Arab-Israeli women slaughtered in the name of the family
THE Abu Ghanem clan has lost another one of its women, the 10th in eight years to be killed for supposedly breaching the family's "honour".
The latest victim is Dalia Abu Ghanem, a 16-year-old mother of one, who vanished several weeks ago after an argument with her family.
It's the most recent in a horrific series of "honour killings" that has infested the Abu Ghanem clan of Juarish, an Arab neighbourhood on the outskirts of Ramla, a blue-collar city of 64,000 south of Tel Aviv.
"A few days after the argument, we received a tip-off, anonymously, that she was missing," Israel Police superintendent Shlomi Sagi told the Herald.
"Immediately, we were afraid because of the family history," he said.
Last week, Sagi said, police picked up Dalia's brother, Mahmoud Abu Ghanem, in Rahat, a city near Gaza in Israel's south. "He told us he was looking for work there. His sister is missing and he goes away to look for work? We arrested him."
Although a body has still not been found, in a court appearance on Monday police formally charged Mahmoud with his sister's murder. He was remanded in custody.
A look into the bloody history of the Abu Ghanem family and it seems like escape was never an option for Dalia.
In 2000, her mother Naifa was the victim of an honour killing, and in 2006 her sister Shirihan bled to death after her throat was slashed.
Dalia also watched as six of her cousins were gunned down, strangled and stabbed for "crimes" as trivial as talking to another man on the telephone.
Further unhappiness was forced upon Dalia when, at the age of 14, shortly after her sister's murder, she was forced by her father to marry a man she barely knew, against her will.
Three months ago she gave birth to a daughter, but motherhood was an experience she had to endure alone as her husband is serving a prison sentence.
At various times during her marriage, Dalia had sought refuge in shelters for battered women, after she had endured beatings and several murder threats.
"But she chose to go back to her family's neighbourhood, as other local women did and were then attacked," a police prosecutor told the Ramla Magistrates Court on Monday.
As recently as March this year, 40-year-old Sara Abu Ghanem sustained light injuries to her head and neck when several unidentified men opened fire at her on her way to work.
Sara had recently divorced her Palestinian husband and wished to make official her relationship with a local Jewish man, a fact that had outraged the family.
So-called honour killings number about 10 a year among Israel's 1.5 million-strong, mostly Muslim Arab population.
"Dalia was a quiet girl, who rarely spoke to me," says Omar al-Omar, a senior organiser at the Juarish Community Centre who knew Dalia well and had taught her gymnastics and folk dancing. "This is a family ruled by fear and you can see it in the faces of the Abu Ghanem women. They grow up with this huge weight on their shoulders," al-Omar says.
Al-Omar says economic hardship and lack of education are likely reasons why the Abu Ghanem clan, which numbers about 2000 people in Juarish, has bred such a culture of violence. "There are a lot of social problems in this family. They pull the girls out of school at age 12 and force them to get married, stop them getting educated, stop them getting out. It's a cycle that goes around and around. It's an epidemic here."
On the streets of Juarish, several people approached by the Herald walked away when approached to talk about Dalia's disappearance.
"When she first disappeared, the kids who come here to the community centre never talked about it with words, they talked about it with pictures that they drew for each other in school. Everyone knows right away that she is killed," al-Omar says.
"It shows how deeply this affected the culture here, where the 'honour killing' is an epidemic, but where no one can talk openly about."
This culture of silence is something that Israeli police have struggled to break as they tried to solve the murders, most of which remain unsolved.
But in January 2006, things started to change after 18-year-old Hamda Abu Ghanem was shot nine times while she lay in her bed. Instead of maintaining the usual wall of silence, the Abu Ghanem women opened up, with police gathering testimony from 20 female witnesses.
Hamda had refused to marry a man she had been promised to, it was revealed. She also talked too much on the telephone and had once been spotted talking to a male cousin. Convictions were eventually secured against several relatives, including her brothers Rashad and Kalil Abu Ghanem.
Convictions against another four Abu Ghanem brothers were also secured over the murder of their 19-year-old sister Reem, who was strangled to death in March 2006.
One of the brothers, Suleiman Abu Ghanem, a respected physician at a local hospital, had conspired in the murder by supplying sleeping tablets to his brothers and instructing them on how to sedate her.
Once asleep, Reem was wrapped in a blanket, placed in the boot of a car and driven to a local field. She awoke and pleaded for her life with her brothers. They tried to convince her that she had disgraced the family's honour because she had refused to marry the man she had been promised to and had instead ran away from home to be with another man she had fallen in love with. They then suffocated her and dumped her body in a nearby well.
"These convictions show that things are changing slowly," Sagi said. "We hope we can continue to get people to talk, especially in this latest case."
Meanwhile, says al-Omar, whose work on the ground in Juarish provides a crucial link to the world outside the Abu Ghanem clan, there are small signs of change.
"In my folk dancing class now, I have nine Abu Ghanem women. Ten years ago this would never have happened. It means they are getting bolder. I am hoping it will continue."
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I've always said Israel isn't perfect...
