The pains of peace.

• Author: Rabin, David
• Position: Peace process in the Middle East - Brief Article

It's March 13, and the image is extraordinary: Almost 400 coffins, in neat rows, stretched out in a central Tel Aviv plaza. At first glance, the coffins might possibly be taken as "real"; hundreds of people are being killed in the inordinate bloodletting that mars Israel and Palestine. But the coffins are empty, and they're made of cardboard.

A memorial to those slain in the latest intifada, the coffin display is a Middle East version of the AIDS quilt. It's the creation of the Families Forum, a coalition of Palestinians and Israelis who've lost relatives in the conflict. The coffins symbolize the more than 1,200 Palestinians and 400 Israelis killed since September 2000.

To the side of the coffins is a banner reading, "Better the Pains of Peace than the Agonies of War." The quote, intoned at various times, according to the Forum, by Israeli leaders as diverse as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, is a kind of credo for the group. Its members have turned away from revenge and instead are asking the warring sides to stop, reflect, start talking, and end the violence.

What makes the memorial especially extraordinary is the presence, in its center, of a coffin draped in a Palestinian flag next to one covered with its Israeli counterpart. It took several Israeli Supreme Court hearings to get permission to show the Palestinian flag. A rightwing group argued that the flag represented the PLO and terrorism.

The Forum didn't get everything it wanted, however. It had intended to drape about 300 of the coffins with Palestinian flags, the rest with Israeli ones, but the police were afraid that the former would elicit an uncontrollable response from a volatile Israeli public. The parties finally agreed to one flag for each side.

Before any speeches are given, that single Palestinian symbol does provoke a negative reaction. Several Israelis spit on it. And two outraged Orthodox Jews manage to grab the flag. Security guards, after a long tussle, eventually pry it loose and block further attempts to remove it.

Having lost that battle, the protesters heckle from the sidelines. One of them, calling himself Yakov, says they're followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the slain leader of the banned rightwing Jewish Defense League, "may his blood be avenged soon." Yakov, an Israeli by way of New York City, says he'll protest as long as people, "traitors of the land, have the nerve to come here and bring enemy flags into the middle of Tel Aviv when people are being...