Living among the headlines

I cringed at the photo of the anonymous Palestinian father trying to protect his son from Israeli bullets. Then I realized he used to work for me.

By Helen Schary Motro

Oct 7, 2000 | This week's photo has been burned into the world's consciousness beside the Vietnamese girl aflame with napalm, the Oklahoma City firefighter carrying the dead baby after the federal building explosion, the boy with raised hands in the Warsaw ghetto. Little did I think when I saw the picture that this anonymous man was far from anonymous to me.

Jamal al-Dirrah and 12-year-old Mohammed were cowering against a wall in Gaza, seeking shelter from the rain of gunshots between Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers, the terrified boy screaming in the crook of his father's arm. Moments later, the boy slumped dead and his father lay wounded with eight bullets in his body.

I knew a Palestinian named Jamal. I sat in my garden looking at the wall he'd built for me when a team of Palestinians had helped build my Israeli house at the height of the intifada. His first son, I recalled, was born 12 years ago, shortly after my daughter. I thought how easily the anonymous victim might have been the Jamal I knew, with whom I'd had an uneasy relationship that tentatively grew into something else.

Then I read in the newspaper that the dead boy's father, 37 years old, was a house painter from Gaza who worked for Israelis in the suburbs north of Tel Aviv. The same first name, the same job in the same area, the same general age. Too many coincidences.

I studied the photo more closely. What if? It was too blurry to see, the man's head turned away. To put my suspicions to rest I telephoned Moshe Tamam, the Israeli contractor for whom Jamal works. "Tell me, Moshe, the man in the hospital, that's not our Jamal?"

But the contractor told me the news I didn't want to hear.

I telephoned the hospital in Amman, Jordan, where Jamal had gone for surgery, and I was able to reach him. "A crime!" said Jamal. "Forty-five minutes firing without stop. And I cried, 'My son! My son! My son!' but nobody listened. Now he is dead and I am half finished. To shoot at a boy; it's a crime."

Jamal began to cry. There was commotion in the background, people talking in Arabic, and somebody hung up the telephone.

In the Middle East, I have often observed, people live their lives maneuvering between the headlines. This week our Jamal became a headline.

Next Page: Jamal was angry and proud, and wouldn't drink my coffee

• View blog reactions