THE BRIDE OF JAFFA

On the morning of March 11, 1978, five years before my birth, an American photographer named Gail Rubin was on the beach near Ma’agan Michael, Israel. She was taking pictures of birds through the morning fog. Eleven armed fighters came out of the water and asked her where they were. They were so far off they believed themselves to be in Cyprus. Rubin told them. Then Dalal Mughrabi shot her.

She died, right there, on the beach.

By the end of the day, Mughrabi and thirty-eight people would be counted dead. Thirteen of them children. More than seventy were wounded, and the fire in which it ended burned hot enough that some could not be named.

The images are unmistakable.

Forty-three years later, on March 8, 2021, Palestinian Authority television celebrated International Women’s Day by presenting four female role models. One was a poet. One was a photographer. Two were terrorists. One of them was Dalal Mughrabi.

She was born in 1959 in a refugee camp in Beirut. Her father had been driven out of Jaffa in 1948 and carried a group with him all the way to Lebanon. Her mother was Lebanese. She grew up in poverty, attended UNRWA schools named after the places her family had lost.

Fatah reached her when she was twelve. She trained on weapons as a schoolgirl. In 1973 she qualified as a nurse and was set to begin her life. When Lebanon’s civil war came she fought in the Student Battalion, and in 1975 she ended an engagement because her fiancé wanted her out of the revolution.

She chose the revolution.

Two years later, she was assigned to an operation planned by Abu Jihad, taking the nom de guerre Jihad. The plan was to seize a Tel Aviv hotel, hold hostages against the release of prisoners, and ruin the peace initiatives between Begin and Sadat.

She went home to say goodbye and at her younger brother’s birthday party she told her sister Rashida that it was the last birthday party she would attend. The day before she left she asked her mother to cook stuffed squash and eggplant. Her father was out, so she left him a note.

It was her handwritten will and testament.

Thirteen fighters sailed from Lebanon. Two drowned on the way. The eleven who landed met Rubin, and climbed to the four-lane coastal highway. They opened fire on the cars driving by, killing some in a white taxi. Having taken the vehicle, they stopped a chartered bus carrying Egged drivers and their families. When they came upon a second bus they forced its passengers in with the rest.

Some seventy hostages now filled the vehicle, and they raised a Palestinian flag over it. They went south towards Tel Aviv, leaning from the windows to fire into cars alongside and throwing grenades at the ones they couldn’t reach. At least one body they threw onto the road.