The U.S. is playing footsie with the Palestinian Authority (PA) instead of supporting its own citizens.
One of my favorite football stories involves Broadway Joe Namath. The famous and popular quarterback was once having a really bad game. He threw a couple of first half interceptions. During half-time, one of his defensive colleagues passed along some critical information: “Joe, we’re the guys wearing green.” It’s always good to know who your team is.
Most every person has in his or her head a room sealed off with locks and skull and crossbones warning. It is a place of memories where one best not travel, as there is pain there, not just standard pain, but rather existential misery. At times, a person is forced to open all of the padlocks and go in so as to pass along information to family or figure out how certain life decisions were reached. For me, our experiences in the suicide bombing in March 2022 falls into this category. While speaking about it generally is facile, recalling the bloody and painful details can often lead to tears and/or complete physical incapacity. One of the worst memories I have is the ambulance ride from the site of the bombing on King George Street to Hadassah Hospital. Because of the enormous number of attacks, emergency response crews carried a simple form that had a picture of a human body, front and back, and a list of conditions underneath. A first-responder was to circle the areas of injury and then cut off the tabs on the bottom so that the last one was the present condition of the patient being delivered to immediate care at the hospital. I remember the tabs as including:
3 GREEN LIGHT
2 ORANGE URGENT--STABLE
1 YELLOW URGENT—UNSTABLE
0 BLACK DEAD
As we drove through the gray, rainy streets of Jerusalem, I saw one paramedic pull a blood-soaked towel from the back of our 7-year-old’s head. The other fellow sitting next to me circled the back of the head on the form and as he was working, what I saw exposed was the last one: dead. I literally felt my heart stop. I grabbed the paramedic and started to scream at him, “He was moving a moment ago! He is not dead!” I shook him so hard, they could have called a second ambulance to take care of him. He moved up the tabs to Urgent-Unstable. My heart rate dropped back below 300.
And every American victim of Palestinian terror can tell a similar hair-raising story. One fellow identified his murdered daughter from her hair flowing out of a body bag seen on the nightly news. Another woman spoke of her two children wounded in a pizzeria suicide bombing and how she ran between hospitals to visit them and find out what their conditions were. No one should go through the horrors of a terror attack and its aftermath. No American citizen should experience such hell and then watch as its government either works against him or simply stands on the sidelines, not sure that his team is the one wearing the red-white-and-blue.
In the first 11 years of Sokolow v PLO, the U.S. government stayed on the sidelines. It neither helped us nor put its foot on the scales in favor of the murderers. After 10 American families won a $655 million judgment against the PLO and PA, Tony Blinken, acting as undersecretary for John Kerry and Barack Obama, wrote a Statement of Interest in favor of the bad guys. He gave some breezy acknowledgment that the long-suffering families deserved a side order of “justice,” but the most important thing was not to bankrupt the PA, as Hamas would take over and the world would end in 20 minutes or so. This was the first but not last perfidy. Jeff Sessions, acting as attorney general, told the Supreme Court not to get involved in our case when we asked for their assistance in determining jurisdictional issues related to the PA and PLO. The Congress twice passed laws to help us and twice Donald Trump signed them into law. The Biden DOJ came in on our side with our recent Supreme Court hearing, and the Trump DOJ continued that support during oral arguments. We won 9-0 and the defendants are finally considered at home for the purpose of jurisdiction.
The case currently rests with the Second Circuit of Appeals. There are two options: return of the judgment or run a new case from square one. We obviously want the former outcome from the appellate court. We have asked the DOJ and the State Department to file a brief on our behalf. Crickets. More crickets. I don’t pretend to know the thought process in these departments, but oftentimes they think like Blinken: “Oh, these American citizens are going to bankrupt the Palestinian Authority! We need to make sure that that does not happen. Let’s stay out of it.” We are not interested in bankrupting the corrupt PA. We want justice and we want closure. We have approached the bad guys a dozens times with a suggestion to negotiate a settlement, and they have told us at each occasion to pound sand. The PA has settled in the past but only when it had no choice. We want the verdict back to force them to settle. And the U.S. government has gone radio silent exactly when we need it. Hello? Anybody home?
If you want to end terror against civilians and make it clear that one does not mess with the U.S., then you make the bad guys pay for harming American citizens. Inflicting financial pain does not undo the physical and psychological pain experienced, but it puts the bad guys on notice: hurt an American and you’ll go broke.
I am asking the U.S. government to continue its support for American citizens and file a brief in the case of Sokolow v PLO. We want justice and we want to know that our government is in our corner. Now is the time to act and not dawdle. Evil is evil, and fighting it makes this world better. We can resolve this case, but only if the PA sees no alternative. Now is the time for the U.S. government to act on behalf of its citizens.
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