by Mike Kelly
It would not be the last time Perles confronted such an argument. Perles had done a masterful job of drawing attention to the plight of Hugo Princz. What had been an uncertain legal case, with all manner of arcane nuances involving the immunity of foreign governments and the payment of war reparations, became a clear and powerful moral cause. Now in his late sixties, Princz was portrayed as a long-suffering victim who had lost not only his family in the Holocaust but had been denied even a fraction of the compensation that other concentration camp survivors had received years before from Germany. Even though the US appellate court blocked Princz from collecting a judgment against Germany, the German government suddenly changed its mind and began negotiating with Perles for a settlement.
Princz ended up sharing a portion of a $2.1 million settlement from Germany with 11 other Holocaust survivors. His case also helped another 235 survivors to collect portions of an additional $18.5 million settlement. Finally, Princz collected an undisclosed amount of money from German firms who used prisoners for slave labor during World War II, including the modern subsidiaries of I.G. Farben and Messerschmitt.
On a June morning in 1996, barely two months after President Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Stephen Flatow walked into the Washington office of Steven Perles.
The telephone call from the rabbi several weeks earlier had persuaded Flatow to seriously consider a legal case, though he felt he had little chance of succeeding. On the other hand, such a case might be a first step in testing the new clause in the antiterrorism legislation that allowed Americans to pursue foreign terrorists in the same way that accident victims would file claims against bad drivers.
Flatow felt such a case was risky. Yet, aside from paying for his traveling expenses from New Jersey to Washington and perhaps some additional costs to file court papers, the case would not drain his bank account. What’s more, the idea gave him energy. He was tired of feeling melancholy. Yes, he was still deeply sad over the loss of Alisa and he knew that he and the other members of his family would never be the same again—no amount of money in a legal judgment would change that. His daughter had been murdered by a man who believed he was acting on God’s behalf.
It was hardly a case of negligent death. It was a case of murder, pure and simple. But in place of a homicide case, Flatow decided he would accept a civil case—if he could get into court and present evidence to a judge that proved who the killers were.
Flatow liked Perles in a way that surprised him. Perles seemed to see the big picture, not only what it would take to win in a federal court, but he understood the kind of research and money the case would require. Flatow already knew about the successful judgment Perles had won for Hugo Princz. But Flatow was not looking just for money. He also wanted an official court ruling that pointed a legal finger at his daughter’s killers.
Flatow sat down at a conference table in Perles’s Washington office. Perles took a seat on the other side, then leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the table.
Flatow sensed that Perles had confidence. Already Perles had studied the new law that Clinton had signed. He had also studied Alisa’s murder.
Perles looked up. There was a problem, he said.
Whom would Flatow actually sue? Islamic Jihad claimed to have detonated the bomb that killed Alisa. But the new antiterrorism law specifically said that only seven countries—Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, and Sudan—could be sued. Many intelligence experts had long felt that Islamic Jihad had close ties to Iran and that its operations were even financed by the Iranians. But what kind of proof could be submitted in court? Premonitions were one thing; hard evidence that could pass muster with a federal judge was something else entirely.
And one more thing: The new law merely gave permission to sue. It cited no specific cause, no process—none of the important legal roadmap pointers that experienced lawyers need when they assemble a case.
Perles felt that the ballyhooed antiterror legislation that Bill Clinton signed, which gave victims the right to take terrorists to court in civil lawsuits, would not have passed muster in a first-year law school class.
Perles looked at Flatow. The law had to be changed.
Chapter 7
The car rolled slowly along the narrow, twisting roads that cut through the rocky hills and valleys south of Jerusalem. A Palestinian man steered. Another Palestinian man sat in the front passenger seat. Israeli police would later say that nothing about the car or its occupants seemed unusual. To other motorists—and to dozens of police and undercover agents searching for potential Hamas terrorists—the two men seemed like dozens of other commuters, trying to rush home from a job or school.
It was Friday evening, May 17, 1996. Almost a month had passed since Arline Duker joined Len and Vicki Eisenfeld at the White House to watch President Clinton sign the new antiterrorism law that opened the door to possible lawsuits by them and other American families victimized by foreign terrorist attacks. It would be several more weeks before Stephen Flatow and Steve Perles discovered that mounting a legal case using Clinton’s new law against Alisa Flatow’s killers was no easy task.
In Israel, a raucous and caustic election campaign was winding down, with polls showing that support had slipped dramatically for Shimon Peres, the embattled prime minister. Peres was still slightly ahead of challenger Benjamin Netanyahu in most surveys, but the margin seemed to shrink each day. Fearing that more terrorist attacks might drain voters’ confidence in his ability to protect Israelis and sink his chances for victory against Netanyahu, Peres ordered Israel’s military and counterterror apparatus to high alert. With voters scheduled to head to the polls in twelve days, the last thing Peres needed was another bus bombing.
The car cruised past tiny vegetable farms, olive groves, vineyards, and fields where teenage boys tended herds of sheep. It passed stone houses abandoned decades ago and other stone homes adorned with TV antennas and driveways filled with rusty, decade-old cars. It passed factories that made bricks, small wooden roadside stands that sold vegetables, cafes where tired men drank coffee at patio tables, and hamlets with minarets rising above small mosques. Not far from the al-Fawwar refugee camp, where Majdi Abu Wardeh lived before detonating the bomb aboard the Jaffa Road commuter bus, the car turned onto a road that led over a steep hill and into the ancient city of Hebron. It was just after 7 p.m. Dusk.
By the spring of 1996, Hebron had become a volatile nexus in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as a nettlesome and equally symbolic stumbling block to peace negotiations. Sprawling across a series of hills deep within the West Bank, Hebron was founded more than four thousand years ago by the Biblical patriarch, Abraham, who is also honored by Muslims as a prophet. In 1996, Hebron was home to more than 120,000 Palestinians and several hundred Jewish settlers who had braved regular sniper attacks to maintain a tiny colony while nursing a deep distrust of the Oslo peace process.
Both sides viewed the city as an important cornerstone of their respective faiths. Hebron was home to the Cave of the Patriarchs—or, as many Israelis called it, the Cave of Machpelah. As the reputed burial spot of Abraham, the cave was sacred to Jews and Muslims. Given the history of animosity between Jews and Muslims on the West Bank, both sides had divided the cave for visitors from their separate faiths—Muslims in one spot, Jews in another. And both viewed their portions as bastions to protect, even to the point of death.
The murders of twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers at the cave two years earlier by Baruch Goldstein were still fresh in the minds of those on both sides. Goldstein’s February 1994 rampage raised tensions inside Hebron and was seen as a warning of how fragile the Oslo process had become. In recent weeks, many Israeli intelligence analysts had come to believe that the bombing of the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road on the second anniversary of the Goldstein murders was a form of symbolic retribution. By May 1996, however, those analysts had greater rea
son to worry about Hebron.
Since the bombings in Jerusalem and other cities several months earlier, Shin Bet agents and Israeli military intelligence officers felt that Hebron had become home to a growing number of Hamas activists intent on plotting future attacks. Adding to the concern, Israel, as part of the Oslo peace process, had agreed to turn over control of a portion of Hebron in the spring of 1996 to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority security forces, led by Jibril Rajoub, a former Palestinian militant who had been jailed by the Israelis years before. Even before the February-March bombing campaign, Shin Bet and the Israeli army did not trust Arafat or Rajoub to monitor Hamas closely. After those bombings, and with Peres running for reelection, Israeli officials postponed the turnover of power in Hebron.
In the three months since the wave of bombings, Shin Bet agents had picked up a series of reports indicating that Arafat had given tacit approval for Hamas to stage the February and March attacks. Or as Shin Bet’s Jerusalem chief, Yisrael Hasson noted, “We know Arafat gave permission. But what does it mean?”
That question would bother Hasson and other Israeli officials for years. Hasson felt that Arafat did not sign off on the specific plans, locations, or dates of the bombings. But Hasson was confident that Arafat generally approved of some sort of attack by Hamas to avenge the killing of Yahya Ayyash. “The problem is not whether Hamas wanted to do it,” Hasson said. “Hamas wanted to bomb every day. The key problem was Arafat.”
Neither Hasson nor other Shin Bet officials knew at that time that Norwegian diplomat Terje Roed-Larsen shared similar concerns after Arafat’s emphatic, yet vague, warning to steer clear of Jerusalem on February 25. Like Hasson, Larsen had become convinced that Arafat was playing a delicate and diplomatically dangerous game of trying to keep his distance from Hamas bombings yet remaining aware of them and offering some measure of approval.
Such suspicions by Hasson and Larsen hardly mattered now. The bombings confirmed what many Israeli officials and even such diplomats as Larsen and high-ranking Americans privately feared, that Arafat was not serious about stopping terrorist attacks.
Shimon Peres’s advisors, especially Chief of Staff Avi Gill, had come to believe that Arafat’s lack of effort to stop Hamas was deliberate. In Gill’s mind, Arafat wanted to depict himself to the Israelis as a more palatable alternative to the Hamas radicals. So while the Israelis—and others such as Terje Roed-Larsen and the Americans involved in the Oslo negotiations—disliked Arafat and his slippery style of diplomacy, they viewed him as the least dangerous of all Palestinian options.
“Arafat always felt that having an active, violent threat against Israel was helpful for his bargaining with Israel,” said Gill. “Not that he was in direct collaboration with Hamas, but that all the time, he was able to hint at the alternative.”
By the spring of 1996, Peres and his advisors also became aware of a startling development. Israeli intelligence had amassed solid evidence that Iran had been urging Hamas to step up its terrorist attacks in Israel, confirming to some degree what US Ambassador Martin Indyk suspected.
“We knew that the Iranians were pushing Hamas,” said Gill. But, as with Arafat, Israel faced a similar dilemma with Iran. It was one thing to know the larger context of the bombings and that perhaps Iran was trying to exert its influence in the Middle East power struggle by using Hamas terrorism to derail the Oslo peace process. But what was to be done about it?
Israel—backed by the Americans and others—was trying to hold onto some semblance of the Oslo process, according to Gill. While Israel and others sensed that Arafat was the wrong man to rely on, they did not want to cut their ties with him and viewed him as the least dangerous choice among Palestinian leaders who seemed capable of honoring a peace agreement. “On one hand,” said Gill, “we wanted Arafat to crack down on Hamas. But we also wanted to preserve our relationship with him.”
Nonetheless, Gill and others in Peres’s circle came to believe that Arafat was not as smart and wily as others thought him to be. Eventually, Gill felt that Arafat had no idea how detrimental the bombings of February and March would be to the Oslo process. He also doubted that Arafat understood what impact Iranians might have on Palestinian attempts to form their own nation. “Arafat did not realize the magnitude that this terrorist campaign would have,” said Gill.
In the meantime, Shin Bet investigators were trying to solve a crime—actually, a mass murder. In various West Bank towns, Shin Bet agents had already arrested several key figures in the Jaffa Road bus bombing. But the most sought-after Hamas operative, Hasson Salameh, had managed to stay hidden. It was now almost three months since those bombings yet Shin Bet still had no firm idea of Salameh’s whereabouts or what his next plan might be.
As the car entered the outskirts of Hebron and wound through a series of narrow, twisting streets, it approached an unexpected and decidedly unwanted obstacle. Israeli solders, urged on by Shin Bet intelligence analysts who hoped to keep Hamas operatives off guard, had set up a temporary checkpoint and were searching all vehicles.
The car slowed, then stopped. As Israeli soldiers asked the driver for his ID card, the Palestinian man in the passenger side opened the door and started to run away.
A soldier yelled at the man to stop. Standing nearby, the sergeant in charge of the roadblock, had already cocked his rifle because he suspected trouble. As it turned out the sergeant was right. The Palestinian man drew a pistol from his belt. Before the Palestinian could pull the trigger, the sergeant fired. The Palestinian man kept running and disappeared down an alley.
An hour later, Israeli soldiers, after mounting a citywide manhunt, found the man at Hebron’s al-Alia Hospital, where doctors were treating him for a painful bullet wound in his buttocks. The soldiers, meanwhile, searched the car and found several land mines, grenades, and a box of rifles and pistols. They also identified the other Palestinian who was driving the car, Rizzek Rajoub, a cousin of Yasser Arafat’s security chief, Jibril Rajoub.
The arrest of a Hamas operative with family ties to a high-ranking Palestinian official, who was supposedly helping Shin Bet to monitor terrorism, was unsettling but not surprising to Israelis. Since the signing of the Oslo accords, Israeli counterterrorism authorities said they tried to find ways to build a cooperative partnership with the Palestinian police, a relationship that was, at best, framed more by a sense of pragmatic skepticism than trust.
While Shin Bet officials had been monitoring intelligence reports that more Hamas squads were trying to infiltrate Israel from their bases in the Gaza Strip, by the spring of 1996 Shin Bet had little confidence that Palestinian authorities would notify them of an impending attack. So Israel police and Shin Bet agents embraced a middle-ground policy; they attempted to share information with the Palestinians (and glean some information too) while remaining on full alert. Now, hearing that one of the men arrested at the Hebron checkpoint was related to the chief of Palestinian security, Israeli officials felt as if they were on their own in battling potential terror plots.
“We had an alert that there was going to be a terror attack leaving Gaza to Israel,” said Shin Bet’s Avi Dichter. “We had to turn over those pieces of information to the Palestinians. After a while, we understood that we were sharing information, not with a partner. I wouldn’t say an enemy, but someone who doesn’t try to stop terrorists. That made it very difficult to be from outside the Gaza Strip.”
As Shin Bet’s commander who oversaw the agency’s operations in the Gaza Strip, Avi Dichter played a key role in the killing of Yahya Ayyash with the exploding cell phone in January 1996. But Dichter was not satisfied. Even years later, he would have preferred to capture Ayyash alive so Shin Bet’s agents could have questioned him about future attacks. Dichter was sure that, before Ayyash died, he had managed to pass on some of his bomb-making expertise to other Hamas members. One of those, said Dichter, was a new operative whose name had recently surfaced in intellig
ence reports: Hassan Salameh.
From his home at a kibbutz north of Tel Aviv, Shin Bet’s Yisrael Hasson heard the report of the suspicious bomb-laden car in Hebron, the fugitive with the bullet in his buttocks, and the familiar name of the driver. It was Friday, the Sabbath. Hasson was about to eat dinner with his family, but the brief encounter at the checkpoint in Hebron had piqued his curiosity. Who was the other Palestinian who ran away? Now that Israeli soldiers had captured that man and were holding him at a hospital in Hebron, Hasson needed to get to the scene.
“We didn’t know who this was,” Hasson said of the wounded suspect at al-Alia Hospital. “But I felt that this was very, very important.”
Since the bus bombing on February 25 in Jerusalem—and the bombing of another Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road a week later—Hasson had devoted most of his time to tracking down the Hamas operatives involved. What concerned him most was whether Hamas was planning other attacks. With the discovery of a car filled with land mines—the same kind of explosives used in the Jaffa Road bus bombings—and the capture of a man who was desperate enough to leap from a car surrounded by heavily armed soldiers and run away, Hasson felt his investigators might have the break they were searching for all these weeks.
Hasson picked up the phone and called al-Alia Hospital and asked to speak to the doctor who treated the man. The doctor said the man was still sleeping from the anesthesia he had been given during surgery to remove the bullet from his buttocks.
Hasson asked when the man would wake up.
The doctor estimated at least another hour.
“Good,” Hasson thought. He asked the doctor to let the man sleep a little longer if possible.