Bus on Jaffa Road Read online

  Then she stepped outside to catch a bus.

  By her side was her boyfriend, Matt, who had walked from his apartment a mile away to join her that morning.

  Sara Duker of Teaneck, New Jersey, and Matthew Eisenfeld of West Hartford, Connecticut, had been dating for almost two years. She was twenty-two years old and planning to embark on postgraduate studies in environmental science, perhaps in Israel or back in the United States. He turned twenty-five three weeks earlier, and was halfway through his second year of studies to become a rabbi.

  In recent months, though, both had begun to seriously discuss marriage. Sara had not settled on a timeline yet, but, in a letter to Matt, she wrote that she was “realizing more and more what I want for my life, even if only in faint spurts,” and while “both of us are moving to the fast track, we’ll both become closer to grasping the distant things we seek.”

  Matt was more sure of what he wanted. He already confided to a rabbi that he hoped to marry Sara within the year and regularly repeated similar sentiments to friends. “He loved her deeply. I think Sara was a combination of brilliance, utterly devoid of pretension, and fun,” said Shai Held, one of Matt’s roommates in Jerusalem. Perhaps with a wedding on his mind and a future life with Sara, Matt had recently jotted down a list of goals on a piece of paper that he hung on the wall of the bedroom of the apartment he shared with Held and another rabbinical student. “Above all, we need to be happy,” Matt wrote. “There is not enough time allotted to us to waste time in misery.”

  Their days in Jerusalem had been jammed mostly by work—Sara’s with meticulous research at the basement microbiology lab on the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University; Matt’s with long hours of scriptural study as part of his year-old immersion at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies just down the hill from Sara’s university lab. They tried to reserve a piece of each day for each other, if only for a short conversation or a stroll along the mile or so of winding tree-lined residential streets between Matt’s apartment in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood and Sara’s near the city’s San Simon section.

  As much as academics had become the center of their routine, each also set aside pieces of their days to nurture their spiritual sides, too. After dinner the night before, Sara walked twenty minutes to the apartment of another American woman, Aliza Berger, who had moved to Israel and was building a career as a translator. Sara and Aliza shared a common interest in trying to find new ways to pray together as Jewish women. But at the same time, they were not religious revolutionaries; they wanted to remain close to Judaism’s ancient rules that governed women’s roles.

  This sort of struggle for Jewish women was not unusual. By the mid-1990s, the spirit of feminism that had altered long-standing customs of politics, business, marriage, academics and other major elements of society had also begun to challenge some of the most fundamental traditions of most religions, from Christianity to Islam and Judaism. Beginning in college, Sara began to focus much of her efforts on toppling some of the walls that barred women from taking greater leadership roles in synagogue services.

  Soon after arriving in Israel in the fall of 1995, Sara joined with Aliza and other Jewish women to recite morning prayers together on the Sabbath. But Aliza and several women in the group wondered if Sara was a bit too progressive. When Sara prayed, she draped a tallit—a prayer shawl—over her head, a ritual traditionally reserved only for Jewish men. Among some Jews, Sara’s decision to pray with a tallit was considered far too radical or at least venturing into uncharted theological ground that had not been mapped by rabbis and scholars. To others, Sara’s tallit was merely another example of how Judaism was adapting to modern times. Progressive synagogues had been welcoming women as rabbis for more than a decade and promoting egalitarian styles of worship with men and women. Only a few years earlier, Judaism’s Conservative branch, which occupied the theological and liturgical middle ground between the Reform movement and the Orthodox branch, began ordaining women as rabbis. A core foundation of the Conservative movement was that Jews, while adhering to precepts of the Torah, should also adapt to modern life in ways that made sense. So, for instance, while Orthodox Jews customarily refrained from driving cars or using electrical appliances on the Sabbath, some Conservative Jews felt that such conveniences were necessary to modern life. With that sort of mindset, some felt it was only a matter of time before women in Conservative synagogues would pray regularly with tallits.

  Certainly Sara already felt that way. At the same time, she also harbored an abiding respect for Judaism’s most fundamental traditions. Though she attended an Orthodox-focused high school in New Jersey, her family belonged to a Conservative synagogue. By the 1980s, Sara’s synagogue embraced a more egalitarian style of worship in which women took on greater roles in rituals and in the leadership of the congregation. Not surprisingly perhaps, Sara frequently led services at Barnard College that included men and women.

  In college, she began praying with a tallit. But like other Jewish women who embarked on this new ritual, Sara adopted a slightly different approach—namely, in what her tallit looked like. Men’s tallits, for instance, were traditionally white with black or blue stripes. To signal their sexual difference or perhaps independence and fashion flair, some women had embraced other colors. In Jerusalem, Sara’s tallit was multicolored—purple, with shades of lavender and blue, and with green stripes. “It was clear that she was comfortable with this,” said Ayala Levin, who was one of the organizers of the women’s group and who was weighing whether to wear a tallit, too. “Many people come to Jerusalem and wonder if this is going to have a spiritual effect on them. She was comfortable and happy in her own skin. You could see that. It showed through.”

  Earlier that day, the women gathered in a third-floor room at Jerusalem’s Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies for morning Sabbath prayers. Sara walked to a podium and gently placed her tallit over her hair. Then, in a soft but confident voice, she steadily recited the opening Hebrew psalms of the traditional Sabbath ritual. Sara was the only woman in the room wearing a tallit that morning. As Ayala Levin watched from across the room, she marveled at how Sara’s voice grew stronger. “She glowed and had a dynamism about her,” Levin said.

  Several women were not as impressed, though, and felt Sara had gone too far. Others, including a few who even supported Sara’s wearing of a tallit, feared that the gesture might seem too progressive—too radically feminist, perhaps—and would turn off some women who had recently shown up.

  On Saturday evening, after sunset and the end of the Sabbath, the women gathered at Aliza Berger’s apartment to talk about the issue. Before the meeting began, Sara chatted easily with several women, describing the bus trip she planned the next morning with Matt. Then, she took a seat on a sofa.

  Rahel Jaskow settled into a chair to Sara’s right. Jaskow had not made a decision yet to wear a tallit but she was open to it. She prayed often with Sara on Friday nights at a neighborhood synagogue. And, after one evening service in which Sara wore her tallit, the two women walked out together.

  Sara seemed aware that her tallit had been noticed. As she left the synagogue, she turned to Jaskow.

  “Wow,” said Sara. “I’ve caused quite a stir.”

  Sitting now, in Berger’s apartment, Jaskow wondered what Sara might say.

  Sara asked the women if she could speak first. She wanted to leave early.

  Sara began by describing her commitment to Judaism and how she wanted to keep her faith as a guiding force of her life as a scientist and as a woman. Then she meticulously noted how Jewish traditions and scriptures had described the tallit as a method for Jews to fully express themselves in prayer. Sara wanted that complete expression. Why should she be denied because of her sex?

  As she spoke, Rahel found herself transfixed by Sara’s words, especially Sara’s gentle phrasing and careful, scientific logic. Rahel noticed Sara’s hair, brown, curly, flowing freely
. She had admired Sara’s hair before. But tonight it was different. As Ayala Levin had seen hours earlier during the morning prayers, Rahel Jaskow noticed now that Sara seemed to glow. “I caught this glimpse of her hair and there seemed to be a light around it,” Rahel said. “I thought nothing of it at the time. I wondered if the glow was maybe a trick of the light in the room. But at the same time, it seemed to me that Sara had a great beauty about her that night.”

  Sara finished and stood up, explaining again that she was leaving early the next morning with Matt. As she walked to the door, the women called out together, “Have a great time.”

  After the door closed and Sara walked down the stairs to the street, the women thought about what she had said—and, perhaps just as important, the passion and soulfulness of her message. “Pure sincerity,” said Aliza Berger.

  That night, the eight women at Berger’s apartment cast votes. They would permit women to wear tallits in their morning prayer services. But Sara never knew about the vote. She was home, packing and getting ready for bed.

  Before Sara closed her eyes, she picked up the phone and dialed the number for her mother’s cousin, Rivkah Fishman, and her husband, Joel, who lived in a nearby apartment. It was almost 11:30 p.m.

  Rivkah was already in bed, reading a book, and reached for the phone on a bedside table.

  “Hi, Rivkah. It’s me.”

  Rivkah instantly recognized Sara’s lilting voice. The Fishmans had a son and daughter of their own, but they had grown to think of Sara as a daughter. A decade before, after her father had died, Sara visited the Fishmans in Jerusalem with her mother and younger sisters. A few years after that, Sara dropped by again, this time with stories of how she was conducting biological research in the Red Sea.

  On the phone, Sara’s voice was light, airy. She seemed excited, but apologized for calling so late. She told Rivkah and Joel that she wanted them to know she was leaving early on Sunday for the beginning of a three-day vacation trek with Matt to neighboring Jordan—a long-awaited respite and reward for several months of intense study and work in Jerusalem.

  “Be sure to see Petra,” Rivkah said, mentioning the ancient Nabataean city that had been carved more than 2,300 years ago into a rocky canyon east of the Dead Sea.

  Sara said Petra was on the itinerary that she and Matt had planned.

  Rivkah mentioned one last request: Be sure to take photographs.

  Sara said she would, then casually explained that she and Matt needed to catch several buses to get to Petra. The first leg of their journey, she said, was a short ride on a Jerusalem commuter bus to the city’s central bus terminal on Jaffa Road.

  The next morning, as Sara left her apartment with Matt to walk to a nearby commuter bus stop, a man stepped from a small apartment on the other side of Jerusalem and slipped into the passenger seat of a blue Opel sedan.

  He was nineteen, a vocational trade student who grew up some thirty miles away in al-Fawwar, a Palestinian refugee community of roughly 6,500 residents near the West Bank city of Hebron. The man had left al-Fawwar a few days earlier, without telling his parents or his six brothers and four sisters where he was going. He traveled first to a mosque in Ramallah, and then was driven to a rented apartment in the Palestinian enclave of Abu Dis on the eastern edge of Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.

  The man slept little as he waited for dawn on Sunday. Those who saw him later recalled that he seemed energetic and happy. He had prayed much of the night, reciting meditations in Arabic and reading from the Koran. He then showered, shaved, and dressed in new clothes purchased for him a few days earlier in the bustling Palestinian-owned shops on Salah al-Din Street in East Jerusalem that sell jeans, T-shirts, jackets, and all manner of baseball caps. His goal, acquaintances said, was to look like an Israeli student.

  Over his shoulder, he carried a small black vinyl duffle bag that had been packed with approximately twenty pounds of explosives, extracted from American-made antitank land mines dug up near the Egyptian border in the Sinai Desert. During the night, as the young man prayed in the apartment, another man wired the explosives to detonate with the push of a button that had been attached to the shoulder strap on the duffle bag.

  The bomb-maker handed the bag to the young man, and reviewed final instructions. Get on a commuter bus crowded with passengers. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Wait a few minutes. Invoke Allah’s name. Push the button. Expect to enter paradise.

  “He was calm,” the bomb-maker, Hassan Salameh, would say later of the young man with the shoulder bag. “He was ready. He was more calm than me.”

  The Opel’s driver, a Palestinian security officer who was secretly affiliated with the militant Islamic Resistance Movement—also known as Hamas—navigated the narrow roads around the Mount of Olives, then rolled past the ancient Jewish cemetery, the gnarled, centuries-old olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane and the stone arches of the Church of All Nations that enshrines the rock where Jesus of Nazareth is said to have prayed the night before he was crucified by Roman authorities. The road flattened out slightly and the Opel turned and crossed the ravine known as the Kidron Valley, then weaved through a series of hilly turns and passed under the northern walls to the Old City of Jerusalem and the gold Dome of the Rock mosque, which enshrines yet another historic rock that had been the centerpiece of the Holy of Holies in temples built by the ancient Israelites.

  After another mile, the car stopped on Jaffa Road. The young man got out, carrying his black bag.

  He walked to a bus stop and waited for the next commuter bus.

  Fifty miles away, in the dusty, seaside Palestinian mecca known as Gaza City, one of the Middle East’s most trusted diplomats awoke that Sunday and changed his travel plans.

  Terje Roed-Larsen had come a long way from his youth amid the snow and frigid winds of Bergen, Norway. Now forty-eight years old, the gregarious Norwegian had become a familiar figure in the Middle East. As a sociologist in the 1980s, who had studied living conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank and along the Gaza Strip, and now as a diplomat and key architect of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, Larsen had earned the respect of both Israelis and Palestinians.

  For many on both sides, the Oslo “process”—as it came to be known when it was signed in 1993 at the White House in Washington, DC, with President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat—was considered the long-awaited breakthrough that would lead to a final peace agreement between two peoples who had fought for decades over the same rocky landscape. In return for an end to bombings and shootings by Palestinians, Israel offered to give back pieces of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip that it had seized during the Six Day War in 1967. By February 1996, however, the land-for-peace process had hardly become an overwhelming success so Larsen was back in the Middle East, trying to keep the peace accords he had worked so hard to formulate from falling apart.

  He left his diplomatic post with the Norwegian foreign ministry to take on a new job with the United Nations as its special representative to the fledgling Palestinian government and coordinator for UN aid to the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and in East Jerusalem—the so-called “Palestinian territories.”

  As the UN’s primary link to the Palestinians, Larsen held the equivalent rank of assistant UN secretary general and had several choices on where he could live. Each was fraught with political trip wires. There were Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, of course—centrally located, with easy access to the world’s diplomatic community, not to mention the UN’s offices and, in general, more modern homes. But Jerusalem and Tel Aviv had obvious disadvantages; they were located in Israel. If Larsen lived in Israel, he risked losing credibility with the Palestinians. He felt that his job demanded that he should live in the Palestinian territories.

  Living in the Palestinian territories meant that Larsen had fewer choices for a home. An obvious possibility was Ramal
lah, the bustling Palestinian capital that had enveloped several hillsides about ten miles north of Jerusalem in the middle of the West Bank lands that many devout Jews now called by their ancient names of “Judea” and “Samaria” and that Palestinians referred to simply as “Palestine.” But Larsen chose Gaza City, the dusty seaside stop on the road to Egypt that was now crowded with more than a half a million Palestinians. Another 1.1 million Palestinians lived elsewhere in the twenty-five-mile-long Gaza Strip, many clustered in what the UN still referred to as refugee camps, even though the tent villages established to care for Palestinians who left Israel after its founding in the late 1940s had now been replaced by concrete box homes along streets barely wide enough for a compact car to pass through. Gaza City was the business and political center of the Gaza Strip and if the United Nations representative wanted to be close to some of the most rampant problems affecting Palestinians, Gaza City was the place to be.

  Larsen’s residence was hardly cramped, dusty, or connected to the omnipresent poverty and hardship of Gaza’s camps, though. He lived near the beach, in the city’s former diplomatic neighborhood. From Larsen’s home, the view, like so many in the Middle East, could be deceiving. If he gazed toward the Mediterranean, Larsen could sense the water’s peaceful ebb and flow. Toward land, however, Gaza City was still a place where gunmen roamed, bombs exploded randomly, and assassins of all types lurked. It was, indeed, a dangerous place to call home. But perhaps the most significant reason Larsen chose Gaza City as his primary residence was the presence of one man he had grown to know well in recent years—Yasser Arafat.

  Larsen’s house was on the same block as Arafat’s. These two key players in the Middle East conflict were neighbors. If they needed to talk, they didn’t need to call on a convoy of armored SUVs, with a phalanx of burly, heavily armed bodyguards. They could simply open the front door and walk down the street.