Bus on Jaffa Road

by Mike Kelly

  It was one thing to create a new law that permitted lawsuits against foreign sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran. Like any lawsuit, the key to any legal action against a nation like Iran would come down to basic evidence that could withstand the scrutiny of a US court. If anyone harbored such concerns on that South Lawn April morning, however, they were not voiced. Despite the grim underpinnings of the legislation, this was considered a triumphant day by the Clinton administration. White House publicists presented the passage and signing of the AEDPA as evidence of a different sort—namely, that Democrats and Republicans had found common ground in combating terrorism.

  For Democrats—in particular, the Clinton administration—the passage of antiterrorism legislation offered a chance to counter mounting Republican criticism that Democrats and the White House were not tough enough on terrorism. In elections only two years earlier, amid a withering storm of accusations from conservative Republicans led by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Democrats lost control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. For Democrats, the loss of the House was especially significant. It was the first time since 1952 that Republicans managed to gain a majority of seats in the 435-member House. And now, in less than seven months, President Clinton would face his own battle for reelection against Bob Dole.

  Despite Dole’s role in shaping the antiterror legislation, Clinton still claimed victory. The president considered himself to be an early supporter of tougher new antiterror standards, especially after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

  After the Florida-based Brothers to the Rescue pilots had been shot down over international waters by the Cuban Air Force the day before Sara Duker and Matthew Eisenfeld had been killed, Clinton voiced support for an expanded proposal to allow the pilots’ relatives to seek compensation from Cuban assets that had been withheld by the US government since the Castro revolution. That proposal now had been broadened in the new antiterror law to allow US citizens to go to court to claim access to assets not only from Cuba but other nations labeled as state sponsors of terrorism. Such provisions in the new law, combined with Clinton’s 1,400-word accompanying statement that the legislation should have been even tougher, gave the president an opening to claim that he was certainly not soft on terrorism.

  As he stepped to a podium that morning, Clinton seemed to sense some measure of victory. He clearly seemed pleased with the scene before him. Not only was Bob Dole looking on, but the White House had invited several dozen people who had been touched in some way by foreign and domestic terrorism. Besides Arline Duker and Len and Vicki Eisenfeld, the audience on the South Lawn that morning included the daughters of Leon Klinghoffer; relatives of the pilots shot down by the Cuban Air Force; the parents of murdered US Navy sailor Robert Stethem; twenty-two survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing; seven office workers who escaped from the World Trade Center’s twin towers after the 1993 bombing; and four relatives of victims who had been killed aboard Pan Am Flight 103.

  Clinton called the new law a “mighty blow” to terrorists who would attack US citizens. “America will never tolerate terrorism,” Clinton said. “America will never abide terrorists.”

  As they watched the president that morning from seats in the crowd on the South Lawn, Arline Duker and Len and Vicki Eisenfeld were still in mourning. Looking back, they remember feeling engulfed by emotional numbness and shock at their fresh loss only two months before. At the same time they felt intensely curious about the new law that the president was signing and that Congressional leaders from both parties seemed to embrace.

  How would this change their lives, though? Certainly, tough new antiterror safeguards—if they were tough—would not bring back Sara and Matt. Also, the notion of gaining some form of compensation from terrorist sponsors seemed vague and distant.

  Two months after their children’s murders, Arline, Len, and Vicki knew only that Hamas had claimed responsibility for the Jaffa Road bus bombing. They had no idea of the complexity of the bomb plot. Nor had they heard the name of the plot’s organizer and bomb-maker, Hassan Salameh.

  Five weeks before the White House bill signing, Clinton visited northern New Jersey. The president was on the way to Egypt for an antiterror summit conference with a variety of Middle East leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. But the day before he left, Clinton spoke on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University in Hackensack, New Jersey, about the need for America to continue to pursue a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  Arline Duker sat in the FDU audience that day along with Stephen Flatow as invited guests. Much like the remarks he would deliver at the White House in April, Clinton’s speech addresssed in broad terms how terrorism had become such a dangerous force to be reckoned with. He vowed not to let terrorists derail the ongoing Middle East peace process, even though he also acknowledged that terrorism had a personal cost in the lives of those who lost loved ones. Pausing in the midst of his remarks, Clinton singled out the Duker and Flatow families “for their incalculable sacrifice and their continued devotion” to the peace process.

  It was a comforting moment. But Arline Duker, as well as Len and Vicki Eisenfeld, who did not come to the FDU speech, had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the new spotlight that had illuminated their lives.

  A death changes family dynamics. But murder causes all manner of emotional fissures to open up, psychologists say. A murder of someone by an act of political or religious terrorism opens even deeper wounds. “This is an unfamiliar place. It feels very surreal to us,” Duker told news reporters covering the president’s speech at Fairleigh Dickinson. “It feels like we have been taken out of our lives.”

  Stephen Flatow had already felt removed from his old life and had decided to spend more time drawing attention to the dangers of terrorism. Soon after Flatow’s daughter, Alisa, was killed, he was asked to speak to a group that was raising money for Israel. Flatow reluctantly agreed. As he spoke, though, he felt a cathartic sense of relief. In stepping to a microphone and telling the story of why his daughter had grown to love Israel and how she died there, Flatow felt he was doing something constructive against the horrors of terrorism. “It’s my form of therapy,” he told friends.

  Arline Duker felt no relief in those first weeks, even though she had offered remarks after Sara’s funeral and tried to make herself available when the news media knocked on her door. She was not shy with strangers. Duker was, after all, a therapist. Nor was she unaccustomed to speaking in front a group. She had been a teacher. But at times Duker found herself trapped in a back-and-forth wrestling match with her feelings—what one of her psychological colleagues called “pendulating.” During portions of her day, Duker was able to meticulously arrange time to make statements to the news media or even to finalize decisions about Sara’s death, including how to arrange for her personal belongings to be shipped home. Then Duker felt pulled in another direction, sometimes even voicing the shockingly obvious: “Oh, my God, my daughter is dead.”

  She found that she could not cope well if she was alone for long periods. Nor could she tolerate long car rides without some major distraction. She continually reviewed in her head what she knew about that final Sunday morning, imagining how Sara got up and caught the bus with Matthew and what Sara and Matthew were doing the moment they died.

  More often than not, Arline wondered why she did not try to call Sara on that final day. Perhaps a phone call would have delayed Sara long enough so she would miss the Number 18 bus that was blown up. Who knew? Still, the possibility haunted Arline.

  The hardest part was falling asleep. In those early weeks, Arline was overwhelmed with insomnia. She discovered that she did not fear sleep as much as waking up. When she awoke, even after a rare restful sleep, Arline found that her thoughts immediately returned to that February Sunday when the telephone rang and she learned that Sara was dead—killed by a terrorist’s bo
mb, on a bus. “When you are awake, you can manage the horror of what happened,” she said. “But when you fall asleep, you relive the whole phone call again.”

  In Connecticut, Vicki and Len Eisenfeld battled similar emotional tides. In the first weeks, the business of planning a funeral and welcoming friends and relatives to their home offered some measure of consolation and helped to fill the time. But by mid-March, the anguish over their son’s murder—and the dashed hopes of a joyful marriage to Sara—deepened in an even more painful way.

  Len went back to work at the hospital, trying to rely on his doctor’s habits and routines to get him through the day. Often he found that the habitual process of visiting with patients, consulting with other physicians, filling out reports and conducting tests offered a respite from his grief. But at some point in the day, Len found himself with no patients to see, no colleagues to speak with, no reports or tests to complete. He was alone, and sometimes he found himself retreating to the men’s bathroom where he would open the door of a stall and weep.

  Likewise, Vicki battled the grief trapped inside her mind. Hour after hour, she found herself thinking about what had happened to Matthew. Much like Arline Duker, Vicki went over Matthew’s movements on that Sunday morning—the bus ride with Sara, the bomber, the explosion, the phone call. Then, she thought of Hamas. What, if anything, could be done to hold someone accountable?

  A week after the bombing, Palestinian police on the West Bank arrested Mohammad Wardeh and charged him with helping Hassan Salameh to recruit his cousin, Majdi Abu Wardeh, as the suicide bomber aboard the Number 18 bus. A day after his arrest, Mohammad Wardeh was sentenced to life in prison by a Palestinian court. No US officials were at Wardeh’s trial. Nor were any Israeli officials there. As for a prison sentence, Palestinian officials released no details about where Wardeh would serve his life sentence.

  The following week, Israeli soldiers arrived at the al-Fawwar refugee camp where Majdi, grew up with five brothers and five sisters. The soldiers ordered the camp’s residents to leave their homes and walk to a nearby hillside. The soldiers went to the home where Majdi’s family lived, a concrete block structure that stood on a narrow alley-like street. The soldiers placed explosive charges on the first and second floors, pushed a button, and blew up the house. The Wardeh family—the parents and the remaining ten children—moved into a Red Cross tent.

  Neither Arline nor Vicki or Len were immediately told about the arrest and trial of Mohammad Wardeh or the destruction of the home of Majdi Wardeh’s family at the al-Fawwar camp. That news came months later.

  The tide of thoughts and random stories about what was taking place in the Middle East and in the United States—or what was not taking place—began to wear Vicki down. Each day seemed to bring a new set of concerns and issues. After weeks of this, Vicki was exhausted. “I can’t stand what’s in my head,” Vicki said.

  As with Arline, falling asleep was difficult. Whatever sleep Vicki managed to get turned out to be mostly restless. So Vicki turned to replacing the angry, mournful, and confused noise in her head with another noise. She started listening to books on tape. “I could turn on a story and be somewhere else,” she said.

  On many nights, those stories put Vicki to sleep.

  After President Clinton finished his remarks on the South Lawn of the White House on that April morning, he picked up a pen and signed the new antiterrorism law. Arline, Len, and Vicki rose from their seats and walked into the White House. A presidential aide guided them toward the West Wing. One of the president’s aides opened a door to the Roosevelt Room, a conference and meeting space dominated by a long wooden table with chairs, already filled with people who had been sitting near Arline, Len, and Vicki as Clinton signed the bill outside. The president’s staff had arranged for an expert to speak to the group about the bill and the specifics of launching some sort of lawsuit against terrorist organizations.

  Arline, Len, and Vicki found seats at the table. A man and a woman seated nearby introduced themselves as the parents of Navy sailor Robert Stethem. Across the table sat several relatives of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots. At another seat was the wife of a CIA worker who was shot to death in January 1993 by a disgruntled Pakistani-born Muslim as he waited in traffic at a stoplight outside CIA headquarters in Virginia.

  Someone asked Arline, Vicki, and Len to introduce themselves.

  “I’m the father of Matthew Eisenfeld,” Len said. “He and Sara Duker were killed on a bus in Jerusalem in February.”

  From around the table, Len, Vicki, and Arline heard people gasp.

  Len was stunned. He thought of all the people seated around the table and how each had suffered a loss. Yet so many seemed to be shocked at the deaths of Matt and Sara. The gasps he heard were not so much uttered in shock but in sympathy. Len sensed that this was a group who knew from personal experience what Arline, Len, and Vicki were going through—why they couldn’t sleep, why they sometimes broke down in tears, why they carried an uneasy anger that mixed with a sense of helplessness at what had taken place in their lives and what had been taken from them.

  A woman turned to Vicki.

  “Oh God,” she said. “You’re just babies at this.”

  The woman’s remark was meant to be sympathetic. But it hinted at something deeper, to a harder, painful, and longer path that these other families had been following.

  Arline, Vicki, and Len had read about many of the people in the room and how their lives had been torn apart by terrorism. But they had never met them and certainly did not know about the years of torment some of them had endured. From their own experiences, Arline, Vicki, and Len already knew how anger and depression had suddenly become recurring strong currents running through their lives. They also knew how much their idle thoughts had become dominated by all manner of concerns about whether they could have done something to stop their children from stepping onto the Number 18 bus. Beyond that, Arline, Vicki, and Len had almost no sense of what lay before them. This—the vague and undefined concept that the woman mentioned—seemed as mysterious as outer space, and as deep and formless a void.

  When it came to terrorism and its impact on the lives of ordinary people, the primary reference point for Arline, Vicki, and Len was Stephen Flatow. But Flatow was not at the White House to watch President Clinton sign the new antiterrorism law. He had been invited, but he stayed home.

  “I wasn’t going to dignify the ceremony,” he said.

  Flatow was not bitter or even angry as much as frustrated and emotionally flattened. A year had passed since Alisa’s murder. While Flatow tried to busy himself with fund-raising speeches on behalf of pro-Israel groups, his personal sadness deepened in recent weeks as the first anniversary of Alisa’s death loomed. As Arline, Vicki, and Len were beginning to confront, Flatow felt the heaviness of a parent’s grief from the death of a child and how that grief does not easily subside with the passage of time. Flatow thought of Alisa constantly—at work, in the car, at home. He had begun to feel, as psychologists generally point out, that the grief over a child lost to a willful, planned murder—in this case, an act of terrorism—can be even more profound than a child lost to a lengthy illness or even in a car accident.

  Flatow knew that although her killers had not targeted Alisa, her murder was no accident. Flatow had come to believe that his daughter’s bus was singled out for an attack because it was filled with Jews, many of them young students or Israeli soldiers. As he often said, “She died because she was Jewish and because she wanted to live in the land of Israel.”

  To reach such a conclusion had left a deep emotional wound in Flatow. It confirmed for him his worst possible fears: that the bombing was an act of hatred. But what to do about it? A year of speaking about Israel and his daughter’s death had left him feeling helpless. Adding to this pain was the slow realization that the most powerful nation in the world seemed incapable, or unwilling, to track down his d
aughter’s killers.

  Flatow searched hard to find comfort. He rarely turned down a chance to talk about Alisa’s death, viewing his speeches to Jewish groups or appearances on TV programs as giving him strength. But what of Alisa’s killers?

  In October 1995, Flatow received a telephone call from Colette Avital, Israel’s consul general in New York. She told him that the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the shadowy group that claimed responsibility for the bombing that killed Alisa, had been shot to death in Malta.

  The killing of Fathi Shaqaqi, a Jerusalem doctor who founded the Palestinian branch of Islamic Jihad and was among those credited with promoting suicide bombing as a form of terrorism against Israelis, seemed like a plot from a spy novel. Shaqaqi traveled under a false name, Dr. Ibrahim Ali Shawesh. He stopped in Malta for a few days before heading to Tripoli where he hoped to meet with Libyan leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi, who reportedly promised to help finance Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s activities.

  Shaqaqi never made it to Tripoli. As he walked to his hotel in the Maltese coastal town of Sliema on October 26, 1995, a man on a motorcycle pulled up and drew a semiautomatic pistol equipped with a silencer and a special attachment to catch spent cartridges so they could not be found by police investigators and traced. The man on the motorcycle fired three shots into Shaqaqi’s head then sped away.

  The killing, which had the earmarks of a professional execution, was believed to be the work of Israel’s top-secret international spy agency, the Mossad. But when Avital phoned Flatow several days later, she made a point of saying that Israel was not taking credit for Shaqaqi’s death.

  Flatow hung up the phone. He understood that tracking down and catching suspected terrorists was not easy and that punishing them was even more difficult. But the street shooting of a leader of a terrorist group did not strike Flatow as much of an accomplishment. The problem of terrorism was much more complex. The terror bombing that killed Alisa went far beyond the control of this Palestinian doctor gunned down on the sidewalk outside a hotel in Malta.