Bus on Jaffa Road Page 8

  Shalikashvili explained that the US military had many options, but that an attack by American forces in Cuba posed major problems. An invasion would require large numbers of US troops, with a sustained ground war. Air Force attacks might prove to be useless, because Castro kept his fighter jets in fortified bunkers. A Naval blockade would likely hurt Cuban civilians instead of punishing its military elite.

  The group next considered economic sanctions. But the US had already imposed a widespread economic embargo on Cuba. Not many other economic options were available, though Republicans in Congress had been pressuring to extend those sanctions with passage of the proposed Helms-Burton Act.

  The group raised one more possibility: What about making Castro pay by taking financial assets that had been frozen in US banks during the early 1960s?

  In general, the idea of taking another nation’s property or, in this case, financial investments, as punishment was considered poor policy. Yes, it might be a way of quickly imposing a punishment—the equivalent of a monetary fine—against a rogue foreign state. But, as most experienced diplomats had long maintained, such quick-fix punishments could set dangerous precedents that might lead to retributions against American assets in other countries. If the US took billions in financial investments from a misbehaving nation, what would stop that nation, or others, from taking US property overseas? What’s more, since the 1970s, US laws specifically gave “foreign sovereign immunity” to most nations, meaning that the US could seize assets or property of foreign nations only in specific cases and generally after the matter had been argued in court. Changing that policy would require new laws.

  Despite these concerns, Nuccio found that the idea of making Cuba pay with some sort of financial fine for its attack on the Brothers to the Rescue planes quickly became a popular option within the White House. At 4 p.m. on Monday President Clinton stepped to the podium in the White House briefing room to announce how America would respond to the downing of the Brothers planes. There would be no military strike, no blockade. Clinton said America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, had called an emergency session of the UN security council to condemn Cuba and to “present the case for sanctions” until Cuba “agrees to abide by its obligation to respect civilian aircraft and until it compensates the families of the victims.”

  Then, Clinton announced a four-point plan for action by the federal government. He called for travel restrictions, an upgrade in anti-Castro radio broadcasts, and pledged that he would no longer oppose but now supported an extension of the embargo as part of the Helms-Burton Act. But most notable and, ultimately, most controversial, was Clinton’s first recommendation—to compensate the families of the Brothers pilots with Cuban government funds that had been withheld years before by the US government.

  “I am asking that Congress pass legislation that will provide immediate compensation to the families, something to which they are entitled under international law, out of Cuba’s blocked assets here in the United States,” Clinton said.

  The president offered no details about how much money was available or exactly what international laws he was referring to. But as a postscript Clinton added:

  “If Congress passes this legislation, we can provide the compensation immediately.”

  They did not know it at the time, but Clinton’s words would ultimately become a major driving force for the parents of Sara Duker and Matthew Eisenfeld, and for the parents of Alisa Flatow, as they sought accountability and justice for the murders of their children.

  They too wanted the killers of their children to pay. On this day, however, they had no idea how much Fidel Castro and the Brothers to the Rescue would play a role in helping them achieve that goal.

  First, someone had to find the killers.

  In Jerusalem, Israeli police and Shin Bet agents were already on the trail of the bombers. But it was a confused, complex and frustratingly familiar trail.

  Within hours of the explosions, Hamas claimed responsibility for the attacks. But there was no single, reliable message from Hamas. A leaflet, purportedly prepared by Hamas, proclaimed that “the attacks were a painful blow” in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Yahya “The Engineer” Ayyash. The leaflet also promised that future attacks would be canceled if Israel promised to stop hunting for Hamas fugitives and released the group’s members who had been jailed for previous attacks. Other messages, allegedly from Hamas, contained no such promise, but nonetheless offered more information on the motivation for the attacks. Anonymous callers, who said they were Hamas members, contacted Israel Radio’s Arabic service and the Reuters news agency and repeated that the bombings were meant to avenge the death of Ayyash. But the callers also pointed out that the attacks were meant to coincide with the second anniversary of the killings of the twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in Hebron by Baruch Goldstein.

  Beyond those brief and strident statements, Israeli investigators faced a more formidable dilemma. Besides the suicide bomber, who else was involved in the bombing plot?

  Shin Bet and Israel’s National Police knew from experience that suicide bombers rarely acted alone or on impulse. A suicide bombing often involved weeks of planning, suitcases full of cash and explosives, and a tightly knit, well-trained team of operatives that included scouts, drivers, guards, and a bomb-maker who doubled as the ringleader and recruited suicide bombers. As suicide bombings increased in Israel and researchers began to study the phenomenon, they discovered that the bomber was often the youngest, least experienced, and most politically naïve member of the team. And while the suicide bomber usually died in an attack, the others escaped.

  So where were the other operatives who carried out Sunday’s bombings on Jaffa Road and at the bus stop in Ashkelon? And were they planning other attacks?

  Investigators had the name of the bomber—Majdi Abu Wardeh—from an ID card they found at the Jaffa Road bombing. And they knew that Wardeh had grown up in the al-Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron. But when Shin Bet agents arrived at the camp and found Wardeh’s parents in a small concrete home halfway up a narrow street on the side of a hill, they found few leads.

  Wardeh’s father, Muhammed, a teacher, and his mother, Intesar, said they had been looking for their son for two days. “He left on Friday, and he told us he was going to Israel to work,” Muhammed said, explaining that he did not feel his son would participate in a suicide bombing.

  By late Sunday, however, Muhammed and Intesar Wardeh had no choice but to accept the terrible truth that their son had blown himself up aboard a bus in Jerusalem that morning. The parents gave the Shin Bet agents DNA, which had been linked to the charred head found near the bus wreckage on Jaffa Road. Also, from talking to their son’s friends, Muhammed and Intesar learned that their son had not gone to Jerusalem directly but had gone to Ramallah with his cousin, Mohammad.

  Shin Bet agents were already contacting sources in Ramallah, focusing in particular on a Hamas cell at the city’s Birzeit University. After questioning several students affiliated with the university, Shin Bet contacted two Palestinian security officers, one of whom turned out to be the driver of the blue Opel that brought Majdi Abu Wardeh to the Jaffa Road bus stop. After a lengthy interrogation, the driver offered a name of a Hamas operative they had not heard of before—Hassan Salameh.

  Now, where was Salameh?

  In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres called a news conference to discuss the bombings. He said Israel still supported the Oslo peace process and would continue to negotiate with the Palestinians—and also hunt for terrorists. “We will keep all the commitments we made, and neither the Hamas nor anyone else will move us from this,” he added. “At the same time, no one will stop us from acting against Hamas with all means and in all ways.”

  Yet the day’s attacks had clearly changed the tone of Israel’s support for the Oslo process. And even as Peres repeated his allegiance to the process f
or which he shared a Nobel peace prize with his predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, and with Yasser Arafat, he still seemed subdued and resigned to even more pain.

  “I know deep in my heart that on the way to win peace, we shall have to pay a heavy toll for it,” Peres said.

  Late in the afternoon, Peres toured the Jaffa Road bombing scene, guarded by dozens of police. Until now, Peres had maintained a formidable lead against his challenger in the upcoming elections, Benjamin Netanyahu. Some polls still placed Peres more than 20 points ahead of Netanyahu. Others said the gap had fallen to 10 points. Whatever the case, Peres still had a clear lead, analysts said. And while Netanyahu quickly made a point of announcing in the hours after the Jaffa Road and Ashkelon bombings that he would not criticize Peres on this day and in the coming days for the attacks, Peres seemed suddenly vulnerable. It was as if the bombings—especially the attack in the heart of Jerusalem’s bustling Jaffa Road business district—had ripped off an emotional scab and reminded Israelis that the Oslo peace process had not really brought peace.

  As Peres walked toward the blackened frame of the Number 18 bus, a crowd of onlookers booed.

  “With blood and fire, we will throw out Peres,” several shouted.

  “Peres go home,” others yelled.

  “Murderer.”

  “Traitor.”

  Still others chanted “Peres is next”—what many believed to be a sordid reference to the fact that Peres’s predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, had been shot to death by an Israeli who wanted to put a halt to the Oslo process.

  Later in the day, Peres announced he was again sealing the borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

  In Gaza City, Terje Roed-Larsen heard about the bombing in Jerusalem that morning, soon after waking up, and instantly remembered the warning he received the day before from Yasser Arafat. As he recalled years later, the news stunned him, but not necessarily because yet another bloody attack had taken place and innocent people had been killed. As an experienced Middle East diplomat, Larsen had seen far too much killing in the region, much of it to avenge earlier killings. He knew the cycle of death and, in particular, how frustrating it had become to men like him who had dedicated so many years trying to convince both sides to end the shootings and bombings and to embark on the difficult journey of building secure nation-states. What shocked Larsen was Arafat’s warning and what it meant.

  Larsen knew that one of the great hazards of Middle East negotiations was having to deal with the mysterious and often elusive and unpredictable Arafat who, with his pistol on his hip and his military uniform, still fancied himself as a guerrilla fighter and yet also wanted to be seen as a respectable diplomat who was as comfortable talking with a US president at the White House or chatting with world leaders at the United Nations in New York City as he was in rallying a crowd of several thousand Palestinians in Ramallah to resist the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

  Israel’s leaders knew this firsthand. Shimon Peres’s staff of advisors came to see Arafat not so much as a trustworthy ally or even a respected adversary but as an often-devious player who publicly proclaimed himself as a man of peace but chose to ignore some of the more violent Palestinian groups. “Arafat knew the impact of terror,” said Peres’s close friend and confidant Avi Gill. “And Arafat always held on to the violent option.” What worried Avi Gill and others in Shimon Peres’s inner circle was whether Iran’s operatives had infiltrated Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups—and, if so, what Arafat planned to do about it.

  In Gaza, following the bombing of the Number18 bus, Terje Roed-Larsen was not weighing the possible machinations of Iran. He was trying to sort out the meaning of Arafat’s seemingly direct, yet typically cryptic warning. In all of his encounters with the Palestinian leader, Larsen had rarely experienced anything quite like the brief conversation on Saturday in which Arafat urged him to avoid Jerusalem on Sunday. To Larsen, Arafat’s tone held even greater meaning than his words. In Larsen’s mind, Arafat was delivering a warning. And now that a bomb had exploded, indeed, a bomb that would clearly cause Israel’s conservatives to again question the wisdom of pursing the Oslo peace process, Larsen had come face to face with one of the deepest concerns shared by many diplomats who came to the Middle East with good intentions only to find themselves mired in rhetorical quicksand and an emotional maze that blurred history, theology, politics, and language.

  Did Arafat, the recipient of a Nobel peace prize, know that this terrorist bombing was going to take place? If so, how could Larsen ever trust him again? And on a more practical note, should Larsen confront Arafat?

  “I felt Arafat had knowledge beforehand that this attack was going to happen,” Larsen said years later.

  For now, however, Larsen decided to keep quiet.

  Apart from the massive hunt for the bombers by police and Shin Bet agents, the jockeying of various political factions for leverage and the looming debates about assigning blame for this latest attack, a delicate and gruesome question had still not been answered by nightfall. How many people had died in the bombing?

  When terrorist attacks take place in Israel, the counting of the dead—and, more importantly, the identification of them—inevitably falls to the group of men and women who work in a series of tan, flat-roofed, cinder-block buildings that are located behind a walled compound on the outskirts of the ancient city of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. Officially, the compound is called the National Institute of Forensic Medicine or sometimes the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute as a reference to its location in the community of Abu Kabir. But to Israelis, it carries a far more mundane name—the national morgue.

  The bodies of Matthew Eisenfeld and Sara Duker were brought to the morgue in an Israeli ambulance, then placed in what their autopsy reports described as a “refrigeration chamber” to await an examination by a pathologist.

  At 11 a.m., the institute’s director, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, removed Sara’s body and brought it to an autopsy room. In an adjoining room, another pathologist, Dr. Esther Daniels Phillips, began to examine Matt’s body.

  Neither doctor chose to perform a complete autopsy, which would involve examining Matt’s and Sara’s internal organs, though both doctors took photographs and x-rays. Hiss had learned from years as a battlefield physician with the Israeli Defense Forces, that the cause of death after a bombing is often so obvious that there is no need to examine a victim’s heart, liver, and brain. “Often the shock of a blast has a severe impact on the human body,” Hiss explained. “Someone can be killed by a blast that takes place fifteen meters away or farther.”

  As Hiss looked down on Sara’s body, he made note in his records that she was still wearing her belt pouch containing her credit card and bank card, along with the travelers cheques she brought for the trip to Petra. One of her hiking boots was missing. And her left earring had become detached and entangled in her hair. But her watch, still attached to her left wrist, was ticking.

  Matt was still wearing his green coat with the brown collar and his black Reebok shoes. But, unlike Sara, who appeared to have been killed instantly, Dr. Phillips found that paramedics had placed an IV needle into Matt’s right forearm. Did this mean that Matt was still alive when paramedics arrived at the scene? At the moment, the question seemed pointless. After all, Matt had died. But in the years to come, that tiny needle hole in Matt’s arm would be viewed by some as evidence that he had suffered before he died.

  At the morgue that day, the conclusion of how Matt and Sara died was clear. Both doctors resorted to identical phrasing in their reports. “Death,” they wrote, “was caused by explosion of explosive material.”

  They would use that same phrase often that day as other bodies were brought to the morgue.

  By nightfall, the bodies had been counted and identified. Twenty-five people had been killed on the Number 18 bus, along with the bomber, Majdi Abu Wardeh. (Another ba
dly burned bus rider, Ira Weinstein, a dual Israeli-US citizen, would die six weeks later, bringing the total to twenty-six.) In the Ashkelon bombing, one bus rider had been killed, along with the bomber.

  It was the highest single-day death toll in Israel from a terrorist attack in more than two decades.

  On Sunday evening, the doorbell sounded and Arline Duker opened her front door. Two men stood on the porch. Arline knew one man well—a rabbi from Sara’s high school. She had seen the other man on television and had come to admire him for his eloquence and passion.

  “I’m Stephen Flatow,” the man said.

  Arline felt relieved to see him. She did not need to be reminded that only ten months earlier Flatow’s daughter, Alisa, had been killed by a suicide bomber who crashed an explosives-filled van into the side of a bus on the Gaza Strip.

  Arline also knew that Flatow, a powerfully built man with round shoulders, thick forearms, and penetrating eyes, had made a point of not remaining quiet about his daughter’s death, either in comments to the media or in appearances. Could Arline take on such a role? Arline sensed that, like Alisa Flatow, Matt and Sara would become symbols of the tragic randomness of terrorism and the growing problems with Oslo peace process as a path to real peace in the Middle East.

  During the day, in brief moments when she was able to set aside the shock and emotional sadness over losing Sara, Arline thought how the attack on the Number 18 bus would change her life. TV news trucks had already parked on the street. News reporters knocked on the door. Photographers clustered on the sidewalk. Arline felt an intense desire to protect herself and her two other daughters. Yet, she was also resigned that her family would be in the public eye for at least the near future.

  “This is going to be a very public experience,” Arline remembered thinking to herself. “My life as I know it is going to be over.”