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

My first thought was to contact the Associated Press journalist who had recorded Mohammad’s “words” from four years earlier. He was sorry – was it true? Maybe she still had her notes, maybe she would remember her source. I wanted her source. After finding her email on a site for professional newspaper reporters, I requested the information. But no reply came.

The only way you’ll know is to ask him, I thought. A nod came from deep within me, without any rational understanding of the mechanics involved. A decision had been made: I would try to secure a meeting with Mohammad, the idea feeling shaky. Seeking a confrontation with the perpetrator of the bombing had never been placed upon the buffet of potential treatments by those attempting to assist in my healing and recovery. Nobody had set this in a metal bin and identified it as an option. Here, psychotherapy au gratin. And next to it, sautéed compartmentalization. And just in this morning, a freshly caught terrorist who talks, answers questions, and is reportedly remorseful.

I had heard of victims intent on confronting their perpetrators. I knew about restorative justice. But such initiatives had always seemed bizarre. Self-flagellating. However, after learning that Mohammad may have felt remorse, the word began to resonate with possibility: restoration. I sensed that the only way I might understand what happened was to understand Mohammad, an understanding which could somehow give me back my lungs, my life.

As I began the convoluted process of attaining a meeting with Mohammad, I couldn’t stop asking, Why are you doing this? It’s a question I repeated after calling the Ministry of Public Security in Israel, trying to discern how one would go about the process of requesting a meeting with an imprisoned terrorist. It’s a question I repeated when representatives called me from the Israel Prison Service, suspicious, asking about my motives. It’s a question I repeated after tracking down an official fax number from a diplomatic aide stationed at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., and composed an official request in Hebrew to the Israeli government for the chance to speak with Mohammad. A question I repeated as I pressed send, faxing the request to Lieutenant Colonel Orit Stelzer at the Ministry of Public Security.

In the comment section of my request I wrote:

In the beginning, after the attack at Hebrew University, there had been darkness, there had been blindness – not knowing who had perpetrated the attack or how it had happened – and that blindness was good. It was good not knowing the details, not having Mohammad’s name and face attached to the pictures of punctured bodies and fractured beams, to images of Jamie shuddering from unyielding pain. As time went on, I clung to that blindness, pretending that darkness had not yet been separated from light.

But those words – he was sorry – backlit everything, threw shadows upon the walls which the darkness had concealed. I saw myself. I saw Mohammad. I saw the destruction. And for the first time, I felt an intense need to speak with Mohammad, to understand him. To understand how he could say such a thing when he was the face of evil.

As my campaign to gain an audience with Mohammad became entangled in webs of bureaucratic paperwork, I was forced to consider this need to meet with him, my need for self-flagellation. Why are you doing this?

For the answer, I went elsewhere, looked for examples of other people who had faced perpetrators, for those with a comparable drive. Every time I searched, every time I plugged an item into Google, the same result kept appearing: reconciliation. And attached to that result: South Africa. And the result scared me, for I had no interest in reconciliation, had no interest in some granola-caked forgiveness trek toward Mohammad. I just wanted to square the words “terrorist” and “sorry” so that I might be able to, once again, sleep through the night. Breathe.

But the result kept appearing. Reconciliation. The victims kept asking for it. The perpetrators kept allowing it. And so I decided to explore a South Africa on the brink of democracy, on the brink of a post-apartheid existence, in order to better understand the phenomenon that was growing within me,⁹ a phenomenon Jamie didn’t yet know existed.

South Africa: This is what I learned:
For over thirty years, white Afrikaners of Dutch descent – under the cover of the ruling white National Party (NP) – raped, murdered, segregated, and economically enslaved an entire population. And when their rule, and thus apartheid, finally came to an end in 1994, when a nation of victims rose to power behind Nelson Mandela’s African National Conference (ANC), there was no state-sponsored revenge, no retribution, no rounding up of the fair-skinned perpetrators and burning them at the stake. Instead, there was a national, legislated process of reconciliation. Of truth-seeking. Of forgiveness. This process, this national attempt to heal through testimony, through dialogue, through understanding, would inform and influence my own burgeoning journey back to Jerusalem.¹⁰

An abbreviated tale. After years of international sanctions, years of a country crumbling under the weight of its colonial transgressions, South Africa’s leaders knew in the early 1990s that the end was near. They knew that apartheid had lost its hold, and that the move to democracy was inevitable. Negotiations were established on how to structure a peaceful transition to democratic rule between the ruling NP and the opposition ANC, between the whites and the blacks, between the perpetrators and the victims. The NP still held control of the military, and this gave the party’s leaders a position of strength from which to bargain. And so before agreeing to step down and allow for a historic election to take place, they demanded this: amnesty. They demanded absolution for all transgressions committed in the name of the state. They demanded get-out-of-jail-free cards. In return, the opposition – people who were victims or family and friends of victims of some of the most horrific crimes ever to be chronicled – demanded that they be given this: truth. The deal is immortalized in the last clauses of South Africa’s interim constitution:

As a typical American, oblivious to the detailed histories of other people, my mouth dropped upon first reading these sentences. Amnesty? No fucking way. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. How could a nation of tortured souls so easily have turned away from justice? How could truth replace justice? The thought of affording Mohammad such an opportunity, some metaphorical amnesty in return for testimony, for the truth, for an answer to the question – Why did you do it? – elicited nothing but a shudder, a shake of the head. There was no fucking way. Never.

I was not alone in feeling uneasy about such a trade: truth for absolution. Antjie Krog, the noted South African poet who, as a radio journalist, covered South Africa’s reconciliation process, struggled with the very idea in her memoir Country of My Skull. How could truth replace justice? Through the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the post-apartheid government was charged with carrying out an exhaustive “truth recovery process”¹² through public hearings that “would give victims an opportunity to tell the world their stories of pain, suffering and loss … and would question victimizers about how and why they had caused that pain, suffering and loss.”¹³ In that order. First the victims. For months telling stories impossible to believe. One after the other. And then the perpetrators. Explaining what had happened. Why it had happened. How.

Before the TRC commenced, Krog – anxious about the stories waiting to be unleashed by the scheduled testimonies, by victims sitting at tables with microphones and television crews and cameras rolling for month after month – struggled to wrap her head around the idea of it all. Around truth as an elixir. Truth as an equalizer. As a replacement for justice.

Initially, she was coaxed to openness by the Chilean philosopher José Zalaquett, whom she heard say, “It will sometimes be necessary to choose between truth and justice. We should choose truth … Truth does not bring back the dead, but releases them from silence.”¹⁴

But soon the silence ended. The victims of South African apartheid approached the microphones, wanting to be heard, finally. Wanting first to dilute their traumas by having their stories recorded, acknowledged, validated. Wanting next to ask questions, know facts, know what had happened to the father who had been necklaced – ringed by stacked tires and burned – or to the child found hung from a eucalyptus tree, or the mother raped in her dead son’s bed and then sunk to the bottom of a lake, stones tied around her crushed skull. They wanted to understand how, when, where, to know from those who knew best. And they wanted closure. Needed the perpetrators to end what they had begun. Needed them to lean into the microphone and say, “I’m sorry.” To reclaim their humanity – their humanness – by forcing the murderers to reclaim their own, even if such reclamation efforts were contained only in the words spoken, words without intention. “I’m sorry.” Words mattered. Articulation mattered. After years of silence, years of darkness, words were lights, illuminative.

Week after week, as the victims revealed their traumas and then sought the truth underlying these brutal experiences, Krog grew viscerally uncomfortable with the word – truth – a discomfort that manifested itself as a stutter, a significant stumbling block for a radio journalist:

“Your voice tightens up when you approach the word ‘truth’,” the technical assistant says, irritated. “Repeat it twenty times so that you become familiar with it. Truth is mos jou job!” (“Truth is your job, after all!”)¹⁵

The victims’ demands for truth I understood, the need to digest what happened as a reclamation effort – this I got. But I also understood Krog’s hesitation, her uncertainty. Her stutter. Perhaps because I couldn’t yet comprehend the victims’ desire for a personal apology from the perpetrator. For what? Particularly when no immediate interest in forgiving existed on the side of the victims. Was it a matter of control, reversing the roles? A form of revenge? You destroyed me and my family, so now I’m going to do the only thing I can: put you on your knees. So go ahead. Ask, asshole. Ask for forgiveness. I’ll determine if it’s accepted. It’s up to me now. I’m in control.

Yet none of the South African victims spoke of this – of taking control – as a motivation, at least none in the testimony I found. Instead, they spoke of reconciliation, as though it was the natural by-product, or the product, of truth. Truth and Reconciliation. Truth coming first. Then the joining, the conjoining.

Reconciliation. The word began to breathe, began to represent something alive within the pulse of my daily research, a research I kept secret from Jamie. I started taking notes, wondering if the word was possible, if the truth which preceded the word was possible.

Me:	Why does it matter?
Me:	I don’t know.
Me:	So he might have expressed remorse? So what?
Me:	It’s important.
Me:	But it changes nothing.
Me:	I know.
Me:	He’s still a monster.
Me:	I know.
Me:	What, then?
Me:	I don’t know how to answer.
Me:	You’re pathetic.
Me:	Thanks.