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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
One of the things that I learned about revenge was that it's often the smaller slights that people seek revenge for. If my father had been killed, I would have been too broken to do anything, really, except to believe that God would take care of the killer. That's why people who are devastated often turn to God.
Like the families of the other tourists who were killed by the same gang of militants -- who were arbitrarily shooting tourists in revenge for America's bombing of Libya -- that shot your father. But the other families didn't seek revenge at all.
And I think the reason why we seek revenge for smaller slights is because we think it's possible to achieve revenge. It's more realistic to think that you can get back at the jerk who insulted you publicly at the staff meeting than the gang of drug dealers who carjacked your wife inside of your Toyota. How really could I avenge a murder?
In the book, you put your hand around a gun. Did you want to shoot Omar?
No, and also that kind of crime would be overwhelming and I would be too terrified of the criminal who committed it. So, interestingly, it was the consequence of my father's injury that made me feel like it was a blow that I could return. Machiavelli said, "Men should either be treated generously or destroyed, because they can take revenge for slight injuries -- for heavy ones they cannot."
You had just gotten married. You really disrupted your life in pursuit of Omar. Why?
I drove my husband crazy about it. And I questioned it all the time. But I decided that this was my last opportunity. Before I started a new family, I had some unfinished business with my old family. I had to look back before I could go forward. But, boy, I questioned that decision all the way through.
Was this about you or about your dad?
It was about family. Revenge helps answer the question, who are you? You are what you're willing to avenge. I wanted to answer the question: Were we a family who stood up for each other or not? Not when it happened. My father was alone when he was shot, my mother didn't come to him. It was a way of asserting our family's identity. Many times I thought about giving up. My husband, who is a lawyer and very much a man of the law, was the one who encouraged me. He felt that this man might not have killed my father, but the intent was there.
This was about the intent.
Yes. But every day I had to go to the Khatibs' home, I would just fantasize about getting away.
What was it like to meet his family for the first time and hear them talk about what Omar did to your father?
As I listened to them laugh and smile and smirk about my father being shot, they were serving me hot glasses of tea, one cup after the next. And I remember swallowing the tea and feeling like I was swallowing all this heat and rage and keeping it down. On the outside, I took notes and nodded and tried not to show any sign of what I was feeling. But on the inside I was seething. My heart skipped beats. I remember feeling palpitations, and I thought, "That's OK, because they can't see my heart." But my forehead was so tense, it felt like it was buckling from the weight of the tension. I kept lifting my hand to wipe away the lines because I thought they'd see the truth written across my forehead.
How did it feel to spend time with the family and get to know them?
I was shocked that I actually found the man. A bullet came at my father and I tracked it down to its source. When I returned to Jerusalem during the years after the shooting, I would wonder about who he was walking down the street. After so many years of wondering about him, and so many months looking for him, I was shocked that I was actually sitting in his living room with his mother and his nephews and his brothers. It was fear and shock and nervousness.
But as time went on, I felt more and more guilty because they came to like me and welcomed me into their home and into their family. Every time I wanted to be in touch with Omar, I had to go through them because he was in prison. It wasn't like I could just drop off a letter like I was going to a post office. I had to sit with the family for at least half a day and pass the time with them. That involved looking at wedding albums and going upstairs to visit the bird coop on the roof and playing with their dog when it had puppies. Sometimes I got so caught up pretending that I liked them, sometimes I wasn't sure if I was actually pretending anymore. It was very confusing.
Did you feel guilty about deceiving them?
Oh yeah, I always felt guilty about that because it was never a part of my plan.
What was your mission?
The question that I asked myself that year was, can I make my father human in the gunman's eyes? And I thought that the only way I could do that was by tricking him. He would come to know me and to like me, or come to know us, meaning me and my father, and like us, only if he didn't know who we were. I needed to erase myself, make myself invisible in order to be seen. That I felt OK about. But dragging his family into it was never part of the plan, but I had to by necessity because he was in jail and unreachable.
How dangerous were they? What did his family do?
I never knew what they were capable of or what they would do when they found out who I was. But I knew that they were not only members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was a hard-line radical faction in the Palestinian national movement, but they were also active in military operations. Pictures of the brothers posing with Abu Jihad and all these famous guerrilla leaders, many of whom Israel has assassinated over the years, were the living room decorations. There wasn't needlepoint up on the wall. And one brother was a member of Force 17, which is Arafat's crack military unit. Another brother was deported to Jordan for his activities and then was jailed by the Jordanians for the Black September uprising where Palestinians tried to take over Jordan through violent revolt. And the third brother was Omar, who tried to kill my father.
Their house was also the last house on the edge of town. There was no traffic there. It was like on the edge of civilization, literally it was on a precipice overlooking this barren gorge that stretched all the way out into the desert. Completely deserted, no one could hear you there. It was an isolated compound of family apartments that were all connected. It was horrible, when I describe it, I think, "Oh my God, I did that!"
What was it like when you and your father returned a month ago?
It was surreal because we were surrounded by terrible violence which was just escalating every hour while we were there. During the time that we were inside the family's home, just up the road an Israeli tank fired a shell at what they thought was a militant leader. It turned out to be his wife and three kids in a pickup truck. There was shootings and bombings all around us. But inside this home, it was this sort of cocoon, and there was this other reality. My father and Imad, the brother of the man who put a bullet in his head, were miles apart ideologically, yet they were able to relate on some level, just as brothers. My father's one of three brothers and he listened to Imad talk about Omar in prison and he thought, "You know I would do the same for my brother." It's not to say that they could overcome all obstacles; they speak different languages, they come from different religions, they're part of two nations that are at war. But they were sitting there smoking a hookah pipe. My father seemed to even like it. I was sitting there whispering, "You don't have to, Dad, you don't have to." He took a drag on their hubbly-bubbly and exhaled heartily.
It's remarkable because when you visited with the family in 1998, it was before Barak's election and then during his term. The prospect of peace was still there. Just a month ago, when you returned, the situation was so much worse. Omar's family hadn't changed their attitudes toward you?
They were afraid. They were concerned about what the neighbors would say. There's tremendous pressure in the community to close ranks. Certain people would accuse them of being treasonous by hosting Jews.
For me, the thing that was so incredible was that the first time I went to their home, they talked about, "Some Jew. Who did he shoot? Some Jew." The first time Omar talked about my father, he called him a "chosen military target." So here I was bringing my father to meet the family and saying, "OK, here he is. Here is 'some Jew.'" I felt like a matchmaker on the world's craziest blind date: "Dad, meet the people who want to see you dead." And it sounds crazy and it was crazy, but so is everything that's going on right now. It's not a solution, but it's a beginning.
In all those long letters to Omar, you presented the idea of the human David Blumenfeld. He returned pages of political ideology. Do you really believe that Omar got your message?
He definitely recognized that I got revenge on him, which made me happy. He said so recently in an interview with ABC. And he said so to me and to my father. He wrote a letter to me and said, "You get me feel so stupide that once I was the cause of your and your kind mother's pain. Sorry and please understand." And then he said to my father, "She [Laura] was the mirror that made me see your face as a human person deserved to be admired and respected."
Did he say he would change?
He told ABC that he was sorry and that he was going to put aside violence. Who knows what lies in his heart? But he stated publicly, at a time when there's tremendous community pressure to close ranks and denounce any kind of overtures to Jews and to defend violence as a means of negotiations: "No, I think that violence is the wrong way and I'm sorry for what I did to you and I wish you well." He addressed my father directly in a recorded message. That says something.
Omar's in prison. He's with people who are justifying their existence by their act -- whether it was planting bombs or shooting tourists. Whatever it was, that's their reason for living and their reason for being in jail. Omar's been in jail now for 15 years. If he can say that what he did was wrong and was a mistake and he's willing to say it publicly, that's something.
You stress in the book that this endeavor was personal and not about national identity. But what did your study of revenge reveal about the Middle East conflict?
