Bus on Jaffa Road Read online

  Arafat was a night owl. He rarely held meetings when the sun was up. So on the evening of Saturday, February 24, 1996, as Sara Duker walked from her apartment in Jerusalem to meet with a Jewish women’s prayer group, Larsen left his seaside villa in Gaza City and strolled up the block to meet with Arafat—a meeting that would impact Larsen’s Sunday schedule.

  Larsen did not have a fixed agenda when he spoke with Arafat that night—certainly nothing important that Larsen could recall when he described the evening get-together years later. It was, after all, not uncommon for Larsen to drop in on Arafat, if only to measure the mood of the mercurial voice of the Palestinian people and perhaps talk about the various twists and turns in the Oslo peace process.

  Certainly the last few years had not been easy. Only months before the formal signing of the Oslo accords in a dramatic 1993 ceremony at the White House, Palestinian militants unveiled a new tactical weapon—­suicide bombings, carried out by religious militants who espoused a radical Islamic theology that promised an instant path to paradise for any “martyr” who killed so-called “infidels.” To the bombers, these infidels were Israelis and their crime was invading Muslim lands, which included Israel itself, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

  In that first bombing, a Palestinian operative drove a pickup truck loaded with explosives up to an Israeli bus that had stopped at a roadside cafe near Jericho. The Palestinian then detonated the explosives, killing himself and setting fire to the Israeli bus. No passengers were killed and only two were slightly injured. But that singular event was the beginning of one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Larsen and other diplomats—including many Israelis—a vexing concern was the fact that the suicide bombings were largely the work of two of the most radicalized groups in Gaza and the West Bank—Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

  Suicide martyrdom was not entirely new to Islam. But when it occurred throughout history—and by no means was it common—it was largely the work of intensely militant factions of Shiite Muslims. Most Palestinians were Sunni Muslims. And while neither the leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hamas had come forward yet with detailed explanations of why their groups had embraced suicide martyrdom, counterterror experts in Israel and the United States pointed to the 1992 deportation of more than four hundred Palestinian militants to Lebanon as a watershed event. When sent to Lebanon, the displaced Palestinian militants were cared for by members of the Hezbollah party, largely Shiite, with the hefty financial backing of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  Hezbollah militants had long promoted suicide bombing as a tactic, with the most dramatic example being the bombing of the US Marine barracks in 1983 in which 220 Marines, eighteen Navy sailors and three US army soldiers had been killed. A year after deporting the Palestinian militants to Lebanon, Israel relented and allowed them to return to the West Bank and to the Gaza Strip. Within months, the first suicide bombing took place.

  To Israel’s primary counterterror agency, the General Security Service—better known as Shin Bet—that initial suicide bombing was hardly accidental. “The Palestinians had adopted the tactics of the Shiites,” one of Shin Bet’s top analysts, Barak Ben-Zur, would say later. But few members of Shin Bet could foresee the carnage that was to come.

  Certainly, Terje Roed-Larsen did not see the ominous trend. On that Saturday in late February 1996, when he met with Arafat, suicide bombings were not as much of an immediate concern. Yes, there had been other suicide attacks, including one less than a year earlier in the Gaza Strip when a twenty-year-old American student from Brandeis University, Alisa Flatow of West Orange, New Jersey, had been killed by a suicide bomber who drove an explosives-laden pickup truck into an Israeli bus. Alisa Flatow had been a student at the same North Jersey Jewish high school as Sara Duker and had come to Israel while in college to deepen her knowledge of Judaism. While Alisa’s father, Stephen Flatow, had begun to give emotional speeches across America about his daughter’s murder, the issue of suicide bombings had not gained the kind of diplomatic or political traction yet that it would in years to come.

  In fact, Palestinian militants had not attempted a suicide bombing in months. And six weeks earlier, Shin Bet agents killed the chief Palestinian bomb-maker for suicide operations, Yahya Ayyash, who had been nicknamed “The Engineer” because of his expertise in assembling explosives. Ayyash’s bomb-making fingerprints seemed to be everywhere. Shin Bet investigators said he played a direct role in at least five bombings. But his influence had become even more widespread. Ayyash recruited other bomb-makers and passed on his skills at building deadly explosives. Shin Bet believed he had been indirectly involved in as many as a dozen other attacks. One of his compatriots played a supporting role in the plot that killed Alisa Flatow. And Israeli agents also had discovered that Ayyash had designed a “suicide vest” for bombers to hide explosives under their coats.

  “Ayyash was to Israelis what Osama bin Laden later became to Americans,” an Israeli counterterrorism agent explained.

  In early January 1996, Shin Bet investigators tracked Ayyash to the Gaza Strip and planted a cell phone loaded with explosives in the home where he was staying. When Ayyash put the phone to his ear to make a call, an Israeli counterterrorism official monitoring the phone from an electronic listening post in Israel pushed a button. The phone exploded, killing Ayyash instantly.

  Ayyash’s funeral on the following day in Gaza City became a cascade of anger against Israel. More than one hundred thousand Palestinians crowded into Gaza City’s dusty streets. In the following days, a variety of Palestinian radical groups vowed to avenge Ayyash’s killing with some sort of terrorist operation against Israel.

  But no attacks took place—not immediately. By early February, from its vast web of Palestinian contacts and double agents within the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, Shin Bet picked up a variety of signals that Hamas was organizing some sort of bombing attack. But where and when? Shin Bet had no precise details, only a vague warning.

  By February 11, Israeli military and counterterror leaders decided that the warnings had become too ominous. Roads to Israel from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were sealed, blocking some fifty thousand Palestinian workers from commuting to jobs in Israel and thousands of others from visiting relatives. Israeli leaders said that the goal was to stop any terrorist teams from sneaking across the border.

  But the roadblocks were too late. On Friday, February 2, Hassan Salameh ate lunch with his family, then told his wife, whom he had married only four months before, that he needed to report to work at a plastics factory.

  Salameh left but never came home. Hamas operatives drove him to a desert road near a fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip. As night fell and after Israeli military patrols passed by, Salameh slipped under the fence and crossed into Israel, carrying a satchel of explosives.

  He hid in an orange grove for the next week. Then on February 12—the day after Israel sealed its borders—Salameh met with Hamas activists in Hebron to recruit a team of operatives who would help him mount an attack.

  The Shin Bet, while extremely worried about warning signs of a revenge mission for Ayyash’s death, had no idea yet of Salameh’s plans—or even that Salameh had crossed the border. Earlier that week, Ami Ayalon, a former Israeli Navy admiral whose heroism as a commando had earned him Israel’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor, took command of Shin Bet. As he reflected on the moment years later, Ayalon remembered how the focus of the agency was not so much on the Palestinian threat but on what he feared at the time was a rising tide of “Israeli fundamentalism.”

  Four months earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated by an Israeli who had become disgruntled with the Olso process and the turnover of pieces of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. To some devoutly religious Israelis—whom Ayalon and others considered to be fundamentalists—the West Bank,
along with Israel itself and the Gaza Strip, was the original land of Israel that God had given to Abraham and his descendants. To give this land away was considered a religious sacrilege.

  Such was the mindset of Rabin’s assassin. Increasingly, it seemed to be a view embraced by a small number of Israeli extremists who sometimes attacked Palestinians. Two years earlier, on February 25, 1994, in the ancient city of Hebron, an American-born Israeli doctor, Baruch Goldstein, carried a semiautomatic rifle into the mosque that adjoins a small synagogue above the Cave of Patriarchs, which Jews, Christians, and Muslims all venerate as the burial place of such spiritual figures as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. Witnesses say Goldsein said nothing as he aimed his rifle and meticulously shot twenty-nine Muslim worshippers to death and wounded another 125. He stopped only after onlookers overpowered him with a fire extinguisher and then beat him to death.

  Terje Roed-Larsen was well versed in the wide variety of increasingly complicated and volatile problems that had emerged in recent months in Israel. But when he entered Arafat’s residence that Saturday evening, he merely wanted to talk about a few mundane concerns involving living conditions for Palestinians in Gaza. The issue had been an abiding concern for Larsen. And that night he did not find an answer with Arafat.

  As Larsen got up to leave, however, the conversation changed in a way that startled Larsen. Arafat asked Larsen what he planned to do the next day—Sunday, February 25, 1996.

  Larsen told Arafat that he was thinking of spending the day in Jerusalem. Arafat paused. The Palestinian leader seemed concerned but somewhat at a loss for words. Larsen knew Arafat often spoke in cryptic ways—not always explaining clearly what was on his mind but nevertheless sending signals. This time was no exception.

  “Why don’t you stay away from Jerusalem on Sunday,” Arafat told Larsen.

  Larsen left and went home.

  What exactly did Arafat mean? The Palestinian leader’s words were unspecific—far too vague. But it was the tone of Arafat’s voice that bothered Larsen.

  Larsen pondered Arafat’s warning through the night. On Sunday morning, he canceled his trip to Jerusalem and decided to say put in Gaza City.

  Around 6:30 in the morning on that Sunday, Sara Duker and Matt Eisenfeld stood at a corner bus stop that was just down the hill from Sara’s apartment and near a vegetable market.

  Minutes later, a red and white commuter bus pulled up. Matt and Sara got on. They paid their fares and shuffled toward the back where a group of soldiers, home on weekend leaves, stood with duffels and backpacks. The bus turned onto Emek Refaim Street, a busy, winding thoroughfare that runs from the city’s southern neighborhoods and eventually approaches the walls of Jerusalem’s “Old City.” Matt grabbed a seat by a window on the driver’s side of the bus. Sara sat down next to him, on the aisle.

  From a seat across the aisle and near the bus’s rear door, Leah Stein Mousa, a hospital administrator who grew up in New York City but had lived more than two decades in Jerusalem’s San Simon neighborhood, watched the young couple settle into their seats. “I could tell they were Americans because they spoke English,” Mousa later remembered, still bearing traces of her New York accent. “I could also see they were in love.”

  If there is a bus that defines Jerusalem, it is the one Sara and Matt rode that day. The Number 18 bus, often simply called “the 18,” is the numeric symbol for the Hebrew word, Chai—to life. Much like New York City’s “A” subway line—the so-called “A Train” immortalized by the bouncy tune written by Billy Strayhorn that became a staple of the Duke Ellington orchestra—the Number 18 bus, operated by Israel’s Egged bus line, is a transportation icon, traversing Jerusalem’s diverse neighborhoods, like a thread that connects different pieces of colorful fabric. The Number 18 bus route starts on the western edges of Jerusalem and winds through the hills near Mount Herzl, then loops through the working class streets of San Simon and skirts the edge of the industrial zone of ­Talpiot before turning onto Emek Rafaim Street and cutting through the ­German Colony, home of many diplomats, academics, and journalists. After the bus climbs a series of hills toward the limestone walls of ­Jerusalem’s Old City and the Jaffa Gate, it turns onto Jaffa Road, and passes city hall, the police station and several miles of small shops and cafes before rolling into ­Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station.

  The passengers are generally a demographic equivalent of a tossed salad—proud Arabs whose families may have fled to West Bank refugee camps after Israel’s founding in 1948, students from Hasidic schools whose families have persevered in Jerusalem for centuries, Israeli soldiers home on weekend leaves and Christian backpackers from Europe or the United States trying to trace the steps of Jesus of Nazareth and his first-century disciples. On any given day, the bus might also be filled with clerks, grocers, government bureaucrats, students, and tourists—a cross-section of Jerusalem’s workers.

  Sara Duker had long marveled at the mix of lives and personalities on Jerusalem’s buses. A few weeks before, in an e-mail to friends at Barnard College in Manhattan, she wrote: “Those of you who have been here before know that bus-riding is a quintessential Israeli experience—the opportunity to come into contract with the true national character.”

  February 25, 1996 was no different on the Number 18 bus.

  Yonatan Barnea, a twenty-year-old Israeli soldier who lived in the German Colony, was heading back to his base. His father, Nahum, one of Israel’s most influential newspaper columnists, rose early and drove his son to the bus stop, then headed to his office to see what kind of news would emerge that day.

  At another stop, Jeffery Sosland, an American graduate student who was in Israel to study how the region’s limited water resources had impacted politics, also got on in the German Colony. Like Matt and Sara, he was also heading to Jordan. But he planned to catch a charter bus at a stop closer to the Old City. Matt and Sara were heading to the Central Bus Terminal.

  Jana Kushnirov, a thirty-six-year-old mother who emigrated from the Ukraine three years earlier, got on at another stop with her thirty-seven-year-old husband, Anatoli. The couple was looking for a new apartment that morning and left their two children, an eight-year-old boy and five-month-old girl, with a babysitter. At other stops there was Peretz Gantz, sixty-one, who escaped the Nazis as a teenager; Daniel Biton, forty-three, a gardener; Masuda Amar, a fifty-nine-year-old grandmother of five; Wael Jumah Kawasmeh, a twenty-three-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem who planned to marry in a month; and Ira Weinstein, fifty-three, a butcher who had grown up in New York City and had moved to Israel.

  Sara and Matt, while only in their twenties, were experienced travelers, accustomed to moving easily among the kind of diverse group of passengers who boarded the Number 18 bus that morning. During the previous summer, Sara had flown to California and Siberia on a research trip. A few years earlier Matt had spent several weeks in China.

  On this day, they planned to take the Number 18 bus to Jerusalem’s Central Bus Terminal. From there, they figured they could board another bus that would take them down the spine of the Negev Desert to the Israeli port city of Eilat on the Red Sea. They would cross into Jordan and catch yet another bus to the archeological sites at Petra.

  In many ways, their trip to Jordan was a key sign of how well the Oslo peace process was working. For the first time in decades, Israeli Jews could cross into Jordan and feel safe. And yet, Sara and Matt both knew that Israel, and the surrounding areas, could erupt in violence at any moment.

  On this same day two years earlier, while waiting for morning prayers to begin at a yeshiva in the Israeli community of Efrat in the West Bank, Matt and a friend, Edward Bernstein, watched in silence as a line of ambulances raced toward Hebron to care for those who had been wounded in the shooting by Baruch Goldstein. “Matt was very upset. We all were,” Bernstein recalled.

  Two days after that attack, Sara, who had just begun to date Ma
tt and was spending a semester sabbatical from college immersing herself in Jewish studies in Jerusalem, wrote in her diary how the Hebron shootings had made her “nervous.” She attended a peace rally, then mused in her diary that Jews and Muslims “should be able to coexist.” Less than a week later, she recorded another milestone in her diary, after taking a walk near Jaffa Road. “I had my first bomb scare,” Sara wrote.

  Now in Jerusalem again, Matt and Sara had not been close to any bombings. Indeed, there had been no significant suicide attacks in Israel since the previous summer. But there were still reasons to be worried.

  Two months earlier Matt had sipped coffee in the study room of the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem and studied the newspaper coverage of the Shin Bet killing of Yahya Ayyash. It was obviously a triumphant moment for Israel’s security forces.

  Matt fell silent as he read about the exploding cell phone that killed Ayyash—a story that seemed more like a plot from a James Bond movie than an actual police operation. Then Matt looked up at his friend and fellow rabbinical student across the table, Shai Held. “Lots of people are cheering about this,” Matt said. “But someone is going to die for this.”

  At five-foot-five, Matt Eisenfeld still had the wiry, muscular frame that had made him a stand-out high school wrestler and track and cross-country runner back in West Hartford, Connecticut. But now, in Jerusalem, in his second year of studies to become a rabbi, he had started to grow a beard—not heavy and thick yet, but distinctive and studious nonetheless. He joked with friends that he let his whiskers grow because he had grown tired of shaving. But Matt’s scruffy beard was, on some level, a sign of the seriousness he brought to his religious calling and the fact that he was stepping into a new phase of his adult life.