73 – On the road to Washington, D.C.
The National Park Service van drove south on the Garden State Parkway through New Jersey, a cautious two or three miles an hour over the speed limit. The three young men inside the van made an attempt to look like what they guessed park rangers might look like, wearing hastily purchased khaki pants and shirts from REI. They took turns driving, switching every couple of hours.
For a week, they’d argued among themselves about their choice of targets. One decision the three agreed to early on was that while the old man, Abram Goldhersh, could give them what he considered to be direct commands, this was going to be their operation and the final decisions were going to be theirs alone. Goldhersh’s references to the “important people in Boston” he had met with made no impression on the young men. Just more old men, they agreed.
“Our asses are on the line,” Gimel said. “Abram’s OK for an older guy, but this is going to be our show. We make the decisions.”
The mall bombings changed their plans radically. Before those bombings, they planned to break up the C4 into smaller packages and place them strategically around Washington, maybe with timers set to go off as close together as they could manage. The bombers would be safely on the road out of the city when the first explosions took place.
They dropped that plan after the suicide bombings in the shopping malls.
“Let’s face it,” Bet had said to the other two men the night of the mall bombings. “Those two guys, Hassids, right, showed they had the guts to give their lives to send a message. The fucking Palestinians have been blowing themselves up for twenty years. What message do we send if we drop our packages and run away and hide to save our tails? What does that say?”
“It says we’re smart,” Gimel answered smiling.
“It says we’re cowards,” Aleph said quietly. “It says we’re afraid to give up our lives in the struggle, that we skulk and hide and run away. Not even the Arabs did that.”
“That’s my point,” Bet said. “Our lives won’t be worth shit if we get caught after doing this anyway. We’ll wind up in some federal prison forever, or the gas chamber. If you ask me, I’d rather die a hero. What do you say?”
The other two men were quiet. Finally, Aleph spoke.
“Masada,” he said. “Masada in D.C.. That’s my vote.”
Masada, the ancient fortress on a cliff overlooking the Judean Desert. A thousand Jewish rebels held out there against the Roman Legion. When the fortress walls were breached, the Jewish defenders took their own lives rather than surrender. Israel Defense Forces recruits climbed Masada to take their oaths.
The two men turned to Gimel, not saying anything. He sighed deeply and nodded his head. “It will make the detonators easier to rig,” he said.
Their final selection of a target, in retrospect, made dramatic sense. Anything similar to a 9/11 type attack from the air would have been beyond their capabilities if it were directed against the obvious Washington targets, such as the White House or the Capital building. The timing of the March, too, figured into their plans. They did not want to kill Jews, of course. Heaven forbid their work should be misinterpreted as an attack against Jews.
They decided that the message they wanted to send was that they were serious about forcing the government to support Israel, that they could strike in the heart of the nation’s capital and that more attacks would follow. They wanted to be dramatic. They knew they had enough powerful explosive to send a significant message.
The van crossed the Delaware River near Philadelphia and drove through Pennsylvania and into Maryland. It was Thursday morning, the day before the March was to begin in Washington. The men were exhausted and had time to kill. They drove the van around to the rear of a Ramada Inn in Rockville, Maryland, a half hour’s drive from Washington.
The men got three separate rooms, using Aleph’s credit card. He’d asked for the motel’s best rooms, joking afterwards that it was not as if he’d be around when the credit card bill arrived. The men rested, ate a tremendous dinner, and prayed before going to sleep.