A Family Buries a Soldier Who Fought for Peace

KIBBUTZ GALON, Israel —  For members of Amir Zohar’s family, any cease-fire between Israelis and Palestinians, whenever it takes hold, will come too late. They buried the 34-year-old reserve soldier Thursday, the day after he was shot in a gun battle with Palestinians near the West Bank city of Jericho.

Even in a place where it is now unusual for a day to pass without a killing, and even on one of the bloodiest days yet in the five weeks of clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, Zohar’s death seemed a particularly poignant one.

He was, his friends and family said, a man of peace, a man who believed in a Palestinian state and in coexistence between Jews and Arabs. He stuck to that view even in the midst of a wave of violence that has made many Israelis and Palestinians question whether they can ever share this land.

There was no nationalist fervor at Zohar’s funeral, no calls for revenge, no rage. The hundreds of soldiers and civilians who trudged across Kibbutz Galon’s plowed fields to reach its cemetery stood quietly as the sun sank, trying to make sense of his death.

“Yesterday, what was going on was on TV. Today it is in our house,” said Elana Holtzman, a kibbutz member who had known Zohar since his childhood.

Only a few days before his death, she said, Zohar had returned with his wife and children--7-year-old Assaf and the 4-year-old twins, Alon and Tamar--to celebrate the three children’s birthdays in this lush place with grandparents and great-grandparents.

“I can’t say that his death was senseless, but it seems that it is at a time when our energy should be aimed at making peace,” Holtzman said. “Instead, we have slipped into senseless violence. It is a horrible tragedy.”

Zohar, the head of a community center in East Talpiot, a neighborhood in southern Jerusalem built on land that Israel captured from Jordan during the 1967 Middle East War, had worked hard to build relations with Sour Baher, the adjacent Arab village. As battles raged between troops and Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, he arranged a meeting between the Jews of East Talpiot and the Arabs of Sour Baher to encourage dialogue.

Before he reported Sunday for the reserve duty that most Israeli men must serve every year until their mid-40s, Zohar was working with Zoher Hamdan, a Palestinian in Sour Baher, to arrange a gathering of Arab and Jewish children from Jerusalem neighborhoods. They planned to call it “Rose Day.”

“This is what makes it even more painful,” said Zohar’s wife, Orly. “Because we simply believed in part of their fight, we simply believed they deserved a state. And he did a lot for it.

“We had good relations with the Arab neighbors living around us, and he did many things,” she added. “It was very important to him to contribute, and he did this, modestly and quietly.”

But as passionately as her husband believed in the need to make peace between Palestinians and Israelis, his widow said, he also believed in his obligation to serve in the combat unit. He was an engineering officer.

On Monday, Zohar was sent to a site just north of Jericho, Orly Zohar said. She spoke to him at noon Wednesday, a short conversation because he was rushing off to help newly arrived troops settle in at the small paramilitary base, which had come under fire several times during the recent unrest by Palestinians in the city.

Although the couple had lived in Jerusalem since their marriage in 1990, Orly Zohar knew she had to bring him back to be buried at the kibbutz where he was born and they were wed.

“He lived in the city but he dreamed of the fields,” she said, sitting surrounded by quietly weeping friends and relatives outside her in-laws’ home at the kibbutz.

Amir Zohar’s roots were deep in the soil here. His maternal grandparents, as immigrants from Poland, helped found the communal farm in 1946. His mother, Nurit, was the first baby born on the kibbutz, which lies about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem at the northern end of the Negev desert, in an area of gently rolling hills once dotted with Arab villages. Nurit and Zohar’s father, Dani, met, married and reared their four children here.

The parents were struggling with the fact that, hours after Zohar’s death, Israeli Minister of Regional Cooperation Shimon Peres negotiated the implementation of a cease-fire with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

“Why didn’t it happen a few hours before, this talk of Arafat and Peres?” Dani Zohar asked, his voice breaking with emotion. “We paid the price.”

The Zohars linked arms with their three surviving children at the grave site, where hundreds stood, heads bent, as Amir was lowered into the earth by an honor guard from his unit. The only sounds were sobs, broken by a volley of gunfire during the military salute.

“Of all the wars, of all the battles, of all the confrontations, this is the real war for peace of the State of Israel,” said Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, who delivered a graveside eulogy. “He fell in this battle for peace, because of peace and for peace.”