“Beneath the pretty flowers of Israel’s propaganda machine lie some ugly facts on the ground in Jaffa.”
Diplomatic briefcases are unlikely to be dropped at news of Condoleezza Rice’s call, on the eve of the Riyadh summit, for Arab states to “reach out to Israel” and show they accept it. Israel’s insistence that negotiators begin by accepting its right to exist has already pushed normalisation up the political agenda.
The desire to become a nation like any other is strong among war-weary Israelis. The problem for Palestinians is that normalising relations with Israel also means normalising an ongoing occupation, the circumstances which led up to it, and the racism that engendered within Israel. And that’s before negotiations even start.
For secular Zionists though, the dream of becoming an ordinary nation with its own Jewish football hooligans and Jewish riot squads has deep roots. Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, believed that attaining statehood would be a guarantor of acceptance by gentile society. He may have been right, but it came at a price. In mandate Palestine, Jews constituted little more than 30% of the population and owned just 6% of its land. The statehood endeavour involved the brutal dispossession of another people.
It may have been the harshness of this reality that fostered a strain of naivety among secular Ashkenazi halutzim (pioneers). In Altneuland, Herzl himself imagined a future state where a proud Ottoman Muslim called Rashid Bey would embrace the Zionist enterprise and join his Jewish friends on sightseeing tours.
During one visit to the Valley of Jezreel, Herzl had Bey point out flourishing Arab villages and exclaim that they were impoverished hamlets before the advent of the Jews. “Would you call a man a robber who takes nothing from you, but brings you something instead?” Bey asks. “The Jews have enriched us.”
Herzl’s vision has now passed. But a “look at the pretty flowers” tradition of argument in Zionism continues. Last year, in the wake of the Lebanon war, Israel’s foreign minister Tzippi Livni launched a public relations campaign to spread a “more inviting” image of Israel abroad. I was on the receiving end of a lobbying campaign of this sort myself in February, when a pro-Israel website encouraged more than 700 of its readers to complain to a British news group I write for, accusing my dispatches of singling out Israel for negative news stories. The complainants were politely rebuffed.
The fruits of Livni’s campaign may also have been seen last week in the normalised coverage of the Israel-England football match, and in the news that Israel’s US consulate had successfully persuaded Maxim magazine to promote tourism by publishing a feature about the country’s stunning models. Maxim is now reportedly sending a team of top photographers to the beaches of Tel Aviv and Jaffa.
While they are there, perhaps they will incidentally record what could be the final days of the 497 residential properties that are slated for demolition in Ajami, Jaffa’s last predominantly Arab district. According to Fady Shbita of the Arab-Jewish Sadaka-Reut (“Friendship”) organisation, as many as 2,000 people could be affected.
“There will be a serious struggle over this because it will change the whole structure of Jaffa if it succeeds,” he told me. “I would characterise it as a combination of ethnic cleansing or transfer and gentrification.”
The Palestinian-Israelis who live in Ajami will not be re-housed in Tel Aviv. Even if they could afford the rents here, it’s all but unheard of for Arabs to live in most parts of the city. They won’t receive compensation either, as they have technically been living in Ajami ‘illegally’ for decades. Before 1948, more than 70,000 Palestinians lived in Jaffa. During the Naqba, the majority fled and were not allowed to return. Under the Absentee Property Act of 1950, their abandoned houses were seized by the new Israeli state and rented to Jews. The few Arabs who remained were concentrated behind a fence in Ajami.
But times change. The fence came down and, in the 1970s, when beachfront property prices began to rise, Tel Aviv’s Mayor, Shlomo “Cheech” Lahat, announced a policy of “Judaising” Jaffa. Building permits in Ajami were frozen and ongoing demolitions funnelled residents into the slums of Lyd and Ramle. Many of the 15,000-20,000 Palestinian-Israelis who stayed in Jaffa were forced to build extensions to their family houses without permits. This practice is now being used as the excuse for a new wave of the sort of soulless gentrification and transfer that has hollowed out Jaffa’s old town.
Much of the land reclaimed by house demolitions invariably gets sold on for luxury developments like the gated community of Andromeda Hill, “a virtual ‘city within a city’ surrounded by a wall and secured 24 hours a day,” according to its website. Local residents complain that Andromeda Hill was built on land which was formerly owned by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate “so that rich Jews can enjoy the magic of the sunset in Jaffa without seeing Arabs”.
The Jaffa sunset can be truly spectacular but Israel’s PR machine is unlikely to encourage photographers to wander the few yards down the road necessary to capture it from Ajami. For in this part of the world, it is arguable that beneath the flowers of normalisation lies the rubble of demolished houses.
Read previous story of attempted house demolition in Ajami by clicking, HERE
The fairy-tale view of Israel as eternally besieged and completely faultless in its conflict with the Palestinians, as presented by David Brumer in the March 18 Focus (“Play shines light on conflict”), has certainly taken a hit this past year.
A growing number of Americans who deeply sympathize with Israel, including former President Jimmy Carter, have spoken eloquently of the need to recognize that Israel has committed severe human rights violations against the Palestinian people through its nearly 40-year military occupation and theft of Palestinian land for Israeli settlements. While extremely critical of Palestinian terrorism, they conclude that peace with security is not possible until Israel ends the injustices.
Perhaps that is why Israel’s more fervent apologists are resorting to distortion and defamation as their preferred method to discredit anyone who dares acknowledge Palestinian grievances or Israel’s grave and well-documented human rights abuses. Carter is facing an onslaught of malicious charges that range from intentionally lying to anti-Semitism. They want to silence an emerging debate over the United States’ one-sided embrace of Israel.
This method of attacking the messenger is clearly on display in Brumer’s article as well as in the flurry of protest against the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. The play tells the story of the 23-year-old woman from Olympia crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer demolishing Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip.
Instead of joining with Carter, Rachel Corrie and countless others, many Israeli and Jewish, who recognize Israel’s occupation and settlements are unjustified and prevent peace, Brumer peddles defamation and falsehoods about Corrie masquerading as reasonable criticism.
Claiming that Corrie was even “unwittingly” supporting terrorists is contradicted by the fact that the Israeli army has never claimed or provided any evidence that the homes in the neighborhood of Gaza that Corrie was defending when she was killed were concealing tunnels or were involved in attacks on Israelis.
Claiming Corrie was in any way providing cover for suicide bombers is easily proved false by the fact that no Palestinian suicide bombers had come from Gaza three years before or during the time Corrie was there.
Claiming that Corrie was working with an “extremist” organization is contradicted by the fact that the International Solidarity Movement to End the Occupation is composed of leading Palestinian voices of non-violence and supported by numerous Israeli peace groups.
Legitimate questions can be raised about Corrie’s risky decision to enter into a very dangerous conflict zone. But that zone was dangerous precisely because Israel has imposed a merciless military occupation over a largely defenseless population and was wantonly demolishing homes to steal land for Israeli settlements.
One can certainly and rightly blame, as Brumer does, Palestinian extremists for damaging the moral justness of the Palestinian cause through murderous and strategically worthless suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of innocent Israelis.
But none of that justifies Israel continuing to steal Palestinian land and building a wall deep within Palestinian lands to annex those settlements. Nor does it prevent Israel from taking unilateral steps to vacate completely the land that it has illegally occupied since 1967.
Brumer’s complete silence regarding Israel’s occupation and settlements implies that it does.
Brumer’s implicit justification for Israel’s occupation and settlements is the continually recycled myth that Israel has always extended its hand of peace while Palestinians have always rejected it. This myth conveniently ignores the fact Israel’s “generous offer” at Camp David in 2000 was based on Israel annexing the bulk of its settlements, cutting any Palestinian state into five tiny enclaves surrounded by Israel. Brumer touts Israel’s recent withdrawal from Gaza, but ignores Israel’s withering siege upon its imprisoned population.
Brumer also justifies the status quo by emphasizing the immutable extremism of Hamas. But the fact is that Hamas has not conducted a single suicide bombing in nearly two years and has endorsed a reciprocal truce with Israel if it were to withdraw completely to its 1967 borders. But Israel completely rejects those terms, missing a historic opportunity to undercut Hamas extremism.
Those who truly support a balanced and just peace in the Middle East should honestly debate Corrie’s life and legacy. Her very act of acknowledging legitimate Palestinians grievances and her promotion of alternatives to violence was a message of hope and peace sorely lacking today.
By attacking the messenger, Corrie’s detractors are sending a clear message opposed to hope and peace.
Steve Niva teaches international politics and Middle East studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia.
Large numbers of police and IDF officers started evacuating the activists, mostly teenagers, at about 7:30 a.m.
Some of the youths at the place have tried resisting and cursed the policemen, who carried them by force into buses.
After having spent two days at the site, the activists were ordered to leave Homesh on Wednesday. Some 700 policemen took part in the operation, alongside 300 soldiers who secured the evacuation.
Police have notified the activists that Homesh was a closed military zone and that they must leave the place immediately.
The settlers spent the night setting up barriers using stones in order to make the evacuation more difficult.
Earlier, one of the older activists thanked the younger ones for staying in Homesh despite the cold nights and harsh conditions, and told them, “The same forces that came to evacuate us six months ago will come today. What will happen next is a show for the media, and we don’t care about it. if they take us out of here by force – let them.”
Boaz Haetzni, one of the organizers of the march to Homesh, stressed, “The instructions were clear – no to violence.”
On Tuesday, police officials warned that should the settlers fail to evacuate willingly, the government would be inclined to give the green light for the forceful evacuation of the several dozen teenage settlers who vowed to put up a tough resistance.
Yossi Dagan, an organizer of the plan to reoccupy the former settlement, told Ynet on Tuesday that “our aim is not to confront the security forces but to build Homesh anew and therefore, as far as we are concerned, the issue is not a struggle. If they evacuate us we will return.”
Raanan Ben Zur contributed to the report
(Previous story)
Officials say should settlers fail to evacuate willingly, government would be inclined to give green light for forceful evacuation of several dozen teenage activists who vowed to put up tough resistance
The police are preparing for the evacuation of hundreds of settlers who reoccupied the settlement of Homesh which was evacuated and destroyed in the summer of 2005 under Israel’s disengagement plan.
Police officials said should the settlers fail to evacuate willingly, the government would be inclined to give the green light for the forceful evacuation of several dozen teenage settlers who vowed to put up a tough resistance.
Hundreds of settlers heeded police calls to evacuate the former West Bank settlement which was declared a closed military zone by the army following the 2005 disengagement plan of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, but many teenagers remained there.
“Our aim is not to confront the security forces but to build Homesh anew and therefore, as far as we are concerned, the issue is not a struggle. If they evacuate us we will return,” said Yossi Dagan, an organizer of the plan to reoccupy the former settlement.
The army blocked roads leading to the settlement on Monday night to stem the flow of settlers.
Despite the army’s measure, Zefat Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu managed to reach Homesh along with a dozen right-wing activists and gave Torah lessons to teenage settlers on the ruins of the former settlement.
‘Even Arafat got food supplies’
Settlers slammed the army for not allowing them to provide food, water and medicine to their comrades in Homesh.
“If people dehydrate, this will fall under the responsibility of the political elements who gave the army these orders,” settlers said.
The Chairman of the National Union-NRP faction, MK Uri Ariel, described the army’s attitude towards the settlers as “inhumane,” charging that the military allowed food supplies into former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat when he was besieged in Ramallah.
An army officer told Ynet in response: “We will not allow the transportation of supplies to an illegal area. Soldiers have water and if someone needs to drink he can approach them.”
“Homesh was rebuilt yesterday, and even if the prime minister and defense minister decide based on small political evaluations not to fix the mistake of eviction and evict us for a second time from our land, we will return to Homesh and rebuild the settlement again,” said Dagan.
Follow the link to the American Hummus website to watch the video, as aired by CNN, by clicking HERE.
The first issue of Palestine Times to be sold in Israel ran a front page story called:
‘East Jerusalem is occupied territory’ by Asa Winstanley
RAMALLAH – In a private letter to Morocco’s King Muhammad VI, British Prime Minister Tony Blair says his government “considers East Jerusalem to be occupied territory,” the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) said yesterday.
Working as chair of the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s committee on Jerusalem, King Muhammad had sent letters to various heads of state asking them to clarify their position on the status of Jerusalem. In his March 12 reply, Blair stated explicitly that Britain does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over any part of the city.
Leaked to CAABU, and passed on to Palestine Times, the letter represents the Prime Minister’s clearest ever statement on the occupied status of Jerusalem.
Chris Doyle, the Director of CAABU told Palestine Times over the phone, that it has been “a challenge to get any senior government minister to make such an official explicit statement” and that “to get Mr. Blair to say it has been impossible.”
Tony Blair typically avoids strong statements on Palestine-Israel issues, so the letter represents a radical departure for the Prime Minister. “Jerusalem’s status has yet to be determined, and should be resolved as part of a final status agreement,” says Blair in the letter. “Pending agreement, we consider East Jerusalem to be occupied territory. We recognize no one claim to sovereignty over the city. We do not support any action that predetermines final status negotiations on the future of Jerusalem.”
Although the British government has long officially held this position, it is the first time in a publicly available statement that a senior minister has made such an explicit statement in over a decade, and the first time ever for Tony Blair.
Doyle said that the last time a senior British minister had made a statement so clearly in opposition to the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem was Malcolm Rifkind back in 1995. His speech was made to the annual Medical Aid for Palestinians dinner when he was foreign secretary under John Major’s Conservative government.
Doyle said that Tel Aviv would not like the idea of Blair referring to the city as occupied, especially against the background of Israeli excavations near al-Aqsa compound.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, and has claimed sovereignty over the entire city since then, though no other government recognizes the claim – including the United States. In 1980, Israel declared the city to be their “eternal, undivided” capital. The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 478 in response, declaring it to be a violation of international law.
Palestinians born and living in East Jerusalem have no citizenship in Israel, their status under Israeli law being similar to that of so-called “guest workers” from overseas. They are granted special Jerusalem ID cards but are not citizens of Israel with voting rights.
The Palestinian people consider East Jerusalem their capital, and the recently formed unity government, as other previous Palestinian governments, has spoken of the desire to establish an independent Palestinian state on all of the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel since 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab Peace Initiative also endorsed this platform.
CAABU said in a letter to Palestine Times that it “was extremely concerned at ongoing Israeli activities to create facts on the ground in an attempt to predetermine the final status of the city.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, John Dugard, commented recently that “The Wall being built in East Jerusalem is an instrument of social engineering designed to achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem by reducing the number of Palestinians in the city.”
My son lived a worthwhile life from The Guardian March 26, 2007
‘My son lived a worthwhile life’
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three small children. Nine months later, he died, having never recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army accountable for his death and the book she has written in his memory.
It is one of the poignancies of Tom Hurndall’s short life that he had gone to Gaza in search of a story, and ended up becoming it. A 21-year-old photography student at Manchester Metropolitan University, he went to Baghdad in February 2003 to photograph human shields, activists who were trying to protect ordinary Iraqis from the threat of Anglo-American attack. While he was there he heard about Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American peace activist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who had been protecting a Palestinian’s family’s house in Rafah, in the southern Gaza strip, when an Israeli bulldozer crushed her to death. Tom went to Gaza to find out what had happened.
All that is clear from the book his mother, Jocelyn, has written about Tom’s life, and about his family’s battle to bring the Israeli army to account for killing him. It’s not a political book, she stresses, though the anger, frustration and disappointment she feels towards the army, and the Israeli and British governments, is obvious.
Tom was in Rafah, in the Israeli-occupied Gaza strip, on April 11, at an ISM demonstration. Suddenly low shots were fired from an Israeli army watchtower in the direction of children playing on a mound of rubble. Most of them ran – but three froze. Tom, wearing a bright orange ISM jacket, ran to help them. He scooped up a boy and carried him to safety. He ran back for the two girls, bent down to put his arm round one of them and was shot in the head.
Jocelyn was at work, at a school in London where she was head of learning support, when she got a call from her daughter Sophie saying that Tom had been shot. It was the last day of the spring term. She calmly finished photocopying a report she had been working on and distributed it into pigeonholes, before setting off for home. It was as if she was trying to put off discovering the full horror of the story. “I think you do anything to delay the moment of impact,” she says in the bright sitting room of her north London home.
After nearly two months by his hospital bedside in Israel, the family – Hurndall, her former husband, Anthony, and their children Sophie, Billy and Fred – were allowed to bring Tom back to the UK. The brain injury had left him in a coma; his main organs working, but nothing else. Did she accept that Tom would die from the start? “I think I knew,” she says. “The pressure in Tom’s head had damaged other parts of his brain. I knew he would never recover.”
Tom eventually died nine months later on January 13 2004 – Jocelyn’s birthday – in hospital in London. Was it a relief, in a way? “It was, because he wasn’t in pain any more,” says Hurndall. “But it was also impossible when he died.” She is silent for a long time. “I still haven’t accepted it.”
Hurndall is softly spoken with gentle, pale blue eyes. She seems fragile but with an intense strength. She’s a battler but seems surprised by it. She tells of the time she met Tony Blair at a dinner. “I remember saying to him, ‘You’ve hurt me’. I couldn’t imagine saying that to anybody five years ago.” She laughs at this. “This middle-class mother coming out with these strident things.” Tom’s death has changed her. “You develop this language when there’s this anger. I’m not usually a strident person, I’ve never needed to be.”
Her book is called Defy the Stars, words Tom had tattooed on his wrist. They come from Romeo’s cry “Then I defy you, stars!” in Romeo and Juliet, and seemed to say a lot about his attitude to life. Hurndall says she finds herself carrying her book around the house, “because it’s what’s left of Tom. It’s my gift to Tom, it’s my gift from Tom.”
Apart from the anger and the love and the pain, one of the strongest senses in the book is that of discovering Tom, as his mother has since his death. She read his journals and pored over his photographs. Tom was young and idealistic, but he also knew how dangerous it would be to go to Iraq and Gaza. “He was very mature in many senses,” says Hurndall. “He was aware of the risks, but his desire to see and question and be curious was greater. People are surprised to read that Tom considered the possibility of being shot. I gulp when I read it, but I understand that of course he would consider it. If you’re there, it’s on your mind all the time.”
She didn’t want him to go to Baghdad but she knew she couldn’t stop him. “I couldn’t condone it. I felt angry with Tom and a terrible worry that weighed me down and affected me every minute he was away. I was numb, anaesthetised, blank. I kept expecting him to come home. I think he would have left Rafah within 48 hours of his final entry in his journal.” His final entry was on the morning of the day he was shot.
From the beginning, the Hurndalls worried that there could be a cover-up. The first news reports, heard by an Israeli friend on the radio station Kol-Israel, said a man wearing military fatigues had been shooting at a watchtower. “Even days later no one from the Israeli army or Israeli government had been in touch with us,” says Hurndall. “So that in itself spoke volumes. We really felt this draught of silence.” At the hospital, one doctor suggested that Tom’s head injury “was commensurate with a blow from a baseball bat”, even though on his notes it clearly said “gunshot wound”, with an entry point and exit point – as though someone was suggesting that the injury had been caused at close range and so not from the watchtower.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, held Tom up as a hero. Hurndall received a letter from Yasser Arafat praising her son. “I do understand something of the mentality of the need to make Tom an icon, a martyr,” she says. “Having seen the level of Palestinian desperation myself, you would grasp at people who seemingly have taken up your cause and suffered because of it, and you idolise them because they represent hope.”
It was shortly after seeing Tom in hospital for the first time that she took her first trip into Rafah. “I remember the faces of the women and the men and the grandfathers, which spoke of such a worn kind of loss. Life was very, very hard. I definitely had a feeling that they were thinking, ‘Here’s this shocked western family. Do they know that this happens to us every day and we live under the threat of it happening every minute?’ I remember really wanting to find a way of saying ‘I understand’.”
Tom’s father, Anthony, a lawyer, set about collecting witness statements and writing his own report into his son’s death, an attempt to get the Israeli army to accept accountability. It was intensely frustrating. The report the Israeli army produced was amateurish, the incident itself reduced to simplistic scenarios including the idea that Tom was hit by a Palestinian gunman, or that he was even the gunman himself. Little of what they said tallied with the many witness statements that Anthony had collected. The map they produced to show where it had happened was out of date, and they had got the location of where Tom had been shot wrong. The Israeli army said they had fired a single shot; witnesses stated there had been at least five shots, maybe as many as eight.
The Hurndalls’ requests for a meeting with Israeli officials went unanswered until, on the day they were due to fly Tom home, they were granted a meeting at the ministry of foreign affairs. Major Biton, the Israeli soldier in charge of the inquiry, insisted that the army couldn’t have seen Tom from the watchtower, saying buildings were in the way of the window where the soldier was standing. Anthony calmly pointed out that there was a surveillance platform on the top of the tower, and that visibility would have been perfect. When he asked for CCTV footage to prove it, he was told there was no footage, although a camera could clearly be seen on the photographs of the tower Tom had taken. Anthony raised the shootings of two young Palestinian men who had been shot within 48 hours of Tom’s shooting, in the same area. “It was clear that Anthony had mentioned the unmentionable,” writes Hurndall. “The shooting of a young Englishman was one thing, but to mention the shooting of young Palestinians was quite another.”
The Israeli government eventually sent a cheque to pay for the repatriation (though it covered only a fraction of the cost), but they did not admit liability. The cheque, for £8,370, bounced. Compensation and damages are still an issue.
When the Hurndalls met Rachel Corrie’s parents, their experience was painfully familiar. The Corries said the doctor who did the autopsy had claimed that her death had been caused by tripping over, though as her father pointed out, “I would like to ask the doctor how many times he’s seen somebody with broken ribs, breaks in her spinal column, crushed shoulder blades and cut lungs just from tripping.”
The British government wasn’t much help. Despite assertions that it had “repeatedly pressed the Israeli government for a full and transparent inquiry”, the Hurndalls felt this was hollow. When the Hurndalls met Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, they found him remote and cold. Blair never publicly condemned the shooting. On top of all this, she received anonymous phone calls and letters calling her a “Nazi-lover” for questioning the Israeli authorities.
With a son in hospital wasting away, and three grieving children at home, how did she cope? “I don’t think I did. I made sure there was food in the fridge and I didn’t crack up. As a mother, you’re used to getting in there if there’s a problem and suddenly I couldn’t get in there. Suddenly motherhood seemed distanced and that is terrible. Grief is such that you do have to do it on your own. The only way that I could grieve for Tom was to uncover who he was and to think about my relationship with him. And to untangle this complex bundle of tragedy.”
The fight still isn’t over. Taysir Walid Heib, a soldier in the Israeli army, was put on trial for shooting Tom, and it was unbearable. A medical witness called by the Israeli army suggested that Tom’s death had nothing to do with the shooting and had been a result of negligence by the British hospital. He even implied that the family had been complicit in Tom’s death. Another medical witness agreed – he claimed Tom’s death had not been caused by pneumonia, but by an overdose of morphine and that this was the fault of British doctors. It was so ludicrous that it strengthened the prosecution.
In June 2005, Taysir, a Bedouin sergeant, was convicted of manslaughter and, in August, was sentenced to eight years, the longest sentence an Israeli soldier has been given for killing a civilian since the start of the second intifada. “It was limited justice,” says Hurndall. “He did break the so-called rules of engagement. On the other hand, he was in a culture where there are very loose rules of engagement and their senior commanders turn a blind eye.” An Arab, Taysir could neither read nor write Hebrew, and had a learning disability. Although the Bedouins are marginalised in Israel, some do volunteer for the army, although they tend to be sent to the most dangerous zones and career progression is rare. “I was convinced that Tom was the victim of a victim,” Hurndall writes. “That it was the policy-makers who had put Taysir in this position, who should be on trial.” The family are hoping there will be further arrests up the chain of command and they have yet to receive a public apology.
But is it getting easier? “It is less mad, less chaotic, less muddled. There are fewer distractions. It feels like coming to the edge of a cliff. I went to Fred’s school to watch him playing football and I was in heaven. I don’t mean because Tom had been at the same school and also played football in the same way, had the same long legs. I mean that I’ve come to value those moments so much more. What happened really put a focus on every minute of life, so in some ways it has made our lives more vibrant. It seems terrible that it has taken that. But life matters even more than it did”.
