“What’s the matter with these guys? Don’t they get along with one another?” Emma whispered.
“They get along fine. There’s plenty of time for chitchat after hours. During the day it’s all work, no play. Sorry, Emma. I know you’re used to a more lively work setting.”
“I love it, especially the diversity.”
“We needed a little affirmative action,” Habash teased. “That’s why we hired a WASH like you.” At Emma’s puzzled expression, he explained, “A White Anglo-Saxon Hebrew—in other words an American Jew.”
“Our classmates at Yale would be surprised to hear this descendant of Polish Jews referred to as Anglo-Saxon.”
“Here you’re as close to Anglo-Saxon as they come. It’s all a matter of perspective.”
Habash led Emma through a maze of desks until they came to a small corner of the office. A bare desk sat beneath a small window. She placed her backpack on the chair and asked, “Where do I start? What’s my first assignment?”
“Your job is to come up with alternative suspects. You were infamous at Yale for your wild imagination. Now put it to good use. Explore, speculate, go with your imagination—who else had motive, means, and opportunity?”
“Wow. That’s quite an assignment.”
Habash sat on the corner of her new desk. “Let’s start with the obvious. Muslim extremists. But that one category includes several subgroups. There are Palestinians: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.” With each group he extended a finger, counting them off on his hand. “Then there are the non-Palestinians.”
“I know about them,” Emma said, pulling a notebook from her backpack and jotting down a list. “There’s Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, who knows what else.”
“And then of course there’s Iran, who pulls the strings of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Mossad is investigating any possible Iranian connection—direct or indirect—to the American Colony. There is a rumor circulating that the Mossad found some kind of match between the explosives used at the American Colony and a lab in Tehran that is experimenting with explosives that could serve as a nuclear trigger. Nothing solid. Certainly not enough for an accusation. But Iran is definitely on the list of Islamic extremists with motives.
“Also, Emma, not only are there Muslim extremists who don’t want a two-state solution, but there are Jewish extremists who don’t see that as an acceptable solution.”
Emma looked up at this, surprised to hear mention of Jews as suspects. “Have any Jewish groups done something like this?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of the King David Hotel back in the 1940s. More people were killed in that attack than in the American Colony. And that was pulled off by Jews. Don’t ignore the possibility that Jewish extremists did this.”
Emma made a note. “Who else?” she asked.
“The Popular Front, old-line communists, most of whom are secular Christian internationalists, who still think they’re doing the bidding of the Soviet Union. Remember Dr. George Habash. Those awful airplane hijackings. Some of the old KGB agents are still doing their mischief here. They’re waiting for the second coming of Stalin. Ironically, one of their leaders is Faisal Husseini’s older brother, Rashid.”
Emma looked at the very long list of groups and wondered what she’d gotten herself into. “So how do we begin our investigation?”
“By learning everything we can about every one of these groups: their history, their grievances, their agenda, their alliances, their finances, their modi operandi.”
“I’ll get online.”
“Online you’ll learn what they want you to know. There’s a better way, but it’s more dangerous.”
“As long as you don’t tell my father.”
Habash shook his head. “He doesn’t have to worry. It’s not that dangerous for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“We have operatives of our own who go to recruitment sessions. I’ll put you in touch with some of them so that you can pick their brains. You have to be careful where you meet them. If you blow their cover, they’re dead—and you could be at risk as well.”
Emma’s eyes widened as the full scope of her task became evident.
Habash smiled. “And at least you won’t be alone. Every Israeli and Arab is playing the same game of ‘guess who might have done it.’ But you’re doing it professionally, as part of a court-appointed legal team. Your only competition is the CIA, the Secret Service, Mossad, Shin Bet, and Palestinian intelligence.”
Emma suddenly felt overwhelmed, and it must have shown on her face, because Habash smiled broadly and said, “Welcome to the Mideast.
“We have one big advantage over everyone else. We have access to the man who has already been charged with the crime—limited access to be sure, but at least no one else can get to him where he is.”
“Where is he?”
“At a secure location, with instructions to speak to no one but us.”
“According to you, he’s talking to everyone but his lawyer.”
“Let’s see if we can change that.”
III
Faisal Husseini
Gar Prison, Jerusalem
FAISAL HUSSEINI DID NOT MIND solitary confinement. Before, in the main block where all the prisoners were held, he couldn’t breathe. The air stank with sweat and fear and desperation, and he couldn’t pray in peace. He hated sharing space with criminals, hated the taunts that filled the air whenever he bowed his body toward Mecca.
It had been his duty to tell his fellow inmates why he was there, his obligation to stir up unrest. It was the only way to bring his plight into focus, to make sure the guards and criminal Jewish lawmakers knew that he was serious, that the Martyrs of Jihad were not men to be trifled with. It was providence that the reward was this nice, quiet cell, where he could think, read the Koran, and pray in peace.
Most prisoners hated solitary, but for him it wasn’t so bad. He had a cot and a sink and a toilet. It didn’t seem much smaller than the one-room house he’d grown up in, that he’d had to share with his father and mother and brother Rashid.
The steel door to his cell swung open, and the close-cropped head of an Israeli soldier appeared. Faisal instinctively spit onto the ground and swore at him. It didn’t matter that the soldier didn’t understand him, didn’t matter that the soldier was younger than him by nearly half a dozen years. Every Israeli soldier reminded Faisal of the death of his father, killed by shrapnel from the explosion of an Arab-owned car. The Israeli government had claimed they’d targeted and killed the driver because he was a terrorist, but what of the three passersby who’d been killed that day? What of Faisal’s father?
This was why the American Colony bombing had been necessary. This is why Faisal would do everything over again, exactly the same.
The soldier cursed at Faisal in Hebrew and kicked the leg of the cot until the flimsy metal frame rattled against the wall. From Faisal’s seat on the floor, he saw the soldier open the door wide and usher in two people, a foreign woman with long dark hair and his traitorous so-called lawyer, Habash Ein.
Habash sat on the cot and peered at Faisal. Habash was entirely too well fed for a Palestinian. Faisal’s older brother, Rashid, had taught him never to trust a man with a soft belly. Habash had never been hungry, obviously. He didn’t understand what it was like to grow up in a refugee camp, scrounging for food, scared that each day might be your last.
Faisal turned his face to the wall. Habash spoke, in Arabic: “Faisal, I’m here to introduce you to Emma Ringel, the newest member of your legal team.”
The woman strode forward and extended her hand. Faisal didn’t move his gaze from the wall. He merely shifted his legs, drawing them into his body so as to not touch any part of her.
The woman looked confusedly at Habash, who merely sighed. She spoke slowly in her native tongue, drawing out her words as one does to someone who speaks a different language. “Faisal, we’re here to help you.”
Faisal responded in bro
ken English. “I don’t talk to Jews.”
The woman, Emma, inhaled sharply, as if she’d been slapped. Faisal grinned at her then and hugged his legs into his body.
“You might not talk to me, but I’m sworn to defend you, even if you want to die here,” she said, her voice cracking with nervousness.
Faisal narrowed his eyes into slits and sneered, “I killed those people. I wish more Jews like you had died, too. Soon Iran will have an atomic bomb, and they will drop it on the Jews. The days of you Zionists are numbered.”
Habash stood and reached for Emma, whose face had gone pale. “That’s enough for today.” He rapped on the cell door, and the soldier opened it. As they left his cell, Habash turned to Faisal and said, “We don’t think you did it, and we will do everything we can to free you if you are innocent.”
Faisal shouted back, “If I am released, I will kill hundreds more!”
He saw Emma’s fists clench as she walked away. Just as every Israeli soldier reminded Faisal of his murdered father, every accused Palestinian terrorist reminded Emma of her murdered friend Yarden. This was going to be a lot harder than she’d expected.
Emma’s thoughts immediately turned to her father. Abe Ringel was famous for accepting only hard cases, unwinnable trials, unpopular clients. “I didn’t work so hard to get where I am in order to win the easy ones,” he would say. But Emma wondered whether her father had ever taken a case as hard as this one, with a client as eager to die—and kill—as Faisal Husseini, and with no apparent leads to other suspects.
IV
The Investigation Begins
ABE HAD ONCE TOLD EMMA, only partly in jest, that if he were ever murdered, they would never solve the crime. “I’d become a cold case, because there would be too many suspects—too many people with motives: every paroled murderer whose case I had lost, the relatives of every murder victim whose killer I had defended, every cop I destroyed on the witness stand, every nut I offended on TV. And on and on.”
As she sat in her corner of the large, open room on the first floor of Pal-Watch, Emma wondered if Abe had ever defended a man so violently full of hatred for him. Faisal’s animosity had lodged itself in her breast, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched. He didn’t even know her, she thought angrily as she watched page after page tumble from the tiny printer that Habash had set up on her desk.
After leaving the prison, Emma demanded to know why Habash thought Faisal was innocent. And so he’d brought her back here and given her all the information the Pal-Watch team had on him.
The first item in the Husseini folder was a picture of a teenage Faisal standing in a dusty street, arm in arm with a similar-looking boy, perhaps a year or two older—this was his brother, Rashid. Behind them stood a tall man, who from the looks of him was clearly their father. The Faisal in this photo was nothing like the mangy, angry man she’d just met. This boy was happy, hopeful, and clearly he hadn’t suffered much. Yet.
According to the file, after the death of his father, Faisal, who had always been more religious than his brother, turned to radical Islam for solace. Conversely, Rashid lost all faith in religion and turned to Marxism. Faisal became devoted to his imam, who preached violence. Soon after this, Faisal’s name began turning up in police reports of anti-Jewish vandalism—burning a synagogue in a West Bank settlement, attacking an Israeli checkpoint with rocks and other objects, planning the bombing of a discotheque, and trying to kill a Palestinian who had collaborated with Israeli intelligence. He had a history of violence dating back a decade to the time of his father’s death.
Most of this information, along with transcriptions of Faisal’s statements at meetings conducted by his imam, had been supplied by an operative working with Habash, a man named Adam. According to Adam’s accounts, Faisal became a strong believer in and practitioner of violence as the only way to liberate Palestine from the “Crusaders.” His hero was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran.
Currently Adam was working on getting financial information about the Martyrs of Jihad. Because even though Faisal had a personality fitting the description of a mass murderer, his group had to have had the means and the access to the American Colony in order to perpetrate such a crime. And Habash was convinced that they had neither; his belief in Faisal’s innocence hinged on this.
In just one afternoon, Emma found plenty of groups who had motive. It was surprisingly easy to get access to the sermons of radical imams. A website called Memory.org monitored many mosques, whose sermons they posted, with translations. Habash’s undercover operative, Adam, had managed to record sermons in those mosques that Memory.org could not infiltrate. All the sermons sounded the same, full of violent rhetoric and praises for shuhada—martyrs.
In this part of the world, it seemed that forgetting the past, especially perceived indignities and injustices, was a grievous sin. “Remember Amalek,” the Jewish Bible commanded, referring to the nation that had attacked Jewish women, children, and elderly during the exodus from Egypt. “There is no statute of limitations on Amalek,” Emma’s Hebrew-school teacher had insisted. “In every generation there arises a new Amalek. He who forgets the past is destined to repeat it.” The teacher believed he was quoting a Jewish sage, rather than paraphrasing George Santayana, a twentieth-century philosopher (who himself was paraphrasing a Jewish sage).
Jews had pogroms, the Holocaust, and the Arab attacks on the Jewish state to fuel their animosity.
Muslims, too, had long memories. The word nakba was repeated over and over in the preachings Emma had read and listened to. Nakba referred to the “catastrophe” of the establishment of Israel, the failed attack on the new Jewish state by the neighboring Arab states, and the resulting displacement of so many Arabs to the refugee camps, which remained a daily reminder of their plight.
But the bombing of the American Colony seemed designed more to stop the future than avenge the past. The two-state solution that was being implemented at the moment of the blast was heresy to Islamic extremists. They regarded Israel as part of Palestine and demanded control over the entire area. It was a religious obligation to prevent Jewish control over Muslim land.
But not only Muslim extremists were upset about it. Emma had found leaflets from Jewish extremists decrying the two-state solution as well. They regarded the West Bank—which they called by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria—as a God-given part of Israel. For them it was a religious obligation to prevent Muslim control over what they regarded as Jewish land. Emma had been vaguely aware of these polar positions, but being so close to those who would kill and die for them brought home to her the reality that for extremists of both religions this was a zero-sum game, and the compromise of two-states was religiously forbidden.
Emma turned first to the Islamic extremists, focusing on Faisal’s group. After hours of reading about the Martyrs of Jihad and their admiration for the Iranian leadership, Emma stretched her hands over her head and yawned.
“It’s tiring work.” Habash spoke suddenly in front of her desk. He’d been careful around her since their meeting with Faisal, as if he were responsible for the hateful words the man had spewed at her.
“I need to turn my chair so that I can see people coming!” Emma said sweetly.
“Soon enough you’ll develop eyes in back of your head. It’s a necessary skill here,” Habash said.
She smiled. “I suppose so. What can I do for you, boss?”
Habash’s complexion changed ever so slightly and he shoved his hands in his pockets. “We’re closing for the afternoon. I wondered”—he looked anxiously over his shoulder, stepped closer to Emma’s desk, and spoke a bit more softly—“if you might want to get a coffee with me.”
It took her all of two seconds to leap to her feet, grab her bag, and follow him out the door. Emma had promised Shimshon that she would pick up some sweet wine for the upcoming Shabbat dinner on her way home from work, but the wine could wait until tomorrow, Friday. Coffee with Habash was now. Here’s some real prom
ise, she said to herself. Habash had finally asked her out. She’d endure a hundred belligerent meetings with Faisal if they resulted in a coffee date with Habash Ein.
V
Shimshon Regel
Shimshon and Hanna Regel’s Apartment
SHALOM ALEICHEM,” sang the Regel family in unison. The words were a comforting bit of familiarity to Emma. She’d been in Israel for two days, two days struggling with the heat, the unfamiliar city, and the prejudice and anger of her client. But there had been good moments, too. Her coffee date with Habash had gone well, she thought. No hint of any romantic interest on his part, but he seemed to be comfortable with her, chatting about their time together at Yale and her upcoming clerkship. He had even walked her home and kissed her cheek. It was a promising start.
Now it was Friday night, what should have been her second day of work, and the offices of Pal-Watch had been closed for the Muslim holy day. Habash told Emma that he’d considered opening up three offices: one in East Jerusalem that would close on Friday and be open the rest of the week, another in West Jerusalem that would close only on Saturday, and a third in the Christian Quarter that would close only on Sunday. “That way we could work seven days a week,” he’d said. “But we couldn’t afford the rent.”
Perhaps it was just as well. The day had given her a chance to relax a bit, to distance herself from work and even from Habash, to reacquaint herself with her cousin Shimshon and his wife, Hanna. Emma had met the whole family during her first trip to Israel, when she’d been thirteen. She had gone for her bat mitzvah, which Abe fought to have at the Western Wall, a site Orthodox Jews regarded as a synagogue where men and women had to pray separately and women could not read from the Torah. It had caused an international sensation, resulting in her bat mitzvah’s being televised. But because of Abe’s battle, girls were now allowed to celebrate this milestone at an isolated section of the Western Wall.
The Trials of Zion Page 3