by Mike Kelly
However, the families still worried that the rug could be pulled out from under them at the last minute. And they wanted some guarantee that the reduced payments would actually be made.
The memory of Bill Clinton signing a law giving them the power to file lawsuits, then watching the White House and other branches of the administration block their efforts to collect from Iran was all too vivid. Almost no one in the Flatow, Duker, and Eisenfeld camps trusted the Clintons, especially after they learned that some White House advisors had actively discussed a plan to keep the families waiting as the clock ran down in Clinton’s presidency and Hillary Clinton pursued a seat in the US Senate.
Frank Lautenberg and Connie Mack came up with what amounted to a legislative end-run. Instead of a separate bill that President Clinton could ignore or veto again by citing national security concerns, the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act and the provision for paying the Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds were inserted into a much larger piece of legislation to prevent what had become a modern-day version of slavery, in which immigrants were forcibly brought to America for sexual exploitation, forced labor or, in the worst cases, for the extraction of organs or tissues.
It was a shrewd maneuver by Lautenberg and Mack. The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act of 2000 was the first US law to address the growing worldwide problem of human trafficking. Feminists supported it, along with liberal human rights advocates and even conservatives who wanted tougher immigration standards. That the law also had a provision to pay victims of terrorism seemed like a footnote. And if Clinton wanted to block the terrorism clause, he would have to veto the entire trafficking bill.
Lautenberg and Mack knew—along with just about everyone else in American politics—that such a veto by Bill Clinton was unlikely, certainly not with Hillary Clinton in the final weeks of her US Senate campaign and his own presidency about to end. The last thing Bill Clinton wanted as he left the White House was the universal scorn of his liberal base and his conservative critics.
The Senate and House voted overwhelmingly for the bill in mid-October. On October 28, Bill Clinton signed the bill into law. Unlike the legislation he signed four years earlier on the south lawn of the White House to give families such as the Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds the right to file lawsuits against terrorist-sponsoring nations, there was no ceremony. There was, however, a presidential statement released by the White House. It ran on for more than two thousand words.
“This landmark legislation,” said Clinton, “accomplishes a number of important objectives and Administration priorities. It strengthens and improves upon the nation’s efforts to fight violence against women. It also provides important new tools and resources to combat the worldwide scourge of trafficking in persons and provides vital assistance to victims of trafficking. And it helps American victims of terrorism abroad to collect court-awarded compensation.”
As he had done so masterfully in previous political battles, Bill Clinton found a way to declare his own victory in the efforts by the Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds to punish Iran even though his administration had worked so hard for almost four years to defeat them.
But signing a bill to clear the way for the Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds to collect on their court rulings was one thing. Paying them was something else. The bill never specified that.
Bill Clinton did not call Stephen Flatow—or Arline Duker or Vicki and Len Eisenfeld. No one from the White House or the State and Treasury departments contacted them. But ten days after Clinton signed the anti-trafficking law, Hillary Clinton won a seat in the US Senate. She defeated her opponent, a little-known Republican congressman from Long Island, Rick Lazio, by more than 12 percentage points.
The calendar turned to a new year—2001. America prepared to welcome a new president, George W. Bush. Bill and Hillary Clinton busied themselves by packing books and other personal items and preparing to settle into a rambling white colonial home in the wooded hills of Chappaqua, New York. Bill planned to write and start a foundation; Hillary planned to settle into her new role as a US senator.
Several days before the Clintons left the White House, the telephone rang in the home of Arline Duker.
Steve Perles was on the line.
He explained that the the US Treasury Department had finally transferred the money that was meant to compensate Arline for Sara’s murder. Perles said Flatows and the Eisenfelds would also be paid that day.
Arline hung up the phone. Neither she, nor Vicki and Len Eisenfeld or Stephen Flatow and his family would receive the hundreds of millions that Judge Lamberth ordered. But the amount was substantial nevertheless.
Arline thought about the bills she would pay and how she would give large portions to Ariella and Tamara to establish financial security as they moved into adulthood. She vowed also to set aside another chunk of the award to fund charities and scholarships. But she was in no mood to rejoice—or even feel a sense of relief.
She thought of Sara and Matt. If they lived, Matt would have celebrated his thirtieth birthday in a few days. Sara would have turned twenty-eight in August. There probably would have been a wedding. Matt would be a rabbi, Sara a successful scientist, perhaps even a professor at a prestigious university.
And, yes, Arline would have possibly been a grandmother.
But on this day, there would be no celebration. Arline was alone. She decided to spend the rest of the day at work.
“Having the money,” she said, “doesn’t make the sadness go away.”
Epilogue
What Remains . . .
“Why did you kill her?”
The question hung in the stale prison air like an uninvited guest. Hassan Salameh stared into my eyes. He seemed momentarily confused.
“Why did you kill Sara Duker,” I asked again.
“ . . . And Matthew Eisenfeld?”
“ . . . And the others on the bus?”
Salameh shook his head. He smiled faintly, then frowned as my questions were translated into Arabic.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “She wasn’t the target. She was there.”
“She was there?”
I repeated Salameh’s words back to him.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
Salameh fell silent and stared at me again.
“We don’t really think about who is being killed,” he said, finally. “She was not the target. The target was Israeli occupation. That was her bad luck that she was on the bus.”
And so we began. We sat in straight-backed chairs, facing each other in a windowless room at Eshel Prison on the edge of the Negev Desert. After removing Salameh’s handcuffs, two guards settled into chairs behind him and two more sat behind me. A framed blue-and-white Israeli flag hung on the wall. It was a Sunday morning in late March 2006, and Salameh had been in jail for almost ten years. He was thirty-four. If she had lived, Sara would have been thirty-two. Matthew would have recently celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday.
I asked to speak to Salameh to assess whether he had any regrets. It was, to be sure, a naïve request. I knew that. But I also knew that, if peace could ever be forged between Israelis and Palestinians, then, as some observers on both sides point out, killers like Salameh might be released and that both sides would begin the long journey to finding some measure of reconciliation over all the blood that had been shed between them. Did Salameh want to reconcile?
Outside the prison walls, Israel faced yet another election that spring and what many felt could be a significant turning point in its history. The Oslo accords no longer seemed to be working. Israel was expanding its settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinian government seemed deeply divided by rival factions with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party ruling the West Bank while Hamas was now in control of the the Gaza Strip. There would, of course, be renewed efforts to revive the Oslo process in the coming years, b
ut something clearly had broken down after more than a decade of suicide attacks. Even many Israelis who once favored a complete withdrawal from the West Bank felt they could no longer trust the peace process and, in particular, either side’s ability to end the fighting. Whatever hope had blossomed in the early 1990s—a hope that prompted Sara and Matt to plan a trip to Jordan—had now given way to deep cynicism among ordinary Palestinians and Israelis.
Israeli authorities had become so frustrated with suicide attacks by Palestinian militants that they had constructed a series of concrete walls and other security barriers along the border of the West Bank and near various Palestinian towns. Some roads now were lined with high barriers to protect Israeli drivers from snipers’ bullets. Ten months earlier, Israel evacuated its residents from the Gaza Strip and closed down a string of settlements, including the beach community where Alisa Flatow planned a short vacation in April 1995. The roadside memorial to Alisa’s murder had been removed and placed in storage in Israel.
Before visiting Salameh, I passed through a border checkpoint separating Israel from the West Bank and drove into Ramallah. Yasser Arafat died several years earlier, but his tomb was still not finished and his former compound lay in ruins.
I walked down a hill to “Martyrs’ Crossing,” the causeway the led to an Israeli checkpoint at the Beit El community and military base where Salameh had been convicted. All was silent now. The gun battles I witnessed on the causeway years earlier between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters were now rare and the burned out cars and tires had been removed. But most of the nearby buildings were still abandoned.
On the other side of Ramallah, I stopped at a government building and met with Dr. Mahmoud al-Ramahi, an Italian-trained physician and Hamas official who had recently become the secretary-general of the Palestinian Legislative Council. In years to come, al-Ramahi would be arrested and imprisoned on several occasions by Israel authorities because of his Hamas affiliation. When I spoke to him, he was in no mood to try to resurrect the Oslo accords or discuss any sort of compromise peace deal with Israel. He talked, instead, of more bloodshed.
I asked about Salameh and whether the kinds of attacks he orchestrated would ever end. “The suicide bombings were the reactions against what Israelis do,” al-Ramahi said, sharply, almost as a rebuke to my question. “We are the victims,” he added. “We have to continue the resistance. We said that until the occupation is over, the resistance is legitimate.”
A few days later, I headed for the Gaza Strip, passing through another Israeli checkpoint and catching a ride into Gaza City.
“Welcome to Gaza Planet,” said Osama, a twenty-seven-year-old Palestinian youth counselor who spoke fluent English and told me how he dreamed of leaving for another country.
Gaza was, indeed, a different planet—perhaps even a different universe—compared to other cities in the region. In an election three months earlier, Hamas had won control of Gaza’s government. Cars competed with donkey carts on roads where few traffic lights worked. Potholes seemed as numerous as people, and piles of trash burned on almost every corner. Most homes and buildings seemed to have at least one broken window. Many had no windows.
We drove up to the city’s main outdoor market, al-Saha Plaza and parked. I opened the car door and got out. The air was laced with wood smoke, dust and diesel exhaust. A breeze off the Mediterranean pushed an old Arabic newspaper along the sidewalk.
I looked up. The plaza was rimmed with billboards but not the kind that advertise soft drinks, clothes, or electronic devices. These billboards proclaimed the exploits of Palestinians who attacked Israelis. I looked for Salameh’s picture. Nothing. Nor was there any mention of the bus bombing on Jaffa Road and how it had damaged the Oslo process and affected the Israeli elections a decade before. Among Gaza’s Palestinians, Salameh’s exploits had simply been folded into far larger violent tapestry. Salameh may have orchestrated one of the most dramatic and politically consequential bombing campaigns in the long struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. But he was not the last. After his arrest, other bomb-makers emerged, along with other suicide bombers, and a decade after Sara and Matt were killed, Salameh’s mayhem was not considered all that unusual by either side. Bombing had become the new normal.
As I walked through the plaza, I met Nahed Abu Khair, who was trying to support his wife and eight children by selling Chinese-made baggy jeans.
“What is it like trying to live here?” I asked.
Khair wiped a sweaty film from his forehead. From a minivan parked at a nearby curb, a man with a bullhorn pleaded for donations to a mosque. Khair turned and listened for a few seconds, then looked at me again.
“I’m hoping for a better future for my kids,” Khair said.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Forty-three,” said Khair, adding sadly: “My time is gone.”
I left and headed for the narrow alleys of the old refugee camps whose tents had been replaced by concrete homes that seemed to fit together like children’s blocks. Around noon, I ate a pita sandwich in a restaurant where the electricity kept shutting down. Later, I spoke with fishermen who cast lines into the Mediterranean by wrecks of ships and not far from the abandoned home where Yasser Arafat warned Terje Roed-Larsen to stay away from Jerusalem on the day the Number 18 bus blew up.
By evening, as a taxi drove a photographer and me back to the border checkpoint, Israeli artillery fired overhead toward positions near the Mediterranean where Palestinian militants fired rockets into Israeli towns. No one talked in our car as shells streaked across the sky and we navigated a two-lane road that crossed fields dotted with olive trees. I gazed out a window as the sun set into the Mediterranean and wondered what the future would be like for this troubled land.
In Eshel prison now, I asked Salameh about his own future. He shrugged his shoulders and said he was resigned to dying in prison, celibate and alone—as the Israeli prosecutor, Avinoam Sharon, predicted. Perhaps as solace or perhaps merely to survive in a place with few choices, Salameh said he awoke at 4:30 each morning. He ate all of his meals in his cell and left only for an hour of exercise, alone in a prison yard that was four meters square and surrounded on three sides by concrete walls and on the fourth side by a chain-link fence. He said he studied portions of the Koran each day. He also said he read Israeli and Arabic newspapers when he could get them. Later, I learned that he had been writing a short book about his exploits as a bomb-maker, entitled The Revenge of the Sacred.
I mentioned Sara and Matt again. Salameh’s voice hardened, his phrasing became more clipped. He nodded and said he remembered the names from an interview years before with FBI agents.
Salameh described himself as a soldier. I moved my chair closer, and suggested that soldiers sometimes regret years later the enemies they had killed in battle, even when those wartime killings may have been justified. Did Salameh regret any of the lives he had taken?
He leaned back in his chair and rested his chin in his hand, sizing me up.
“I’m not happy when civilians are killed,” he said.
For a moment, he seemed softer. I wondered if this was Salameh’s way of expressing a small flicker of remorse. But just as suddenly, he caught himself. He took a breath, and quickly added: “It’s not in my hands.”
Our conversation continued like that for another hour. Salameh argued that the bombs he assembled were his way of defending his homeland. I countered by pointing out that every victim on the Jaffa Road commuter bus—and the other buses he targeted—was unarmed. He tried to avoid responsibility; I questioned why he would consider killing so many innocent civilians, no matter how justified he felt his cause was.
“How can you call yourself a soldier if you kill unarmed civilians?” I asked.
For every point I raised, however, Salameh seemed to have an answer. Finally, I fell silent. Salameh shook his head.
“You look a
t the picture in a different way than I do,” he said. “You speak about emotions and feelings. The subject is a lot bigger and more complicated than you make it.”
I mentioned Sara again.
“If Sara’s mother was sitting here with me, what would you say to her?”
Salameh shifted in his chair.
“Her daughter was not the target.The target was the Israeli occupation,” he said.
“Sometimes when you make a suicide attack, mistakes can be made.”
“So was this a mistake?” I asked, wondering if he was offering another hint of remorse.
Salameh paused.
“I can’t say that it was a mistake,” he said. He stopped himself, then returned to a phrase he uttered earlier: “It was her bad luck.”
Our time was winding down. The guards explained that Salameh should return to his cell. I said I only had a few more question. Could we talk just a few more minutes? Salameh nodded and looked at me, waiting.
“Does the Koran allow you to kill innocent civilians?” I asked.
“No,” Salameh said.
“Then how do you justify killing all those people on the bus?”
“I didn’t kill civilians,” he said. “It was the situation. It is written in the Koran that we are allowed to defend ourselves.”
“And what will God say?” I asked.
It was a clumsy question—a final attempt to shake Salameh out of his scripted rhetoric and jaded theology that advocates suicide bombing as a path to spiritual paradise. He didn’t flinch.
“I did what was allowed by God.”
I returned to Israel six years later. It was early January 2012—more than a decade since the 9/11 attacks and almost sixteen years since the bus bombing by Salameh on Jaffa Road. Benjamin Netanyahu was again the prime minister. Christmas lights flickered atop the stone buildings in Jerusalem’s Old City. Jaffa Road was no longer a bus route but now home to a gleaming light rail line. A memorial plaque listing Sara’s and Matthew’s names and all the others who died on the Number 18 bus hung on a wall of a building near the intersection of Jaffa Road and Sarei Yisrael Street. Nearby, a memorial of twisted and charred steel from the Number 18 bus had been fashioned by a local sculptor, with an inscription in Hebrew: “Fear shall not win. In good and bad, all of us together.”