My beloved son Arik, my own flesh and blood, was murdered by Palestinians.... If to hit his killers, innocent Palestinian children and other civilians would have to be killed, I would ask the security forces to wait for another opportunity. Your only motivation should not be vengeance, but the prevention of any injury to innocent civilians. Ethics are not black and white — they are all white. Ethics have to be free of vengefulness and rashness.
Every act must be carefully weighed before a decision is made to see whether it meets strict ethical criteria... It is unethical to kill innocent Israeli or Palestinian women and children. It is also unethical to control another nation and to lead it to lose its humaneness.
Let all the self-righteous who speak of ruthless Palestinian murderers take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves what they would have done had they been the ones living under occupation.
I can say for myself that I, Yitzhak Frankenthal, would have undoubtedly become a freedom fighter and would have killed as many on the other side as I possibly could. It is this depraved hypocrisy that pushes the Palestinians to fight us relentlessly — our double standard that allows us to boast the highest military ethics, while the same military slays innocent children.
My son Arik was not murdered because he was Jewish but because he is part of the nation that occupies the territory of another. The Palestinians cannot drive us away — they have long acknowledged our existence. They have been ready to make peace with us; it is we who are unwilling to make peace with them.
It is we who insist on maintaining our control over them; it is we who escalate the situation in the region and feed the cycle of bloodshed. I regret to say it, but the blame is entirely ours.
— Yitzhak Frankenthal is the chairman of the Families Forum. This is an edited version of a speech he made at a rally in Jerusalem on July 27, 2002.
