CONVERSATION: BLUMENFELD

	April 24, 2002
	Margaret Warner talks with author Laura Blumenfeld about her new book, "Revenge: A Story of Hope."

MARGARET WARNER: The book is "Revenge: A Story of Hope." The author is Laura Blumenfeld a reporter at The Washington Post. It recounts his personal journey into the psychology of revenge. As a brief excerpt on the book's cover puts it, "my father was shot by a terrorist; a decade later, I went looking for him." Laura Blumenfeld welcome. LAURA BLUMENFELD: Thank you. Good to be here. MARGARET WARNER: You were a student at Harvard in 1986. Your father, a rabbi, was in Jerusalem on business, and he was shot. Explain to us the connection between that event and this project of yours. LAURA BLUMENFELD: Well, I realized that these attacks didn't begin or end with my father. They were really part of a mindset, which said it was okay to target innocent civilians to make a political point. And that really bothered me. That sort of shook up my sense of the world. I was a college student at the time, and I was just about to step out into the world. It wasn't just a shot at my father, it was a shot at my innocence and my sense of security. I thought, "if people can think and act this way, then none of us are safe." And I need to find a way take that bullet, to track it down to its source, and challenge that mindset in some way. MARGARET WARNER: And we should point out, your father lived in fact. He wasn't even seriously wounded. But did he have the same urge to explore this the way you did? LAURA BLUMENFELD: Well, my father got lucky, but other tourists who were shot were killed. And so I felt like it was important to look at... this man, this gunman was more than just someone who shot my father. He was a symbol of a way of approaching the world. MARGARET WARNER: So tell us how you proceeded. You got yourself to Jerusalem. LAURA BLUMENFELD: Right. I got myself to Jerusalem, and it took about six months to find the actual gunman. I dug around in police records and newspaper archives, and turned out there were a list of 25 suspects who had been rounded up for shooting and killing various foreign tourists. I didn't have any addresses or phone numbers. I just went to the West Bank and kind of went door to door to try to find these families, until I knocked on the right door and his mother welcomed me inside with a glass of orange soda to drink. MARGARET WARNER: That must have been very difficult. I mean, because I gather you didn't tell them who you were? LAURA BLUMENFELD: I introduced myself simply as Laura, "I'm a journalist write a book about revenge," which was true. I just didn't mention my last name, which was the same as the victim's, my father. And they were quite open about it. They said, "yes, my son tried to kill a man, he shot him one time in the head." When I asked, "who was he?" They said, they sort of shrugged and laughed a little bit, and said it was some Jew; they said it was public relations, it was a way to get people to look at us, was how they explained the shooting. MARGARET WARNER: Now you write at one point, you said, "I wanted the make the shooter realize he had done something wrong." When did you decide that was the form your revenge would take, that that's what you wanted to do? LAURA BLUMENFELD: There were two competing impulses all the way through. Part of me was just this angry daughter. Someone had tried to hurt a member of my family, to kill a member of my family. And we all have these dark fantasies about grabbing that person who hurts our child and shaking them up or smacking them around. But I had to be realistic. I don't have an army, I don't have arm muscles, I'm not Sylvester Stallone. So I had other idea of a different kind of shaking up, a sort of reaching inside of this person and shaking him up from the inside. MARGARET WARNER: So you began writing to him in prison. And what were you trying to find out from him? LAURA BLUMENFELD: I was trying to find out who he was, why he had done it, and more important, I wanted him to slowly discover who his victim was. The first time he wrote to me he described shooting a, "chosen military target," and I just thought about a radar station. I couldn't even picture a human being the way he described it. And so I told him in my letters that, as a reporter, I also had interviewed his victim, David Blumenfeld, and he wasn't a military target. In fact, he was an American, and he was just visiting Jerusalem for a week. MARGARET WARNER: And from reading it, it appears that his... the shooter, Omar Katib, is that his name? LAURA BLUMENFELD: That's right. MARGARET WARNER: That his communications with you evolved over time. They were very sort of nationalistic, polemical at first. Tell us a little bit about that. LAURA BLUMENFELD: The first letter was eight pages of just ideological screen. My husband said, "it sounds like a stereotype of a crazed terrorist espousing ideology." But as he relaxed, and I guess he grew more comfortable with me, he started to talk about details from his childhood. He became more human to me as well, about hiding under his bed during the 1967 War, hearing the foot falls of Israeli soldiers, and being afraid. MARGARET WARNER: So the big moment in the book, the big dramatic moment, is the confrontation that you have with him when he go to his parole hearing. Tell us about that. LAURA BLUMENFELD: Well, as I traveled the world and listened to other people's stories of revenge, it seems that there was a stark choice of turn the other cheek or an eye for an eye. And what I had discovered really was a third way, which is transformation, which basically says that you don't have to destroy your enemy, you can transform your enemy instead. That's a new way of getting revenge. I decided it was something risky and definitely optimistic, but I had to try it. I decided if I performed some kind of act of generosity toward him, maybe that would turn him around. Maybe I could restore my father's humanity that had been denied at the time. MARGARET WARNER: And so? LAURA BLUMENFELD: And so he was sick. This was a medical hearing. And I had a medical report from his doctor saying that he was gravely ill, and I asked my father how he felt about him being released on medical grounds. My father was very pragmatic. He said, "I don't want revenge. I'm not here for forgiveness. If he's sorry and if he's sick, let him go home." So I managed to argue my way up to the front of the courtroom and speak at this hearing. I spoke in Hebrew. All along I had spoken only in Arabic or English with the family, because I didn't want them to know I was Jewish. And when I started talking in Hebrew, of course, they got very concerned. Omar himself jumped up and said, "What is going on here? Who is this journalist, this woman? She's clearly not the person she pretended to be." I was introduced as anonymous in front of the courtroom. I said, "My name is Laura, I come from the United States, and I have gotten to know the family and through the family Omar, and I don't know all the facts of the case, but I do believe that he would not repeat his violence. There would be no more violence if he were freed. And I spoke to the victim, David Blumenfeld, and he also thinks if he's truly ill, 12 years in prison is enough ,and it's time for him to go home. This is what David Blumenfeld said." And the judges yelled at me and told me to sit down, and of course, the prosecutor was seething and saying this is classic hearsay. There was a storm really in the courtroom. And I kept insisting I do have a right to speak. I do have a right to speak. They said, "Why?" And I said, "Because I'm his daughter." And there was just a silence in the courtroom, and I said, "I'm Laura Blumenfeld." And I heard one woman crying behind me, it was Omar's sister. And then everybody broke down in tears. It was only then that I turned around to face Omar for the first time and really look him in the eyes, and I said to him, "And you made a promise, this is on your honor between the Katib family and the Bloomenfeld family that you'll never hurt anybody ever again." He was flabbergasted. MARGARET WARNER: And so, the denouement? They didn't let him out. LAURA BLUMENFELD: They didn't let him out. He wrote me a letter and he said, haven't slept for days, you know, trying to reassemble this puzzle of your letters and our whole relationship, but he said, "You made me feel so stupid that I ever caused you or your kind mother any pain. Sorry." More important he wrote my father a letter. And he said, "Laura was a mirror held up to your face to see you as a human being deserved to be admired and respected, and I'm sorry I missed her message from the beginning." And for me that was a very sweet kind of revenge. It was what I had been looking for all along really. MARGARET WARNER: And based on your own story and then all the travels you did-- I mean, you were in Albania, Sicily, Iran-- what have you concluded about the psychology of revenge, and why some people need revenge and others don't? LAURA BLUMENFELD: It's very interesting. Sometimes it's not even the offense, it's not even how much somebody hurts you, but whether they humiliate you or not, whether you've been shamed. If you think into your own life, whether it was a friend or a boss or a colleague, it's the sense of powerlessness and humiliation. That's on a personal level, but also on a national level when you think about some of our international conflicts. I also think memory is really important. Memory is the fuel that keeps revenge going. And countries and cultures and individuals who are steeped in memory and tend to remember dates and history, often carry through at least revenge fantasies, if not actual revenge. Cultures and people that are forward looking, like America frankly, tend to be more resilient. It's also people who have a group identity or some kind of tribal identity. I think that, also, it's people who have a very simple view of justice, where it's us versus them, who can easily externalize their hate and are able to separate things in very simple terms. Those are also the kind of people who seek revenge. MARGARET WARNER: Given what's been happening the last few months in that region-- the suicide attacks, the reprisals-- do you still consider this story what you call it in your title, "a story of hope?" LAURA BLUMENFELD: I think more than ever it's a story of hope, but it's a story we need to hold on to, because there's a saying in the Middle East, "when you seek revenge you should dig two graves: One for your enemy and one for yourself." And we see that being played out every single day. There's no question that in the Middle East and, also, in our country after 9/11, these are very, very dark times. There is a spark of hope in my story, because it says that the more we can see each other as individuals, the more likely the violence will decline. If we can step way back from the... from the daily hatred and if you can look someone in the eye, it's hard to shoot him in the head. MARGARET WARNER: Laura Blumenfeld, thank you. LAURA BLUMENFELD: Thank you.

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