Murder in Tel Aviv

It is told of the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, who moved from Odessa to Tel Aviv in the early 1920s, that, upon hearing for the first time of a robbery in the new Jewish city, he thanked God for having made the Jews a normal people. A similar story is attributed to a half-dozen other Hebrew writers and intellectuals of the age, which shows how paradigmatic it seemed to its contemporaries. Were Bialik still alive, one might remark with black humor that, after the events of the past days, his gratitude would know no bounds.What hasn’t Israel experienced in recent years? Financial scandals, sex scandals, political corruption in high places, horrid cases of child abuse, underworld crime, gangland murders, a ghastly series of wife-killings — enough to prove its normality many times over. And yet none of that, it would seem, has so shocked Israelis as the unrelated murders of two four-year-old children by a mother and grandfather that hit newspapers and television screens this week, making generally respectable pages and news programs look like lurid tabloids.One of these murders, that of a girl named Rose Pisam, took place months ago but only now has come to light; the other, that of a boy named Alon Borisov, occurred a few days ago. Rose was murdered by her grandfather, 45-year-old Ronny Ron, who was living in a sexual relationship with the child’s mother, Marie Pisam, a Frenchwoman married to his son who left her husband for her father-in-law. Mr. Ron, who told the police that the child had gotten on his nerves, claims to have thrown Rose’s corpse into Tel Aviv’s Yarkon River, from which divers and dredgers have so far been unable to retrieve it.Alon Borisov was deliberately drowned in the Mediterranean by his mother, Olga Borisov, who is a Russian immigrant married to an Israeli. Mrs. Borisov, too, could not stand the nuisance of having a child around, although, less mentally stable than Mr. Ron, she may be able to plead temporary insanity. Now under psychiatric observation, she asked the court for, and was denied, permission to attend her son’s funeral, which may make her the first murderer in history to sue for the right to see her victim buried.Israelis are by now accustomed to murders in their midst, just as they long ago became accustomed to the robberies that were still a novelty in Bialik’s day. They don’t need to be reminded that they are — in respect of crime, at least — a normal people. Underworld vendettas, knife-wielding teenagers, and homicidal husbands no longer surprise them.But murdering one’s own child or grandchild is, of course, something else. Most of us can understand the urge or perceived necessity to kill because most of us have, at one time or another in our lives, felt like, or fantasized, killing someone else, even if we knew or believed that this was not something we would really want to do or be capable of. Every thoughtful person knows there is a potential murderer inside him, though it might take more to elicit that potential than even the most extreme of life’s situations could bring to bear on it.But most people also know that there is almost nothing they would not do to save the lives of their children, including sacrificing their own lives if necessary. This is a matter of natural instinct, not of moral philosophy, and has little to do with ordinary courage. And just as we know that we would, without thinking, throw ourselves in the way of a speeding car in order to push our child out of its way, so we know that we could never deliberately murder that child. We might get mad enough to slap it, or spank it, or worse even than that, but we could not imagine ourselves taking a life that we have brought into this world and would do anything to protect.And yet some people — very few, it may be, but still some — do the unimaginable. There is no more frightening kind of murder, because there is no other kind that more challenges our assumption that there are some things that, no matter what the circumstances, our fundamental humanity would never allow us to do. Mr. Ron and Mrs. Borisov are, after all, as fundamentally human as the rest of us.Israelis’ reaction to the Ron and Borisov murder cases has not been of the “How could this happen in Israel?” variety. Israelis have learned by now that anything that can happen elsewhere can happen in Israel, too. They know that they are normal, for the worse as well as for the better, and do not need new crimes to demonstrate it. The question they have been asking this week is, rather, “How could this happen to human beings?”This is a more mature, because less self-centered, question to ask. Although shocking crimes do not impinge on our lives as do other things (a rise in gasoline prices has more of a practical effect than does the murder of a child), they do, if we allow ourselves to think about them, impinge much more on our sense of who we are. Humans have a capacity for evil that will never fail to astound us as long as it involves something that we can’t bear to admit we might have too. And perhaps that’s as it should be. The most shocking thing of all would be if nothing shocked us any more.Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

Murder in Tel Aviv

Murder in Tel Aviv

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