Bombshell (14 page)

In many ways, Siobhan's life as a terrorist paralleled Mairéad's. Mairéad had taken the young girl under her wing when Siobhan secretly joined the PIRA. Siobhan was still in her first year with the organization when Mairéad was gunned down by the SAS in Gibraltar. Siobhan, only fifteen at the time, was devastated. “To the people of Falls Road Mairéad was a patriot. To the British she was a terrorist. To her family she was a victim of Irish history.”
⁵⁵
To Siobhan she was a friend. Days before Siobhan's bombing attempt,
An Phoblacht
reported on the British government's actions to obstruct the investigation into the Gibraltar killings.
⁵⁶
The assassination of Mairéad Farrell, the subsequent British cover-up, and a perceived pattern of discrimination and human rights abuses suffered all her life led Siobhan to board the airport bus that day to carry out her mission.

As the uniformed officers lifted the bomb from under her overalls and handed it to the bomb-disposal unit, Siobhan thought to herself that someone had given the authorities information about her mission. They knew too much. They knew that she would be
traveling alone, that she would be pregnant (not really), and exactly what her plan was. The Provisional IRA was rife with informers and people who were working with the British security services, MI5, or the RUC. A few years earlier, a high-ranking informer on the IRA's command council had provided the information that saved Prince Charles and Princess Diana from an assassination attempt at London's Dominion Theatre in 1983. Another informer, a double agent code-named Stakeknife, had alerted the authorities to Farrell, McCann, and Savage's mission in Gibraltar. Siobhan counted herself lucky that the officers had not shot her on the spot as part of the dreaded shoot-to-kill policy.

Siobhan was sentenced on May 21, 1990. When, years later, she reminisced about her time in jail, there was no regret or bitterness in her voice. Armagh's green and pink stone walls had made her the person she was now. She felt that it was a tremendous growth experience for her. Like Mairéad, she had entered jail as an idealistic young woman, but her experiences in jail transformed her into a leader. Mairéad had not regretted her time in jail either. Her only regret was getting caught.

The idea that prison could be a learning experience was duplicated in many instances of political incarceration around the world. When Nelson Mandela left his prison cell after twenty-seven years in February 1990, the African National Congress dubbed the prison Robben Island University. It had become a college of resistance, a training school for opposition to apartheid in which the older prisoners cared for and educated the younger ones. In prison they learned to read and write, and became politically aware. Among Palestinian inmates in HaSharon and Megiddo prisons, captured terrorists serving life sentences take classes and complete degrees online. Northern Ireland in the 1990s (once political status was restored) was no different. According to the women, prison broadened their political horizons and sharpened their ability to
recognize violence against women both in the family and as a form of economic exploitation. As part of the learning process, the women initiated contacts outside of prison. As a consequence, they identified themselves with women across the globe. They spent hours talking about politics, cooking, and studying. The camaraderie was intense and the friendships Siobhan formed in prison lasted long after she was freed.

While in jail, Siobhan worked out two hours a day and took classes online from the Open University toward her degree in political science. By the time of her release she had read hundreds of books on Irish history and politics and had learned about nationalist struggles in the developing world and injustice in places far and wide. Her experiences differed from those of Mairéad Farrell because special status had been reinstated. She was allowed to wear her own clothes, study, and receive packages and mail. Most important, special status meant that she was not considered an ordinary criminal. This was what Bobby Sands and the other nine men had died for, and why Mary Doyle, Mairéad Farrell, and Margaret Nugent had gone on their hunger strike.

After her release Siobhan once again followed in Mairéad's footsteps, pursuing a degree in political science and sociology at Queen's University in Belfast. She was active in many of the student organizations. Unlike Mairéad, who had become famous in jail, Siobhan rarely shared her personal history with others. Unless people were in the movement, they were unlikely to know who she was. But within her own community, she had rock-star status. When she got out of prison, every man wanted to date her and everyone wanted to buy her a pint. She laughed when she told me she could have gotten any man she wanted. After a few months of the adulation, however, she grew bored. She married a boy in her social circle and settled down to start a family. After school she went to work for several benevolent organizations
connected to Sinn Féin. Eventually, she took a job at Sinn Féin headquarters.

Siobhan sat in her office wearing a colorful sundress with tiny red and blue flowers. Her shoulder-length strawberry-blond hair would occasionally fall into her eyes. She looked no more than twenty-five despite her five years in prison (she was released early as part of the Good Friday Agreement in 1995). A picture of two lively children and a handsome husband sat on her desk. She smiled a lot and spoke in an animated fashion of life in the PIRA.

Siobhan felt that she was working for peace and justice for her people, but legally now, helping to raise community awareness, ensuring that everyone had voting rights, and helping Sinn Féin win elections. Was she angry at having spent so many years behind bars? No, she did not feel any anger. Several times she said that everybody has to forgive in order to move the peace process forward. That's what she was doing, working toward a peaceful future for her children.

THE SCOUT

I do not recognize the legitimacy of this court, and I do not introduce myself to you by my name or age, I introduce myself with my actions … I see you all in this court today angry, and it is the same anger that [is] in my heart and the hearts of the Palestinian people … Where are your hearts when you kill children in Rafah, Jenin and Ramallah, Where is the sense!?

—Ahlam at-Tamimi, 2005
¹

AHLAM

Ahlam at-Tamimi smiled angelically as she recalled the events of the afternoon of August 9, 2001, when twenty-two-year-old Izzedine as-Suheil Al Masri went to the Sbarro pizzeria at the intersection of Jerusalem's King George and Jaffa streets. In Al Masri's guitar case was a fifteen-pound improvised explosive device, which master bomb maker Abdullah Barghouti had packed with nails, screws, nuts, and bolts to maximize the carnage. This trip to the Sbarro pizzeria was not a maiden trip for Ahlam. The twenty-year-old from the village of Nebi Saleh had reconnoitered the street days earlier, studying the neighborhood to ascertain when and where a bomb might do the most damage. Ahlam claims that she chose the Sbarro after seeing
the crowds of people who crammed into the restaurant at lunchtime.
²
Israel assassinated Jamal and Omar Mansour and six other people in Nablus on July 31, 2001; the next day, Hamas set in motion their act of revenge. The attack had taken just nine days to plan.

Ahlam pointed out the busy intersection to Al Masri. There were four stoplights and people crisscrossed the street in all directions. It was one of the busiest intersections in all of West Jerusalem, the Jewish part of the city. She first suggested detonating the bomb in the middle of the street, perhaps as a bus was stopped at the traffic light, so he could kill all the passengers inside in addition to the pedestrians. But he opted instead to enter the pizzeria.

Al Masri bore an innocent expression as he walked into the Sbarro and sat down at a table. It was 2:00
P.M.
and the two-story restaurant was packed with families and young children eating their midafternoon snack. When the bomb exploded, 15 civilians were killed instantly and another 130 wounded. Half a dozen strollers lay charred on the street where mothers had left them while they ate lunch. When rescuers ran into the restaurant, the blistered bodies were still smoking, so hot that they could not be touched. The first wave of good Samaritans ran in and wrapped the pizzeria's checkered tablecloths around the victims' hair and clothes. Everyone in the restaurant and several passersby had been struck by shards of flying glass when the windows were shattered. Streaks of blood ran down people's arms, legs, and torsos.

According to
The Independent
's Robert Fisk, who arrived on the scene soon after the blast, one woman lay in a heap, a chair leg run through her,
³
and another lay outside with her brains gushing out of her head. A small child was so mutilated by the bomb that the eyes had been blasted out of his head. Amid the acrid smoke and broken glass, rescue workers pulled bodies from the rubble. Jens Palme, a German photographer from
Stern
magazine, counted ten dead in two minutes.
⁴

HERZL'S DREAM

Many people observing Israel-Palestine today assume that its inhabitants have been killing each other since Biblical times. In fact, this is not at all the case. Jews and Arabs got on well for centuries even as Jews were being persecuted in Christian Europe in inquisitions, witch hunts, blood libels, and pogroms. In the golden age of Islam in Spain, both Muslim and Jewish philosophy and science were celebrated. Jews, like Christians and Zoroastrians, were honored as “people of the book” (
ahl al Kitab
), their prophets recognized and respected by centuries of Islamic rulers.

The Islamic world was largely insulated from the religious anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages and the so-called “scientific” anti-Semitism that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Europe penetrated the Middle East in both positive and negative ways, influencing political thought and technological progress. When violence erupted between the Muslim and Jewish communities it was often the result of European instigation.

The story of the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict starts with the Jewish diaspora in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While religious Zionism (love for the Holy Land) was enshrined in the Jewish faith from the beginning, the desire to create a political entity in the Holy Land developed much later. Various movements in the late nineteenth century began to agitate for a Jewish homeland. One of these, the Lovers of Zion, emerged in 1882 during the Russian pogroms and encouraged emigration to the Holy Land. At the time, Palestine was a neglected backwater of the Ottoman Empire,
⁵
a narrow strip of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea and characterized by swamps, disease, and deserts. While there had been a continuous Jewish presence in the region since Roman times, it consisted mainly of religious scholars.
⁶
Small Jewish settlements at Hebron, Tzfat, Tiberius, and Jerusalem were notably poor if not destitute.

In 1894 a seminal event in France would have reverberations throughout the Jewish diaspora. A young Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of spying for Germany. He was found guilty, publicly stripped of his rank, and sent to Devil's Island. But Dreyfus was innocent, and new evidence that implicated the real conspirator, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was covered up by French intelligence. Dreyfus's religion had made him the ideal scapegoat.

French writer Émile Zola wrote an open letter in the newspaper
L'Aurore
accusing the government of anti-Semitism and suppressing evidence. Most of the French intelligentsia took one side or the other. The home of liberty, equality, and fraternity witnessed some of the ugliest anti-Semitic propaganda from the literati. In attendance at Dreyfus's second trial was the Paris correspondent for the Austrian
New Free Press
, Theodore Herzl. A journalist long assimilated into Austrian culture, Herzl found himself shocked and dismayed by the racist epithets he read and the rallies he witnessed in Paris where many chanted “Death to the Jews!” For Herzl this was an epiphany: if Jews were discriminated against in the home of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, they would never be safe until they had their own homeland.

Herzl quickly wrote
Der Judenstaat
(
The Jewish State
), which became the basis for political Zionism, in 1896. The next year the first Zionist congress met in Basel, Switzerland, to discuss how and where to create a Jewish state. In the sixth congress in 1903 suggestions mooted for potential sites included Uganda, Kenya, or somewhere in British East Africa. But the majority held fast to the idea that the Jewish state would have to be in the biblical Kingdom of Israel.

Zionist groups and their supporters approached the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II about forming a chartered company to develop the area. Europeans used charter companies to establish economic and political domination over the developing world;
South Africa and Rhodesia began as chartered companies, as did the Dutch East Indies and the Belgian Congo. While the sultan refused to sanction large-scale Jewish immigration to the area, he permitted several waves of immigration with the hope that European settlement would provide hard currency and strong trading links, both of which the Ottoman Empire needed badly.