A Season In Bethlehem

In January 2002, after a period of quiet ushered in by Yasser Arafat’s mid-December unilateral ceasefire, Madani found himself tested anew by a crime that became a symbol of the city’s worsening anarchy and the hatreds unleashed by the intifada. The victim was an American-born Israeli who lived in Jerusalem, worked in Bethlehem, and for the first fourteen months of the intifada had managed, despite the violence, to move easily between worlds. The occasion was one of Madani’s lowest moments as governor–the moment his authority unraveled before his eyes.

Mohammad al-Madani had never met Avi Boaz, but he knew him by reputation. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1930, Avi Boaz studied architecture at Columbia University, joined a Zionist youth movement called Habonim Dror, and emigrated to Israel just after the Six-Day War. But his Zionist ardor soon dimmed, his daughter, Idit Cohen, told me, and he found himself drawn to the stark beauty of the West Bank and the warmth of Palestinian society. In the fall of 1967 he began renting a room on weekends in a quiet hilltop retreat in Beit Jala called the Everest Hotel. Boaz spent his days hiking through the area and came to know the Everest’s owner, a Palestinian Christian named Jamal Arjah. A friendship developed over their shared interest in sports cars. In 1968 Boaz salvaged a gray twelve-cylinder Ferrari originally owned by King Hussein of Jordan that had been abandoned in a wadi near Beit Jala when the Israelis seized control of the area the previous year. Arjah and Boaz repaired the Ferrari and spent weekends traveling around Israel, one time racing up the coastal road from Tel Aviv to Haifa at 120 miles per hour. (Boaz sent the Ferrari to be auctioned at Lloyd’s in the early 1970s, but British customs agents spied the royal Jordanian seal on the hood and impounded it.)

Boaz crossed easily between Israeli and Palestinian societies. He married an American Jewish emigre, raised his daughter, Idit, as a Jew, and lived in a series of neighborhoods on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem that had been built on Palestinian land occupied during the Six-Day War. But he learned to speak Arabic far better than Hebrew, started an architectural design firm in Bethlehem, and returned with his wife and daughter often to visit Jamal Arjah and his family in Beit Jala. The bond between the American Israeli and the Palestinian grew stronger: after Jamal’s older brother Ja’el Arjah, a militant with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hijacked an Air France jetliner filled with Israelis and was killed by commandos at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976, Boaz comforted the distraught Arjah. “Avi didn’t consider himself a Jew,” said Jamal Arjah’s son Bashir. “He didn’t consider himself an American. He was just Avi.”

Boaz, an impish man with a boyish gap between his teeth and a pronounced limp he’d acquired during a childhood bout with polio, was a man of eclectic tastes. An incorrigible car buff, he often busted his budget importing pricey new vehicles from the United States and Europe; he loved tooling around in his 1996 British Rover convertible. At the height of the intifada he was waiting for delivery from the United States of a new Ford Mustang. He was a voracious reader whose tastes ran from the Talmud to Danielle Steele. He listened to classical music and jazz; a devotee of Frank Lloyd Wright, he incorporated the great architect’s stylistic flourishes in his own modest projects in Bethlehem and Beit Jala.

He was also a creature of habit: every morning he rose at seven A.M., combed his hair fastidiously, listened to the English language news on Israeli Radio, rode a stationary bike for half an hour, ate a bowl of bananas and cold oatmeal, and then set out from his apartment in Ma’ale Adumim to his office in Bethlehem and building sites around the West Bank. As the violence worsened and few Israelis dared to travel into the Palestinian territories, Boaz’s yellow Israeli license plate became increasingly conspicuous. But he shrugged off his family’s concerns. “He went to places we would never dream of going,” Idit told me. “I told him, ‘Don’t you know how dangerous these places are?’ He said, ‘Nothing will ever happen to me. Everybody likes me. Everybody knows me. I’m an American.”

On January 15, 2002, Boaz started the morning with a visit to the Everest Hotel, which is located at Beit Jala’s highest point, straddling the border with Jerusalem in Israeli controlled territory. Boaz’s wife had died of cancer only ten days earlier, and he had arranged to move from Ma’ale Adumim to a smaller apartment in the twenty-year-old hilltop settlement of Har Gilo, a few hundred yards down the road from the Everest Hotel; the move would bring him back to the region of hillside olive groves and undeveloped wadis that he had fallen in love with just after his arrival in Israel thirty-four years earlier. He and Bashir Arjah, Jamal Arjah’s thirty-one-year-old son, hung a mirror in Boaz’s new apartment, had lunch in the Everest’s empty dining room, and then decided to drive to Bethlehem to buy a table and chairs for Boaz’s new abode.

It was a tense time in the Palestinian territories. Two days earlier a remote-controlled bomb planted in the wall of a Christian cemetery blew to pieces Ra’ed Qarmi, the charismatic commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the northern West Bank town of Tulkarm; the targeted killing by Israel, which broke the longest lull in the violence since the beginning of the intifada, led to immediate calls by Tanzim factions across the West Bank for revenge. Despite the threat of violence against Israelis, Bashir Arjah didn’t feel any need for caution; Boaz, he reasoned, was well known and liked in Beit Jala and Bethlehem; “He was one of us,” Bashir says. Boaz got behind the wheel of the Rover, with Bashir Arjah in the back and a friend of Bashir’s who was visiting from Amman sitting next to Boaz. They crossed the Israeli checkpoint into Palestinian-controlled Beit Jala at one o’clock and headed down the hill toward Bethlehem.

They didn’t get far. A man with a Kalashnikov was standing in front of the Arab Orthodox Club, a few hundred yards past the checkpoint. He motioned for the Rover to pull over. Arjah thought he might be a policeman.

“Show me your ID,” the man with the gun demanded.

“Who are you?” asked Arjah.

“Keep quiet,” he replied.

He inspected the documents of the two Palestinians. Then he walked around the car to Boaz. The American, who still traveled with a United States passport, flashed him a friendly smile.

“Shalom,” he said. Boaz was just joking, as he often did with Palestinian Authority officials. But Arjah realized that Boaz had made a grievous mistake. The gunman shouted “Yehud!” Arabic for Jew, and called over several Tanzim lurking nearby. Arjah recognized one of them as Riad al-Amur, one of the late Atef Abayat’s top lieutenants and the chief suspect in the shooting death of the female settler Sarit Amrani in September 2001. The armed men surrounded the Rover and one of them asked Boaz, “Do you have a gun?”

“Sure,” Boaz replied, still not realizing the gravity of the situation. He extended his cane. “I have a gun right here.”

Bashir Arjah tried to calm the militants. He showed them Boaz’s blue U.S. passport and his New York State driver’s license and explained that Boaz was an American businessman with connections to high officials in the Palestinian Authority. While Arjah was pleading, a jeepload of Naval Police passed by. “Is there something wrong?” one of the policemen asked.

“Get going, there is nothing wrong,” one of the gunmen said, and the Naval Police obediently drove away.

One gunman climbed into the car with Boaz, Bashir Arjah, and his friend and ordered the American to drive to the Bethlehem Hotel. Four other cars filled with gun-toting members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades joined the convoy. Seated next to Boaz, Bashir whispered to him in English to speak no Hebrew and then tried to reason with the gunman, who was sitting in the rear. “Look,” he said. “I’m from the Arjah family. We own the Everest Hotel. Let’s go to the muqata. Let’s go to Preventive Security. They all know me and they all know Avi.”

The Tanzim guerrilla snorted derisively. “We’ll go to my muqata,” he replied. Bashir spotted his younger brother Anwar driving down the street in the opposite direction. Bashir waved frantically out the window and called to his brother. The gunman whacked Bashir in the back of his skull with his pistol, and Bashir slumped in the front seat. Boaz begun to plead with him. “Please, my daughter will be asking for me,” he said. “The police will be looking for me.”

“We’ll go to my police,” the gunman said.

At the Bethlehem Hotel, a modern twelve-story building located at one of the city’s busiest intersections, the Tanzim pulled Bashir Arjah and his friend from Boaz’s car and at gunpoint forced them into another vehicle. Minutes later the gunmen dropped them on the roadside in Beit Sahour. “Anyone asks you what happened, you say you know nothing, understand?” one gunman said. Bashir nodded. But as soon as the car disappeared around a corner, he began phoning his contacts at Preventive Security and Fatah, who passed the report of Boaz’s kidnapping to Governor Madani. Madani dialed Arafat. “A crippled Israeli has been seized by the Tanzim in Bethlehem,” he said. “Do your best to save the man,” Arafat replied. The governor rushed to Kamel Hmeid’s office. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked. Hmeid replied that he didn’t know.

While Madani tried in vain to gather information about the kidnapping, the chief of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Ibrahim Abayat, arrived at the Bethlehem Hotel. With him was Jihad Ja’ara, a former high-ranking officer with Preventive Security, now one of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades’ most ruthless killers. A compact figure with tousled black hair and a gap between his lower teeth, Ja’ara had joined the Tanzim thirteen months earlier, he later told me, after witnessing a checkpoint clash in Jericho in which Israeli soldiers shot dead several Palestinian youths. Ja’ara’s Preventive Security unit had standing orders not to interfere in such clashes. But taunted by an eight-year-old boy, he told me, Ja’ara spontaneously opened fire on Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint, shooting one dead and injuring two others. Then he went into hiding, going first to Ramallah and arriving in April 2001 in Bethlehem, where he joined Atef Abayat’s militia. In retaliation for Raed Qarmi’s assassination by Israel, Ja’ara later told me, he had decided to execute one Israeli; he had ordered that a trap be laid for Avi Boaz, who he knew worked in Bethlehem. “He was an Israeli, a Jew,” Ja’ara told me. “He worked for Israeli intelligence and enlisted people to become collaborators.”

Ibrahim Abayat objected to Ja’ara’s plan; he thought that shooting a seventy-two-year-old polio victim who was a popular figure in Bethlehem would serve no purpose and would possibly harm the Tanzim’s interests. Abayat pleaded with Ja’ara not to harm Boaz, but Abayat had never been able to command his forces with the same authority that his predecessor Atef had exerted, and Ja’ara ignored him. “This is not your business,” Ja’ara replied. Ja’ara, Riad al-Amur and a third gunman named Ismail Abayat comandeered the Rover, placed Boaz in the rear passenger seat and dropped Ibrahim Abayat in front of Kamel Hmeid’s office. The Rover wound east toward Beit Sahour, following the edge of a wadi that was now vibrantly green from the winter rains.

Boaz was frightened now. “Don’t be afraid,” Ja’ara, the driver, told him. “Nothing is going to happen to you.” Ja’ara questioned Boaz about his relationship with the Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic intelligence service. Boaz denied having any connection with the agency. The Tanzim asked him if he owned property in Har Homa, the Jewish settlement still under construction on a West Bank hilltop just north of Beit Sahour and clearly visible from the car. Boaz, Ja’ara told me later, admitted to owning property there. “You’re hurting the Palestinian people,” Ja’ara said he told him. The car sped unhindered through a Palestinian Authority checkpoint-the cops manning the post later claimed they never saw the car carrying Boaz-and descended a steep path to a football field. Ja’ara stepped out of the car. He and the two other Tanzim with Boaz had already decided what they would do next. “Riad al-Amur and I walked ahead to the field,” Ja’ara told me. “Ismail Abayat [a distant cousin of Ibrahim Abayat] got out and started walking too. Avi Boaz slid behind the wheel of the Rover and began to drive away. Then Riad raised his M-16 and sprayed his windshield with bullets.” Avi Boaz was killed instantly; Palestinian police would later count 19 bullet holes in the dead man’s windshield.

Minutes later Madani learned that police had discovered Avi Boaz’s bullet riddled body in his car in Beit Sahour. Ala Hosni, the chief of police, who had spotted Ibrahim Abayat and Jihad Ja’ara in the Rover convertible fifteen minutes before Boaz’s death-he hadn’t realized Boaz was a prisoner in the car with them- now summoned the two Tanzim to his office in the Bethlehem Peace Center for questioning. Hosni was seated at his desk, eating a chicken and rice lunch, when Ibrahim Abayat and Jihad Ja’ara swaggered through his door. The two men helped themselves to bits of the police chief’s meal.

“Did you kill Avi Boaz?” Ala Hosni asked them.

Ibrahim Abayat denied knowing anything about the murder, then he turned around bruskly and walked with Ja’ara out the door.