PW: Your book Revenge: A Story of Hope chronicles the year you spent looking for the Palestinian terrorist who shot and wounded your father in 1986; it's part memoir, part confession and part study of the nature of revenge. How and when did you decide to undertake such a project?
LB: It was one of those things that I inched into slowly, like water in a pool that's too cold. You say, I'm just going to put my feet in, I'm just going to go up to my knees. So I don't think I ever really decided to write it, even as I was writing it. I just sort of let it happen. Revenge was one of these things that I had in the back of my mind—it was a fantasy, really, to find the guy who shot my father. It seemed so impossible to find him and when I did, what would I do? So I decided I would go to Israel—I had just gotten married and my husband wanted to spend a year there—and I thought well, I'm interested in the subject of revenge. As a reporter, I've seen all kinds of examples of it, whether it's in Northern Ireland or in Congress. And so I decided I'd talk to other people and learn about it, all the while keeping in mind that I was looking for my own personal revenge.
PW: Your research took you to some dangerous places—how did you deal with that?
LB: There were two people operating throughout this book. I was the journalist who was looking at revenge from the outside and, as a daughter, I was living it from the inside. Each of those personas had different strengths. As long as I could say to myself: I'm a reporter, and I'm going into the desert to find a Bedouin—that's what reporters do. That got me through the scarier moments. On the other hand, as a journalist you have to have empathy. While that was my greatest tool as a reporter, it was my biggest threat as an avenger, because it weakened my resolve.
PW: Was this an emotional book for you to write?
LB: It was interesting—some chapters and sections I was happy writing, because when you write you have to relive the moment. But the scenes where I was in the shooter's house with his family? I procrastinated on the days I was supposed to be writing those, because I knew that I would have to go back to their home in my mind and remember what the tea tasted like, what the air smelled like, and how my palms were feeling moist and my heart was literally skipping beats.
PW: Did September 11 affect your book?
LB: It didn't change anything except that I added a section that's three pages. My husband, Baruch, saw the second plane fly in, and my father was on his way to work when he saw the first plane, so they're the vehicles that I use to tell the story of September 11. My book is all about trying to humanize the victim—the project I set for myself was: Can I make my father a human being in the eyes of the shooter? Because he talks about him as a military target. So you wonder: If the hijackers had sat down and had lunch with the wives of some of these people or tea with their children, could they have done it? And in some sense, my book is trying to answer that question. The shooter never expressed any regret—he expressed pride, really, about what he had done—until he found out who I was and who my father was. And we can only hope that that would be possible with anybody.
PW: Did you talk to the shooter's family?
LB: I did call up the family to say hello and see how they were. I wanted to see what they thought about America bombing Afghanistan and the terrible violence going on between Israelis and Palestinians, and all they wanted to know was: How is your baby? Does he look like you or your husband? At first I was frustrated, because I wanted to know where they stood on the world situation. I wondered—could these be the same people who had dismissed my father's shooting the first time we met as "nothing personal"? And then I realized that this was what I had wished for from the beginning. It had become personal for them now, too. That gave me hope.
