'The government is stabbing us in the back, that's how it feels'

Tzviah Dahan says given no prior notice her father's killer would be one of 26 prisoners released.

By BEN HARTMAN
Tzviah Dahan 370 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Tzviah Dahan 370
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Tzviah Dahan, 56, was 37-years-old when her father Moshe Beker was beaten and stabbed to death with a knife and pruning shears by three Palestinian men in a grove outside Rishon Letzion in January 1994. Two of the suspects later confessed that their plan to kidnap and murder a soldier in Ramle fell through and they were sleeping that morning in the field when the 61-year-old Beker arrived to check if one of his workers had arrived that morning. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Beker made for an easy target for the three men, who left him for dead that January morning.
The day before Moshe Beker was killed he was putting the finishing touches on a synagogue he built in memory of his son Yaakov Beker, a soldier who died fighting in the first Lebanon War. His daughter Tzviah came to visit him at the job site in Rishon Letzion, where Moshe showed off the synagogue.
The next morning he left to the grove, telling his wife Bella that he’d be back soon. When he didn’t return she began to worry, and not long after Tzviah heard on the radio that a man was found murdered in a grove in the city. Tzviah said when she heard the report she knew right away it was her father, and she collapsed in anguish.
“All of these years we've been in pain. But when you open the newspaper or the internet in the morning and you see that among the 26 there's the man who killed your father in cold blood, it's a shock”, Tzviah said Monday.
Dahan said she didn't hear from any government official before the list with her father's killer Barbakh Faiz Rajab Madhat was published in the Israeli press, much like she didn't hear about the release of one of the three murderers under the Gilad Schalit prisoner release in October 2011. In that case however, she says she supported the move.
“With the Gilad Schalit deal no one asked me what I thought but I thought at the time I don't want him [Schalit] to end up like [missing Israeli airman] Ron Arad. But this time? Who are they saving?”
When asked if the possibility of a peace deal helps ease the pain, she dismisses the possibility outright, saying “I don't think that there will ever be peace. And when you think about these killers, why won't they do it again?”