RAMLA, Israel — The Abu Ghanem women are buried just inside
the main gate of the old Muslim cemetery, eight in the last seven
years.  

The New York Times

 

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

RAMLA, Israel – Amama Abu Ghanem says her daughter Hamda
had been beaten by her brother and complained to the police months before she
was killed.

Reem eloped with a lover to escape an arranged marriage. Her brothers, one a
pediatrician, are on trial for murder. Sabrin rests under a bare concrete slab
with her name roughly scratched on by hand. She is said to have been killed by a
cousin whom she refused to marry. Shirihan, 15, the youngest of the dead women,
is also said to have rejected a marriage. Her stepbrothers are suspected of
having killed her.

Others lie in crudely marked graves, covered with plain marble or a mound of
earth marked with an oval of stones — all a few minutes’ drive from Israel’s
gleaming new international airport, here in this hardscrabble town of 64,000
Jews and Arabs.

So-called honor killings among Muslims are a phenomenon across the Middle
East, including in Israel, where Arabs, most of them Muslim, make up almost 20
percent of the population. The Israeli police and courts have caught and
convicted some of the killers; unlike the laws in some Arab societies, Israel’s
do not make allowances for such acts.

Yet among the Abu Ghanem clan here in Ramla — where family honor can be
tainted by a woman’s desire to go study at a university or her use of a
telephone — the bloodletting has carried on. Some women’s advocates have accused
the police of a dismissive attitude toward Arabs, while a Jewish district police
official speaks of the “ambivalence” of Israel’s Arab citizens, who do not
always want to cooperate with investigations “for nationalist or local reasons.”
So far, the Abu Ghanem cases have ended without convictions, the police say,
mainly because relatives maintained a conspiracy of silence and washed all the
evidence away.

Then in January, after the last killing, of Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18, female
relatives decided to speak up. Twenty of them.

The most incriminating testimony came from a witness the police identify only
as Y for her protection. She came forward to say that she had heard shots, then
saw someone she believed to be Hamda’s brother Rashad, 30, fleeing Hamda’s home.
The police found traces of gunpowder on the brother’s clothes.

Hamda’s mother said her daughter, who had hoped to be a nurse, had done
nothing wrong although she had been beaten by her brother a few months earlier
and complained to the police, possibly setting off the brother’s anger.
According to the police, Hamda had refused to marry a man her family had
arranged for her as a husband.

“In most cases we manage to bring circumstantial evidence to court, but it’s
not enough to convict for murder,” said Superintendent Yigal Ezra, a Jew who is
the head of investigations and intelligence at the Ramla police station. This
time, he believed, there was a solid case.

But Y, the police said, had refused the police protection they offered, and
in late February she disappeared. Now, with Rashad Abu Ghanem’s trial under way,
it is still unclear whether she is in hiding, has been abducted or is dead.
Without her, the case could fall apart.

“It won’t be easy to convince the judge to convict a man of murder without
the witness appearing,” said the defendant’s lawyer, Giora Zilberstein. Mr. Abu
Ghanem denies killing his sister, Mr. Zilberstein said.

Police officials concede that if the court fails to convict him, the
likelihood of witnesses coming forward in future cases would be slim.

Ramla was once an entirely Arab town, but most of its residents fled or were
exiled during the 1948 war. The Abu Ghanem clan, which is Bedouin, arrived in
the 1950s, settling on the edge of Ramla and in the nearby town of Lod.

The meeting between traditional desert culture and modern urban living has
not been particularly successful here.

“They all use drugs,” Amama Abu Ghanem, the mother of Hamda and Rashad, said
of the clan’s criminal, controlling core, an observation echoed by the police.

While many of the Abu Ghanem seem to live on welfare, Mrs. Abu Ghanem washes
dishes at a no-frills wedding hall in the town center. Some of the cut-price
stores here have signs in Russian, to cater to the more recent arrivals. Ramla
is about 80 percent Jewish today.

Mrs. Abu Ghanem said even if her son, who she says has an illegitimate child
with a 17-year-old Jewish woman in another town, had not killed her daughter,
she did not want him back. “Give me 10 years for my soul to dry out,” she
said.

Mrs. Abu Ghanem, 52, had nine children before her husband left 16 years ago
to move in with a new wife in an apartment below hers. He now has 11 more
children, none currently in school though education is supposed to be compulsory
from age 5.

A reporter and photographer were angrily shooed away from Mrs. Abu Ghanem’s
apartment by her eldest son, Muhammad, who said the family did not need more
scandals. “They are still in shock about Hamda,” Mrs. Abu Ghanem said, sitting
in the apartment of the second wife.

Aida Touma-Suliman of Women Against Violence, an Israeli group that works in
the Arab sector, said 8 cases of honor killings were reported in Israel last
year, 11 the year before. Yifrach Duchovny, the commander of the Coastal Plain
district police, said there were 17 cases in Ramla and Lod in the past five
years.

Ms. Touma-Suliman blames years of neglect by the local police and social
welfare services. But she acknowledges that even Jewish women at risk of
domestic violence can be reluctant to go to the police, and Arab women are all
the more so, given the political history and tensions between Arabs and Jews.

Superintendent Ezra keeps a package of black body bags on the shelf behind
his desk, below a tray for outgoing mail.

“They’re not there for nothing,” he said grimly.

“These are clever girls who write diaries and poems,” he said of those he has
helped find refuge. “But once they are no longer minors, they often say they’re
going back home. We say, ‘You’ll end up in one of those.’
”