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Little girl, big symbol By Avirama Golan Tags: Rose Pizem, Israel Appalling as it is, the murder of little Rose Pisam is not, as the police and the media have asserted numerous times, "one of the most shocking cases in the country's history." That sort of superlative belongs to the era of a nerve-tingling, rapid-fire media with their ever-shorter memory, and to a police force whose public image often interferes with its work. The intense preoccupation with the affair is not due solely to competition between media outlets and an uninhibited voyeurism that borders on pornographic lust. Nor does it stem from a desire "to understand the implications of the story," because it has no implications: Neither the police nor the welfare services could have prevented Rose's misery, and from May, it was already a lost cause. The desire to endlessly rehash the story is not only a need generated by the media. Apparently, speaking of the cruel and bitter fate suffered by a little girl with innocent, blue, sad eyes has the effect of reigniting the ashes of the tribal campfire. Suddenly, a child who was unknown until yesterday became the center of the attention, excitement and shock of an entire public. Suddenly she is not her parents' or her family's little girl, but one who belongs to a diffuse collectivity that is terribly worried about her. Advertisement In its own eyes, this collectivity is merciful and compassionate, filled with forbearance. Children are the center of its world, and its members will go to any length to protect them. Consider how far-reaching the police's handling of the case is: "We will do everything to bring Rose to burial," the police commissioner said, after his staff considered drying up extensive sections of the Yarkon River. The navy, which had the temerity to say "this is not a case involving the saving of lives," and therefore did not help, has drawn fierce condemnation. This new-old collectivity is not an exclusively Israeli phenomenon. Its latest incarnation - social networking on the Internet - reflects the longing for human closeness and unity. Tragically, Rose's mother, Marie-Charlotte Renault, supplied important material for that longing, from the ostensibly sweet and rosy beginnings to the bitter end. The French forum "Mothers of October 2003" documented everything online, until the beginning of this week when, at Marie-Charlotte's request, all the posts and her responses were deleted. The whole story is laid out there in full detail, in typical Internet style, with nothing censored. Marie-Charlotte shared her life with the women of the forum - so much so that they were involved in the most fateful decisions regarding her daughter. They parted sorrowfully from her when she and her husband, Benjamin, moved to Israel, were saddened to hear the two had separated because Marie-Charlotte fell in love with his father, and offered her advice in April 2004, when she returned to France to sign the divorce papers. Some of them were shocked when she gave up custody of the child and left Rose in her father's hands, but most of them stood by her unwaveringly and attacked Benjamin who, they said, "exploited the forum" to tell his side of the story. In 2007, when Marie-Charlotte returned to France to lay claim to Rose in a Versailles court, the forum girlfriends backed her again. Without knowing anything about her real life or about her problematic new partner (she hinted at this several times, but the message got lost between the red hearts and the pink decorations embellishing her posts), those friends all responded to the perfect-mother image that she painted. Not one wondered about the fact that the pretty young woman, who under the "occupation" rubric wrote "mother," continued to fill the forum with photographs of her daughter and never stopped describing her as "my flower" and the "joy of my life," even though the girl was living with her father. And then they learned that he was beating the child, that she was suffering and in distress. This was the moment when the tribal longing, which the imagined intimacy of the Web further heightens, gave rise to a uniform outcry of the heart: They all talked about Marie-Charlotte's sincere concern for her daughter, they all identified so ardently with her maternal struggle and were so captivated by her desire "to turn over a new leaf and establish a new family," that they forgot that this was a mother who had seen her daughter for a few months at most since her birth. Let the court decide, they exulted. Because the court, like the police and the welfare services - from which everyone suddenly demands the use of force, and immediately - symbolizes the old type of social authority, now lost. Indeed, a judge in a juvenile court perused the evidence before him and consulted with experts, but it appears that he, too, mainly looked at the young woman standing before him. She was then 22 years old, with light hair and blue eyes, and in an advanced state of pregnancy. Her name was Marie-Charlotte, a name that evokes strawberry cake with cream - like the good old France from the realm of nostalgia, France as it was before the migrants from central Africa and the Maghreb, before the deportations and the family rifts, before the dread of entering the suburbs. Tearfully, Marie-Charlotte demanded custody of the little girl from her former husband, who struck the girl and perhaps struck her as well. If she succeeded in describing in court her love for the toddler and the maternal instincts that stirred within her, and the desire to repair her broken world by means of a perfect family, harmonious and sweet - if she were able to do all that with the same captivating, heartbreaking charm she displayed in her blog and on the mothers forum, one can understand why the judge granted her custody. Thus, with the members of the forum providing her with emotional support, Marie-Charlotte packed a small suitcase for her daughter, Rose, and went off to the country that she described in the blog as "a wonderful land that I have fallen in love with." After that she stopped writing, which is apparently the reason her online friends knew nothing about what emerged in the investigation: about a little girl who was almost immediately placed in the care of her great-grandmother, who at home pounded her head on the wall, did not speak and wet herself - a girl with whom it was impossible to get along, until Marie-Charlotte asked Ronny Ron, her new husband and the girl's grandfather, to come get her because she couldn't take it anymore. The disparity between the chaotic perverseness of an entire family, which apparently ends with a small body in a suitcase, and the longing for a perfect family and the old, familiar social order, which is supposed to protect children and preserve them from all evil - that disparity is the material that has engendered the obsessive, fearful and threatening preoccupation with the affair. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Sarkozy in Syria Visit will put the onus on Damascus to cooperate further on Lebanon. 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