Putting a Face on Hatred

Who would want to hurt him?” Laura Blumenfeld used to wonder, standing at the exact spot in the Jerusalem market where, in 1986, her father was shot and wounded by a Palestinian terrorist. After the shooting, Blumenfeld, reporting from Israel for the Washington Post, was repeatedly drawn to that same place and to that same question. Then the moment would pass, and she’d “go on writing about other people’s lives.”

On one particular day, however, standing again at the scene of the crime, she noticed a single word--REVENGE--spray-painted in black on a stone archway. At that moment, an idea lodged in her mind with unabating intensity: “What if I could really track down the shooter?”

Now, as the headlines bring their sad daily quota of deadly suicide bombings and retaliatory reprisals in the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, Blumenfeld’s new book--”Revenge: A Story of Hope”--offers a welcome antidote. Part memoir, part cultural history of revenge, the book chronicles her obsession with her father’s shooting, the actions she undertook to avenge it and the surprising results of what the New York Times called her “one-woman espionage plot.”

Blumenfeld’s ambition was large and her intentions numerous: She wanted to explore the origins of revenge, its rules, its motivations. Why do some people need to get even and others don’t?

“I wanted to break it down and study it. I wanted to master revenge,” she announces early in the narrative.

To study it was the easy part--she would interview people who had suffered from and acted on the revenge impulse. The hard part was the personal experiment: following her own dark fantasies. She acknowledged from the beginning that “the outcome was unclear, the effort self-absorbed, the process full of ethical compromise.” How would she find an appropriate revenge, one that went “to the heart of the crime?”

How could she make the terrorist understand that it wasn’t just “some Jew” he had shot--it was her father? Most of all, how could she make the shooter realize he had done something wrong?

Violent Act Spawns

a Daughter’s Vow

Blumenfeld was in college when her father, a New York rabbi, was shot in Jerusalem. He was one of several tourists attacked by members of a rebel faction of the PLO. He was fortunate. The bullet only grazed his brain, leaving no lasting injuries. The same week as the incident, in a writing seminar at Harvard, Blumenfeld wrote a poem about the shooting that ended: “this hand will find you/I am his daughter.” She had already made a vow to avenge her father--but didn’t know yet what she meant by it.

Reached by phone at the Upper West Side apartment in New York she shares with her husband, a federal prosecutor, and her young son, Blumenfeld, 38, explained why she took on the role of family avenger. “I’m the kind of person who remembers things. I remind my husband, ‘This is the fourth anniversary of our first date.’” She takes her family’s history quite seriously. “You could say that I’m the person in charge of the ‘Natural History of the Blumenfelds,’” she laughs. “Families need to stand up for each other. It’s a way of saying, ‘We’re worthy of respect.’”

Blumenfeld dedicated a year in Israel, where the archaeology of revenge is “layered all the way back to the beginning of time,” to her obsession with confronting the man who’d hurt her father. She was no stranger to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a teenager, she had joined Seeds for Peace, a program for Arab and Jewish youth that emphasizes tolerance. She is fluent in Hebrew and comfortable in Arabic. She covered the 1994 massacre at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs for the Washington Post.

Not long after settling in Jerusalem, she was able to name the man who shot her father: Omar Khatib. She learned he was serving a 25-year sentence in a prison in Ashkelon for the shooting. His family, she discovered, lived in the West Bank village of Kalandia, and “on a fiery July afternoon” in 1998, she arrived unannounced on the family’s doorstep. She did not tell family members she was David Blumenfeld’s daughter. “I was just Laura the journalist, no last name.”

Her ability to keep up the deception surprised her. “It made me wonder about myself,” she says now. “I’d always thought of myself as very warm, impulsive. I didn’t hide my feelings.” As she scribbled notes in the living room of Khatib’s family, she worried her body would betray her: sweaty palms, furrowed brow, a heart that literally skipped beats. One of the shooter’s brother’s thought he recognized her from somewhere, an observation that made her heart beat even faster. She had written about the reopening of homes in nearby Ramallah in 1994, during the first days of Palestinian self-rule. Had he seen her then? He wasn’t sure.

In response to her questions, the friendly Khatib family recounted how Omar shot her father “one time in the head.” “Why only once?” she asked. The shooter’s brother told her the attack “wasn’t personal. It was public relations.” The scene is excruciating. How can she sit there? Managing to appear sympathetic, she describes “a rising anger that made me scrutinize them for the ugliest details. The father’s split toenails. The ceiling’s cauliflower-shaped stains. The flies raving in circles. The feces floating in their toilet. I noted [Omar’s] mother’s breasts lumped beneath her pink robe, and hated them for suckling him.”

She arrived back in Jerusalem after that first visit, distraught and angry. “I was so repulsed--by them for dehumanizing my father, by me for accepting their sugared tea--that I wanted to break something, or someone.”

A Reporter’s Skills,

a Daughter’s Mission

For this assignment, Blumenfeld’s professional skills as a reporter waged war with her mission as a daughter. “As a reporter, empathy was my greatest tool. As an avenger it was my biggest threat.” It weakened her resolve. The journalist in her was curious about the shooter’s motives. The daughter in her did not care why Omar had hurt her father, only that he had.

She admits that one identity seeped into the other, that she was often confused--”part journalist, part lonely girl, part cartoon avenger.” She was on a tear, her thoughts of the shooter never far from her mind. Her best friend, Rachel, told her she’d lost touch with reality. During her “long, embroiled honeymoon year,” her understanding husband joked that God paired him with Laura as “divine retribution for mistreating past girlfriends.”

To deepen her understanding of revenge, she extended her research abroad. Among the diverse interviewees are a grand ayatollah in Iran (who reminds her of her Polish grandfather) and a member of the provincial Blood Feud Committee in Albania. The mayor of Palermo, Sicily, tells her, “Here we have no limits on revenge.” She interviews Benjamin Netanyahu, then Prime Minister of Israel, whose brother commanded and was killed in the famous raid to free hostages in Entebbe, Uganda. She summons her nerve and asks Netanyahu if Yasser Arafat had ever expressed his condolences. (The answer, not surprisingly, is no.)

She studies the anthropological evidence on predator-prey relationships and concludes that revenge is probably hard-wired into our brains. “It’s very hard to resist the impulse to strike back. Revenge is Darwinian. It’s an animal instinct,” she observes. After interviewing a Bedouin Arab embroiled in a blood feud, she comes closest to defining her subject: What is revenge? “Revenge,” she concludes, “is when you can walk away. But somehow, you cannot. Something pulls you back.”

An Israeli chief of staff whom she interviews doubts that she has “the intelligence or the resources” to track down the shooter. He’s wrong. He underestimates Blumenfeld’s tenacity, her imagination, her indispensable naivete, and her considerable personal courage as she turns her contacts with Omar’s family into a friendship, and eventually a means of coming in contact with him.

Blumenfeld is ultimately drawn to the idea of constructive revenge. How can she turn what had been a destructive act (the shooting of her father) into a force for good, for positive change?

She realizes that, for many people, the emotional goal of revenge, more than the desire to hurt, is to have the other person acknowledge his mistake, acknowledge the legitimacy of the victims’ pain. “The only substitute for revenge is acknowledgment,” a psychologist at Hebrew University tells her. “Acknowledgment establishes a new reality.”

Remarkably, that is what she ultimately establishes with the shooter, Omar Khatib. With his family as couriers, Blumenfeld corresponds with the man who shot her father and finally, at his parole hearing in 1999, she meets him face to face. In a courtroom scene of high drama, Blumenfeld reveals her identity to the shooter, his lawyer, his family and the court. She asks that Omar, who has asthma, be given parole on medical grounds. She explains that he is sorry, that he has promised never to hurt anyone again, that she has come to know his family. Her mother blurts out, “If the Blumenfeld family can forgive Omar, then it’s time for the state of Israel to forgive him.”

The judges are flabbergasted and impressed (though not enough to set him free; they deny him parole until 2010).

“Why would you do something so dangerous?” one judge asks her.

“You have to take a chance for peace. You have to believe it’s possible,” she answers. “I wanted them to understand this conflict is between human beings and not disembodied Arabs and Jews. And we’re people. Not ‘targets.’ We’re people with families. And you can’t just kill us.”

Victim Meets Shooter’s

Family for First Time

Since Blumenfeld finished her book, relations between the Palestinians and Israelis have plummeted to an all-time low. The tragedy of Sept. 11, the intifada and the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl all conspired against Blumenfeld meeting again with the family of Omar Khatib. Phones were down, and she could no longer call them. Then ABC journalist Diane Sawyer pulled strings. With a camera crew in tow, Blumenfeld and her father traveled to Kalandia in March, for a “PrimeTime” segment that aired last week. Where before she had ridden a bus, this time they went in an armored truck riddled with bullet holes.

The meeting was emotional. For Blumenfeld, it offered a sense of completion. She was able to bring her father to the Khatibs, to make him “real and human not just ‘the Jew.’” To open the possibility of real dialogue, she says, there has to be a way to see through the stereotypes.

“Palestinian children see Israelis as men with guns. Israelis see Palestinians as terrorists. Or the man mopping their street, or tending their garden,” she says. At the meeting, Khatib’s brother explains to Blumenfeld’s father, “We thought of things before in terms of politics and ideologies. Laura taught us to see things on a personal level.”

Perhaps one prescription right now for peace in the Middle East would be to mobilize 30,000 Laura Blumenfelds on both sides of the conflict to transform what is politically stagnant to something constructively personal. For the time being, one woman’s story of hope--of people coming to understand their similarities by seeing each other “up close”--may inspire others.