What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? by David Harris-Gershon

Author:David Harris-Gershon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2013-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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