Bombshell (16 page)

The Palestinian militant groups began to use acts of terrorism to great effect. Arafat created a virtual “state within the state”
inside Jordan. As the militias took and did as they pleased in their host country, tension mounted between the Palestinians and the Jordanian monarch, King Hussein bin Talal. Fedayeen raids distressed King Hussein because the Israeli air force responded to every Palestinian incursion with strikes against Jordanian targets. On September 1, 1970, the king narrowly dodged several attempts on his life. Three airplane hijackings on September 6 were the last straw. The king declared martial law and began to eliminate Palestinian officers from the military. The clashes developed into an all-out civil war between Jordanian forces and the Palestinian militias. The neighboring Arab states that had promised to provide air cover to the PLO reneged as the Jordanian air force strafed columns of fleeing Palestinian refugees en route to Lebanon and Syria. The Palestinians were outgunned by the well-equipped Jordanian forces and more than 3,500 of them died in the melee. The events are known as Black September.

The PLO and its leadership left Jordan for Lebanon. Once again Arafat carved out a state within a state, in the southern part of the country. The refugees' presence exacerbated the fragile sectarian balance within Lebanon and led to the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). After Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the PLO fled once again, this time to Tunisia. For many Palestinians who resided in the Occupied Territories there was a discernible gap between the jet-setting lifestyles of their leaders and the horrors of their everyday existence. According to Dan Fisher of the
LA Times
: “The youth lost hope that Israel would ever give them their rights. They felt the Arab countries were unable to accomplish anything. They felt that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has failed to achieve a thing.”
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By 1987, the disconnect between the Palestinian people and its formal leadership had reached a breaking point. A whole generation of young people had grown up knowing nothing but the
Israeli occupation and felt little or no solidarity with the leadership in Tunis. In December Palestinians launched their first intifada, a “shaking off” of Israeli control. The First Intifada (1987–93) began as an uncontrolled, unplanned explosion of Palestinian frustrations. It started within the Occupied Territories but was soon co-opted by the leadership in Tunis. It also marked a shift in world opinion as Israeli forces increasingly lost sympathy by shooting at children throwing rocks and killing scores of civilians daily. The event that most shifted public opinion was the burial alive of four young Palestinian protesters on February 5, 1988, in the West Bank village of Salim. The Israeli army had ordered them to lie facedown on the ground and then bulldozed dirt over them.
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Once Israel lost the moral high ground in its fight against terrorism, what people would consider an acceptable response changed dramatically.

While the PLO dominated Palestinian resistance in the 1960s and 1970s, a rival group was emerging from the Society of Muslim Brothers. In Israel's infinite wisdom, it assumed that any challenge to the PLO's leadership was positive and so it pursued a dual strategy of benign neglect and even encouragement of rivals to the organization. Likud, the Israeli right-wing governing party, had watched Arafat's transformation from a revolutionary leader to the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people, recognized by the Arab League and the U.N. General Assembly in 1974. In response, the party's strategy was to promote an Islamic alternative. According to Arab-American journalist Ray Hanania: “In addition to hoping to turn the Palestinian masses away from Arafat and the PLO, the Likud leadership believed they could achieve a workable alliance with Islamic anti-Arafat forces that would also extend Israel's control over the occupied territories.”
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Between 1967 and 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza tripled from two hundred to six hundred, all with Israeli government sanction. In trying to undercut the PLO, Israel's leaders,
Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, created the Village Leagues, local councils composed of Palestinians willing to cooperate with the Israelis. In return, the Israelis put the group's members on their payroll and allowed them to publish a newspaper and set up an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat.
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The Village Leagues were dominated by Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin and his followers within the Al Mujamma' Al Islami (Islamic Center). The organization that emerged from them in 1988 became known as Hamas, an acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement.” It was Hamas that would claim credit for the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001.

JUSTIFYING MASS MURDER

As Ahlam at-Tamimi sat answering questions, she was the embodiment of serenity. She wore no makeup and her thick dark hair was neatly tucked under a beige hijab. She wore an earth-toned silk scarf and a long brown
jilbab
(a long, baggy overgarment). Ahlam both personified and led the Hamas women in HaSharon prison, but she had come to represent much more: she was a symbol of the Palestinian resistance and the new feminine face of Hamas.

Ahlam had done more than just accompany the suicide bomber Izzedine as-Suheil Al Masri to the Sbarro pizzeria. Together they had caused one of the most infamous and deadly terror attacks in Israel's history. Ahlam provided the intelligence and was pivotal in planning the operation, choosing the target, and accompanying the bomber. She claims that blowing up the pizzeria was her idea. This was not Ahlam's first mission as a terrorist. On June 30, 2001, a little more than a month before the pizzeria bombing, she had placed an explosive device disguised as a can of beer in a garbage bin at a Jerusalem grocery store on King George Street, then tried to detonate it at a distance using a timer. Security personnel detected
the can before it could explode and it caused no damage. Having failed at her first attempt, Ahlam needed to up the ante with the next operation.

Hamas and Ahlam learned some valuable lessons from the failure that June. The first lesson was, use a suicide bomber rather than a timed device. A suicide bomber is a weapon with a brain that can change directions or make adjustments as the situation requires. Because there is no need to plan for the perpetrator's escape route, the hardest part is reaching the target. The suicide bomber is deadlier than other forms of terrorist attacks because of his or her ability to switch targets midmission or, if the detonator fails, to find an alternative way of activating the explosive. Timed devices, although they allow the attacker to survive another day and conduct more operations in the future, are more likely to fail or be discovered.

Part of the lethality of a suicide attack comes from the actual explosive, whose bursting fireball kills anyone near the bomber on impact. Additional casualties result from projectile materials—such as nails, screws, or ball bearings—added to the weapon, all of which tear into the flesh of bystanders. Hamas had also learned that a bomb is even more deadly when it explodes in an enclosed space. As the explosive burns, it gobbles up oxygen: in a confined area, the explosion causes the space to implode under the pressure of the disappearing oxygen. Knowing this, the bomber tries to find a spot away from the doors and windows, which might allow oxygen to fill the vacuum created when the bomb goes off. This is what made Israeli buses attractive targets to Palestinian terrorist groups: during summer all the windows are closed (when the air-conditioning is on) and in winter they're still closed (when the heat is on). And this is probably why Al Masri entered the restaurant rather than explode on the street. That hot day in August, most of the Sbarro customers were crammed into the restaurant, which was air-conditioned,
rather than sitting outside in the blazing sun. Fortunately, the building that housed the pizzeria had been recently retrofitted to improve its structural integrity. If not for these improvements, the ceiling might have collapsed, doubling the death toll.

Earlier on the day of the bombing, Ahlam rendezvoused with Al Masri and his lethal guitar case at an intercity taxi stand in the West Bank town of Ramallah. The couple shared the ride with six other passengers going to Jerusalem. At the heavily manned Kalandiya checkpoint outside Ramallah, they briefly separated, and Al Masri passed through security on foot without his guitar case. Ahlam rested the case on her lap in the backseat of the vehicle and watched Al Masri cross to the other side while pretending not to know him. Both wore Western-style clothes, mimicking young Israelis rather than conservative Palestinians. She was in tight blue jeans and a sexy halter top. He had shaven off his beard and his chest and body hair, following the Islamic tradition of preparation for a martyrdom operation, but rather than shave his head as well, he had taken the suggestion of their Hamas handler Hassan, and had dyed his hair platinum blond so he would look more like an Israeli. To complete the look of a hipster, Al Masri sported dark sunglasses, blue jeans, and a T-shirt. No one would give the young “Israeli” couple walking through downtown Jerusalem a second glance.

Hassan had given Al Masri 100 Israeli shekels (about $27) for the cab fare, and had instructed them not to talk to each other until they had cleared the checkpoints. When they did speak, it was only in English. Ahlam carried a camera so that she could pass for a tourist. After the pair successfully traversed Kalandiya, they switched taxis at the Aram checkpoint and continued on toward Jerusalem. The taxi dropped them off at the Damascus Gate near the walls of the old city and Ahlam and Al Masri continued on foot toward the city center. They arrived at the intersection of King
George and Jaffa streets. Ahlam says, “I did not want to blow up that day,” so she had asked Al Masri to wait fifteen minutes before detonating the bomb. She wanted to be far from the blast area.

With her head start, Ahlam raced back to the Palestine TV studio where she was a news presenter for the Palestine Authority. She changed into a cream-colored cotton turtleneck and chocolate brown safari jacket for the broadcast. With her long dark hair and tawny lipstick matching her outfit, she was extremely telegenic, the picture of a modern Palestinian woman. Her on-air persona looked nothing like the woman she became later in HaSharon prison. She composed herself and reported the event in which she had played such an intrinsic part. She recalls that it was hard to keep a straight face. “A suicide action took place on Jaffa Street at the Sbarro restaurant,” she told viewers. “The result: fifteen dead.”
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Within hours, several Palestinian groups had claimed responsibility for the attack. The Islamic Jihad, based in Damascus, faxed several news agencies, including Agence France Presse in Beirut, and claimed that the bomber was Hussein Omar Abu Naaseh. Hours later they corrected their mistake, this time claiming that the bomber was Hussein Omar Abu Amsha. Finally, after several hours of confusion and competing claims of responsibility, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the Islamic Jihad's secretary general, told a Gulf television station that there had been a mistake: Hussein Abu Amsha was indeed on a suicide mission, but he was not the Sbarro bomber. Shallah explained: “Our fighter Hussein Abu Amsha was en route to carry out a martyrdom operation and when the explosion [in Jerusalem] happened our brothers thought it was him … Abu Amsha is now a
potential
martyr.”
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Shallah had blown Amsha's cover, alerting the Israelis to his name, destination, and intent, and so rendering him virtually useless.

Hamas also claimed responsibility for the attack, identifying the bomber correctly as twenty-two-year-old Izzedine as-Suheil
Al Masri, from Aqaba in the Jenin district of the West Bank. Following the standard operating procedure after a suicide strike, Hamas representatives distributed a pre-attack photo of a bearded Al Masri holding an M16 assault rifle and a copy of an illuminated
Qur'an
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in his left hand with explosives strapped around his waist. His green Hamas headband matched the flag behind him and proclaimed in Arabic,
La ilaha il Allah
(“There is no God but God”).

Reactions within the Al Masri family varied from joy to sorrow. Al Masri's older brother, Iyad, expressed unadulterated pride, calling the operation unique because of its quality and success. Izzedine had always spoken of martyrdom and now Palestinians everywhere would hold their heads up high.
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Their father, Suheil, said that he was filled with both pride and sadness. “When I heard about the operation in Jerusalem, I did not doubt that my son did this,” he said. “I will weep for him all of my life.” And then he added, “I hope that many others follow him.”
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Yet to Barbara Victor, a journalist who interviewed him a few years after the attack, Suheil said that the operation had made him sick to his stomach and “had destroyed him and his family.”
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Another brother, Salahaddin, considered Al Masri a hero, but their mother, Umm Iyad, disagreed. Izzedine was never active politically, unlike the other little boys growing up during the First Intifada. He never threw stones at the Israelis and had not joined any of the militant organizations operating in Jenin. Umm Iyad had never seen anybody from Hamas in the house, and besides, the Al Masri family would not have wanted them there! While many groups had tried to claim Al Masri as their own, Umm Iyad argued that he did not belong to any of them. She even said he would have to have been mentally unbalanced to commit such an atrocity.
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Al Masri's mother probably did not know of his activities. Would-be suicide bombers rarely inform their parents of their
plans. The terrorist groups deliberately keep the family in the dark for fear that they might try to change the bomber's mind. Procedure dictates that the group isolate the bombers in a safe house for several days before the attack, during which time a minder will sit with them, pray with them, and help them through the various purification rituals. The isolation is intended to focus the bomber's thoughts and instill the clarity required to commit a suicide operation. Despite warnings to keep his mission secret, a few days before the attack, Al Masri asked his very pregnant sister, Hala, whether she would name her unborn child after him if he died a martyr. But since he had no previous record of extremism or political activism, his sister assumed he was kidding.
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