Rami Elhanan is an Israeli, Bassam Aramin is a Palestinian. Both live in Jerusalem, both grieve for daughters killed in the conflict. And somehow they fought off the urge for vengeance
Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan are sitting opposite one another in a London sitting room: there is plenty of banter and laughter. They are obviously extremely close, and comfortable in one another's company: two men who know that when you strip away the rest, what matters most is family and friendship.
But these men found out in the hardest way possible how precious life is, when their lives were torn apart by the deaths of their children. Bassam's daughter Abir was 10 when she died; Rami's daughter Smadar was 14.
The two families live in Jerusalem and their daughters died in the conflict there. Abir was shot in the head with a plastic bullet outside her school on the West Bank and Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing when she was shopping with her friends on a busy street.
So the two fathers have much in common, but Bassam is Palestinian and Rami is Jewish. In their youth, each man played his part in the violence: Bassam served seven years in jail for throwing a hand-grenade at a group of Israelis; Rami was a soldier in the Israeli army. And each man lost his daughter to the violence of the other side: the bullet that killed Abir was fired by an Israeli soldier, while the suicide bomber who killed Smadar was Palestinian.
All of this makes the camaraderie in this room truly remarkable, because Bassam, 45, and Rami, 63, now regard one another as brothers and have pledged to devote their lives to working together for peace in their divided community. "The bottom line is that this conflict is not worth the life of one more child," says Rami. "The only way forward is to talk to one another, to understand one another's point of view – and to make concessions."
Rami says that after his army service ended, he settled into "a kind of bubble" after his marriage. He built up a successful graphic design business, bought a nice house in a good part of Jerusalem, and he and his wife Nurit had four children. Everything changed on 4 September 1997. "It was the beginning of term and Smadar was out at the shops, buying stationery with her friends," he says. "I was on my way to the airport and Nurit called me and said there had been a bombing and she had lost touch with Smadar.
"I went home and we started looking for her – when we couldn't find her, we starting touring the hospitals. We went to hospital after hospital, and to police station after police station. And then came the terrible moment when someone said, you need to start looking in the morgue ..."
Smadar was his only daughter; the sight of her lying dead will never leave him, he says.
By the time Rami met Bassam, Smadar had been dead for eight years; the two men were introduced at a meeting of Combatants for Peace, an organisation of former fighters now united in the search for peace. In prison, Bassam had seen a film about the Holocaust and begun to understand for the first time what the Jewish people had experienced. "One of the problems with our communities is that we are shielded from ever seeing things from the point of view of the other side," he says. "I knew nothing about the Holocaust. I couldn't believe what I was watching. It explained so much about the Jewish people, to see what they had gone through."
Despite being committed to working for peace, Bassam remembers the awkwardness of meeting Rami, a man whose child was killed by a Palestinian. "What can you say to a man who has lost his daughter?" he says. "I wasn't sure what to say." But the two men became friends in the cause and when Rami heard, two years later, that Bassam's daughter Abir was in hospital fighting for her life after being shot in the head, he could hardly believe what was happening. "It felt to me as if Smadar was dying all over again. Nurit and I went to the hospital to be with Bassam and his wife Slawa. We wanted to be with them, to support them, to do whatever we could."
He will never forget the exchange he had with Bassam after Abir died. "It felt so terrible, because I knew exactly what Bassam was going through. Seeing him standing there, I felt the hope draining away from me, and I said to him: 'What are we going to do now?'
"I'm not a believer but Bassam is: and he said: 'God is testing us.' That seemed such a remarkable thing to say at that moment."
"I realised straight away," says Bassam, "that I had a choice. What happened next was up to me."
Rami agrees. "Before we lost Smadar, we thought everything was fine, we didn't think about what else was happening. Our family was well-off and happy. And when it happened, at first, every inch of your body cries out for revenge. But you ask yourself: would that take away my pain? And you know it would not. So instead you start to ask, what is happening here? Why are men so angry that they are prepared to kill children to get what they want?"
Rami and Bassam now attend rallies and events together, both inside and outside the Middle East – which is why they are in London – talking about peace. The Forgiveness Project, which exists to foster alternatives to resentment and retaliation, uses their story as an example of what can be done, and they are the subject of a new documentary. Yet both men know that their biggest challenge lies within their own families: they both have other children and, for peace to happen, those children must choose the path of non-violence. Rami's eldest son, Elik, was in the army at the time of Smadar's death and, says Rami, was given the chance to take revenge during a sortie: thankfully, he refused. Yigal, 20, the youngest, was five when his sister was killed, and is now in the Israeli army: Rami tried to dissuade him from joining up but, he explains, all his son's friends were enrolling: "If you want to have a voice in Israel, if you want to be accepted in any way at all, you have to have served in the army."
Meanwhile Bassam's eldest son, Arab, is 19, and has sometimes talked about revenge. "I've tried to help him to understand that more violence is not the answer and I think I trust him now – I think he realises that working for peace is the way forward and the best way to remember Abir," says Bassam.
Both families have a new reason to work harder for peace: Rami and Bassam are now grandfathers. Rami's son Guy has a son called Yishai, who is 18 months, while Bassam's daughter Areen has a three-month-old, Jude. "Next time both our families get together for dinner, which we do every couple of months or so, both the babies will be there too – a constant reminder of how much is at stake in this work of peace," says Bassam.
And peace will come, says Rami. "In the end there will be a peace agreement, that is absolutely clear. It will happen at the moment when the price of not having peace exceeds the price of having peace." Their message to their communities is that the moment has come because the price of one more child is a price too far.
Within the Eye of the Storm tells the story of Bassam and Rami. To watch the trailer or rent the movie online, see withineyeofstorm.com
