'We lost our daughter, but we want peace'

Rami Elhanan knows the horror of suicide bombing, which returned to the streets of Israel last week after a lull of more than three weeks, when two Palestinian suicide bombers killed three innocent bystanders in Tel Aviv.

On the afternoon of 4 September 1997, Mr Elhanan's 14-year-old daughter, Smadar, was walking with her best friend among the crowds on Ben Yehuda street in central Jerusalem, when two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up. Smadar and her best friend were killed.

"That is when the darkness descended," is how Mr Elhanan puts it. You can still hear the pain in his voice when he talks about his daughter, five years on. Yet he and his wife, Dr Nurit Peled-Elhanan, reacted to that darkness by becoming two of Israel's most outspoken peace campaigners.

"What is the point of revenge?'' he asks. "Will it bring back my daughter?'' Today, at a time when Israeli society is struggling for a new response to suicide bombings, Mr Elhanan's is a rare voice. "The two sides are completely blind to each other," he says. "The Palestinians don't see the Holocaust. The Israelis don't see the suffering of the Palestinians. My mission is to try to close the gap, to break the endless cycle of violence."

Mr Elhanan shows old pictures of his murdered daughter. "Who is to blame?'' he asks. "We consider ourselves victims, and also the guy who murdered my daughter. He is a victim of the 1967 occupation and the continued denial of freedom to 3.5 million people, people with no civil rights."

There is a picture of her aged four, holding a placard that says "Stop the occupation". Mr Elhanan smiles sadly: "Smadar was a child of peace." Her maternal grandfather, Matti Peled, was an Israeli general and hero of the 1948 war when Israel came into existence. He was also one of the pioneers of dialogue with the Palestinians, one of the first Israelis to visit Yasser Arafat in his exile in Tunis.

Mr Elhanan, a graphic designer, was not political until the death of his daughter. "My wife says it activated me," he says. Dr Peled-Elhanan, who lives in France, has won a peace prize from the European Parliament for her work.

The couple are part of a movement called Bereaved Families for Peace, which brings together Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones. Three months ago they put 1,000 coffins outside the UN headquarters in New York, each covered with an Israeli or a Palestinian flag. "It was reported in the international press, but not here in Israel," he says.

What is striking about Mr Elhanan is that he says the unsayable. "Everybody knows what the solution will be," he says. "We will withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, the Palestinians will get the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there will be no right of return for the Palestinian refugees, and Jerusalem will be divided. The only question now is how many people will die before this happens."

Mr Elhanan gets criticism from Israelis. But, he says, he benefits from the deep respect in Israeli society for the bereaved. "They think I am mad from grief, but they let me speak." His father survived Auschwitz, something Mr Elhanan only found out when he was 12. His mother came from an old Jerusalem family.

Mr Elhanan fought as an Israeli soldier, first in 1969. He was called up as a reservist in the Yom Kippur war in 1973. "I began with 11 tanks and finished with three," he says of that war. "In 1982 I was in Beirut for six months. I know what it is, and I have blood on my hands," he says.

Today he gives lectures at Israeli schools, calling for peace and an end to the occupation. "I tell them how the conflict began and ask them to imagine a house with 10 rooms where Mohammed and his family live in peace. Then, one night, there's a knock at the door. Outside, like a half-drowned cat, is a sick, beaten, broken Moshe with his family who says: 'Excuse me, but I once lived here'."

He shows the children maps of the offer Ehud Barak made Yasser Arafat at Camp David, before the peace process broke down. They show swathes of the West Bank held back from the Palestinians and kept for Jewish settlers.

"This was the greatest secret of all," he says, "because Barak never allowed any maps to be made. I sometimes suspect Barak wasn't willing to give anything at all; he was giving a proposal he knew the Palestinians would not accept. But from the Israeli point of view he gave a lot. He was like the Persian prince who went through seven gates of hell to save the princess, and at the last one he turned round and the princess stayed behind.

"The first ones to blame are the Americans," he says. "They are the people who are standing aside while two children fight, waiting for them to kill each other. Up to last week [before the latest attacks], there have been 2,007 casualties. Among them are 266 Palestinian children younger than 18, and 60 Israeli kids. This is the price of not making peace. It's an enormous price."