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

Antjie Krog underwent a remarkable psychological transformation while covering the commission’s events. In the beginning, she was the objective reporter, a disconnected professional, attending the commission’s first hearings as nameless victims limped forward to tell how they had watched nameless men chop a brother’s arms off, split their sister in two, asking now to simply be told where the bones were, to know where a body rested. Krog, the objective observer, dutifully wrote everything in a pad. But it didn’t take long before it became impossible for her to remain distant, disaffected, for the stories were so shocking, so brutal, that she began to exhibit symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The truth made her crack. The truth made her a victim, another victim wanting her story to be heard, craving an audience willing to listen to the truth as she knew it. A truth called memoir – an internal truth and reconciliation process.

As I read Country of My Skull, I nodded, recognizing her disintegration on the page. I nodded when a psychologist told Krog, “The more you empathize with the victim, the more you become the victim: you display the same kinds of symptoms – helplessness, wordlessness, anxiety, desperation.” And I thought, Yes, patting myself on the shoulder, thinking, It’s okay to feel as though you’re a victim, even though you were eating pesto-coated pasta in the sunshine when Jamie’s body was ripped open. It’s fine that you have been compelled to chronicle these experiences, these stories. It’s fine that you now seek to understand what happened, that you now seek the truth, that you desire some type of reconciliation. This is what happens. This is what can happen. This is happening.

In the years after the bombing, attempting to resume a violence-free life in Washington, D.C., I had dismissed my growing psychological distress partially because I refused to acknowledge a personal claim to any form of victimhood. Jamie was the one blown up, I’d say. She’s the victim, I’d say. You have no reason to be such a fucking mess, I’d say.

It wasn’t until after reading Krog, after seeing someone unconnected by blood or relation crumble upon being exposed to the mere telling of a trauma, that I understood how far things could go. She gave me permission to be released from the illusion that I stood, definitionally, outside the word victim. I gave myself per mission to release myself from myself, to let go of the collar and dust off the shoulders.

I put down Krog’s memoir and went to the library’s databases housing psychology journals with names like Traumatology, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Journal of Traumatic Stress – in search of a name, a diagnosis, something to which I could point and say, See, there it is. There’s scientific proof. A name to your plight.

Jamie could hang a hat on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) when things got tough, or at least could point to some of its chronicled symptoms, one of which is “restricted range of affect” – the inability to feel. Clinically, I knew I qualified for that one. I certainly wasn’t feeling anything. But the diagnostic criteria for PTSD listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) were meant for a “primary” victim, someone who “experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others.”¹⁶

Jamie was the primary victim, not me. I was nothing.

Then I discovered an article entitled “Understanding the Secondary Traumatic Stress of Spouses” by Kathleen Gilbert. In it Dr. Gilbert of Indiana University’s School of Public Health noted that a spouse often exhibits psychological symptoms mirroring those of the primary victim, so much so that a unique syndrome – secondary traumatic stress disorder (STSD) – had been identified and defined as “a syndrome of symptoms nearly identical to PTSD.” She shared a striking case of STSD from a qualitative study done in 1988 on the female partners of Vietnam veterans, all of whom had been at home in the United States during the war. In interviews, the women claimed they were so affected by their husbands’ stories of trauma that they often had panic attacks “set off by triggers similar to their husbands’, such as ‘the sound of helicopters, sudden noises, gunfire, [and] the smell and sound of spring rain.’”¹⁷

I imagined a housewife looking up from her shopping cart in the local Safeway parking lot and, seeing a traffic helicopter hovering overhead, being so overcome by the spinning blades that she dives under the nearest car, arms shielding a baby and a bag of groceries. And the thought gave me a strange sense of joy. Not for the astonishing psychological suffering of this woman, her apples rolling on the asphalt, but because such a reality said to me, “If this can happen, then you too are allowed to be damaged.”

And I thought, Are such staggering psychological imprints temporary, or will they forever be branded into the psyche? Will this woman duck into the nearest building every time a helicopter hovers overhead for the rest of her life? I wasn’t so much concerned with this hypothetical homemaker, but the way in which she metaphorically represented my own suffering. And I thought, Can I go back to the person I was before the terrorist attack, or have I forever lost that identity? Is it possible to “move beyond” or “overcome” a trauma? Or is such an idea mythical, a misleading cliché we repeat in order to survive?

And I thought of South Africa, of the perpetrators seated before microphones, surrounded by rows of victims in the packed courtroom, and began to imagine what this would look like, Mohammad seated before me as I listened to the story of how he had become a butcher. I began to believe that true healing might only be achieved – if at all – through some type of reconciliation. I began to believe in the possibility of such an intuitively obscene construction actually doing something remarkable, something magical, as EMDR had for Jamie. And as I began to believe, with South Africa pressing me forward, the scores of victims – throwing justice aside for understanding – pressing me forward, an email arrived from Israel, an email for which I’d been waiting over five months, since I had first faxed off my request to meet with Mohammad:

Sitting in the UNCW library, surrounded by students, I read the screen with disbelief. Then, half-forgetting my coordinates, I muttered, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck. You fucking asshole,” shaking my head involuntarily, quickly, the words coming out automatically, “No, no way, you can’t do this, you prick.” People started looking my way. The woman at the computer next to me pivoted and stared.

I rose and left and pounded my steps into the sidewalk as my mind absently fired rounds into the air. You blow up my wife and then refuse to meet me? How can you still have control? You can’t still have control. You can’t refuse. You fucking have to be a part of this. I’ve traveled so far, worked so goddamn hard for this after what you did. Fuck you. You can’t do this. I won’t let you do this.

The anger was forceful, knocking me off balance as I walked past giddy students, my first moment of authentic emotionality since the bombing coming unexpectedly in public.

Taken aback by the taste of my venom, I lapped the campus, a do-it-yourself dose of bi-lateral stimulation, a bit of self-therapy, EMDR on the cheap. As my anger dissipated, I thought about South Africa, about a nation committed to the process of healing, about how being immersed in history – in stories of reconciliation – had somehow reoriented everything, had become my only conceivable way forward. And I thought about my anger at the prospect of being denied a meeting with my perpetrator, the potential for which I’d only realized after reading other victims’ testimony. But the anger ran deeper than that.

This anger was something I had sought for so long, an anger I had anticipated would accompany a desire for revenge, a desire for vengeance, for the chance to exact my will upon Mohammad as he had exacted his will on Jamie as she enjoyed a peaceful lunch with Ben and Marla in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria that summer’s day. But as I circled the UNCW campus, my anger transitioning to dull despair, I began to consider what had so suddenly triggered this emotional response after all these years of near-paralysis, after all these years of complete synaptic frigidity with regard to the bombing. What had made me so angry?

“Hey,” I said, closing the front door behind me.

Noa turned around and yelled, “Abba,” running toward me, arms spread. She was a bird. She was soaring. They were soaring – Jamie and our two young girls – spreading their wings to the music, gliding across the hardwood floor. I dropped my bag and momentarily joined in, grabbed Noa’s hands and twirled as the girls laughed, Tamar flapping to the beats, a syncopated response to falling from the nest. We’d begun falling from the nest, a tangled mass of spit, straw, and synaptic debris. It was above us somewhere. I could see it, knew it was there, knew I’d soon be returning to it, would be leaving them behind and flap up toward it when the music ended as I grasped Noa’s hands, lifted her three-year-old body off the floor and spun it, her legs submitting to the centrifugal force, body straight, arms taught, the curve of her smile leaning into the circles we were tracing, rising, rising –

After dinner and putting the kids to bed, I slumped into a green sofa-chair. Jamie looked at me with the eyes of a raptor.

“What’s wrong?”

“Yeah, just tired.”

I sat down with Krog’s book, from which I’d removed the dust jacket in order to keep my reading somewhat discreet. Jamie knew I was doing research. She knew I was preparing for something related to my writing. But she recognized this as my process, whatever it was, and was content to leave me to my own devices, motivated, in part, by her own desire to leave the attack in the past, where it belonged.

Opening Krog’s book, I started to skim, my eyes eventually resting on a passage near the conclusion of the victims’ public testimony:

Jamie was sitting opposite me on our juice-splotched couch, reading Sarah Vowell and smiling to herself. There can be no story without the balance of the antagonist, I thought, and though Krog was speaking of something different – of the time in South Africa when everyone felt the weight of anticipation, listening to victim after victim chronicle their traumas, waiting anxiously for the perpetrators to show themselves – her words shook loose another thought: What if Mohammad didn’t really refuse the meeting? After all, I didn’t have his story, the story of the antagonist. All I had was a vague “I’m so sorry things didn’t work out” from Israel’s Ministry of Public Security. Of course they don’t want me meeting him. Why would they allow access to some writer looking to see if a terrorist had expressed remorse for his crime? Why would they approve such a meeting?

I began to suspect that the Israeli government might not have given my request any consideration, that Ruti Koren, Bureau Manager, Ministry of Public Security, might have used Mohammad’s refusal as easy cover. My suspicion was based on nothing more than an intuitive hunch. And I thought, How do I even know if they asked Odeh? They probably didn’t even approach him about it. Why would they?

Rising from the chair, I went to the kitchen and grabbed a bag of organic Colombian coffee beans, the image of a rooster, our local independent coffee house’s logo, stuck on the front. I felt like crowing. After putting on a pot of coffee, I brainstormed ways to verify that Mohammad had in fact refused my request to meet, knowing no satisfactory gestures would be forthcoming from the Israeli government. Hearing the pot’s gurgling, Jamie came in and said, “You’re not making coffee.”

“I know it’s late, but I kind of need it.” We had a standing rule: I was allowed to drink as much coffee as desired, so long as it was consumed before three in the afternoon, on account of my insomniac tendencies. It was a rule I had approved after protracted negotiations, the original time offered having been noon.

“David, it’s almost ten o’clock. Please don’t.”

“I’m going to be up tonight doing some research. I’ll be fine.”

“You have to do this tonight? You can’t wait until tomorrow?”

“No. I’m thinking about something and want to dig into it a little bit, and I’m not going to be able to sleep anyway.”

“Fine, as long as you can get up with the kids in the morning.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“And be in a good mood?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” she said, willing to drop it, the conversation now ammunition to be used in the morning were I to remain buried under a foxhole of blankets when the alarm chimed or our kids awoke and started jumping on the bed, the latter more likely than the former.

Armed with a cup of coffee, I returned to the living room and opened up my laptop. How do I do this? Who might be able to get an audience with Mohammad? Or his family? And again the answer came, an answer that had been quietly planted in my synapses while reading about South Africa: peace activists. Israeli and Palestinian professionals and grassroots activists who were already dedicated to the cause of reconciliation. Those already on the ground, already enmeshed in the difficult task of creating dialogue among Palestinians and Israelis, would not only be capable of helping, but they would be passionate about doing so. I knew they would – knew at the very least they would show more interest, more responsiveness, than the bureaucratic channels in Israel among whom I had drifted for six months before being told that Mohammad had waved off a meeting.

From the beginning, attempting to procure an audience with Mohammad – the process itself – proved to be nothing short of maddening. My frustration with the Israeli government bubbled over immediately when first dealing with the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Under the illusion that good fortune had landed at my feet, I attempted to contact Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, whose daughter I had taught at JDS for over a year and whose wife I had met countless times for parent–teacher conferences; his wife even knew me by name. She liked me, or, perhaps more accurately, she had bestowed upon me kind smiles indicating that I was not hated. I convinced myself that this would make the process easy: I had exactly the type of high-level connection that one dreams of having in such situations. Israel’s top diplomat owed me a favor. And though I knew the difficulty of the request, knew that it was bold to expect gaining an audience with one of Israel’s most renowned terrorists, who was held in a maximum security prison, I thought, You’ve got this. Just call the embassy, explain who you are, get a phone number, and call the Ayalon family.

But expectations and reality failed to converge. The embassy rightly refused to provide contact information. We will forward on to the Ambassador anything you’d like to provide us. So I sent personal emails to an embassy secretary who acted as my middleman, waiting for responses from her which only came after I pestered, annoyed, refused to go away. And the answer, when it did come, was always the same: no response from the Ambassador or his wife. After three months of being ignored by the parents of a child I taught for a year, I gave up.

I decided to bypass the embassy and manufacture my own high-level contact, gaining press credentials from David Horowitz at the Jerusalem Post and flashing them at Israeli officials, sending faxes to the Israel Prison Service and emails to the Israeli Ministry of Public Security with my credentials plastered boldly at the top. Repeatedly. I sent the same email daily to everyone who worked in the ministry for a solid month until finally receiving confirmation that my request had been received (over thirty times, actually). It took a similar barrage of insistent emails, of emailing the same email every day – Could you please update the status of my request to meet with Mohammad Odeh? – until eventually, six months after I’d started, I learned Mohammad had shaken his head. Thanks, but no thanks.

It was the response that had released my anger, a response I was beginning to realize might never have been given.

Clicking through the web pages, I realized that there was a time, not long before, when I would have viewed such organizations as anti-Israel, as anti-Semitic, a time when I would have looked upon reports critical of Israel coming out of such organizations – reports on, say, Israel’s settlement policy or the economic distress of the Palestinians in Gaza – as nothing more than pro ducts of a terrorist sympathizer. I did not think of Palestinians as human – they taught children to champion martyrdom and spilled blood joyfully, dutifully, in the streets of Israel. All of them. I had written every one of them off. Fear and propaganda had urged me to write them off. An entire people. This despite my progressive sensibilities, the same sensibilities that triggered an automatic bristling anytime broad-stroked stereotypes in America were brushed over entire peoples. In America, I was enlightened, but in Israel, I was at war. Us against them. Us against a brutal people. An evil people. A people not worth considering, much less expressing concern over. They were murderers, and anyone interested in standing up for their rights or plights was a traitor and saboteur. For me, it was a zero-sum game. Either we won, or they did.

And so the irony: being personally affected by the inhumane brutality of Palestinian terror – of this murderous element woven into the outer fringes of their social fabric by ideological extremists – forced me to consider Palestinians’ humanity. I read Peace Now’s website, from an analysis of Israel’s segregating barrier wall to a chronicle of ongoing dialogue initiatives, and grew aware of just how far my moral and political pendulums had swung. As I sought the assistance of these peace activists, I began to sympathize with their mission: working for the human rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. Things were not black and white, as I had been led to believe. It was not good versus evil. There were shades of brutality and benevolence on both sides.

Unlike the Israeli authorities, who sat on their hands for months as I sent futile inquiry after futile inquiry, requesting updates on the status of my request before I learned that Mohammad had refused, the response from peace activists was overwhelming and immediate. Twenty-four hours after I had sent emails to a few hand-picked individuals from a handful of the organizations I had found online, my inbox was filled with messages from people wanting to help, from those wanting to put me in touch with others whom they thought could help. They considered my mission theirs, so much so that my note was reposted on listservs, bulletin boards, blogs, co-opted by people who wanted this as much as I did.

Then I received a message from Leah Green at an organization called The Compassionate Listening Project. I had never heard of it. The name sounded painfully hopeful, painfully touchy-feely. She suggesting that she could help, then wrote, “I think we should talk by phone.”

I had nothing to lose.

Before calling, I searched for the organization’s website and was instantly impressed. Leah had founded an organization with a full résumé of reconciliation initiatives around the world, produced three documentaries about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and led delegations in Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hi Leah, this is David. You emailed me – ”

“David. Hi. I’m glad you called. How are you?”

“I’m good, thanks. I’m just curious. Can I ask how you found me?”

“I saw your request reposted on a human rights blog, and I think it’s great what you’re doing – very brave. I would like to help if I can.”

“I appreciate your offer. I don’t know exactly what, but anything you could do would be great, really. I’m just looking for advice or some direction on what I should do, because I’m a little lost at this point.”

“You’re looking for a path to somehow meet with the perpetrator, and have not been successful going through Israeli authorities, correct?”

Leah and I talked for a bit about the governmental structure in Israel, about those departments which were likely to be of little help. Then we talked about the professional contacts she had established over decades working in the region, contacts she seemed more than willing to use on my behalf.

“Listen. This is what I think you want to do. You want to make direct contact with the family of the perpetrator – Mohammad, right?”

“Yeah. The family name is Odeh.”

“My advice is to make contact with the Odeh family and let them know who you are and what you’re trying to do. If they’re receptive, my guess is that they would be able to ask Mohammad directly if he would permit you to meet him in prison. I’m sure they have minimal visitation privileges. They would have the capacity to present Mohammad with your wishes and learn how he feels about you meeting with him.”

“Wow. Okay. That’s interesting advice, though I’m not exactly sure how to go about doing that. I don’t speak Arabic or anything, and I have no idea how to navigate contacting a random Palestinian family.”

“I believe you wrote that the family lives in the Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem?

“As far as I know – just what I read in a few newspaper articles.”

“Well, I happen to have an extremely good contact in Silwan with whom I’ve worked before, a Palestinian official well-known and respected in the community. And I’m planning on traveling to Israel next month for something else. If you want, I could contact him and perhaps try to see if he knows the family. Maybe he would be able to arrange a visit with them for me. If so, I would be willing to go on your behalf.”

“Of course. I’d be honored to help. What you’re doing is important and brave.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Well, thanks for your kind words and generous offer. I’m not sure what to say. I’m a little shocked right now that you’d be willing to do all of this for me. You don’t even know me.”

“This is my job, and it’s a gift what you’re trying to do. I think that – the best thing I think would be for you to write a letter to the family, something that tells them who you are and why it is exactly that you want to meet with Mohammad. Something that will give my Palestinian colleague an idea of what he’s presenting to the Odeh family, and something that I could also read to them in person, should I have the opportunity to visit them.”

Me:	I’m sorry about that. Didn’t mean to press you so hard against the wall.
Me:	It’s okay. You kept me there a long time, you know.
Me:	Sorry. Just had no idea you are a victim, too.
Me:	Me either. Can I go now?
Me:	Yeah, you can go.

Me:	Fuck him.
Me:	Hey, you’re angry. Something within has changed.
Me:	Shit – you’re right.
Me:	Nice going.

Me:	It’s South Africa. All your reading about the TRC, the hearings, the victims learning what happened directly from the perpetrators – the victims finding solace in the details and in the expressions of remorse from those perpetrators who gave them.
Me:	But how did this make you so angry?
Me:	Because you want it. It’s evidence that you believe in it – in the restorative power of directly learning from Mohammad why he did it and why he’s sorry for it. Or at least why he expressed remorse when, in all likelihood, none actually exists. If he even said such a thing.
Me:	So you feel robbed?
Me:	I think so.
Me:	Isn’t that naive?
Me:	What?
Me:	That you’re giving such restorative weight to a hypothetical meeting with Mohammad?
Me:	It’s just hope. I believe in it because I hope it could be powerful. Have heard it worked with others. And you’re forgetting something.
Me:	What’s that?
Me:	The impulse to confront Mohammad came before reading about South Africa. The impulse was already there. It was there as soon as you read the word “sorry” in that AP article. South Africa simply put the impulse in context.
Me:	And now you’re angry because –
Me:	Because he refused.
Me:	Could it be that you’re angry because his refusal shows he’s not really sorry?
Me:	That’s possible. I mean, how could he be sorry and refuse to speak with you? I think it’s both – if he’s not remorseful, then there’s no opening to speak with him and understand how all this happened. And I want him to be sorry. I want him to be remorseful. And then I want him to speak.
Me:	You want control.
Me:	I deserve it.
Me:	So now what?
Me:	I’m not sure.