Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

As a teenager, Bassam was among a group of militant youth imprisoned for attacking Israeli soldiers. Hatred of Israel consumed him. In prison, he started watching films that exposed him, for the first time, to the calamities Jews had experienced before Israel came into existence. One of the films was Schindler’s List. At the start of the movie, the thought went through Bassam’s mind, “Why did this Hitler not kill all the Jews?” By the end of it, he was in tears. Bassam left prison convinced armed struggle would never end the cycle of hatred and violence that kept claiming more victims, a commitment he maintained even as the conflict plunged his family into renewed despair. In January 2007, his ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was walking to school after buying a snack when a projectile struck her in the back of the head. She was soon pronounced dead, the victim of a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli border guard, witnesses claimed. Instead of calling for the loss to be avenged, Bassam worked with his Israeli counterparts to build a garden in Anata bearing Abir’s name. He also pressed for an investigation into her death, which the Israeli police blamed on a stray rock hurled by a Palestinian.