost their lives, this case created pockets of co-operation between the warring nationalities.
The disappearance of Nur while playing outside her East Jerusalem village home galvanised a search by thousands of Israeli police and volunteers. A police helicopter scanned the terrain near Nur's village, but it hovered close by lest it unwittingly wander into nearby area controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and risk being shot down by Palestinian snipers.
Israeli policemen, in the last two years perceived as enemy intruders, converged on Nur's village, scouring the streets with specially trained German shepherds. Suspicions as to the motive for Nur's murder centre on the child as victim of a feud between family clans.
A Palestinian labourer working illegally in Israel gave police the key tip which led to the discovery of Hodaya's body and the arrest of her killer.
Last Saturday, a distraught father reported his toddler missing. The child of separated parents, she was spending the weekend with him. He reported that he had left Hodaya in the living room watching television; when he came into the room a few minutes later she was gone.
During the ensuing four days of intensive searching, the father gave numerous interviews to the media, appearing on television in tearful appeals to find his beloved child. Hodaya's photo and photos of her parents plastered the front pages of every newspaper in the country.
A Palestinian labourer, whose work in Israel had been rendered illegal due to an expired work permit, saw those pictures. The previous week, walking through a wooded area, he had noticed a man digging a hole between the trees. On Tuesday, he identified Hodaya's father as that man, and after receiving assurances he would not be penalised, led searchers to the site. Within hours, Hodaya's body had been dug up.
Her arrested father confessed to drowning the girl in the bathtub and then burying her, a murder plotted a month beforehand to "hurt" the child's mother.
Yet the gulf between Palestinian and Israeli is now so wide that the girls' identical misfortune prompted no connection between their families. This lack of identification illustrates the huge gap between people who live just hundreds of yards apart. A newly published survey of Israelis and Palestinians by the respected international dispute resolution organisation, Common Ground, reveals an amazing finding: the main gap between the two groups is not ideology but mistrust. Although 70 per cent of both groups would be amenable to a political compromise, neither Palestinians nor Israelis give the other side credit for goodwill.
But the parallel child murders did bring forth some exceptional, if small, gestures. Perhaps a dip in mutual distrust has been an offshoot of the two tragedies.
Nur's family received a solidarity visit by a Jewish father whose own daughter perished this year in a Palestinian terrorist incident. Bearing sandwiches and commiseration, the man said: "I know what it is to lose a daughter." The Palestinian governor of the nearby Bethlehem region appealed to Arab residents and Palestinian security officials to aid in the search for Hodaya. And the Palestinian worker who solved Hodaya's murder said he sought no reward: "If I need to get any paycheck, I will get it from God."
In life, there was no connection between Hodaya and Nur. Had they lived out their days to have families and grow old in Jerusalem, the girls almost certainly would never have met. Only their untimely, brutal deaths created a bond between them. In this society torn apart by hatred, can the loss of two innocents make both peoples recognise each other's common kinship?