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A girl on edge By Amir Zohar and Ben Grubner Tags: Doron Assaf  "I want to leave with a crash and noise / The flesh crushed like the soul / The body broken like the girl" - Doron Assaf, May 18, 2005 "This is my testament, then. I am emotional now, and afraid, but for the last time. I had dreams that I do not see myself realizing. As I said, I just don't want to live. I love you all. Shalom. Doron Assaf." These are the last words of the 19-year-old soldier, written shortly before she jumped to her death from Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv, on January 14, 2007. On that day, she sent about 50 text messages with the words "I love you" to family and friends. Some of them responded with a message of love of their own; she replied to one friend that in the evening, he would know. Her father, Yaron, says that for a moment he felt uneasy, but made do with replying "I love you too." Her mother, Dafna, was certain Doron had sent the message from the army medical board, to which she had been summoned. "There was an 'I love you' pact between us, and the message seemed totally trivial to me," she recalls. Advertisement The last person known to have received a sign of life from Doron was a former classmate, Nadav Peled, from Karkur. His phone rang at 1:51 P.M., and this message scudded across the screen: "I trust you, otherwise I wouldn't ask. I am going. I left you a letter that is the testament. It is in the yellow notebook in the black bag, together with a letter to Doron Aloni [her boyfriend]. I left the bag on a bench on the roof of Azrieli in the smoking corner, on the floor from which you go up to the roof elevator. You are in charge of handling everything, as detailed. I love you. Be blessed and be at peace." At 2:10 P.M., Doron jumped from a height of 27 meters, from the seventh floor of the lower level of the Azrieli compound, hurtling to her death in the parking lot next to the Supersol outlet. In January, a memorial ceremony was held at her kibbutz, Maagan Michael, on the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa, marking the first anniversary of her death. Her parents distributed a book of reminiscences they had printed, containing texts from the poetry notebooks that were found with her testament and photographs from the album that remained in her home. Other texts were written by her mother, a literature student, who composed a sensitive portrait of her daughter's short life. Along with the wit and the joy, she described anxieties and depressions. She singled out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a metaphor to which Doron's conflicted mind was drawn, and she regretted in particular her daughter's tragic encounter with the Israel Defense Forces. Between the lines written by mother and daughter, other issues emerged, which her parents and friends address with candor. For example, the influence of military patriotism on Doron's feeling of not belonging and her yearning for love from her father - who took part in the Entebbe operation [to rescue Israeli hostages in 1976]. With broken hearts, they offer the poems of depression and death that she wrote in secret, and note her reverence for the Israeli rock band Aljir - two central motifs in the daughter's life, which became an integral part of the mother's life, too. Two lonely girls "Death looks me in the eyes / Caresses my head / Beckons me with his hand to come" At the mention of Aljir, Dafna's eyes grow wide and a broad smile crosses her anguished face. "Two weeks after Doron's suicide, I went to meet the band's soloist, Aviv Gedj, and I found a charming and amazing person. I told him on the phone, 'Listen, Aviv, my daughter killed herself. She really liked your group and I have a very powerful need to meet you. What do you say?' He immediately said yes. We met in his sister's place in Tel Aviv. It was incredible. "Aviv talked about everything," Dafna continues, "including the fact that he also tried to commit suicide. He said he was orphaned from an early age, that his older brother raised him. He told about a crisis that led him to jump from the Ayalon bridge next to Azrieli, but luckily for him he landed on the roof of a moving car [laughs]. That event landed him in Abarbanel [a psychiatric hospital], where he received treatment that stabilized him. The group's guitarist, Gavriel Valahsan, who was hospitalized with him, was very moved by the story and wanted to come to the meeting, too, but he is still not feeling well." A schoolmate of Doron's, Noam Gabinet, from Pardes Hanna, relates that the two of them went to see an Aljir performance. "The first time we saw them we really wanted to talk to them, but we were embarrassed," Gabinet says. "Another time - this was in Metulla - Doron said 'We have to.' She went up to Valahsan and told him, 'We're wild about you, and live on your music.' She absolutely gushed, and he gave us this kind of contemptuous smile and said, 'So you don't have a life, eh?' He was right. We were two lonely girls, connected by depression. What we shared with each other was that everything is black, and the suicide thing actually ripened after we met - but as a fantasy, not as something concrete." Dafna Assaf, who since her daughter's suicide has moved from writing biographies and prose to poetry, showed Gedj poems written by her daughter and suggested that he set them to music. "He said it was amazing material," she says, radiant, "but that he composes music only for what he himself writes." Gedj was reluctant to talk about the meeting. "Our album 'Engines Ahead' produced one big distortion," he says. "It's hard for me to get to sleep at night, thinking about how it was interpreted in the opposite way to what I intended. At the philosophical level, I say that everything related to that album has already turned into damage. It is perceived as something that knocks people down and throws them into depression. Speaking personally, it is something I can easily leave behind." Young and restless "When death comes now, it's a different feeling. / When it opens the door for the hundredth time / I feel happy for a moment" In Maagan Michael, Doron is remembered for her cynical, subtle and intelligent humor. Outwardly she did not stand out, but around the table in the dining hall or on the wooden benches of the youth club, she is recalled as someone who took part in conversations and displayed coherent opinions on a range of topics. "A baby who develops quickly. Walking at nine months," Dafna writes at the start of the chapter "Her history" in the book. "Until the age of seven she is not sick, does not need antibiotics, doesn't cry, doesn't protest. Broadcasts a strong, easygoing girl. Omri [her brother] welcomes her gladly. Doesn't bug her, isn't jealous. In kindergarten she spoke in the masculine form, wore boy's clothes and played boys' games. Discovered the world of the Barbies. Liked going home at midday, sleeping with mother in bed. Doron knew a lot of books by heart before she learned how to read, made herself a storyteller and riveted children. When she didn't remember something, she improvised, and in the end made up the name of the author and the illustrator." Toward the end of elementary school, beneath her captivating laughter and impressive intellectual ability, a high sensitivity welled up. So much so that from fourth grade onward, Doron was exempted from attending Holocaust memorial events. Above all, she could not bear wrongs that were perpetrated by people in authority. In junior high, still in the kibbutz, she found it hard to cope with the new social milieu, but was named outstanding student. At the graduation ceremony, she announced that she was returning the certificate of excellence to protest the fact that there were other students, no less diligent, who did not receive a commendation and felt frustrated. After the summer vacation, Doron entered Mevo'ot Eron High School, in the Lower Galilee. "At this stage, Doron, the strong girl, the leader and the lead actress, began to develop a deep personal pain, which would continue to intensify, irrespective of one school or another, and irrespective of our efforts to do well by her," Dafna writes in the book. "Certain people claimed she had no sensitivity," Noam Gabinet says, "because she would cover up her hyper-sensitivity by means of tactless behavior, even though she felt more pain for others than for herself. The eating disorders of others shocked her more than her own, and she laughed about her own death, while the death of others disturbed her very much." Art therapy did not help, and in 10th grade she was not doing well in school. Disappointed, Doron spent a lot of time reading alone at home and became addicted to television series like "The Young and the Restless." She watched the film "Billy Elliot," about a boy in a poor English town who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer, dozens of times. Her mother identified two opposing patterns of highly sensitive behavior: "On the one hand, escapism - an attempt to distance herself from everything painful in the real world - and on the other, awareness and caring about the suffering of the other, and above all, identification with the suffering of the Palestinians. Ironically, she was also angry at the father of a boy from her grade who committed suicide. 'How could he let his son live with that pain?' she said to us time and again." 'A different girl' "Let's join the army / We'll fool them into thinking our mind is hale and hearty" Doron's escapism led her to take a creative writing course for young people, where she met new friends and encountered new concepts. She was particularly taken with the writers who conducted the workshops, Ron Leshem and Eshkol Nevo. In the wake of her work in the course, one of her poems was published in the veteran literary journal "Iton 77." "Doron wrote a great deal," Dafna says in the book. "Her writing was very direct, from the heart, without embellishments, without compromise for herself, her milieu or for us, her parents. She continued to read and buy a lot of books - she had a crammed bookcase - fantasy and science fiction alongside Agnon, Dostoevsky and James Joyce. She declared that she would be the first Israeli woman to write science fiction. She registered with the Association for Science Fiction and Fantasy. She worked hard in school and enjoyed subjects that she was fond of. At the end of 11th grade she had her first love, and in 12th grade she got high marks in all her matriculation exams, with excellence in literature and art history." That doesn't sound like a girl undergoing mental crises. Dafna: "It wasn't a situation of successive crises, but one particular crisis that we saw in her, and we understood that I would no longer be able to be a regular mother. We saw a different girl, special, a girl on the edge. On the one hand, very mature and intelligent, with insights and high self-awareness; and on the other hand, undeveloped, very deficient in protective mechanisms and unable to tell the wheat from the chaff." And also an active pacifist. "When Yaron and I could not abide what the IDF did after the first Lebanon war, or when the occupation drove us out of our minds, we turned to political activity. Doron's sensitivity for others was not translated into political activity - apart from writing poetry. Her only concrete activity was on behalf of conscientious objectors. We did not miss a single demonstration. I went with her, and so did Yaron. She went to the hill opposite Military Prison 6 [from where activists shout support for jailed conscientious objectors] by foot, sometimes alone. Here in the kibbutz you had, and still do, fierce attacks on anyone who doesn't do army service. That drove Doron crazy. Someone here hit a youngster who didn't serve, and Doron absolutely cried over it. The construction of the separation fence also tore her in half, exactly like the suicide attacks." In September 2004, the Ynet Web site published a report about the release from prison of five young men who had refused to do military service. Doron sent a sarcastic talkback to their critics, writing: "Really, congratulations to the law-abiding citizens who saw fit to condemn and jail five of your best sons who still had the strength to resist." Her parents describe a substantial improvement during the events held in the kibbutz to mark the high school graduation. Doron said that for the first time she "understands what people mean when they say they are happy." Contrary to all expectations, she said she wanted to do army service, and after thinking things over a little, chose the first combat track of its kind for women, involving information gathering in Field Intelligence. Doron's mother was concerned about her decision to serve, and could have spiked the plan by refusing to sign a parental release, but decided not to. "It was clear to me that she was very fearful, but she wanted to demonstrate to her surroundings that she was militaristic, despite being a pacifist," Dafna says. "That duality again: she harbored guilt feelings toward the members of the kibbutz, and military service was part of her return to the circle." A myth that has long since been shattered, isn't it? "Not exactly, even though at home we very much defended parents and children from the kibbutz who didn't serve and endured social condemnation. She would say in reaction: 'It's all very well what they say about the left-wing kibbutzim, but that is not Doron Assaf - Doron Assaf needs to serve in the army.'" The induction into the army of one who fought for the conscientious objectors was documented in a short film shot in the kibbutz. "I am being drafted into Field Intelligence and I am going to be a fighter-collector," Doron is seen stating proudly in the middle of the dining hall. "The reason is so that the boys can serve in the territories and to free them from the Egypt-Jordan sector. It's the first time something like this is being done - an all-girl company, from the officer to the driver." Interviewer: "How did you decide on this?" Doron: "Because people told me, 'You will never in your life be able to be a combat soldier.'" Interviewer: "Why did you want to do army service at all?" Doron: "Oy, that's a really tough question. I don't want to do army, but it is ... to guard a border that has nothing to do with the Palestinians." Someone from the side: "Anyone in our society who doesn't serve is ostracized." Doron: "They are socially lynched." Basic training took place in the sprawling Tse'elim base in the South. It started well, and Doron finished second in the fitness tests. But after two weeks, the tough going started to get to her. Her mother recalls her complaining that she had joined up as a female soldier, not a male. Her first Shabbat on the base was difficult, and the field forays on the freezing desert nights in December targeted her for a crash. "I was amazed when Doron decided on combat service," Noam Gabinet says. "She was against the occupation and signed up because of the high boots, the uniform, the pose, the pretense. She was afraid not to be the best. What she said about serving was different before and after her induction. Another reason she didn't get along in the unit was because of the obligation to be with the group at all times, without a moment to herself. It drove her up the wall to be surrounded by girls." During one guard rotation, Doron succumbed to hyperthermia and was evacuated to the base clinic. Her father, who in the 1970s was an officer in the ultra-elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, was summoned to take her home. "The most important thing for her was to be home when her boyfriend arrived," he relates. In her blog, which her family found out about only after her death, she admitted to faking the fainting spell. The mental health officer who released her from the combat track and assigned her to the base personnel unit, stated: "The soldier is not suicidal." Doron continued to be recalcitrant, even if that meant having her army profile lowered. To that end, a visit to a psychiatrist in the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv was arranged. Three days before her death, he complied with her wishes and recommended her transfer to a base close to home. He summed up: "The soldier does not display suicidal tendencies." To determine her new profile, she was summoned to a medical board, whose decision she never heard. A RICH chocolate cake "To leave / life / with a tranquil sigh of relief / It was awful / Thanks, farewell / Excuse me" Doron spent her last weekend with her family. She was disappointed that her boyfriend, Doron Aloni, a soldier in the Givati infantry brigade, could not be with her - his unit had been rushed to the northern border. On Friday night she went to a movie and then to a pub with girlfriends, and on Saturday had lunch at her grandparents' home. On Saturday night she prepared to spend the night at her parents' place, without giving the least hint of her intentions. "Doron liked to watch television with me in bed," Dafna says. "That night she wanted a little warmth and pampering after a weekend without her boyfriend. She 'kicked out' Dad but then called him back, 'to be a trio until we fall asleep.' She hugged us and said, 'You are awfully cute together.'" Early the next morning, Dafna escorted her daughter to the bus stop. Her next meeting was with her aunt, Edva Markovitz (Baharav), 35, an animator living in Tel Aviv. "At 8 A.M. I got a text message from Doron saying 'I love you,'" Markovitz recalls. "She had already had caprices like that, but it was always a surprise, and I got uptight. I called her back and she sounded a little down. She said she was on her way to a medical board and had forgotten her purse at home. I told her we could meet at Azrieli and I would give her money." They met at 9:30 and spent some time in two cafes. Doron ordered a rich chocolate cake. "She said she was getting her profile lowered and chuckled at the psychiatrist," her aunt relates. "We hung out for about two hours and there were lots of laughs. At around 12, when I had to leave, she said that the decision of the medical board would not be made until 3 o'clock. I suggested that she spend the time at a movie and she said that wasn't a bad idea. We parted next to the escalator. I remember looking at her and asking myself if she was all right, and also answering myself that she looked perfectly fine." Dafna describes the meeting as misrepresentation by her daughter, and takes note of the movie ticket she bought for an animated film that started at 12 noon. "If you look at the times, and take into account that the used ticket was found among her effects, it could be that she went to the movie," she says, and wonders, "Maybe so someone would stop her? Maybe to reflect a little more?" Nadav Peled, who received the last message from Doron, at 1:51, which placed him in charge of executing the "testament" she had left on the Azrieli roof, embarked on a desperate race to save her. Now a music student in New York, Peled reconstructs by telephone the events from the moment he got the dramatic message: "Her phone was off, so I got into the car and drove to Tel Aviv. On the way I called her parents' house and left a message. I called Noam Gabinet and another girlfriend. The only place I didn't think of calling was Azrieli. I kept switching radio stations - maybe there would be some announcement. Nothing. We got there in less than two hours, but everything had been cleared away and there was nothing to see and no one to talk to. It's incredible how everything went back to normal. "It was my first time in Azrieli and I got totally disoriented. I went up to the roof and looked for the bag in all sorts of corners. I understood that it would not be possible to jump from there. I went back to the lower level and got to the smoking corner, but I didn't find a bag on the benches." Gabinet, who had already spoken with Dafna, arrived at Azrieli from the coastal plain region. She met up with Peled, and through a friend of her brother's, a girl who was serving in the Defense Ministry compound, started to get reports about a young woman who had jumped. They refused to believe the terrible news and kept on looking, until a security officer told them that a bag had been found and handed over to the police. On the way to the station, Dafna called to say that Doron's body had been found. "Until then we were cool and calm," Peled says, "but when the news arrived from Dafna, we immediately switched to sadness and crying. The police insisted on keeping the bag, so we drove to the home of Doron's parents in the kibbutz." Dad from Sayeret Matkal "And if I die now / So thin at the foot of a tower" Yaron and Dafna Assaf are an integral part of the history of Kibbutz Maagan Michael. "We are both 52, we fell in love long before high school, and we have been together ever since," Yaron says in a subdued voice and with a melancholy smile. In line with their declared secularity, they established a family without getting married, and brought Omri and Doron into the world. In the 1970s, Yaron Assaf was drafted into Sayeret Matkal. His commanding officers were Yoni Netanyahu and Omer Barlev, the latter succeeding Ehud Barak, the present defense minister. Two of his buddies from the commando unit - which carried out the Entebbe rescue operation of 1976 - were Avi Dichter, the former head of the Shin Bet security service and now minister of public security, and Amos Ben-Avraham, who later became the unit's commander. Assaf completed his service with the rank of captain and then attended the School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. Following his residency, he made a career switch to industry, and for the past seven years has been director of clinical affairs at CardioDex, a company based in Tirat Hacarmel, a Haifa suburb, which makes devices for use following catheterization procedures. Dafna, who raised the children, was always waiting for him on the kibbutz. She previously worked in the metals plant and is now coordinator of all kibbutz communications matters. The two made many trips with the children to Sinai and throughout Israel. Every morning, when Dafna made a sandwich for Doron to take to school, Yaron attached a note to it. None of this prevented the disaster. "Suicides do not necessarily come from families that are not supportive," Dafna says. "I do not abide by theories - everything is individual and complex. The only thing that helps me is a support group for parents of soldiers who committed suicide. There you hear intelligent remarks, including remarks about parents who are ashamed and hide their child's suicide." But you still have no answer about Doron. "She had a complicated, conflicted soul; she was too much for me." Doron's tomboy behavior as a little girl may have been inspired by Omri, her brother, or by her attempt to get her father's attention. On the eve of her induction she wrote the following about him in her private notebook: "The super-hero for whom nothing is difficult, who is never cold, but who also hears nothing ... I know that you do not really believe in me ... Dad, you are wonderful, I love you, even though it's hard to communicate with you or to please you ... Fighter or not, I am the only daughter you have." Her father responded in remarks he made in her memory on the eve of Yom Kippur: "Trips we will no longer make together, which I don't know if you really liked, or simply understood that this way we would have more time together ... Learning to cry inwardly when no one feels it, to smile in broad daylight and shed tears in the dark of night." Doron used the masculine form in many of the dark poems she wrote. Her mother thinks that the masculine image did not reflect a blurring of sexual identity, but a need to observe things from the outside. Her father is outraged: "It is terribly easy to fall prey to the thought that she committed suicide because of a sexuality crisis. She was always in love with boys, was good at manipulating them, was flagrantly sexy and fell in love with many more boys than those who were her boyfriends. Doron belongs to the category of people who ask basic existential questions." Omri, her brother, declined to be interviewed, as did Doron Aloni, her boyfriend for the last six months of her life. Aloni wrote in the memorial book, in part: "I am not reading the hard notebooks you left, I am simply ignoring them. It's too much for me. Sorry ... But nothing has changed in my love for you." The Assafs do not accuse the IDF diagnostic and medical units, but do feel a powerful need to speak out against the social pressure created by the campaigns against evasion of army service. "If a girl of 15 wrote poems like these and had a dialogue like that with death, you cannot blame the army for her death," says her father, who learned about and read her poems only after her death. Dafna has more to say on the subject: "Someone who truly wants to commit suicide does not give hints, but a year before the induction, a private psychologist [to whom we sent her] found that Doron was in remission, a state of recovery, meaning that she was not entirely healthy, even though she functioned and was happy." So you are angry? "If I feel anger, it is because we let her be drafted, or did not give her enough space to enable her not to serve. But I am not one to be angry at my girl. I chose not to get involved in anger and accusations, because I do not want to be a mourner all my life. At the moments when I am consumed with grief and miss her, I remember that even at the age of 70 I will be a bereaved mother, and ask myself whether I will be able to hold on. But I have a son to raise, a life of my own and a husband with whom I want to have a good relationship. So I had a wonderful girl who was given to me for almost 19 years, and maybe it is piggish to ask for more." What about the IDF's responsibility to safeguard her? "I am not one of those parents who chase after the mental health officer who didn't diagnose, or the doctor who didn't send someone to the mental health officer. Parents like that are in a poor situation, and I don't envy the children who are left to live with them. I, too, can accuse the IDF and sue the psychiatrist who wrote 'no suicidal tendencies' two days before her death, but go mess with them - it will delay my rehabilitation by five years at least. I also really think that they were not able to diagnose her. She misrepresented herself to them and also to her aunt; she slept in the same bed with me and I did not feel that anything was amiss." Yaron, too, defended the army during the conversation, but even he has something to say about the induction procedures: "There are people who are not suited to army service, and the army needs to diagnose the subtleties. True, the IDF has come a long way, but it is still not enough. All the declarations by the chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, and by [Personnel Directorate chief] Elazar Stern are ridiculous, empty of content and off the mark. The army is committing the sin of being two-faced: on the one hand, intolerable ease in releasing people from service, and on the other, campaigns against evasion." The IDF Spokesman stated in response: "The campaign to prevent draft evasion is intended to increase the motivation to serve. The military classification system identifies candidates for service who are not mature or have difficulties and adapts service tracks for them so they will be able to adjust and contribute optimally." Dafna Assaf also has a bone to pick with civil society: "I am no longer very left-wing, but I still demand from parents, and especially in the kibbutzim, to understand that along with kids who are serving in Hebron and Gaza, there are others who cannot serve, and no public campaign or local stigmatizing will help. There are kids who, if they do not opt out, will drop out. Doron did not opt out; she did not withstand the public pressure, and she dropped out." At Doron's funeral, a comic monologue was read out, at her wish, from Dror Shaul's film "Operation Grandma." She did not want a military funeral, says Noam Gabinet. "She wanted to be herself. Doron."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fight club Jerusalem camera catches brutal attack by Jewish teens on Arab youths. Unbrotherly behavior Rights group: Palestinian governments violate human rights in quest for control.   1.   I have left the world behind 10:39  |  Dror 15/03/08   2.   The IDF for girls 13:14  |  Dror 15/03/08   3.   I want to be honest with you 14:16  |  marilyn 15/03/08   4.   In response to Dror and Marilyn 16:59  |  AL 15/03/08   5.   A girl on edge 17:09  |  AL 15/03/08   6.   sad story 17:28  |  shimon 15/03/08   7.   Israeli kids are as bad as americans and europeans 18:27  |  Dror 15/03/08   8.   Sad but IDF not to blame 18:41  |  Sara 15/03/08   9.   Zero Torah and zero morals!!! 20:41  |  Susan 15/03/08   10.   Yes, Susan, I think your answer characterizes very well what`s 21:54  |  Andreas 15/03/08   11.   MY LOVE 21:19  |  BLAYR 28/05/08

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