Skin Deep

When a suicide bomber took Kinneret Boosany's physical beauty, she found the beauty inside.

*Note: in keeping with our mission, the Hot Zone is putting a human face on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We're profiling doctors, victims of the violence, journalists and artists -- one from each side. In focusing more on the human picture than the political one, we aim to present a clearer portrayal of the scope of the conflict.

ISRAELI VICTIM 

TEL AVIV -- The first time she went out to a bar after the bombing, Kinneret Boosany says she was terrified.

"I was with my ex-boyfriend," she says, sitting on the couch in her apartment in the Florentine neighborhood of Tel Aviv, her two dogs on her lap, "and other friends were on both sides of me. I was holding onto his hand so tightly. It was a long time before I could go out alone. Or I would only go out at night."

She recalls that time as her "vampire life."

Boosany had been a waitress in a Tel Aviv restaurant called "My Coffee Shop" when a Palestinian suicide bomber chose it as his target. It was the 30th of March, 2002, at 9:30 in the evening.

Because it was a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, she says the restaurant wasn't very crowded. She was tired and a little hung over because she had been out late the night before celebrating Passover, smoking and drinking with friends.

She says a young guy came in and asked for a cup of coffee. That's the last thing she remembers. When she regained consciousness it was July, four months later.

She had survived the attack, which killed one other woman, but just barely. She had burns on 70 percent of her body, her dominant left arm burned most severely. She lost the sight in her right eye and her lung capacity was reduced by half.

Despite the severity of her injuries, Boosany says there was never a time when she wished she had not survived the blast.

"Never," she says. "For the whole time I was in a coma I was struggling to live. It's kind of like you're fighting your own demons."

In fact, she calls the threshold between death and life a holy place -- because that's where she feels she discovered a critical truth about her existence.

"The first time you wake up you say, 'thank God I'm alive...' That's all that matters. But the farther you get from the danger of death, you get more confused because the pressure of the material world begins to affect you again," she says.

"You've been in a place much more holy because you only survived to live. You don't care if you have legs. No legs, no eyes, no skin -- you don't care. As long as I'm alive, that's what matters. But when you start coming back to reality, which unfortunately is 'worship the money, worship the body,' it becomes more confusing. You start asking yourself questions, how will I manage the house, how will will I find a partner?"

For her, recovery meant years of surgery and rehabilitation. She has needed skin grafts, repairs and cosmetic work, requiring 14 operations so far.

A photograph of her before the bombing shows a smooth-skinned beauty with an uncertain smile and searching eyes. Her smile today is confident, as is her laughter. She jokes about her neighborhood, a bohemian area where she's "not the only weirdo."

Boosany's face shows the scars of surgery and discoloration from patching and grafting. But it's not hard to see the beauty that was there before. She wears long sleeves to protect and cover her arms and a glove on her left hand.

Though she suffered intense physical pain, she says it was never an issue -- that was something she could handle. The psychological aspect of her injuries was another matter.

"I had a lot of anger," she says. " Now the world owed me whatever I wanted. If it was a mad moment and you were next to me, you got it. I don't see it as justified today, but I think you need to go through that and let it pass."

She found a way to channel some of that anger by videotaping herself in her apartment.

"A teacher told me to start writing a diary. But I thought that takes too much time, so I starting recording myself instead. Every time I felt lonely I put the camera on. I said everything that was on my mind. How I'm in a shitty situation, sometimes how I was thankful."

The moments were so powerful that an Israeli film editor, Ruth Yuval, and an advertising executive, Zamir Dahbash, turned them into a documentary, "Kinneret Lives," which aired on Israeli television. It is a brutally honest portrait of Boosany coming to terms with her new life.

"I'm trying to go out into the world now," she says, in one of the video clips, "and I suddenly realize how strange I am. I can't escape from the way I look. My appearance is an obstacle."

Boosany says the video diary helped her heal psychologically.

"I can tell you I am more happy now with the person I am today than I was before the bombing..."— Kinneret Boosany

"There is more peace, more calm. There's less need to look around for stuff elsewhere. Now if I feel a lack of something I know I need to go into me -- it's all inside. A lot of problems that I used to have then, I don't have them anymore. You know that you can get through anything."

But while she's discovered that inner strength, it took her friends and family to get her there. She says they were like "silk pillows" through her recovery, taking shifts at her bedside during her coma and at her side during rehabilitation.

"My mother essentially gave up her life for me, quitting her job and putting all her efforts into my recovery," she says. "I say she gave me life twice."

Boosany says she doesn't harbor any anger toward the suicide bomber, who she learned was the same age, 23, at the time of the incident.

She does, however, think about the bomber's mother every once in awhile. She was told the mother did a television interview after the bombing, saying how proud she was of her son.

"I don't believe she really felt that way," Boosany says. "I think she definitely misses him, regardless of what she said during the interview."

Boosany says she's moving ahead with her life, studying 3D animation and video editing,  She might make a documentary of her own some day.

"I can tell you I am more happy now with the person I am today than I was before the bombing," she says.

"This is my lesson that God sent me," she says. "It has nothing to do with Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kinneret got burned, Kinneret died. I was reborn -- now Kinneret lives."

Yesterday: Palestinian Doctor

Tomorrow: Palestinian Victim 

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