Bus on Jaffa Road

by Mike Kelly

  I asked to visit Salameh again, but Israeli prison authorities declined, saying he had been plotting protests inside his prison and was considered too dangerous. So I hired a driver at the American Colony Hotel and set out to find the family of the suicide bomber, Majdi Abu Wardeh.

  On another Sunday, we headed southward, over the Jerusalem hills and past Bethlehem. Just before we reached the outskirts of Hebron, we turned onto a two-lane road. We passed olive groves and small meadows where sheep grazed, then drove to the top of a hill. In the valley below lay al-Fawwar refugee camp.

  Along the camp’s main thoroughfare, posters of Palestinians who were being held in Israeli prisons hung from walls of stores and homes. I approached a teenage boy and asked where the Wardeh family lived.

  He led me through a series of narrow streets, then pointed to a vacant lot once occupied by Majdi’s family home and introduced me to another boy, sixteen-year-old Mussab Wardeh—Majdi’s cousin.

  Mussab said he was born after the Jaffa Road bombing and did not know his cousin. But Mussab knew the story of how Majdi became a shaheed—a martyr—by carrying a black bag aboard a bus and calling out “Allahu Akbar” before pushing a detonator button. As we talked, Mussab pointed to a wall and two graffiti messages in Arabic about Majdi’s death. February 25, 1996—the day he was martyred, said one. Another said: The 25th of February is a blessed memory.

  Beneath both messages, in Arabic, was a signature—the tag of the graffiti artist.

  “Hamas,” it said.

  I turned to Mussab. What did he think of Majdi’s suicide?

  “God will take care of this,” he said. “God will bring us justice eventually.”

  “Where is Majdi’s family now?” I asked.

  Mussab motioned me to follow him. We got in the car and rolled down the hill and back along camp’s main thoroughfare. After passing stores that sold fruit and vegetables and the stares from a cluster of elderly men who sat in plastic chairs, we turned onto another street and drove up another hill.

  I got out and walked up to a middle-aged man in a wrinkled jacket—Majdi’s father, Muhammed Abu Wardeh.

  “Welcome,” he said, when I explained why I was there. “Come inside.”

  Muhammed led me up the stairs and into a room with no furniture and only one photo on the wall—the eight-by-ten martyrdom poster of his son. He motioned me to sit on a floor cushion. One of Muhammed’s five remaining sons brought tea.

  I turned the conversation to February 25, 1996. Why did Majdi become a suicide bomber?

  Muhammed repeated the story he told Israeli police—that he thought his son left on a Friday to find work and that he was shocked to discovered Majdi was a suicide bomber.

  “If I had known I would have stopped him,” he said.

  He took a sip of tea, then continued.

  “I was sad,” he said. “Because I lost my son. You are talking about a father’s feelings after losing his son.”

  Muhammed explained that he understands why some young men decide to become suicide bombers and listed a common litany of reasons, ranging from the Israeli occupation to the lack of jobs and the feeling that they have no future for themselves.

  Then he fell silent.

  “As a father I couldn’t bear dealing with this issue,” he said. “As a father . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  I pointed to Majdi’s photo on the wall.

  “Why do you keep his photo there?” I asked.

  “Because he is my son,” Muhammed said.

  Beyond the door, children laughed as they frolicked on the stairwell to the apartment building where Muhammed lived with his wife, Intesar.

  Muhammed smiled, nodded toward the door and said the laughter came from his grandchildren. He had recently turned sixty-one and still worked as a principal of a local school. His wife was fifty-nine. Most of their ten remaining children had moved out, he said.

  I asked about Majdi again. How old would he be?

  “Thirty-five,” said Muhammed.

  “Do people in al-Fawwar still talk about him?” I asked.

  Muhammed shook his head from side to side.

  “Not very much,” he said. “Things like that go into oblivion.”

  A year later, I drove into the Connecticut hills, west of Hartford. It was now August 2013. If she had lived, Sara would be preparing for her fortieth birthday party.

  I knocked on the door of Len and Vicki Eisenfeld’s house. Arline Duker arrived a few minutes later with her youngest daughter, Ariella, and a new puppy.

  Len, Vicki, and Arline were grandparents now. The Eisenfelds still lived in West Hartford, and Arline had stayed in Teaneck and had remarried. But the two families—as Len predicted in the days after Sara and Matt had been killed—had become one. Both purchased vacation homes in the same Rhode Island beach community and often celebrated holidays together.

  They had not given up on their pursuit of Iran, however. After agreeing to take only a fraction of what Judge Lamberth awarded them, the Dukers and Eisenfelds, along with the Flatow family decided to take their case to courts in other nations where Iran had substantial investments. Their first test was an Italian court. But no settlement—or final judgment—had been rendered. In June 2014 the US Justice Department, along with the Manhattan district attorney, credited Flatow’s research into Iranian holdings with helping them expose illegal money transfers by Iran through several large banks, including France’s BNP Paribas, which pleaded guilty and paid an $8.9 billion penalty.

  Steve Perles and Tom Fay were now pursuing other terrorism cases, most notably a lawsuit on behalf of some of the families of the 220 Marines, eighteen sailors, and three Army soldiers killed in the 1983 bombing of their compound in Beirut by Iranian-supported Hezbollah militants. Perles and Fay had already won their case before Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington. But as with the other cases involving the Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds, the major concern was how to collect money from Iran.

  A few weeks before I met with Len, Vicki, and Arline, I sat in a courtroom in Manhattan’s federal court, as Perles, Fay, and other attorneys argued with a judge about possibly collecting a substantial portion of the judgment from an Iranian investment account they had recently discovered. But with the case already almost ten years old, no ruling was expected soon.

  Officially, the Department of Justice still maintains that it is weighing a possible criminal indictment—and extradition—of Hassan Salameh for killing US citizens. But internal memos circulated within the Justice Department told a different story. From almost the day FBI agents and prosecutors checked into the American Colony Hotel, they harbored major doubts that they could gain a conviction of Salameh in a US court, under American rules of evidence. The Justice Department team eventually decided not to prosecute Salameh. Among other concerns, they worried that Salameh’s confession to his Israeli handlers had been coerced. And while no evidence existed that Salameh was, in fact, forced to confess, the US prosecutors feared that they would not be able to successfully deflect challenges from defense lawyers that Salameh was subjected to harsh treatment. The only legal recourse for American families was the civil lawsuits similar to those filed by the Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds.

  In Washington, Judge Lamberth, who had been promoted to the chief judge of the US District Court, decided to retire to senior status, handling a far lighter caseload. But when I visited with him at his office one afternoon, he conceded that he still worried about the ultimate effectiveness of the rulings he made in cases with the Flatows, Dukers, Eisenfelds, and other families. Lamberth said he was surprised that the families received any money—even the smaller amounts they agreed to take. “I’m not comfortable that the courts are the best place to do this kind of thing,” he told me. “I’m still saying that twenty years later.”

  As for Iran, Lamberth wondered if any amount of money wo
uld cause it to renounce terrorism. He mentioned the Beirut Marines case and his decision in 2012, ordering Iran to pay more than $2 billion in damages to victims. “A billion dollars to Iran is a drop in the bucket,” Lamberth said. “What is that, two days’ oil? It’s not going to deter their conduct.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m still as frustrated at that as I was at the time of the Flatow case,” he said. “How do you actually deter their conduct?”

  Like Judge Lamberth, Stuart Eizenstat also worried about the legacy of the terrorism cases. After the Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds had been compensated, other US families who had lost relatives to terrorism complained. Why had they been left out of a piece of legislation that had been narrowly defined to compensate the Flatows, Dukers, Eisenfelds, and several others, including journalist Terry Anderson, who had been held hostage in Lebanon?

  The question still seemed to haunt Eizenstat when we spoke. Even the family of Ira Weinstein, a dual Israel-US citizen who later died of burns suffered in the same bus bombing that killed Sara and Matt, had been left out. The Weinsteins filed their lawsuit too late to be included in the original compensation legislation sponsored by Senators Frank Lautenberg and Connie Mack. Lautenberg left the Senate, but returned after another New Jersey senator, Robert Torricelli, was forced to resign amid an ethics investigation. One of Lautenberg’s first efforts was to introduce legislation to broaden the compensation for terrorist victims. But in spite of a compensation plan for relatives of those killed in the 9/11 attacks, the federal government was not able to agree on an all-encompassing strategy to compensate all other victims of terrorism.

  Like Lautenberg, Eizenstat also decided to take up the issue again. After he left his last post at the Treasury Department and joined a law firm, he offered to help find compensation for the Weinstein family after Judge Lamberth ruled in 2002 that Iran should pay $160 million in damages. To date, the Weinsteins have collected only a fraction of the award.

  The same was true of Leah Stein Mousa. Another federal judge ruled in 2001 that Iran owed her $132 million in pain and suffering for her injuries. She collected several hundred thousand, her attorney said.

  When I visited with her at her Jerusalem apartment in 2012, Mousa still suffered from damage to her eyes and hearing and had trouble walking. She died a year later. Her friend Phyllis Rosenbaum told me that Leah had never recovered from the emotional and physical pain of the bombing of the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road.

  The Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds, meanwhile, were led to believe that they had been paid with Iranian funds. But that does not seem to be the case. Even though they had received checks from the US Treasury, the Flatows, Dukers, and Eisenfelds had been told that an equivalent amount of money would be taken from the frozen Iranian account for military sales and used to repay the US Treasury.

  The $400 million Iranian fund had not been tapped, however. A spokesman for the US Treasury told me that the equivalent of a lien had been placed on the Iranian fund—to be negotiated at some point in the future. As this book is published, those negotiations had not taken place.

  For many families, however, no amount of compensation could ever erase the pain of their losses. To them, terrorism was still as personal as a funeral. And on a breezy evening in August 2013, Arline, Len, and Vicki decided to take another step in that personal journey. They paid a visit to the side-by-side graves of Sara and Matt.

  Arline still worked as a psychologist in Teaneck. Len continued to practice medicine and care for sick children. Vicki still designed jewelry. To see them without knowing their backstory, you might think they were just three friends who had reached a satisfying and successful place in their lives. They laughed easily at their jokes and mentioned grandchildren and trips they planned to take. But the deaths of Sara and Matt—and the long fight through the courts and with the various political figures in Washington—had clearly changed them.

  Several years earlier, after I had spoken to Hassan Salameh at Eshel Prison, I contacted each of them. I wanted them to know that I had met the man who murdered their children.

  “What did you make of him?” Arline asked, as we sat in her therapist’s office one afternoon.

  I paused and drew a breath.

  “I’m sorry, but he has no regrets,” I said.

  Arline leaned forward in her chair. She gazed at the floor for a few seconds, then looked up.

  “The most disturbing thing is not about Hassan Salameh,” she said. “It’s this belief system that is tied to religious fanaticism.”

  Before calling Len and Vicki, I telephoned Stephen Flatow. He said he was not surprised by Salameh’s lack of remorse. Alisa’s killers had also never said they felt any sorrow. “If he gives up on that belief, if he weakens, he has to confront what he did,” Flatow said.

  On the phone with me, Len echoed Stephen Flatow’s feelings. “We’re not surprised,” Len said. “This is a long-term effort on how we address terror and this different mindset. Hassan Salameh symbolized that.”

  Vicki listened to Len on another telephone extension at their home. After several minutes, she joined in.

  Salameh’s intransigence was upsetting, she said. “It’s difficult to think that we can’t reason or debate.”

  In the car now, on the ride to the cemetery, no one mentioned ­Salameh. There was no need. Len had offered to drive. Vicki, Arline, and Ariella sat in the back.

  Len turned at a light and steered the car on to a narrow road that led through a grove of oaks and maples. Everyone fell silent. It was after 6 p.m. The August sun, already starting to sink into the western Connecticut hills, left wide pools of shadows under the leafy trees.

  Len parked and we got out and walked up a gentle slope to a headstone that simply said: Duker Eisenfeld.

  Arline laid a rock atop the headstone—a traditional Jewish custom. Len and Vicki followed suit.

  Someone mentioned that Sara would have turned forty in a few days. Everyone nodded. A breeze kicked up and brushed the leaves in a nearby maple.

  Arline, Len, and Vicki stood for a moment in front of the headstone and the side-by-side resting places of the daughter and son they once thought would marry.

  “I wonder what they would have become,” said Arline.

  Her voice fell off, then she added:

  “We’ll never know.”

  Several weeks later, just after Labor Day 2013, a man from Israel walked into the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. It had been several decades since he had ventured onto the Columbia University campus as an undergraduate student and explored the nearby Morningside Heights neighborhoods. But Avinoam Sharon, the Israeli military officer who prosecuted Hassan Salameh, felt he had finally come home to a calling he had been following for years.

  Salameh’s trial had been Sharon’s last as a military prosecutor. He had no regrets, he said. Indeed, he felt gladdened that the judges had sentenced Salameh to prison rather than giving him the death penalty and, in Salameh’s view, a martyr’s death.

  But after years of working as a military prosecutor, Sharon decided to change careers. After Salameh went to prison, Sharon retired from the Israeli army and enrolled in a program to become a rabbi. After his ordination, he became affiliated with a synagogue. But over time, Sharon felt he wanted to delve deeper into Jewish scriptures and, by 2013, had been awarded a fellowship to pursue a doctorate at Jewish Theological Seminary.

  As he entered through the main doors of the seminary, Sharon was told that new doctoral students would be meeting in a downstairs study hall—a beit midrash—for an orientation to the campus and to the neighborhood. Sharon walked down a flight of stairs, then opened a door. He stepped into a foyer, looked up and noticed a large plaque on the wall.

  The plaque said the study hall had been dedicated to the memory of Sara and Matt and carried this inscription: Study is great for it leads to action.
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  Sharon stopped. He remembered the names all too well—especially the story of how Sara and Matt planned to marry and were merely taking a short vacation to the ruins of Petra when the bus exploded on Jaffa Road.

  After a few seconds, he turned and walked into the study hall and took a seat.

  A seminary administrator gave a short talk about the school and what the students could expect in the years ahead. When he finished, the administrator asked the students to introduce themselves to the group.

  “Then it hit me,” Sharon said.

  Not only was he sitting in a room dedicated to the memory of Sara and Matt, but it was the same room where Sara and Matt had studied the Jewish scriptures and attended prayer meetings when they were alive and young students. Now, Sharon thought, he was studying Talmud—the same course of study that Matt intended to pursue.

  When it was his turn, Sharon explained that he had served in the Israeli army as a criminal prosecutor for many years. Then he mentioned the names of Sara and Matt, and how he noticed as he walked through the door that the room had been dedicated to their memory. Most of the students knew that Sara and Matt died in a terrorist attack in Israel years before. But few knew all the details.

  Sharon looked around the room. Many of the students were far younger. They were probably small children when Sara and Matt were killed. Finally, he said: “I was the military prosecutor who prosecuted the murderer of Sara and Matt.”

  The room fell silent. But Sharon did not feel out of place or uneasy about the piece of his past he had revealed. He had tried to leave his previous identity behind when he left the army. But now he understood that his previous career had led him to his new life as a rabbi. Equally important, it had led him to this new place to study the Talmud.