What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? A Memoir

Jerusalem in Five Acts: Jerusalem is a traumatized land. It is a land that has been held down against its will and forced to witness the plunging of knives and tearing of flesh for thousands of years without pause. It has been the victim of a divine session of water-boarding, the land forced to drink an endless flow of blood. When Cain killed Abel – the first recorded act of biblical violence – God told the murderer, “The voice of the blood of your brother is calling to me from the ground.”⁴ The land has always borne witness. And witnesses rarely forget.

In the arc of biblical history, what follows may not be the first time a trauma came to Jerusalem. But for me, as a Jew, I cannot begin the story of this land anywhere but the moment God called to Abraham and said, “Take your son, your only son, the son whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, where there you will offer him up as a sacrifice.”⁵

Forget that Isaac was the child Sarah carried in her old age after a lifetime of barrenness, after a lifetime of praying for seed to grow in her belly. And forget that Isaac was the child God had promised Abraham, was the long-awaited heir God said would inherit the land of Israel. And forget that Abraham was living in the land of Israel because, when God spoke to him out of the blue at his home in modern-day Iraq and said, “Go to a land I will show you,”⁶ Abraham inexplicably went.

Forget all that. What should be noticed is the way God commands Abraham to commit filicide. “Take your son, your only son, the son whom you love, Isaac.” See anything unusual? The medieval rabbis – who viewed every biblical word as essential – sure did. Their question: Why did God identify Isaac in four different ways when commanding Abraham to sacrifice him? Why not just say “Take Isaac” and get it over with?

Many answers have been given, but one from Nachmanides, a thirteenth-century Spanish commentator, sends chills: “[God is repetitive] to make the commandment greater.” In other words, God’s intention is to make the task so fucking hard by hammering Abraham over the head with reminders of how painful it will be to kill his son that going through with it won’t just merit normal commandment-abiding points, but super-metaphysical bonus points as well.⁷

But the land. Jerusalem.

Abraham takes his son to a place called Moriah, drags him up a mountain of God’s choosing, and there builds an altar of stone upon which he binds Isaac with twine. This place, this land of Moriah, is a mystery. Where is it? With few clues, the medieval commentators artfully concluded that it must be Jerusalem. And the mountain? It’s the Temple Mount, the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City, where the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock now dominate a political/religious space that has been the geographic fulcrum of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for as long as memory serves.

And it is this space where Abraham raised the knife, prepared to plunge it into Isaac’s flesh, before an angel stopped the bloodshed mid-stroke. It is this space, in the heart of Jerusalem, where Isaac is traumatized by his father’s attempted murder. The Bible says nothing of this trauma, of course. But it doesn’t need to. Isaac disappears from the text for several chapters, is never seen with his father again, and only surfaces to attend Abraham’s funeral, unable to step forward until his father is dead and gone.

When thinking about Israel as a traumatized place, I begin with the Binding of Isaac because of its incomprehensibility – that such a trauma was orchestrated by God. The story makes little sense, the commandment going beyond any recognizable reflection of the good, humane world in which we hope to live. And His preferred place in that world for such an incomprehensible test of brutality? Jerusalem.

It’s been this way ever since.

Act I – Thursday, July 18, 2002: For several months during the spring and summer of 2002, high-level talks between Palestinian and Israeli officials had gone dormant, the negotiations for peace having been obliterated by unchecked violence. But by early July, after a time of relative calm, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres had quietly begun meeting with several Palestinian cabinet ministers.⁸ An attempt at a new beginning. Again.

Then, on July 16, predictably, the violence came, violence meant to railroad such talks. It worked.

Activists from Fatah’s Tanzim – the Palestinian Authority’s new-guard armed wing – ambushed an Israeli bus in the West Bank. Then, a double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, leaving scores of civilians dead over a two-day span. So familiar.

In response, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon banned Peres from talking further with the Palestinians. Then, he ordered the borders immediately closed, borders which were virtually closed already, sealed since June.⁹ The Prime Minister, it appeared, wanted retribution after the attacks – as so often is the case, each side reacting reflexively. He was waiting for the right moment, the moment that would come, days later, the moment I refuse to accept.

But first, July 18, the day Peres was forced to abandon talks with the Palestinians, talks that would have focused on easing those travel restrictions keeping Palestinian workers home – travel restrictions meant to keep the terrorists out.¹⁰

July 18, when Israeli families held funerals for the innocent – for the mothers, fathers, and infants murdered by masked gunmen running and firing and screaming in Allah’s name.

July 18, when Jamie took me to breakfast at our favorite café, where we enjoyed an Israeli breakfast of eggs, cucumber-tomato salad, and toasted pita.

July 18, thirteen days before Jamie would bend down beneath a cafeteria table, reaching for a workbook, just wanting to study for an exam.

Sharon and Israeli military officials would reveal that, to them, what happened was meaningless. Much of the world would see it as extraordinary. In less than three days, it wouldn’t matter, for the event and the momentum it produced would be buried under rubble and the wailing of sirens in Gaza. Arguably an unprecedented moment in the Middle East. A moment that happened. A moment which disappeared in the desert sand.

Here is what happened: on Saturday, July 20, Palestinian Authority officials from Fatah – the Palestinian Authority’s largest political wing – met with high-ranking members of the Islamic groups responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. They met with Hamas. They met with Islamic Jihad. The goal? Convince them to discontinue the use of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians as a legitimate form of resistance. Convince them to stop killing innocent people. Convince them that terror wasn’t working. Never would.

Extraordinary. Or meaningless.

The meetings were the result of a European-led diplomatic effort supported by Jordanian and Saudi delegations, an effort described by journalists and Palestinian officials as unprecedented. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, one of several observers to the talks, indicated the groups had been productive during initial meetings and had quickly begun working jointly on a ceasefire document – a document stating that it was time for the Palestinians to make a strategic shift in their struggle for independence.¹¹

According to a key, unnamed Palestinian figure close to the talks, the shift was not only strategic, but social in scope, precipitated by the unease among prominent Palestinians about the destructive forces that suicide bombings were unleashing within Palestinian society:

Now, questioning the morality of suicide bombings against civilians, on the surface, shouldn’t impress. Nobody obtains morality points for questioning whether blowing up innocent people is a mistake. However, what does impress is this: those evil enough to have championed suicide bombings as a legitimate form of resistance were reportedly being pressured by Palestinian society – by political, economic, and social forces – to consider abandoning terror against civilians. Not solely out of a concern for Israeli civilians, it should be noted. But because such tactics were damaging the fabric of Palestinian society, were doing more harm than good.

And thus Hamas and Islamic Jihad, invited to sit at a negotiating table set by the Palestinian Authority, not only accepted, but engaged in productive dialogue. The talks generated a fair amount of optimism from observers not accustomed to seeing these groups meet, much less agree on anything. However, an anonymous official qualified this optimism by stating, “It [will] be hard for the Palestinian Authority to reach a deal to stop bombing attacks as long as Israel keeps carrying out military operations against the Palestinian people.”¹³

Propaganda. Political posturing. Prophesy.

Act III – Saturday night, July 20, 2002: Those in the Knesset, Israel’s seat of government, knew of the meetings being held on Saturday between the various Palestinian factions. They also knew of their significance, their theoretical potential. And it was this knowledge, perhaps, which inspired Sharon to send Peres – banned from speaking with Palestinian officials only two days earlier – back to the negotiating table. For on Saturday night, Peres met with the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, and Ahmed Razak Yehiyeh, the Palestinian Authority minister responsible for security forces and the lead negotiator for the ongoing ceasefire talks amongst Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority.¹⁴

In their three-hour meeting, Peres, Erekat, and Yehiyeh discussed many issues related to Israel’s role in improving life for the Palestinians. They talked about easing curfews in the West Bank and about opening borders so that Palestinian workers could reach their jobs within Israel. They talked about scaling back Israel’s military occupation of major cities and towns. They talked about life’s quality and how to improve it. For the Palestinians, anyway. A one-sided conversation. A start.¹⁵

Few things were said publicly after the meeting concluded, though Israeli minister Danny Naveh, who also took part in the talks, indicated that Israel had a “clear interest” in improving its own security by improving the economic situation amongst the Palestinian people.¹⁶

The words weren’t empty.

Immediately, funds Israel owed the Palestinian Authority, funds which Israel had frozen since the Intifada ignited in the summer of 2000, were transferred to Yasser Arafat’s government. Not all of it, but a significant amount: $200 million. It was meant as a gesture, a show of good faith, something that had not been done in over two years, a time during which Israel refused to hand over customs and tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority for fear such money would be funneled directly to organizations of terror, would be used to support the violent uprising.

Now, after one of the first reported meetings between top Israeli and Palestinian officials in over three months, Israel was willing to hand over the funds, and Peres, on Sunday morning, indicated that if the money transferred was not misused, Israel would be willing to hand over all $420 million it owed.¹⁷ Just like that.

Just like that. The about-face was stunning. Perplexing. What was said in that meeting, at an undisclosed location, late that Saturday night? What did Erekat tell Peres? Did he implore the senior Israeli official to consider that, this time, things were different, that things were happening between Palestinian leaders that had never happened before? Did he reveal that Fatah officials had, for the previous three months, been flying secretly to Tehran to meet with Hamas’s senior spiritual leaders? And that these leaders had, for the first time, agreed to give “silent support” to a ceasefire calling upon the cessation of civilian terror? Did Erekat continue by revealing to Peres that Fatah’s jailed leader, Marwan Barghouti – whose popularity among the young, armed members of the Tanzim was unparalleled – had given his support to such a ceasefire?

Much of this must have been revealed to Peres, for in their meeting Erekat handed him a report revealing the significance of the ceasefire declaration – then a work-in-progress – that Fatah officials were hammering out with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a report that implored Israel to cease its targeted assassinations in order for such a ceasefire to succeed.¹⁸

I wonder if Erekat slid the actual declaration across the table, allowing Peres to see its text, to understand intimately the significance of the words being agreed upon by rival, militant factions. Is that what created more momentum toward peace in a twenty-four-hour period than had been achieved in the previous two years?

After finding an archived copy of the ceasefire declaration – along with a letter to Israel that would have accompanied it – I can only conclude one thing: Peres was handed some papers. And after scanning them, he blinked and thought, Please let this be the moment history demands of us.

Text of the ceasefire declaration:

Act IV – Late Monday night, July 22, 2002: Ninety minutes after the ceasefire’s text was finalized, Israel attacked. It was an American-made F-16 that dropped the one-ton bomb in the crowded Gaza neighborhood. The blast killed Sheik Salah Shahada, a senior Hamas leader, and demolished the apartment building in which he was sleeping. It also partially destroyed two adjacent apartment buildings, killing along with its mark children, the elderly, entire families.¹⁹

Here is what is now known: by Monday night, every major Israeli player knew about the Palestinian ceasefire declaration. Sharon was getting regular updates on its progress from European diplomats working alongside the Jordanian and Saudi officials in a small room in Jenin. And ninety minutes after word came that the document had been finished, that Fatah officials had settled on a workable version ready for international release at daybreak – declaring a unilateral cessation of suicide attacks – Israel’s Prime Minister approved the targeted bombing.²⁰

Why. Not a question, a statement. An exhalation.

After the dust had cleared, after all fifteen bodies had finally been recovered from the rubble in Gaza, a July 25 New York Times article would confirm what most assumed: Israel didn’t believe in the ceasefire effort, and wasn’t bothered by having undermined it. The article revealed the attitudes and postures that allowed the bombing to take place, a bombing that came minutes after perhaps – this being the operative word – the most important step Palestinian leaders had collectively taken toward ending terror as a strategic option in years.

Israel felt differently:

Nine days later, on July 31, a Hamas terror cell blew up the cafeteria at Hebrew University. It was a Hamas cell taking orders from a Hamas organization that, according to media reports, had finally hinted, during ceasefire negotiations with Fatah, a willingness to shift away from terror attacks and their all-or-nothing stance: the destruction of the State of Israel by any means. Not a change in ideology. That never changed. But strategically, Hamas seemed on the unprecedented verge of scaling back its violent strategy – even if temporarily. It was aware of the punishment Palestinians were enduring because of its suicide bombings,²² aware that the Israel Defense Force’s brutal and incessant presence in West Bank towns, the choking checkpoints and curfews, were partly a response to men strapping their bodies with explosives and walking into fruit markets, restaurants, shoe stores. Hamas, it appeared, was beginning to shoot for less lofty goals, if the destruction of a democratic state can be viewed as lofty. It wanted the Israeli military out of the West Bank, wanted Israelis out of the West Bank, wanted a chance to achieve lasting religious and social improvements within Palestinian society. Most importantly, though, it wanted a chance to win big at the polls when the next election came. The decision was almost purely political, the organization beginning to realize that terror, and the military wrath it brought upon Palestinians, was now doing more political harm than good, was making it more difficult to win popular support among secular and moderate Palestinians. So a partial ceasefire, a movement away from killing civilians while still maintaining its militaristic voice, was showing itself to be a savvy, practical move.

But that was before late Monday night, July 22. The night Sheikh Salah Shahada was killed by a one-ton bomb. After that, revenge was reclaimed.

A revenge which tore open my wife’s scorched body and killed our two friends.

To understand why he was target number one for the Israeli military, why Sharon could have cared less about some theoretical ceasefire when Israeli intelligence officials barged into the Prime Minister’s office on the night of July 22, claiming they had pinpointed Shahada’s whereabouts, it’s necessary to understand Shahada the terrorist.

Having founded Hamas’s military wing, he was terror. And he was still serving as the leader of Hamas when the one-ton bomb fell upon him from the night sky. In the early days of Hamas’s violent ascension, Shahada wrote the book on suicide bombings, and had been teaching its message to militant ideologues for over ten years,²⁴ a span during which he planned hundreds of attacks.²⁵ He murdered and created murderers. He was good at his job.

After escaping one in a series of failed Israeli assassination attempts in early July of 2002 – just weeks before the one that would finally get him – Shahada had brazenly revealed on an Islamic website the rudimentary tactics Hamas used to ensure the success of its terror operations. They were tactics he invented and saved for posterity. Among them: “We take advantage of any security breakthrough [reported by network intelligence], define the target, and take some camera shots to decide whether the operation will be conducted or not.”²⁶

A camera shot of Shahada shows an image the Western world has come to associate with Islamic extremist leaders: the long, black beard; the white layers of flowing cloth covering wrinkled, olive skin wrapped around eyes that appear singularly focused. The association in this case was accurate: he had become not only one of the most influential Islamic leaders fighting Israel’s existence, but one of the most extreme as well. In the years before his death, he had grown close to Hamas’s ailing spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. So close, in fact, that many within the movement were looking toward Shahada as Yassin’s successor, as next in line.²⁷ As divine.

Shahada’s death sent supporters into hysterics – hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Gaza for his funeral (and those of the other victims).²⁸ Internally, Hamas operatives were set aflame, as revealed by the following statement released after Shahada’s death:

After the attack and the images that relentlessly played on Palestinian television, there would be no chance for a ceasefire. Everyone knew this, and the international community took out its frustrations on Israel with harsh statements of condemnation, as per usual. But this time, it wasn’t the typical scenario: the Western world (Europe) bullying Israel with one-sided expectations of restraint, leaving the United States to step in and defend its democratic baby brother. This time was different, for the White House, remarkably, joined a deafening chorus of disapproval for Israel’s actions, something the Bush administration – itself still reeling from the terror of September 11, 2001 – very rarely did. White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer summed up the President’s view thus:

This statement from the White House – severe by its own standards – merely underscored the powerful reverberations that rippled out from Sharon’s decision to attack, with some critics cynically going so far as to accuse Sharon of intentionally sabotaging the historic ceasefire talks.³² Diplomats intimately involved in the negotiations, having witnessed a senior Fatah official meet with Hamas leaders to hammer out a workable draft just two hours before the F-16 strike, certainly felt this was the case, as evidenced by an assessment from an international mediator, who wished to remain anonymous:

Even though Sharon remained defiant in the face of such criticism, calling Israel’s targeted assassination “one of the biggest successes,”³⁴ there were immediate calls from within Israel’s government to investigate what happened, to find out how the military’s intelligence – which claimed the attack would have minimal collateral damage – could have been so woefully misguided. Nobody was happy. It had been a disaster. A horrible mistake.

The above events, stitched together using journalistic reports, reports that almost unilaterally point the implicit finger of blame upon Israel, make up only part of the story. For there are partial-truths, details left out, details found buried just beneath the surface. It’s a matter of narrative construction – a matter of history cut and pasted by those in the business of disseminating information. Which story to tell?

The following detail comes not from a journalist’s pen, but from counter-terrorism experts at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel (ICT), which proclaims itself as “the leading academic institute for counter-terrorism in the world.”³⁵ See, what wasn’t reported in any newspaper after the Hebrew University bombing was the fact that after September 11, 2001, the U.S. State Department had updated its list of terrorist organizations, placing Hamas on it. It was a move that reverberated loudly in Gaza. Hamas’s literature became obsessed with the influence and presence of the United States in Israel, calling it, among other things, “the patron and participant in the Zionist project in the region.” It was an early sign that Hamas operatives were beginning to consider the United States as another enemy at home, and its citizens as fair and desirable targets.³⁶ And in the winter of 2001, Hamas’s intentions were made clear in a statement intended for world consumption: “Americans are the enemies of the Palestinian people” and will now be considered “a target for future attacks.”³⁷

This detail was absent from newspaper accounts after the bombing of Hebrew University’s cafeteria, in which five Americans were among the nine killed. Also absent was mention that Hamas operatives had likely targeted the location because of the number of American students who frequented the area, had targeted it because Americans had explicitly become legitimate strategic targets of terror for Hamas. The organization had been planning to strike Americans for months, well before Shahada was killed. And the preparations for the Hebrew University bombing were made before ceasefire negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas reached their apex. It was meant to happen all along, though a ceasefire could theoretically have delayed or canceled the operation.

When Israeli officials were quoted after Shahada’s death, were asked to justify the bombing in the midst of a Palestinian ceasefire effort, no media outlet chose to substantiate their claims by going to counter-terrorism experts for a word. If they had, those Israeli officials who were made to appear as insensitive, as callous – calling the ceasefire between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority “futile” and “pointless” – would have been supported by much of the intelligence community. For ICT seemed to affirm, in a series of articles written between 1998 and 2002, Israel’s justifications for killing Shahada. It described Hamas as highly decentralized, as an impossibly chaotic organization incapable of controlling its terrorist wing, a wing composed of individual ideologues independently congregating under Hamas’s Islamic umbrella. It would have been highly unlikely for any ceasefire declarations to have actually found across-the-board adherence, much less recognition. Leadership on the ground simply didn’t exist in a traditional sense. Nobody had control over the actions of a fractured terrorist wing at a time when Hamas had no official political might.

Meaning: Israel may have been justified in assassinating Shahada; meaning: the journalists may have gotten their stories partially wrong; meaning: Israel as the bad guy worked better, sold more papers, made good copy. Blame the Jews. A common theme throughout history, no?

And absent from all media reports, after Shahada was killed, was the following excerpt contained in an article filed in late 2001 by Dr. Ely Karmon, a senior ICT researcher:

But questions remained. If Sharon’s government truly believed the ceasefire was futile, then why did Israel release funds to the Palestinian Authority? Why allow Peres to renew high-level talks when days before he had been banned from speaking with the Palestinians? These don’t seem like the actions of a government taking things lightly. They don’t square with the post-mortem justifications rattled off by Israeli officials after Shahada was killed. Things simply don’t add up. Never will.

And the fuzzy mathematical equation that led to Israel’s assassination of Shahada – and Hamas’s subsequent bombing of Hebrew University – reaches farther back into the shadowy recesses of state politics than most realize. It reaches back to calculations Israel made decades previously, which unintentionally assisted Hamas’s birth in the 1980s.⁴⁰

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood movement (from which Hamas would eventually emerge) migrated from Egypt and established itself in the Israeli-occupied territories. The movement’s overarching mission was to lead an Islamic revolution in Palestine – a social and religious awakening within a Palestinian society dominated by the PLO’s secular, nationalist stance. The Brother hood was not explicitly political in its structure or solely nationalist in its vision. Instead, it was intent on influencing Palestinian society, and thus the nation, by grabbing the hearts and minds of citizens rather than the state levers of power. It thus focused its efforts on Islamic education and social construction, building mosques and educational centers in conjunction with a focus on da‘wah – the communal development of broad-based social welfare services.⁴¹

The Brotherhood’s desire was ultimately the formation of an Islamic state, but its efforts were focused on “internal jihad” – a cultural and religious initiative within Palestinian society – rather than “external jihad” against Israel and the West. And this reformist approach adopted by the Brotherhood, this building of social and Islamic institutions from the ground up, was seen by Israel as desirable. It was seen as a potential way to weaken the PLO by mitigating its nationalist reach with a competing, cultural Islamic revolution. The Brotherhood’s war was internal. To Israel, it was innocuous. And so Israel gave “tacit consent”⁴² to its actions by ignoring its initiatives and, sometimes, even encouraging them⁴³ by allowing the Brotherhood’s institutions, unencumbered by Israeli suppression, to thrive.

During this time, the Brotherhood had no violent arm, and was not engaged institutionally in terrorism or violence directed against Israel. The organization was viewed in practice, if not in principle, as pacifist.

But things would change.

In the mid-1980s, Islamic Jihad was formed by breakaway Brotherhood activists, who created an organization that embraced a political, violent struggle against Israel. The ideological foundations of this struggle were Islamic, thus melding nationalist aspirations with religious ideology. And after several, high-profile attacks against Israel, the organization enjoyed growing popularity on the street – a popularity that did not go unnoticed by the Brotherhood.⁴⁴

Then in 1987 the Intifada erupted – an uprising that swept through Palestinian society in the form of nationalist demonstrations and nonviolent protests, giving the PLO a shot of adrenaline. The Brotherhood, which bristled at the PLO’s “claim for exclusive national authority,” saw Palestinians taking to the streets and knew it needed to make an institutional shift or risk losing its influence. The Brotherhood looked to the right and saw Islamic Jihad’s popularity. It looked to the left and saw massive crowds waving PLO banners and chanting nationalist slogans. And when it looked straight ahead, a hybrid path appeared. And Hamas was formed.

In the Intifada’s infancy, Hamas immediately became a nationalist, political movement focused on gaining power and influence, with the social and educational foci moving to the side, but not out of the picture. Sure, the Brotherhood’s original purpose remained: the Islamization of Palestine. Its methodologies, however, changed. Hamas created an Islamic Charter delineating in party terms its core principles. Among these principles was the reclamation of every inch of Palestinian land. Palestine was defined by Hamas as “an Islamic endowment” (waqf), and fighting anyone defiling a Muslim land was charged as a religious duty (fad’ayn). War with Israel thus became a core Hamas principle, a meld of its newly formed nationalism with right-wing interpretations of Islamic law.⁴⁵

The internal jihad had become external.

Killing Israelis became a national and a religious duty for an organization of growing influence. Pacifism was dead. Terror was about to be embraced as Islamic militarism became, for Hamas, both an expression of nationalism and a principal recruitment tool.

Israel hadn’t seen it coming.

All of this historical excavating is meant to uncover one thing: how Hebrew University came to be bombed. But more than that, it’s an attempt to ride history backwards in order to point a finger and say, It’s your fault. The only problem is this: I don’t have enough fingers. Because one could point to America’s flawed Middle East policy, which helped propel radical Islamists in various countries (including Osama bin Laden before the transformation of al-Qaeda). One could point to Muslim extremists’ doctrines of hate. Or to Israel’s penchant for disproportionately violent solutions to a violent problem. Or to suicide bombings and targeted assassinations. To military checkpoints and Qassam rockets. To a Palestinian rage generated by intense suffering. To Israeli machismo driven by a post-Holocaust fear of extinction. Or one could point toward a God continuing to use the Middle East as a poker table. All impersonal. All theoretical. All illusory.

Haunting is the face in the mirror, the image of Mohammad Odeh’s face.

Haunting are the statements made by Hamas after the Sheik’s death, the statements I remembered reading in the Jerusalem Post on July 27, as Jamie and I lounged in Marla’s living room in Jerusalem on a Shabbat afternoon, enjoying the breeze and the company. I even, ridiculously, had read aloud the article about Shahada’s death, reciting the statements of revenge that had been put out by Hamas’s leaders. They were statements we talked about, naive, happy, unaware they would apply to us, that these statements would kill Marla and Ben, wound Jamie, and shatter everything: