Jerusalem city councillor Dov Kalmanovitz, the first Israeli wounded in the 1980s intifada, successfully campaigned for terror victims to be officially commemorated on Remembrance Day.
By SAM SOKOLDov Kalmanovitz(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
On January 31, 1988, when he was 31 years old, Dov Kalmanovitz was driving back to his then home in the settlement of Beit El when a Palestinian threw a Molotov cocktail at his car, engulfing him in flames. Years later, Kalmanovitz extends his hand to me in greeting, completely unselfconscious about the missing fingers and burn scars as we take our seats at a coffee shop in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood.A practicing CPA and deputy mayor of the city, Kalmanovitz was the first victim of the first intifada and, in the decades since, has become one of Israel’s most prominent advocates for those wounded or killed by Arab terrorists.We meet early, arriving even before the coffee shop opened because, as Kalmanovitz explains, he is extremely punctilious about arriving at his office on time.It’s very important that his children “see that their father, like all the people in the world, wakes up in the morning and goes to work and does not stay at home,” he says.“I have 285 percent disability, and very few people who are wounded like me return to their work. I think it’s very important that my family sees their father wake up in the morning and go to work like a normal person,” he says.When he was lying in his hospital bed, the hesder yeshiva graduate and former soldier in the Tank Corps had been approached by another veteran who had been wounded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, who demanded that he make a vow that if he survived he would dedicate himself to Israeli society.With burns over three-quarters of his body, still visible as plastic-like scars on his exposed skin, Kalmanovitz says he was given “no chance to live” by his doctors.As a former soldier, he saw how differently the war wounded and the dead were treated from those wounded or murdered in terror attacks, each being categorized differently in the minds of Israelis.“When Israel was established it was after the Holocaust, and prime minister David Ben-Gurion wanted to make people proud, and the soldiers represented the new heroic Israelis. The soldiers who were wounded or killed were considered holy, but the people wounded or killed in terror attacks were not considered heroic,” he explains.Such attitudes persisted for decades until, after years of terror attacks, Israelis began to understand how civilians being targeted by their country’s enemies were also on the front lines.“Terror changes the world. It is no longer army against army but rather it’s terrorists versus civilians, and it’s part of the struggle in Israel” and, over time, “the atmosphere changed,” he says.“We must understand that for people who take the bus and go to work every day, if some terrorist gets on the bus and bombs it, the civilian is also a soldier in this conflict. We have two kinds of soldiers – one in uniform and another not in uniform,” he elaborates.After years of effort, which included the establishment of the Terror Victims Association in the 1990s, Kalmanovitz and other survivors of terrorism managed to obtain the same recognition of the sacrifices of Israel’s terror victims as that afforded to those wounded in the army.After all, says Kalmanovitz, who is both a terror victim and IDF veteran, the majority of those killed or wounded in the IDF are not killed in battle but fall during exercises and other non-combat scenarios.It was during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister that Kalmanovitz began campaigning for recognition of victims of terror, positing that if you separate terror victims and soldiers into different categories, you likewise have to “divide between soldiers killed by an enemy and those killed for other reasons.”A government committee headed by Judge Ya’acov Maltz was established and determined that Remembrance Day commemorations should include a tribute to victims of terror. Although the ceremonies for fallen soldiers and civilians are separate, both take place at the Mount Herzl Cemetery and are attended by the country’s leadership. Today the graveyard, Israel’s national cemetery, also contains a memorial to civilian victims, a memorial that initially drew harsh opposition from the defense establishment.These actions have improved how Israelis view victims of terror, says Kalmanovitz, stating that “as terror comes more and more, more people understand [that] it’s very directed to make the civilian people in Israel a part of the struggle.”Aside from the official state ceremony, Kalmanovitz holds one of his own every year at the Sultan’s Pool, aimed at bringing together both civilian and military victims. This year’s ceremony will be attended by Rachel Fraenkel, whose son Naftali was one of the three yeshiva boys kidnapped and murdered by terrorists last summer, precipitating the IDF’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. It will also include the widow of Zidan Saif, the Druse police officer who was killed by Palestinian terrorists who attacked the worshipers at the Har Nof synagogue in Jerusalem in November.This year’s event will place special emphasis on the mothers, girlfriends, wives and sisters of those who fell victim to terror and war. But while they are all brought together by tragedy, he says that the main thing is to “emphasize hope.”The Jewish people have a long history that includes much suffering, but despite it all, “we continue to fight in this land,” he says.
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