As President Bush and his new friend Abu Mazen step to the microphones, some words to consider from a bereaved father:
The Day I Fear Most: When My Daughter’s Killers Roam Free
by Stephen M. Flatow
As the road map to peace in the Middle East unfolds, I find myself once again praying for the best while preparing for the worst. But I do so from a vantage point different from many others.
About noon on Sunday, April 9, 1995, a young man named Khalid el-Khatib sat in a van parked alongside the northbound side of the road leading to the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom. The van was loaded with explosives. Seeing his target — the No. 36 Egged bus on the route from Ashkelon to Gush Katif — el-Khatib stepped on the gas, aimed for the side of the bus and, when he hit it, detonated all his explosives.
Eight died because of that attack, among them my 20-year-old daughter, Alisa. More than 40 were wounded, some permanently.
In the weeks and months after the attack, I didn’t have much desire or time to think about the scope of the attack that was carried out by Islamic Jihad. I didn’t ask who recruited el-Khatib to become a murderer, who bought the van, who made the bomb or who provided the funding for all of it. And no one in law enforcement, either Israeli or American, volunteered any information.
Eighteen months later, that began to change, as my lawyers and I began to investigate the attack in connection with a planned lawsuit under a new American dictum that gave American citizens the right to sue foreign countries that sponsored terror attacks against them.
With information from the U.S. State Department and material drawn from Israeli government demands upon the Palestinian Authority for the transfer to Israel of terrorists who had killed Israelis, I learned that at least 10 men had been involved in the attack at Kfar Darom.
Not all of them were named in the transfer requests Israel presented to the P.A. According to the State Department, two men were at large, two were in Israeli custody and the rest were dead. Although I was never invited to testify at the trials of the two in custody, I was assured that they were placed in prison — and there they would stay! — because the Jewish state will not release prisoners “with blood on their hands.”
It was an unwritten red line.
We all knew of the Palestinian prisons’ revolving-door policy. Adnan Yihye Mahmoud Jaber al-Gohl, who helped conceal the car used in the attack, and Nabil Sharihi, who helped prepare the bomb were arrested, then released, by the Palestinians, only to participate in more terror. But I thought Israel’s prisons would be harder to leave.
In a country famous for setting red lines when it comes to water shortages, the unity of Jerusalem or the need to retain the Jordan River Valley, the release of prisoners with blood on their hands has not achieved such high status in official circles.
Maybe that’s a good thing, because we know that the red line for the Kinneret was lowered at least twice; that former Israeli premier Ehud Barak offered shared sovereignty in Jerusalem; and that we no longer hear about the security offered by maintaining an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley.
The problem with red lines? They embarrass those who cross them.
I try not to think about Alisa’s killers. I’d rather think about my daughter’s smile, her laugh, the way she could light up a room with her presence.
But I fear the day her murderers are set free. So while I continue to pray for their imprisonment, I am sadly preparing myself for the day when those men are released as another demonstration of Israel’s desire to live in peace.
And while I will never forget the events and aftermath of that April day in 1995, I hope that one day God will give me the strength to forget Israel’s crossing of an unwritten red line.
Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney living in West Orange, N.J.
