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Israelis consider coincidence { February 2 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/international/middleeast/02CND-ISRA.htmlMany Israelis talked today about coincidence, fate, or God, about the colors of the Israeli flag in a scene of such destruction and about how a spacecraft carrying the first Israeli astronaut could break up over the town of Palestine, Tex. The longtime journalist Arik Bechar captured this reaction in a column today in "Ma'ariv."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/international/middleeast/02CND-ISRA.html
February 2, 2003
Israeli Students Reel After Losing Nation's First Astronaut
By JAMES BENNET
KIRYAT MOTZKIN, Israel, Feb. 2 — The experiment was envisioned as pure science — how crystals grow in space — but nothing in Israel is completely sealed off from politics.
The students at the high school here decided for their experiment aboard the space shuttle Columbia to use cobalt and calcium. Their crystals would be blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, an expression of their pride in their country and in its first astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon.
Today, with the delicate crystals lost in white streaks across the blue Texas skies, the students searched for further meaning in the disaster.
"Maybe someone didn't want us to be happy," Dor Zafrir, a 16-year-old in torn jeans and work boots, said of Colonel Ramon's voyage. "No matter what we do, nothing comes up right."
Colonel Ramon's voyage, he said, "was almost the only good thing in Israel."
Israel reeled today from the loss on Saturday of Colonel Ramon, who flew with six American crew members aboard Columbia. Flags flew at half-staff, and radio stations played the sorrowful ballads that are usually heard in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.
At the beginning of his weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent condolences to the United States. He spoke of Colonel Ramon as "a man who should not have been taken from us so suddenly, along with the hopes, dreams, history and future of all of us, to a place higher than we can realize."
Their hero's homecoming denied in the final minutes of his flight, many Israelis wrestled with a crushing disappointment, and with a more familiar sense of despair. In the newspaper Ha'aretz, Ari Shavit wrote of "this hope that keeps shattering, the hope of freeing ourselves from our gravitational destiny, of floating in some weightless normalcy in utter disregard of the gravity of our existence."
Students here are accustomed to that gravity. To reach school, they pass through a guarded steel fence, then walk by a memorial to graduates who have died fighting in the army.
Almost four years ago, this school in northern Israel selected about 35 of its students to compete in a NASA program to send high-school experiments into space. The students gathered after classes for extra work in astrophysics, as they tried to dream up an experiment worthy of a trip into space.
In the end, they wanted to know how crystals would grow if they were freed of gravity.
NASA picked experiments from six high schools worldwide. Photographs of the Israelis' "chemical garden" sent back from Columbia told the students that their experiment yielded an intriguing result. While, on earth, both materials fought gravity to grow upward, in space the calcium crystals grew in the shape of a sphere, while the cobalt "was all messed up, like spaghetti," said Pini Shekhper, 14. Pini and his friends were hoping that when they analyzed the crystals they would find the source of this difference.
Today, after students walked into the school's entrance hall, they saw flickering votive candles. The candles were set out beneath pictures cut from newspapers of Columbia's lost crew and of the stunned, aching expression of Colonel Ramon's wife, Rona, when she learned her husband was not coming home. Colonel Ramon, 48, had four children, ages 14, 12, 9 and 5.
"From the heavens, he was supposed to emerge like some sort of Messiah," read a poem laid before this memorial.
Members of the scientific team assembled in the office of the principal, Marga Segal.
On a sheet of black paper, someone had scribbled the word "consolation" in white. The students had then contributed their comforting thoughts: "for science," "national pride," "role model" and "hero." On a second, white sheet, the word "disaster" was written in black. Some of the words around it were similar: "for science" and "national symbol," along with "sadness," "injustice" and "sympathy with the families."
The students had met once with Colonel Ramon. "I had a lot of hopes for Ilan and the other astronauts," said Adar Moritz, 17. "It was a disaster for me."
The students were solemn about the shuttle's loss, but they could still tease one another, to bursts of laughter, about their sudden celebrity. At such moments, they seemed like young people anywhere.
But they were young people in Israel, and so they spoke about national troubles that the shuttle's voyage and their experiment had distracted them from: the miserable economy, Israel's ethnic and religious divides, the conflict with the Palestinians. They spoke about a temptation to leave the country, about a choice between doing what was best for one's family and what was best for one's state.
Ilana Zibenberg, 16, spoke of the many options that graduating Americans have after high school. "We have to go to the army," she said. "In the army, we lose a lot of friends, mostly boys."
The students wondered if Israel, and Jews, were being singled out for suffering. Some noted that there was also a Jewish astronaut aboard the Challenger when it exploded in 1986.
Many Israelis talked today about coincidence, fate, or God, about the colors of the Israeli flag in a scene of such destruction and about how a spacecraft carrying the first Israeli astronaut could break up over the town of Palestine, Tex. The longtime journalist Arik Bechar captured this reaction in a column today in "Ma'ariv."
"Ilan Ramon fell victim to the same curse that has turned the Israelis into a paranoid people," he wrote. "And how can they be blamed. The representatives of 30 nations have already hitched a ride with the American space fleet, and all of them returned safely to earth to be able to tell their grandchildren, when the day comes, that the tortured Earth looks much better from afar."
But, Mr. Bechar concluded, "history will remember Ilan Ramon not as the victim of a collective Jewish sin, but as another Israeli pioneer who fell before the camp."
Dor, who gathered members of the science team at his house Saturday night, said: "It makes you doubt your dreams. But you can't give up. Especially with our situation here in Israel, we can't afford to give up."
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