“Wow. Okay. That’s interesting advice, though I’m not exactly sure how to go about doing that. I don’t speak Arabic or anything, and I have no idea how to navigate contacting a random Palestinian family.”
“I believe you wrote that the family lives in the Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem?
“As far as I know – just what I read in a few newspaper articles.”
“Well, I happen to have an extremely good contact in Silwan with whom I’ve worked before, a Palestinian official well-known and respected in the community. And I’m planning on traveling to Israel next month for something else. If you want, I could contact him and perhaps try to see if he knows the family. Maybe he would be able to arrange a visit with them for me. If so, I would be willing to go on your behalf.”
“Seriously?”
“Of course. I’d be honored to help. What you’re doing is important and brave.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“It is.”
“Well, thanks for your kind words and generous offer. I’m not sure what to say. I’m a little shocked right now that you’d be willing to do all of this for me. You don’t even know me.”
“This is my job, and it’s a gift what you’re trying to do. I think that – the best thing I think would be for you to write a letter to the family, something that tells them who you are and why it is exactly that you want to meet with Mohammad. Something that will give my Palestinian colleague an idea of what he’s presenting to the Odeh family, and something that I could also read to them in person, should I have the opportunity to visit them.”
“What should I write?”
“Just something that tells them who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing. Direct it to them.”
“Could I email you something so you could look it over and see if it’s in line with what you’re thinking of?”
“Sure, that sounds fine.”
“Great. I’ll write something tonight and send it to you.”
“Sounds good. I will contact my colleague in Silwan and let you know when I hear back.”
“Thanks so much.”
“You’re welcome, David. Good luck.”
16
Me:
What does a letter to the family of the man who tried to murder your wife look like?
Me:
Sorry, what was that?
Me:
I know, it sounds a bit crazy.
Me:
Just a bit.
Me:
No advice?
Me:
Not exactly my area of expertise.
Me:
Why are you always such a smartass?
Me:
Don’t start.
Me:
Fine. I’m going to write.
Me:
Good luck.
Aware that I needed to shed the sarcastic vestments tied around my waist, I sat down at our dining room table with my laptop and afforded myself the blank space in which to write from the heart, or at least from a heart I hoped existed, or could exist, a space which was difficult to locate. I began to type:
Dear Odeh Family,
My name is David. On July 31, 2002, my wife was injured in the bombing at Hebrew University that your son, Mohammad, perpetrated –
Jamie walked in. “Whatcha doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Writing?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“Nothing important.”
She stopped and stared. “Then why did you have that look?”
“What look?”
“That look you have when you’re focused or determined. You look like whatever it is you’re doing over there, it’s taking great effort.”
“Are you trying to give me a hard time?”
“No.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Probably right.”
It was the truth – Jamie really didn’t want to know. If she’d asked at that point about the books I’d been reading, books about South Africa and the theoretical concept of reconciliation, I would have told her. I would have revealed my embryonic thoughts, thoughts of engaging in some type of reconciliation effort. But this? Writing to the family of the man who had caused her so much suffering? So much pain? I couldn’t do it. At least, not yet.
Jamie opened a bag of Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips, signaling that she was taking a sensual escape from something. “What are you up to?” I asked, shifting our focus.
“Recovering.”
“From what?”
“From Tamar – she was a little challenging today.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. How were classes?”
“Fine. My students don’t talk. Literally. I think they’re brain-dead.”
“Just blame it on the beach.”
“The beach?”
“All that salt corroding their brains.”
“More likely the weed.”
With that, she returned to the living room. I returned to my letter to the Odeh family. Deciding not to hold back, I suppressed all of my usual ironic impulses and wrote without pause:
I am writing to you now with a pure heart and a desire for understanding, a desire for reconciliation, a desire for peace. I have no interest in revenge, no interest in harboring feelings of anger, no interest in blame. Instead, I am only interested in listening, in giving Mohammad a chance to speak, to hear his story so that I may understand fully my own as I attempt to move beyond what happened …
I requested a meeting with Mohammad through the Israeli Prison Service, but he recently refused to meet with me. At least, this is what Israeli authorities told me. However, I cannot be sure that Mohammad truly does not want to meet unless I’m able to know from his own words.
If you can find it in your heart, I ask that you speak with Mohammad and let him know why I would like to speak with him. And if you find my motivations pure, I humbly ask that you encourage him to agree to speak with me.
After reviewing the letter, Leah wrote to say it was spot-on, and that she was in the process of contacting her associates in Silwan to lay the groundwork for a potential meeting with the Odeh family. Then, as an aside, she emailed me a link prefaced only with the following: “You might want to email her to find out more about her story … how it turned out.” No other context. I didn’t recognize the url – www.justvision.org – nor did I have any clue as to whom Leah was referring. I dutifully clicked on the link and found myself staring at the profile of someone named Robi Damelin. Confused, I read.
She was an Israeli. Had lost her son, a young Israeli soldier, to a Palestinian sniper. And now she was working toward some type of reconciliation, working toward meeting the perpetrator, toward speaking with the enemy.
And I thought, Someone else is doing this in Israel. I’m not the only one.
The profile page indicated that Robi had been featured in a recently released, award-winning documentary called Encounter Point. I pressed earphones into my ears, clicked on the movie and a trailer popped up, waiting to be viewed. I pressed play. The screen opened onto visions of hysterical crowds, people running in slow motion, the sounds of Israeli ambulances, Middle Eastern strings echoing in the background. The screen opened wider, swallowing the periphery with flashing images: a Palestinian man in his twenties showing a missile-induced scar running down his cheek; an Israeli man in his forties snorting absently after recounting the moment he learned of his daughter’s death from a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv; a clip of Robi being interviewed on a prominent Israeli political talk show, the interviewer looking confused, asking, “I really want to understand this – you don’t have anger toward the sniper?”
Then, for the first time, Robi’s voice became audible, her South African accent echoing in the miniature speakers as images of the Old City in Jerusalem scrolled across the screen. Sto
ne in the foreground. A voice in the background, echoing against the stone, speaking of confronting the enemy, of channeling the will to do what most would never consider.
I listened to Robi address herself as she unknowingly addressed me: “So what do you do with this pain? Do you take it and look for revenge and keep the whole cycle of violence going, or do you choose another path?” Her voice was followed by more images of Israelis and Palestinians, all bereaved, all victimized by horrific losses, shaking hands, hugging, speaking with one another, trying to understand each other.
The screen flashed a text interrupted by barbed wire:
The most important story in the Middle East
is not being told on the nightly news.
When it went blank – when the trailer’s music faded, leaving me staring into the pixels – I digested what I’d seen, feeling the weight of what I had decided to begin, what I was joining. This wasn’t a game. This wasn’t simply about personal healing. This was about the history of a region, a conflict, a struggle, into which my personal mission for recovery fit. Without warning, I felt alone, isolated. Why hadn’t I told Jamie about my letter to the Odehs? I thought, understanding that my impulse to tell her was a selfish one, a desire to have the weight of this realization shared and shouldered by someone else. What I really needed was the company of the people I had just witnessed on the screen; I needed to converse with them and smoke with them and understand them in order to understand myself. I need to see this film, I thought. The website said the documentary was still being shown at film festivals around the world, but it wasn’t yet available for purchase, and it had not yet been released. I reviewed the list of upcoming screenings. The only showing anywhere remotely close to us was at the Harrisburg Jewish Film Festival.
Harrisburg is where Ben was from, I thought, knowing his family, the Blutsteins, still lived there. The coincidence felt meaningful – an implicit message from an implicit force informing me that this trip needed to be made. Leah’s traveling to Silwan. So I’ll travel to Pennsylvania. It only seems fair, I thought, shrugging, a shrug that pulled me by the scruff and dropped me a week later five hundred miles away in the lobby of Harrisburg’s Midtown Cinema, a small room filled with multi-colored plastic chairs and a barista serving up Green Mountain Coffee and entrance tickets.
Momentum was hurtling me forward quickly. It was disorienting. Never before had I been given over to such spontaneity. Such irrational abandon. From Wilmington to Harrisburg. For a movie.
Jamie was at home with our children and knew why I had traveled so far. She understood what the movie was about, and understood that I was beginning to consider a trip to Israel which would take me much farther. While she hadn’t asked for details, she also hadn’t objected.
“The movie’s in Harrisburg?” she’d asked.
“Yes.”
“And you need to see it?”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re considering doing something similar?”
I paused before answering, “Yes.”
She didn’t want to know anything more. It was enough. By the time I’d traveled to Harrisburg, she finally knew about my conversations with peace activists and visions of going back to Israel. She did not yet know, however, about the letter to the Odeh family, about how far I was going, how far I’d already gone.
As I waited for Encounter Point – the only movie in Harrisburg’s Jewish Film Festival that I intended to see – I became skeptical about the wisdom of my journey. Something was off internally, something somewhere had misfired, leading me inexplicably to a room where a smattering of retired Rust-Belt Jews were schmoozing about grandchildren and Israel, waiting for the screening to begin.
Me:
How did I get here?
Me:
You’re trying to do something that is unspeakably crazy – better get used to finding yourself in situations that don’t make sense. This won’t be the last.
Me:
But I don’t even know how to explain this. Driving from North Carolina to Pennsylvania for a movie is not something I would do. Ever.
Me:
Of course not. But you’re not you anymore. You’re someone else, someone trying to visit the terrorist who attempted to murder your wife, and you’ve driven a distance you wouldn’t normally consider because the film is about a similar subject, and you felt compelled to drive and see the film rather than wait six months for it to be released on DVD, would rather drive up the East Coast for an hour-long documentary about an Israeli woman who lost her son to a Palestinian sniper, lost him and responded by trying to reconcile with the sniper’s family, would rather drive than wait. Because you’re tired of waiting. And because you need to see how it’s done before you leave to do the same.
Me:
I drove through North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland.
Me:
You want to travel farther.
Me:
I know.
I wanted someone to approach me and ask who I was. What I was doing. Why I was there. And I wanted to tell him, to tell everyone – these people who undoubtedly knew the Blutsteins, knew their story, the tragedy having been local – how I was connected, why I was sitting in this theater waiting for this film to begin. I now understood that it was my training for a journey to Israel I’d been planning, intent on confronting whatever there was to be confronted, without fully realizing it. The desire to be known felt liberating – being identified by those who would have responded with an Oy vey. They’d know about Hebrew University. They’d remember. They’d press my hand, touch my cheek, say, Ayzah mizkein – poor one.
But I remained anonymous, watching the hall empty as the double doors to the theater swung open, the barista taking tickets as the abandoned cappuccino machine gurgled to a belated stop.
17
Before traveling to Harrisburg, I had contacted the Blutsteins by email, wondering if they wanted to see me – wanted to see the side that survived, the side saved by chance. Ben’s father immediately emailed back, inviting me to dinner, which made me nervous, a survivor’s-guilt-induced anxiety. I was unsure whether it was a genuine offer or one motivated by some obligatory sense of courtesy.
After viewing the film, I became nervous for another reason, for it had concretized my path going forward. The images of mourning Palestinians and Israelis, reaching for each other out of desperation, out of exasperation, made solid the significance of the steps I had decided to travel. I was going to try being a reconciler – not a forgiver, a reconciler – and I knew I needed to reveal this to the Blutsteins. A scene flashed in my mind from the film I’d just seen of a Palestinian man, once imprisoned for a role in the Intifada, who was shunned by his community after engaging with peace activists upon his release. “Some people got to the point of only saying hi to me.”20
Then I thought of Susan Sarandon, playing Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking, being tossed angrily from the home of a family bereaved of their daughter after learning Prejean had been counseling the killer on death row. “You brought the enemy into this house, Sister. You gotta go.” And I wondered if I too would be tossed from the Blutstein home, afraid to call and confirm dinner for that evening, despite the family’s insistence that they wanted to see me. But they didn’t know about my attempts to attain a meeting with Mohammad, and I was unsure if they even knew his name, afraid of even mentioning it, of recalling images they undoubtedly had worked to blur over the years. And my thoughts of reconciliation? How could I possibly tell them about my desire to understand the enemy, to dialogue with the enemy? I imagined them responding, heard their internal thoughts, heard them say, Sure, it’s easy for you. You didn’t lose anyone. Your child, your oldest child, wasn’t murdered. You still have everything. Everyone. And to come into our home and evoke not only memories, but the idea of reconciliation with that monster – you shouldn’t have come. You should go. Now.
Finally, an hour before driving to their house, I called, hoping nobody would a
nswer the phone. Someone picked up.
“Hello?”
“Katherine? Hi. It’s David Harris-Gershon.”
“Hi. It’s Rivka.”
Rivka, Ben’s younger sister. The one who, when visiting Ben in Israel months before his death, never left her brother’s side. Never stopped smiling. It was startling – I had never seen two siblings more in love. It was something Jamie and I talked about constantly during their visit, particularly this effusion of warmth emanating from Ben, someone I had previously viewed as sarcastic, prickly. Around Rivka, he was a puppy unrestrained. Jumping. Tickling. Laughing. So when she said her name, I froze on the line, unable to collect anything other than a memory of her burying a laugh in Ben’s shoulder.
“Rivka,” I said, a statement, not a greeting. “Um – I was just wondering if I was still meant to come over.”
“Of course. We’re looking forward to it. Five o’clock. You know how to get here, right?” Her voice was so kind, so exuberant. So disarming.
When I arrived, we stood around for a couple of minutes, hands in pockets, shuffling feet, before moving to the dinner table, where Richard had placed plates full of salads replete with asparagus, mushrooms, tomatoes, lettuce, and sliced strips of tenderloin. I picked at the abundance as we picked around the conversation until, unable to wait any longer, I said, “I know I emailed that I’ve been doing some research and a bit of writing about the attack, and I just want you to know that, if you have any questions about it, ever, or if you want to read some of what I’ve written, I’m willing to share. Not that I’m recommending it, but figured it would be best to let you know about it, and – ”
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 16