In the Intifada’s infancy, Hamas immediately became a nationalist, political movement focused on gaining power and influence, with the social and educational foci moving to the side, but not out of the picture. Sure, the Brotherhood’s original purpose remained: the Islamization of Palestine. Its methodologies, however, changed. Hamas created an Islamic Charter delineating in party terms its core principles. Among these principles was the reclamation of every inch of Palestinian land. Palestine was defined by Hamas as “an Islamic endowment” (waqf), and fighting anyone defiling a Muslim land was charged as a religious duty (fad’ayn). War with Israel thus became a core Hamas principle, a meld of its newly formed nationalism with right-wing interpretations of Islamic law.45
The internal jihad had become external.
Killing Israelis became a national and a religious duty for an organization of growing influence. Pacifism was dead. Terror was about to be embraced as Islamic militarism became, for Hamas, both an expression of nationalism and a principal recruitment tool.
Israel hadn’t seen it coming.
All of this historical excavating is meant to uncover one thing: how Hebrew University came to be bombed. But more than that, it’s an attempt to ride history backwards in order to point a finger and say, It’s your fault. The only problem is this: I don’t have enough fingers. Because one could point to America’s flawed Middle East policy, which helped propel radical Islamists in various countries (including Osama bin Laden before the transformation of al-Qaeda). One could point to Muslim extremists’ doctrines of hate. Or to Israel’s penchant for disproportionately violent solutions to a violent problem. Or to suicide bombings and targeted assassinations. To military checkpoints and Qassam rockets. To a Palestinian rage generated by intense suffering. To Israeli machismo driven by a post-Holocaust fear of extinction. Or one could point toward a God continuing to use the Middle East as a poker table. All impersonal. All theoretical. All illusory.
Haunting is the face in the mirror, the image of Mohammad Odeh’s face.
Haunting are the statements made by Hamas after the Sheik’s death, the statements I remembered reading in the Jerusalem Post on July 27, as Jamie and I lounged in Marla’s living room in Jerusalem on a Shabbat afternoon, enjoying the breeze and the company. I even, ridiculously, had read aloud the article about Shahada’s death, reciting the statements of revenge that had been put out by Hamas’s leaders. They were statements we talked about, naive, happy, unaware they would apply to us, that these statements would kill Marla and Ben, wound Jamie, and shatter everything:
We promise … that our eyes will have no rest until the Zionists see human remains in every restaurant and bus, at bus stops and on every street.46
Days later, Mohammad Odeh would set his bag down in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria at Hebrew University – a place considered by many as off-limits, out-of-bounds. He would rest a folded news paper upon it and walk away. The phone in his pocket. The call to be made. A call made because of calls that were made by others.
PART II
Disconnection
5
Jamie spent the night in the ICU with a dozen other victims needing constant monitoring. When I arrived the next morning, I was greeted outside the unit by a small gathering of friends. They had nowhere else to go, they said. There was nobody else to see, they said. Ben and Marla’s bodies had been identified. They were gone.
I rang a buzzer and gained entry to the ICU. Jamie smiled when she caught sight of me. Her face was covered with a transparent cream, her body being soothed by the rhythms of oxygen flowing, liquids dripping, electronic beeps monitoring her, keeping time. It was a syncopated show of survival.
The nurses had brought chairs into the room, so I sat.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
There wasn’t much else to say, much else that could be said. And so I sat with her, both of us mostly silent. When she asked, I would dip a small sponge attached to a plastic handle in a cup of water and raise it to her lips, letting her suck, giving her mouth some moisture. It was something I could do, something to show that I was there, that I would care for her. After a time, she asked that I leave, being wholly focused on healing, on resting. Please don’t let anyone in, she said.
I nodded and returned to the waiting room to find friends and teachers with food, board games, and silent support. I was thankful for them. I was thankful for their presence as I absently munched on Doritos, waiting for a nurse to step forward and let me know when Jamie had awoken. The weight of my own limbs was barely perceptible as I watched the door, a pervasive numbness having worked its way up my spine, a numbness that gave me license to behave in ways I’d never before dared. At one point, a pack of twenty American Jewish leaders who happened to be touring Israel on a fundraising mission gathered unannounced around the ICU’s double doors, expecting entry. They wanted to touch the American terror victim who had survived, who had made it out alive, demanding to express their sorrow, their regret, their anger. I was unsure how they had found her, but I was certain they were looking for Jamie. The numbness made me hard-nosed and pushy. I rose and blocked the door. “Get away, now.”
A bearded man approached as though attempting to sidestep me. He looked past my shoulder and said, “We’d just like to share our sympathies.”
“This is a freaking ICU. She doesn’t want to see anyone.”
“But we – ”
“Leave now. All of you.”
As they shuffled off, I thought, Assholes. All strangers, even Jewish tourists, were now potential perpetrators, potential harbingers of harm.
It would be the first in a series of confrontations I had with people trying to get close to Jamie in those first forty-eight hours after her admittance into the hospital. I turned away: Israeli politicians looking for a photo-op; American emissaries searching for ways to be useful; journalists looking for some blood to suck out of the trauma. After Jamie had whispered that she didn’t want to see anyone, had said, “Don’t let anyone in,” I obeyed. I’d failed her once. I was not about to do so again.
So when the press secretary for Jerusalem’s mayor, Ehud Olmert, called, expressing the mayor’s desire to visit Jamie, I scoffed and hung up. When reporters rang from the New York Post or USA Today, sounding officious while pretending to care, I hung up. When a U.S. congressman traveling in Israel on a diplomatic mission wanted to speak with Jamie, I hung up. It wasn’t anger, merely duty. Cold, detached duty. Something to do. Something upon which to focus. Take care of her. This was my lone responsibility, my only thought, echoing, repeating, a mantra.
There was only one person I allowed entry: Jamie’s father. While I was rejecting journalists and politicians, he called, wanting to hear her voice, wanting to know that, yes, She is alive. I held the phone to Jamie’s ear. Then took it away. Then learned what she had heard.
“David, he’s flying here.”
We had tried to conceal from family members the extent of Jamie’s injuries. She didn’t want anyone to worry, thought maybe it would all just go away, that if nobody would bear witness, there was nothing to see. It was a fantasy we shared, motivated not by a desire to protect others, but instead by a desire to protect ourselves. I needed to protect myself. I had been shamed by what had happened, by that which I had caused. The wife I failed to protect, the daughter I failed to protect. So together, we deliberately downplayed what had happened when on the phone with family in America. But once Jamie’s father said he was coming to Israel, once we knew the jig was up, we shifted our tactics from deception to damage control.
Right after the bombing, after doctors wheeled Jamie into emergency surgery, I called home to my parents, to a mother who obsessively watched CNN and who would have seen the words “Hebrew University” crawl under the report. When I got her on the phone, I lied. “I’m here visiting a friend who was injured.”
She asked pointedly, “Is Jamie hurt?”
“No.”
She didn’t believe me.
I could sense by her hesitation, her unwillingness to stop asking questions. But it didn’t matter. There wasn’t any information to give her, only images. Snapshots of Jamie’s damaged body. Nothing more, nothing concrete – no medical diagnoses or reports from the operating room. So I withheld what little I knew as long as possible, withheld that Jamie had been caught in the blast, that her intestines were being held together by sutures, her body prone, her mouth dry. I would have withheld this for a lifetime had the doctors not said, after Jamie emerged from surgery, “Months. It will take months for her to heal.” Then I understood that I would have to reveal what had happened, that it would have to be known, this thing.
Even after it was revealed, with Jamie’s father on a plane, making his way to Jerusalem, we were still in damage control mode. We wanted to show that things were not so bad. Really. Which is why, on Jamie’s third day in the ICU, with her father en route, we played around with a miniature mirror, trying to find Jamie’s good side. Her face had been lightly burned in the blast – first degree burns. It was red and slightly swollen. She didn’t look like herself. And so I held the mirror, flexed and turned it as Jamie gingerly moved from side to side and determined, “The right side, take him to my right when he comes in. That’s the good side.”
I agreed. Though when Jamie’s father entered, when I ushered him in, trying to explain that things were not as bad as they seemed, that she would make a full recovery, his face clearly told us, There is no good side. And there wasn’t.
6
In the summer of 2000, Jamie and I arrived in Israel to study. Doves were circling Camp David when our plane banked high above a chalk-lined surf off the Tel Aviv coast as we arrived after a year of marriage to study our bequeathed culture and internalize biblical Hebrew and Talmudic texts with wizened teachers and progressive peers at our chosen yeshiva, Pardes. Bill Clinton was confident about a final peace that never came. We were confident as well. But just after arriving, talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat collapsed in Maryland, and the Intifada took root. Not long after settling into our fourth-floor apartment on a picturesque street lined with limestone homes, the bombs began.
Palestinian terrorists started wearing heavy coats in the heat of September, wires tangled within the insulation. Israeli artillery responded by shelling eastern villages just over the Judean Hills. From our flower-filled balcony, the echoes were unmistakable. “So this is what war sounds like,” we whispered. Yet we decided to stay. We would not be scared away. Instead, we made concessions: avoid buses, cafés that lacked armed security guards, open-air markets, large grocery stores, crowds. We were careful.
I learned Hebrew that first year by reading newspapers designed for new immigrants. Despite being rather elementary, with simple sentence structures and cartoon images designed to soften the shock of ancient characters and guttural sounds, I learned how to speak about suicide bombings – of the injured and the dead – before learning how to ask for a menu. Once, on my way to pick up the latest issue at the local makolet – a phone-booth-sized store selling newspapers, children’s toys, and cigarettes – I encountered mayhem. At our favorite café, a tattooed waiter had tackled someone. The man, a Palestinian, had approached the waiter to ask for a glass of water, his voice timid, his skin sweating intensely. He was immediately clothes-lined like a wide receiver coming free over the middle, the detonation device ripped from his grip. An angry crowd formed, collectively holding him down until the police swarmed, a sneering smile stuck on the bomber’s lips.
Still, we stayed. Even with the regular calls from our worried parents, asking that we come back – please, come home – we stayed, enrolling in a two-year graduate program at Hebrew University to pursue degrees in Jewish education. Our plan: graduate and return to America for teaching careers in Jewish community day schools.
At Hebrew University, our lives were serene. We congregated in sunny atriums, lounged on grassy knolls, and ate in large, swank cafeterias without the slightest hesitation. This despite the cautious way we lived near our home, less than five miles away. For a meal of falafel and chips, gun-toting security guards were demanded; for a trip to the mall, metal detectors were required; for a rare movie, only matinees in empty, cavernous halls were allowed. This is how we lived, making routine decisions based upon the likelihood of not being killed. We constructed invisible walls and lived within them, closed to the illusion of danger – the danger of illusion.
But on the Hebrew University campus, we were artists impersonating the impressionists, painting the campus quiet, brushing ponds and lily pads under the school’s limestone arches. Everyone did. Israelis. Palestinians. Exchange students. We all pretended the university was off-limits. An oasis of integrated study outside of the greater conflict. An agreed-upon no-fire zone.
And though I chose to drop our rules for survival at the university’s gates, I never relinquished my fears, never checked my suspicions at the security booths leading into campus. Walking around, I’d quietly watch Palestinian workers, worried. When alone, I sat in remote corners of eating establishments to avoid being hit by a spray of shrapnel should something go off. I knew the dangers. But I never mentioned these things to Jamie, not wanting to ruin our dream with my neurotic nightmares, neuroses that were irrational, overblown. I didn’t want to scare her, a woman already close to the edge, close to calling it quits, close to heading home. I didn’t want to see us pack our bags. Which is why I didn’t mention that, months before Mohammad struck, Hebrew University’s student newspaper had exposed the pathetically lax security on campus. The paper even imagined a hypothetical scenario in which a suicide bomber detonated himself within a busy cafeteria in an article that was largely dismissed by students and ignored by the administration – an article that substantiated my fears.
I chose not to mention it.
7
While Jamie was confined to the ICU – and I to the closed circuit running from her bed to our apartment and back – things were happening. Our community at Pardes was grieving. Impromptu ceremonies were convened, where people wept and shuddered together, without Jamie. Without me. Without Ben and Marla. One evening, they gathered on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport and sent off Ben and Marla’s caskets, listening to teachers choke through remembrances and politicians paperclip their deaths to Israel’s struggle before loading their bodies into the bellies of El Al Boeing 777s. Then, they said goodbye.
It was another world, a world focused on grieving, not healing, the wheels moving slowly, grinding painfully outside our antiseptic-swiped cocoon of survival. And in the midst of this, Michael called.
The Shabbat afternoon before the bombing, Marla had invited us over for lunch with her and Michael, the man we all knew she would marry. We had grown close to Marla during our two years in the Pardes Educators Program, Jamie particularly so. For these last two years they had studied together in a chevruta – a partnership traditional in Talmudic study, the text serving as a fulcrum between two arguing learners. Most mornings they sat across from one another in the Beit Midrash, teasing out legal decisions more than a thousand years old with a bubbly enthusiasm that would have alarmed the rabbis whose judgments they were studying.
When Jamie and I walked into Marla’s apartment, the smells of a Shabbat afternoon, of already-cooked food slowly warming on a hotplate and flowers settling into their new liquid life, were noticeably strong. The meal was casual. Sunlight streamed through the open windows as we sat around a coffee table in the living room, our plates perched on scrunched laps, munching and chatting.
What remains from that lunch is more sensational than imagistic. My dominant memory is a feeling of warmth. But a single, vivid scene does stand out distinctly, in three dimensions: Michael, sitting across from me in a recliner, looked over and said, “This is nice. This is what life might be like if we moved to the same city, hanging out on Shabbat.”
“It is nice,” I replied, picking up the weekend Jerusalem Post. I scanned the lead story on a deadly Israeli
missile strike in Gaza, a strike that killed a notorious Hamas leader named Sheikh Salah Shahada as well as scores of civilians in a residential area. The article struck me both for its horror and for what it seemed to portend – there were reported calls from Hamas militants to launch revenge attacks. I showed it to Michael, who nodded. That summer had been a relatively quiet time, and the attack seemed brutal, ominous. It stuck out.
So we nodded – unaware of what was to come – then returned to reading, to the lives we wanted to live.
When Michael called, I picked up.
“David.”
“Michael,” I said, not knowing what else to say, struck by the guilt of being the lucky one – the secondary survivor.
“I need to do something, and I want you to come with me, if you can. I don’t want to do it alone.”
“Okay.”
“Here it is: I need to go to Marla’s apartment and begin gathering her belongings. I’ve been asked to send her things home by her parents.”
“Okay.”
“Will you come with me?”
“Of course,” I replied. The request seemed natural, as though I had been waiting for it to be made this whole time, being the friend capable of understanding the rawness, the ridiculousness, the unspeakable reality of it all. And so, early in the morning on Jamie’s third day in the ICU, I went with Michael to Marla’s apartment.
When we reached the building, Michael placed a key in her door, jiggled it, and pushed open into the stillness we knew was coming. It was the moment I realized that Marla, who had been sitting opposite Jamie in the cafeteria, was really gone.
I watched Michael sort through Marla’s effects. I watched him breathe in her clothes, then riffle through hundreds of TV Guide crossword puzzles stacked neatly in the corner of a bureau – perplexed and amused as to why she would have collected them. Scanning the apartment, I noticed black, dusty fingerprint marks caked on the sides of cups, countertops, and door handles. The FBI had needed fingerprints to identify the body, to make it official.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 6