OPINION: The spectre of Hamas has stalked me for three decades
Elliot Sorene's son Ariel survived the Supernova festival massacre. Here he reflects on how terror has cast an ominous shadow over his life since he was a teenager.
Hamas has been with me for 33 years. A connection that has spanned my whole adult life.
On the evening of 27 July 1990, at the age of 18, some friends and I got talking with a group of young Canadian Jews in Tel Aviv who were on an organised tour of Israel. I chatted to Marnie Kimelman from Toronto, who was 17 at the time. I was enamoured by her beauty and smile. When her friend asked me if we wanted to join them on the beach the next morning, I said we would think about it.
The next day, we chose to sit around a hotel pool, and all hell broke loose. A bomb had been planted on the beach by a Hamas terrorist and Marnie was murdered. This was during the first intifada. Hamas is an acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah (the Islamic resistance movement), a relatively new terror group had only been formed in 1987 based on the Islamist principles of the Muslim brotherhood with the expressed aim of eradication of Jews from the land of Israel.
I attended medical school in London and undertook my internship at the Soroka Hospital in Beersheva thereafter, I was drafted for military service as a combat doctor stationed within southern Lebanon.
It was there I got to know Hezbollah, another Islamist terror group whose self-proclaimed aim also being the destruction of my people.
I was honoured to serve shoulder-to-shoulder with the south Lebanon army made up of Christians, Muslims and Druze fighting against Hezbollah.
Hamas was out of sight and out of mind. Or so I thought.
Once discharged from the IDF I undertook my surgical residency in trauma and orthopaedic surgery at the Tel Aviv Medical Centre, involving long on-call shifts of up to 32 hours in the emergency department and the operating theatre.
The trauma room, or the resuscitation room, is the emergency area (ER) where the most severely injured patients are initially stabilised and treated on arrival to the hospital before transferring to the operating theatre.
This trauma room had been donated by the family of Marnie Kimelman, and Marnie’s picture was on display.
Her smile was ever present in the trauma room where I treated the severely injured from the second Intifada terror attacks, despite the large numbers of killed and wounded that I have treated, there are those that I can never forget and have become engraved in my soul.
Each Hamas terror attack had its own characteristics, among the most memorable, the Dolphinarium discotheque massacre of 2001 with its injured and mutilated teenagers, the Park Hotel terror attack of 2002 with horrifically injured elderly people and Holocaust survivors who were gathered for seder night and the Mike’s Place Hamas bombing on 30 April 2003.
Pic: David Collier
That night I operated on Dominique Hass, who, at age 29, died after being severely injured by the bomb blast. The Mike’s Place attack was also unique at the time as a Hamas attack perpetrated by two British radicalised Islamists, one from London of Indian Muslim heritage and one from Derby of Pakistani heritage, neither with any connection to Israel apart from a visceral desire to murder Jews.
During the second Intifada, I undertook my reserve military service inside the Gaza Strip, and in 2011, Marnie Kimelman’s murderer was released in exchange for the hostage Gilad Shalit.
I have been living in London for some years, living the diaspora Jewish-Israeli existence. Once again, Hamas has resurfaced in my life while destroying the lives of so many others. My son was one of the survivors of the Re’im music festival massacre. He managed to escape with his life.
At this festival 260 innocent civilians were murdered, including a friend from London, Jake Marlowe, age 26, who was murdered at the same music festival the day when 1,400 Israelis were massacred – the largest pogrom since the Holocaust.
Jake Marlowe was a great man, mature beyond his years, with a massive heart and an infectious laugh.
In London this last weekend, tens of thousands of people, many Jew haters among them, showed their support for Hamas and the Palestinian cause and its ideology of cleansing Israel of Jews ‘from the river to the sea’.
In 33 years nothing has changed. While these Islamist terror organisations and their support are outlawed in most Arab countries, their murderous terrorist ideology is embraced by ignorant Western so-called liberals tacitly support their terrorism.
Hamas has accompanied me my whole adult life and has now entered my son’s life. I hope that my grandchildren will never know of this evil.
This story, however, is not about me and my son, who are alive. It is about Marnie Kimelman, Dominique Hass, and Jake Marlowe, whose faces will never leave my mind. As I have continued with my life and career, married, built a home, and raised a family, and as I age, they remain the same, forever young and frozen in time forever.
- Elliot Sorene is a consultant trauma, orthopaedic and hand surgeon
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