Respectfully,
Ruti Koren
Bureau Manager
Ministry of Public Security
Sitting in the UNCW library, surrounded by students, I read the screen with disbelief. Then, half-forgetting my coordinates, I muttered, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck. You fucking asshole,” shaking my head involuntarily, quickly, the words coming out automatically, “No, no way, you can’t do this, you prick.” People started looking my way. The woman at the computer next to me pivoted and stared.
I rose and left and pounded my steps into the sidewalk as my mind absently fired rounds into the air. You blow up my wife and then refuse to meet me? How can you still have control? You can’t still have control. You can’t refuse. You fucking have to be a part of this. I’ve traveled so far, worked so goddamn hard for this after what you did. Fuck you. You can’t do this. I won’t let you do this.
The anger was forceful, knocking me off balance as I walked past giddy students, my first moment of authentic emotionality since the bombing coming unexpectedly in public.
Me:
Fuck him.
Me:
Hey, you’re angry. Something within has changed.
Me:
Shit – you’re right.
Me:
Nice going.
Taken aback by the taste of my venom, I lapped the campus, a do-it-yourself dose of bi-lateral stimulation, a bit of self-therapy, EMDR on the cheap. As my anger dissipated, I thought about South Africa, about a nation committed to the process of healing, about how being immersed in history – in stories of reconciliation – had somehow reoriented everything, had become my only conceivable way forward. And I thought about my anger at the prospect of being denied a meeting with my perpetrator, the potential for which I’d only realized after reading other victims’ testimony. But the anger ran deeper than that.
This anger was something I had sought for so long, an anger I had anticipated would accompany a desire for revenge, a desire for vengeance, for the chance to exact my will upon Mohammad as he had exacted his will on Jamie as she enjoyed a peaceful lunch with Ben and Marla in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria that summer’s day. But as I circled the UNCW campus, my anger transitioning to dull despair, I began to consider what had so suddenly triggered this emotional response after all these years of near-paralysis, after all these years of complete synaptic frigidity with regard to the bombing. What had made me so angry?
Me:
It’s South Africa. All your reading about the TRC, the hearings, the victims learning what happened directly from the perpetrators – the victims finding solace in the details and in the expressions of remorse from those perpetrators who gave them.
Me:
But how did this make you so angry?
Me:
Because you want it. It’s evidence that you believe in it – in the restorative power of directly learning from Mohammad why he did it and why he’s sorry for it. Or at least why he expressed remorse when, in all likelihood, none actually exists. If he even said such a thing.
Me:
So you feel robbed?
Me:
I think so.
Me:
Isn’t that naive?
Me:
What?
Me:
That you’re giving such restorative weight to a hypothetical meeting with Mohammad?
Me:
It’s just hope. I believe in it because I hope it could be powerful. Have heard it worked with others. And you’re forgetting something.
Me:
What’s that?
Me:
The impulse to confront Mohammad came before reading about South Africa. The impulse was already there. It was there as soon as you read the word “sorry” in that AP article. South Africa simply put the impulse in context.
Me:
And now you’re angry because –
Me:
Because he refused.
Me:
Could it be that you’re angry because his refusal shows he’s not really sorry?
Me:
That’s possible. I mean, how could he be sorry and refuse to speak with you? I think it’s both – if he’s not remorseful, then there’s no opening to speak with him and understand how all this happened. And I want him to be sorry. I want him to be remorseful. And then I want him to speak.
Me:
You want control.
Me:
I deserve it.
Me:
So now what?
Me:
I’m not sure.
When I got home that afternoon, Billy Jonas was turned up on the living room stereo, Noa shaking her little tochus to the song “Watermelon” –
Green on the outside, it’s pink on the in, Your tummy’s gonna ache if you eat that skin. You better spit the seeds out, sisters and brothers ‘They’re coming’ out one end or the other!18
Jamie was smiling and shaking Tamar on her hip to the folksy beats, Tamar letting out a giggle each time Jamie swayed.
“Hey,” I said, closing the front door behind me.
“Hi.”
Noa turned around and yelled, “Abba,” running toward me, arms spread. She was a bird. She was soaring. They were soaring – Jamie and our two young girls – spreading their wings to the music, gliding across the hardwood floor. I dropped my bag and momentarily joined in, grabbed Noa’s hands and twirled as the girls laughed, Tamar flapping to the beats, a syncopated response to falling from the nest. We’d begun falling from the nest, a tangled mass of spit, straw, and synaptic debris. It was above us somewhere. I could see it, knew it was there, knew I’d soon be returning to it, would be leaving them behind and flap up toward it when the music ended as I grasped Noa’s hands, lifted her three-year-old body off the floor and spun it, her legs submitting to the centrifugal force, body straight, arms taught, the curve of her smile leaning into the circles we were tracing, rising, rising –
After dinner and putting the kids to bed, I slumped into a green sofa-chair. Jamie looked at me with the eyes of a raptor.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, just tired.”
I sat down with Krog’s book, from which I’d removed the dust jacket in order to keep my reading somewhat discreet. Jamie knew I was doing research. She knew I was preparing for something related to my writing. But she recognized this as my process, whatever it was, and was content to leave me to my own devices, motivated, in part, by her own desire to leave the attack in the past, where it belonged.
Opening Krog’s book, I started to skim, my eyes eventually resting on a passage near the conclusion of the victims’ public testimony:
We prick up our ears. Waiting for the Other. The Counter. The Perpetrator. More and more, we want the second narrative … There can be no story without the balance of the antagonist. The ear and the heart simply cannot hold their heads above a one-way flood.19
Jamie was sitting opposite me on our juice-splotched couch, reading Sarah Vowell and smiling to herself. There can be no story without the balance of the antagonist, I thought, and though Krog was speaking of something different – of the time in South Africa when everyone felt the weight of anticipation, listening to victim after victim chronicle their traumas, waiting anxiously for the perpetrators to show themselves – her words shook loose another thought: What if Mohammad didn’t really refuse the meeting? After all, I didn’t have his story, the story of the antagonist. All I had was a vague “I’m so sorry things didn’t work out” from Israel’s Ministry of Public Security. Of course they don’t want me meeting him. Why would they allow access to some writer looking to see if a terrorist had expressed remorse for his crime? Why would they approve such a meeting?
I began to suspect that the Israeli government might not have given my request any consideration, that Ruti Koren, Bureau Manager, Ministry of Public Security, might have used Mohammad’s refusal as easy cover. My suspicion was bas
ed on nothing more than an intuitive hunch. And I thought, How do I even know if they asked Odeh? They probably didn’t even approach him about it. Why would they?
Rising from the chair, I went to the kitchen and grabbed a bag of organic Colombian coffee beans, the image of a rooster, our local independent coffee house’s logo, stuck on the front. I felt like crowing. After putting on a pot of coffee, I brainstormed ways to verify that Mohammad had in fact refused my request to meet, knowing no satisfactory gestures would be forthcoming from the Israeli government. Hearing the pot’s gurgling, Jamie came in and said, “You’re not making coffee.”
“I know it’s late, but I kind of need it.” We had a standing rule: I was allowed to drink as much coffee as desired, so long as it was consumed before three in the afternoon, on account of my insomniac tendencies. It was a rule I had approved after protracted negotiations, the original time offered having been noon.
“David, it’s almost ten o’clock. Please don’t.”
“I’m going to be up tonight doing some research. I’ll be fine.”
“You have to do this tonight? You can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“No. I’m thinking about something and want to dig into it a little bit, and I’m not going to be able to sleep anyway.”
“Fine, as long as you can get up with the kids in the morning.”
“I will.”
“Seriously.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“And be in a good mood?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” she said, willing to drop it, the conversation now ammunition to be used in the morning were I to remain buried under a foxhole of blankets when the alarm chimed or our kids awoke and started jumping on the bed, the latter more likely than the former.
Armed with a cup of coffee, I returned to the living room and opened up my laptop. How do I do this? Who might be able to get an audience with Mohammad? Or his family? And again the answer came, an answer that had been quietly planted in my synapses while reading about South Africa: peace activists. Israeli and Palestinian professionals and grassroots activists who were already dedicated to the cause of reconciliation. Those already on the ground, already enmeshed in the difficult task of creating dialogue among Palestinians and Israelis, would not only be capable of helping, but they would be passionate about doing so. I knew they would – knew at the very least they would show more interest, more responsiveness, than the bureaucratic channels in Israel among whom I had drifted for six months before being told that Mohammad had waved off a meeting.
From the beginning, attempting to procure an audience with Mohammad – the process itself – proved to be nothing short of maddening. My frustration with the Israeli government bubbled over immediately when first dealing with the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Under the illusion that good fortune had landed at my feet, I attempted to contact Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, whose daughter I had taught at JDS for over a year and whose wife I had met countless times for parent–teacher conferences; his wife even knew me by name. She liked me, or, perhaps more accurately, she had bestowed upon me kind smiles indicating that I was not hated. I convinced myself that this would make the process easy: I had exactly the type of high-level connection that one dreams of having in such situations. Israel’s top diplomat owed me a favor. And though I knew the difficulty of the request, knew that it was bold to expect gaining an audience with one of Israel’s most renowned terrorists, who was held in a maximum security prison, I thought, You’ve got this. Just call the embassy, explain who you are, get a phone number, and call the Ayalon family.
But expectations and reality failed to converge. The embassy rightly refused to provide contact information. We will forward on to the Ambassador anything you’d like to provide us. So I sent personal emails to an embassy secretary who acted as my middleman, waiting for responses from her which only came after I pestered, annoyed, refused to go away. And the answer, when it did come, was always the same: no response from the Ambassador or his wife. After three months of being ignored by the parents of a child I taught for a year, I gave up.
I decided to bypass the embassy and manufacture my own high-level contact, gaining press credentials from David Horowitz at the Jerusalem Post and flashing them at Israeli officials, sending faxes to the Israel Prison Service and emails to the Israeli Ministry of Public Security with my credentials plastered boldly at the top. Repeatedly. I sent the same email daily to everyone who worked in the ministry for a solid month until finally receiving confirmation that my request had been received (over thirty times, actually). It took a similar barrage of insistent emails, of emailing the same email every day – Could you please update the status of my request to meet with Mohammad Odeh? – until eventually, six months after I’d started, I learned Mohammad had shaken his head. Thanks, but no thanks.
It was the response that had released my anger, a response I was beginning to realize might never have been given.
I sat down with my cup of coffee, propped up the computer, and went to work, searching online for organizations and individuals to contact about my situation. Peace Now. B’tselem. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
Clicking through the web pages, I realized that there was a time, not long before, when I would have viewed such organizations as anti-Israel, as anti-Semitic, a time when I would have looked upon reports critical of Israel coming out of such organizations – reports on, say, Israel’s settlement policy or the economic distress of the Palestinians in Gaza – as nothing more than pro ducts of a terrorist sympathizer. I did not think of Palestinians as human – they taught children to champion martyrdom and spilled blood joyfully, dutifully, in the streets of Israel. All of them. I had written every one of them off. Fear and propaganda had urged me to write them off. An entire people. This despite my progressive sensibilities, the same sensibilities that triggered an automatic bristling anytime broad-stroked stereotypes in America were brushed over entire peoples. In America, I was enlightened, but in Israel, I was at war. Us against them. Us against a brutal people. An evil people. A people not worth considering, much less expressing concern over. They were murderers, and anyone interested in standing up for their rights or plights was a traitor and saboteur. For me, it was a zero-sum game. Either we won, or they did.
And so the irony: being personally affected by the inhumane brutality of Palestinian terror – of this murderous element woven into the outer fringes of their social fabric by ideological extremists – forced me to consider Palestinians’ humanity. I read Peace Now’s website, from an analysis of Israel’s segregating barrier wall to a chronicle of ongoing dialogue initiatives, and grew aware of just how far my moral and political pendulums had swung. As I sought the assistance of these peace activists, I began to sympathize with their mission: working for the human rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. Things were not black and white, as I had been led to believe. It was not good versus evil. There were shades of brutality and benevolence on both sides.
Unlike the Israeli authorities, who sat on their hands for months as I sent futile inquiry after futile inquiry, requesting updates on the status of my request before I learned that Mohammad had refused, the response from peace activists was overwhelming and immediate. Twenty-four hours after I had sent emails to a few hand-picked individuals from a handful of the organizations I had found online, my inbox was filled with messages from people wanting to help, from those wanting to put me in touch with others whom they thought could help. They considered my mission theirs, so much so that my note was reposted on listservs, bulletin boards, blogs, co-opted by people who wanted this as much as I did.
Then I received a message from Leah Green at an organization called The Compassionate Listening Project. I had never heard of it. The name sounded painfully hopeful, painfully touchy-feely. She suggesting that she could help, then wrote, “I think we should talk by phone.”
I had nothing to lose.
Before calling, I search
ed for the organization’s website and was instantly impressed. Leah had founded an organization with a full résumé of reconciliation initiatives around the world, produced three documentaries about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and led delegations in Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. I picked up the phone and dialed.
“This is Leah.”
“Hi Leah, this is David. You emailed me – ”
“David. Hi. I’m glad you called. How are you?”
“I’m good, thanks. I’m just curious. Can I ask how you found me?”
“I saw your request reposted on a human rights blog, and I think it’s great what you’re doing – very brave. I would like to help if I can.”
“I appreciate your offer. I don’t know exactly what, but anything you could do would be great, really. I’m just looking for advice or some direction on what I should do, because I’m a little lost at this point.”
“You’re looking for a path to somehow meet with the perpetrator, and have not been successful going through Israeli authorities, correct?”
“Yes.”
Leah and I talked for a bit about the governmental structure in Israel, about those departments which were likely to be of little help. Then we talked about the professional contacts she had established over decades working in the region, contacts she seemed more than willing to use on my behalf.
“Listen. This is what I think you want to do. You want to make direct contact with the family of the perpetrator – Mohammad, right?”
“Yeah. The family name is Odeh.”
“My advice is to make contact with the Odeh family and let them know who you are and what you’re trying to do. If they’re receptive, my guess is that they would be able to ask Mohammad directly if he would permit you to meet him in prison. I’m sure they have minimal visitation privileges. They would have the capacity to present Mohammad with your wishes and learn how he feels about you meeting with him.”
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 15