The Trials of Zion

by Alan M. Dershowitz

  Rendi had persuaded Abe that Emma, an American human-rights worker who supported Palestinian rights, was far more valuable to her captors alive than dead—if her captors behaved rationally. And knowing that she was likely being held by Faisal Husseini’s brother convinced Abe that some sort of terms would be offered. He spent the waiting hours racking his brain as to what they might be.

  Abe always tried to anticipate every opportunity or risk.

  He first considered the possibility that they would ask for money—a lot of it. He was prepared to pay whatever it took. He recalled an acquaintance of his—a Las Vegas entrepreneur—whose daughter had been kidnapped several years earlier. The kidnappers, who were simply in it for the money, had called Abe’s acquaintance and asked for $1 million in ransom. He responded by upping the ante: He offered $2 million for the safe return of his daughter but warned them that if she were not returned alive, he would give $5 million to the Mafia to track, torture, and murder each of the kidnappers and their immediate family. He also told the kidnappers that he had no interest in prosecuting them if his daughter was returned safely and they were caught. He did not want his daughter to have to go through a trial. He also told them that this was the last negotiation he would have with them: “Take it or leave it.” Within hours his daughter was returned in exchange for the $2 million, and, true to his word, he never called the authorities or tried to track the kidnappers down. Abe was ready to offer the same sort of deal.

  Abe also thought about the possibility that a prisoner exchange would be offered, and he had already contacted influential friends in Israel and the United States to put pressure on the Israeli government to release any number of prisoners to save his daughter’s life. The problem was that years earlier he had written an article urging the United States and Israel never to negotiate with terrorists and never to participate in prisoner exchanges with them. So what! he now thought. Let them call me a hypocrite. He was reminded of one of his law professors who was arguing a case in the Supreme Court and taking a position entirely contrary to what he had previously written in an authoritative book on the subject. The chief justice confronted him with the contradiction, to which the professor responded, “I think better when I’m paid more.” Abe realized that he, too, thought more clearly when the stakes were even higher than money or professional reputation. Abe thought of Samuel Johnson’s observation that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Having a daughter held by terrorists focused the mind even more clearly.

  XVIII

  Double Cross

  THIS MORNING Faisal Husseini was able to sit up. The nurses in the prison hospital acted as if he’d just traveled to Mecca on foot. Such joy over his progress. They were idiots, marking each day since his poisoning on a large paper calendar they’d hung on his wall.

  Why were they trying to make him better? If their roles were reversed, he would be doing everything in his power to kill them. Maybe they were trying to kill him.

  He’d lost weight in the days since the poisoning. He could feel his own ribs through the hospital gown. He refused to eat or drink, and so he had been hooked up to an IV. They were force-feeding him, thinking that his inability to take nourishment was a result of the poisoning.

  It was because of the humiliation.

  To be killed in such a way would have been a disgrace to his cause, to his mother, to Allah. He wanted to die a martyr. He wanted to stand trial, be put to death by the Israelis, and get to heaven a hero. But to be taken down in such a way? Poisoned food? There was no honor in that.

  “Faisal, you have a visitor!” His least favorite nurse, the loudest, nicest Israeli in the whole prison, bustled into his room. He turned his face to the wall and grunted.

  The nurse replaced his IV bag, adjusted his blanket, and patted his feet before two policemen opened his door and ushered her out. In walked Habash Ein.

  Habash Ein looked different. His hair was limp, his face gray, his jaw clenched. His clothes looked like they’d been slept in—his shirt was misbuttoned, and his body was several pounds lighter than the previous time they’d seen each other.

  Faisal had been surprised that Habash hadn’t come to him earlier; he’d have guessed that a poisoning was a big event to his lawyer, that he’d want to check on him, see if the attack had changed his mind about his defense or about telling what he knew.

  He’d be wrong about that. Faisal had adopted a no-talking policy, and he wasn’t about to break it now.

  Habash waited for the policemen to leave the room and shut the door. Then he walked to the side of Faisal’s bed, grabbed him by the front of his hospital dress, and shook him violently. “Where is she? Damn it! Tell me where she is!”

  Faisal tried to push him away, but his grip was too tight and Faisal was weakened by the poison. He pulled at Habash’s hands, but that did nothing to stop him from shaking Faisal until his brain was slamming against the inside of his skull.

  A look passed over Habash’s face, the realization of what he was doing. He released Faisal violently and without warning. Faisal crashed against the pillow, his head pounding, his neck smarting from where the hospital gown’s fabric had dug into his flesh.

  Habash sank into a nearby chair and bowed his head. A deep purple blush climbed up the side of his neck. Faisal smiled to see it. Mr. Ein was too soft to handle any kind of violence, even that of his own doing.

  This spurred on Faisal’s curiosity, if nothing else. “What happened?”

  Habash lifted his head in surprise, shocked to hear Faisal’s voice. “Your brother kidnapped Emma Ringel. And I think it’s my fault.”

  Faisal said nothing else. He couldn’t even if he wished to; he was consumed with fury. Rashid. Damn him. Always meddling. Always sticking his nose where it wasn’t wanted. No doubt he was cooking up some sort of scheme to free Faisal, to end his bid for martyrdom.

  Faisal didn’t know what his older brother was up to, but how dare he! Whatever Rashid was doing, Faisal was sure he was trying to ruin his plans. It would not work. Faisal was destined for paradise, and no one could interfere with destiny. He couldn’t care less about Emma Ringel.

  XIX

  The Deal

  ABE TURNED UP the volume on the news and stretched out on a chaise, his head resting on an overstuffed pillow and his cell phone just inches away. As he was drifting off to sleep, the phone rang. At first he wasn’t sure it was real, because on several prior occasions he’d been shaken out of the beginnings of a slumber by what he thought was a ringing phone only to realize he was dreaming. Rendi stopped her frantic pacing, hung up her own cell phone, and stared at Abe’s. This time it was real. He cautiously picked up the phone and pressed the “talk” button.

  “Hello?” he asked tentatively.

  “Hi, Daddy. It’s Emma.”

  Abe immediately sat up in his chair and snapped his fingers toward Rendi. She came running from the other side of the room and grabbed the black box from the table. Abe waved it away.

  “Oh, my God, are you okay?” he gushed.

  “I’m fine, Daddy, at least physically, but I’m scared.” It was as if she were calling from college just to say hello. Her tone of voice was typical Emma.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Daddy, I’m okay. Everything is copacetic.”

  Abe took a deep breath and relaxed a bit into his chair.

  Years earlier he and Emma had agreed on code words that would signify she was telling the truth in the event she was ever in a situation like this. Emma loved the word “copacetic.” She had picked it up while working on a kibbutz during the summer of her bat mitzvah. She had actually written a term paper on the origin of that strange word, tracing it to Cajun French, American slang, and even Hebrew. On the kibbutz it was used interchangeably with the Hebrew phrase hakol b’seder—“everything is in order.” Abe decided it was a good code word to signify that everything was fine. They also had a second code word, as a backup in
case her captors wouldn’t let her use the word “copacetic.” This one was even simpler. If she wanted Abe to know she was not telling him the truth, she would call him “Father” instead of her normal “Daddy.”

  Abe heaved a silent sigh of relief as he heard Emma say both of the positive words. She really was okay. She was telling the truth. “What do your kidnappers want?” Abe asked anxiously.

  “Daddy, they want you to defend Faisal Husseini.”

  This was the last thing that Abe was expecting to hear. He had money and political favors lined up, ready to be cashed in. It hadn’t occurred to him that the kidnappers would want him. “But Pal-Watch is defending him,” he said, as if the request were an impossibility.

  “I know.”

  Abe’s mind quickly began working over possible connections between the kidnappers and Faisal Husseini. “Listen, Emma,” he whispered, “we know who took you. Is Faisal part of their group?”

  “No. Husseini is as radical a Muslim as they come. Habash will tell you that he always talks about getting to paradise as a martyr and rails against Israel. The guys holding me—including his brother—are Marxist, an offshoot of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”

  Abe knew that from Dennis, but didn’t say anything, fearful that Emma’s kidnappers, who were surely listening to the call, might move their location if they were aware they were being watched. He slowly passed a hand over his face. Trying to disentangle the kidnappers’ motives suddenly seemed unimportant. Abe looked at Rendi as he asked, “And if I defend him, they will release you?”

  Emma didn’t answer right away. There was a long pause at the other end of the phone. “It’s not as simple as that. Here comes the challenging part. They said they would release me only if you win the case.”

  Now Abe became angry. He stood from his chair suddenly, the pillow falling to the floor as he did. Rendi stood, too, though she didn’t know why he was upset. Abe spoke slowly, assuming that Emma’s captors were listening to every word. “I can’t control the outcome of a trial! I can do my damnedest, but I can’t promise them I’ll win.”

  Now was the first time that Emma’s voice broke, her calm demeanor betrayed by a sense of urgent fear. “You have to win, Daddy. They’ll kill me if you lose. I know they will. I’m sure of it.”

  The sound of her voice and what she said shocked Abe into stillness. He stared at himself in the mirror as he spoke. “How can you be sure they’ll actually release you, even if I win?”

  Emma had, of course, thought of that frightening prospect. Indeed, the snippets of argument she’d overheard—the repeated juxtaposition of her name with the Arabic word for death—had brought it chillingly home to her. She decided to address it directly.

  “They’d kill me, Daddy, without a second thought, if they believed that killing me would help their cause, so I decided to make them a promise. I told them that if they released me, you would agree to defend any of their members who get caught in the future. That way they have an incentive to keep their promise. Will you agree?”

  “Yes, of course. I agree.”

  “I also promised that we wouldn’t help the Israelis find or prosecute them. And I’m going to keep my promise.”

  “You did right. You can tell them that I, too, promise we won’t help the Israelis if they free you.”

  There was an uneasy silence, and then Emma said, “Daddy, I don’t know what you know about the case. But do you think you can win it?”

  For a moment she sounded like a little girl. “If your life depends on it, I will win—whatever it takes.” Abe paused and repeated for emphasis, “Whatever it takes.” There was nothing he wouldn’t do to save Emma’s life. Nothing!

  Abe had not pressed the button on the black box. He knew that if the precise location of Emma’s kidnappers were found by the Israeli authorities, they would probably try a rescue operation. The last time such an operation was tried, for a hostage named Nachshon Wachsman, the operation succeeded but the patient died: All the kidnappers were killed, but so was the hostage. Abe wanted none of that. Nor did he tell the authorities that the man who had ordered the kidnapping was Faisal’s brother. That piece of information might also lead them to the location where Emma was being held. Had Emma not used the agreed-upon code words to signify that she was okay, or had she told him that there were some among her captors who wanted to kill her no matter what, Abe might have decided to take a chance on a rescue effort, but he preferred to know that his daughter’s life would be in his hands, not in the hands of some soldiers or prisoner-exchange negotiators. For that, he was relieved. In his wildest dreams or nightmares—and he had many, starting from the day he learned of Emma’s kidnapping—he could never have imagined that his daughter’s life would depend on the deal described over the phone. Now he had to figure out a way to assure an acquittal in the Husseini case.

  XX

  The Stakes

  THE STAKES HAD BEEN HIGH for Abe in other cases. His clients had faced the death penalty. He had faced discipline, even disbarment, for questioning the integrity of judges and prosecutors. He had been indicted for criminal defamation by an Italian prosecutor for criticizing an Italian judge who had freed some terrorists because she thought they were “freedom fighters.” Once, when he was about to cross-examine a mob boss, his own life had been threatened. But all these paled in comparison with the stakes he now confronted: win an acquittal for a probably guilty mass murderer or lose his beloved daughter.

  Abe had also been criticized—sometimes savagely—for his choice of clients. This time it was far worse. Both the American and Israeli media attacked him for defending the man who killed their leaders. The Israeli press also berated him for taking a case instead of trying to retrieve his daughter. As usual, Abe ignored the criticism.

  Abe rarely experienced nervousness or self-doubt before a big case. He loved the challenge—the harder the better. He was like a great brain surgeon who relished high-risk operations, but this was different. Emma’s life hung in the balance. If he lost, she would die. He knew they meant it. It was as if that brain surgeon were operating on his own child. No surgeon would ever do that. But Abe had no choice.

  He considered telling the judge, in secret, about the dilemma. But the kidnappers had been clear. Five minutes after Emma had hung up the phone with Abe, he’d gotten another call, this time from one of her abductors, a man Habash Ein had known as Adam. If Abe told anyone about their deal, he said, Emma would be killed. The kidnappers knew that if Abe told the judge, or the prosecutors, they might issue a fake acquittal and then retry the defendant as soon as Emma was released. But if Abe won, fair and square, the defendant could never be retried. He had to win, and he had to win without the thumb of a hostage release on the scales of justice.

  But could he win? In Israel there was no jury and therefore no chance of any emotional defense or appeal to the prejudices of the jurors, as there often is in an American courtroom. Here the judge would decide, and the judge selected to preside over Israel’s trial of the new century was Dan Shamgar, one of the country’s most distinguished jurists, a former attorney general and law professor. Shamgar was a no-nonsense judge with a reputation for calling it straight and never being swayed by emotional appeals. “Just the facts,” he would say, paraphrasing the American TV show Dragnet, which had become a popular rerun in Israel.

  Abe admired Shamgar and liked his approach. But he worried that in this case “just the facts” pointed in only one direction—to his client’s guilt.

  It had been easy enough to get assigned as one of Faisal’s lawyers. Since Pal-Watch was already defending him, Habash simply appointed Abe as Pal-Watch’s lawyer. The one good thing Abe had going for him was the strength of the work that Habash had already done: There were pages and pages of evidence suggesting that Faisal might not have done it, that he hadn’t had the wherewithal to get into the American Colony Hotel to plant the bomb. In fact, though his group, the Martyrs of Jihad, claimed responsibility, Habash�
�s team had amassed substantial reports on their financial backing and political connections. Habash believed that this particular group might have had the resources to successfully carry out an attack of this magnitude but certainly didn’t have the opportunity.

  It was a start, but it wasn’t enough to assure an acquittal. Abe knew that in a high-profile case—and there was none with a higher profile than this one—it would not be enough simply to cast some doubt on his client’s guilt. He would have to prove that his client didn’t do it.

  Abe read over all the evidence, looking for something, anything that he could latch onto and use as evidence that Faisal was innocent. But it seemed to him that for every argument Pal-Watch was prepared to make, the prosecutors had ammunition with which to prove Faisal was guilty.

  Abe’s task was made more difficult by his client’s adamant refusal to talk to him about the case. When Habash had first brought him to meet with Faisal and had explained that Abe would now be the primary lawyer, all Faisal said was “I don’t trust Jews.” Abe’s decision to retain Habash Ein as his co-counsel didn’t help. “I don’t trust Arabs who collaborate with Jews,” Faisal would say whenever Habash tried to elicit information from him.

  “He’s been saying this to me since I first started meeting with him,” Habash confided in Abe.

  “We’re on our own here,” Abe told Habash, who was the only person, other than Rendi, with whom he shared the details of the desperate deal he’d been forced to make with Emma’s kidnappers. This did nothing to help Habash’s mood. Abe remembered him from his Yale days as a vibrant, passionate advocate of human rights. His mind was quick and his demeanor admirable. But since Abe and Rendi had arrived in Jerusalem, Habash had been despondent. Abe noticed daily changes in him. Habash was growing thin, terse, and irritable. While his files were helpful, Abe had trouble engaging him in conversation about the case. He’d stare off into space or lose his train of thought. Rendi thought his guilt was eating him up. Habash had alluded to feeling that way only once, when Abe had caught him one day at Emma’s desk. Habash shook his head, his voice breaking. “It is my fault. Adam was my contact, and I should have seen through him.”