The Hadassah Covenant

by Tommy Tenney

  “I know her. I know that girl. I recognize those eyes—I saw them through a window just two weeks ago. She and her family—they were trigger sentries for the Al Hillah raid! She’s not just a Jewish girl in hiding—she’s a coalition collaborator!”

  “What on earth do you mean?” Hadassah asked.

  “The Viper 5 squad got reports of potential targets within a block or two. But often they need a local sympathizer to help them pinpoint an exact location to attack. This girl and her family had volunteered through some kind of local network. I don’t even think we knew they were Jewish.”

  And then Ari glimpsed his father sagging into the arms of Hadassah’s bodyguards, and his professional reserve shattered whole.

  They were not able to speak again for another hour—a mind-numbing sixty minutes of shouted code words and chaotic but perpetual movement.

  When the madness was over, Hadassah and Ari Meyer found themselves standing in an improvised medical suite somewhere in the same underground floor, next to a bed where Anek al-Khalid lay unconscious but stable. A doctor in civilian clothes stood watch beside a faintly beeping crash-cart from which snaked a dozen tubes and electrical contacts. Behind them, half visible through a door slightly ajar, lurked a dozen men in varying aspects of military and diplomatic attire.

  “I don’t have the equipment to say with complete certainty that he did not have a heart attack,” the doctor said to Ari. “But from his blood analysis, I would give you a ninety-percent likelihood that he came as close to a myocardial infarction as it’s possible to come without actually suffering one.”

  “That’s quite understandable,” Meyer said, his voice cracking. “He suffered an incredible shock. I still can’t believe my colleagues were so—so callous as to rush him in there to witness that without some kind of preparation.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m truly sorry,” Hadassah told Meyer, stepping forward. Then the sympathetic look was replaced with something else. “However, I have some questions—”

  “Yes.” He nodded grimly. “I’m sure you do.”

  “Your sudden appearance up there”—she waved vaguely toward the ceiling—“what was that all about?”

  “I did not plan on being seen. If the emergency call had not come, you would never have known of my presence. However, please remember that my father and I were never told you were the reason for the invitation. Your arrival at the embassy was a complete surprise.”

  “Yes. Well, there are shocks on my side, too. The fact that you are alive, that you are here, and most of all, that you are my cousin.” She paused to appraise him carefully. “I have so many questions, I hardly know where to begin.”

  Before he could answer, an aide stepped in and handed her a telephone.

  “My dearest, did you see it? Did you see . . . see the footage?”

  The voice was Jacob’s, as clear as the next room, and he sounded tense. He rushed on, “I had no idea, no warning they would go through with it—”

  “Yes, I’m afraid we did see the whole terrible thing—” Her voice caught before she added, “And Mr. al-Khalid suffered a near heart attack.”

  “Honey, I’m very sorry you had to go through that.” Jacob’s genuine regret was clear. “Like I said, I had no idea—but I do need to speak to him right away. I can’t tell him to call off his lawsuit, of course, but I must talk with him.”

  “Did you understand me, Jacob? He almost died.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “I’m not . . . not sure. Semiconscious at best.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to ask you to find out.” His tone was gentle but firm. “Look, this is the most volatile, dangerous, and tragic event I’ve ever seen. I’ve been on the phone with the President of the United States. His Secretary of State is right now on hold, waiting for my line to clear. As you can imagine, the sight of this young girl has grabbed the world’s attention. It’s not just the lead story, it’s been the only story for the last two hours. And now her actual death—” He stopped to clear his throat. “And the only question on any Arab street is Who is this Anek al-Khalid, and why is he so greedy that he’d rather steal food from starving Iraqi children than lift a finger to save a Jewish child from a horrible death? And did you hear the terrorists claim earlier that the 2005 London bombings were actually a warning to him? A personal warning about which he was given prior warning, and did nothing to heed, let alone pass on to authorities?”

  “Oh, Jacob, I can’t believe that—”

  “It gets worse. Iraq has exploded. There’s fighting across the country. Gaza too. The Palestinian peace talks have been suspended out of pressure from Muslim states, even so-called moderates. In the last hour there’ve been riots outside twelve of our embassies around the world. Including the one you are at.”

  “I don’t understand. There’ve been atrocities before—why would this one be so . . . so incendiary?”

  “They’ve never taken a whole family hostage before or publicly murdered a child like this. And it’s never been a Jewish family before. The dilemma has caused Muslim factions to actually declare war against each other! Some say the Koran forbids the killing of infidel children. Others insist it’s a sacred duty. Six different mullahs on three continents have issued fatwas against the others for their opinions about the taking of this girl and her family. And that’s not to mention the fatwas against Anek, like the one leveled years ago against Salman Rushdie. He is a marked man.” “I can’t believe this—”

  “And Hadassah, consider this. All this is without anyone knowing that the First Lady of Israel was personally meeting with Anek al-Khalid when the girl was murdered! Not to mention that he happens to be her uncle! Do you realize what fuel that would add to the fire? I can hardly think about it! For the Arab World to realize al-Khalid is related to the Israeli Prime Minister!”

  Her head was spinning. Forcing herself to stay in control, she asked, “All right . . . so what do I do now, Jacob?”

  “Honey, crowds are gathered right outside the compound where you are. They’ve been held back only because London police can lock down the entire street, but it won’t last long. Especially if they learn that al-Khalid is actually on the premises. You have to come home. Now. And you really ought to persuade him—your uncle—to come back with you. He cannot be kept safe anywhere but in Israel.”

  “Did you hear me, Jacob?” Hadassah demanded once more. “He’s unconscious, and it’s only with G-d’s help he didn’t die when he heard that girl speak his name. He’s incapable of conversing with anybody, let alone a head of state.” She paused to look around. “However, there is someone here you can speak with in his stead.”

  “Who in the world might that be?”

  “You already know the man—in fact, you told me about him. In the Mossad, he goes by Ari Meyer. Actually, it’s al-Khalid’s son. My cousin, whom I never even knew existed.”

  The line went silent. He finally asked, “What in the world is going on, Hadassah? I thought your investigation was going in a different direction—”

  “It is a strange story, honey. I had no idea how involved it would become.”

  “Or how bizarre. I am so worried, with all these strange convergences—saving exiled Jews, Esther Edicts, genocidal plots—I feel as though I’m reliving Esther myself, and Haman’s evil plot is still under way!”

  “I told you the old story was important.”

  “I never doubted it, honey,” he said dryly. “Regardless, I want you and this Meyer on the plane back here within an hour. This time, my dear, it’s an order. Be safe.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Emunah America Magazine 2003

  Although the Jewish community in Iraq dated back 2,700 years, by the time the most recent images of Iraq were being transmitted around the globe, nearly all of the Iraqi Jews were living elsewhere, mainly in Israel, some concentrated in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The vast majority of these Jews left Iraq without anything tangible.

&n
bsp; The Iraqi Jews are split on the issue of their former homeland. Some retain warm reminiscences of the country, while others nothing more than bitterness. And others take a more financially oriented approach to the country, seeking to regain some of the of the property that was taken from them by the Iraqi government. An East Coast–based organization that calls itself the American Committee for the Rescue and Resettlement of Iraqi Jews is spearheading a drive to file a class-action lawsuit like the one filed against the Swiss Banks on behalf of Holocaust survivors.

  —SHERYL KATZ ELIAS, “GOOOOD MORNING, BAGHDAD!!!!” HTTP://WWW.EMUNAH.ORG/MAGAZINE_COMMENTS.PHP?ID=P175_0_4_0_C

  * * *

  LONDON—LATER THAT NIGHT

  The mob gathered outside the security gate leading down Palace Green Street to the nearby Israeli Embassy had now grown into a sprawling, strident human mass—a single organism three hundred yards across, spilling all the way onto Kensington Road and heaving with oceanlike surges of rage and crescendos of shrill anti-Semitic chanting. Rioters from London’s huge Islamic community along nearby Edgeware Road had now been joined by an even more volatile element: young, liberal bohemians from London’s hipper neighborhoods like adjacent Notting Hill, drawn by the banking of choppers overhead and the irritating echoes of impending bedlam.

  At the mob’s outer edges stood the press, shooting spotlights and camera lenses into the melee, inevitable participants of any event this photogenic. In fact, Fleet Street’s contribution to the chaos was even more obvious than usual, for several of the city’s television stations had just announced the presence of Hadassah ben Yuda, First Lady of Israel, inside the embassy walls. The media’s helicopters had begun their slow, circular dance in the sky.

  Drunk with this knowledge, the mob was smelling and demanding blood.

  The roar intensified when a phalanx of vehicles appeared from inside the embassy complex and edged to the outer gates. Swirling lights on two flanking police vans and a thick, armored limousine between them announced to the crowd that someone important urgently wanted to leave. Surely, this was ben Yuda attempting to flee—and that was all the provocation the mob needed.

  The gates opened slowly, pressing back the crush, and the vehicles moved forward, slowly but inexorably. The human beast only pushed back harder. Bodies were crushed without mercy from behind against the vehicles’ metallic surfaces. A hollow drumbeat of fists struck up against the motorcades’ outer shells. A rock appeared in a hand and came down hard against a window. The glass splintered into a spiderweb array of cracks, but held. More rocks fell upon the limousine roof, causing visible dents but no rending of the body itself.

  Barely twenty yards out of the gate, the trio of vehicles seemed to run aground against a beachhead of unmovable humanity. A fanfare of honks rang out over the bobbing heads. Commanding voices rang out through the metallic buzz of loudspeakers, ordering the crowd to disperse. And from the various corners of Kensington Palace Park, for the first time, came the shrill sirens of approaching London riot squads.

  While the rioters concentrated their wrath upon the more obvious vehicles at the embassy’s Kensington Road entrance, a much smaller service gate in the compound’s rear alleyway swung inauspiciously open. Even had the enraged pedestrians known to stand watch at this spot, they likely would have overlooked the drab panel truck bearing the sign Kensington Uniform Supply. The lorry pulled out from beside the neighboring fire brigade building—an inauspicious delivery vehicle making its normal rounds, unremarkable except for a dark protrusion from its roof.

  You would have needed a high perch to glimpse the black-clad figure sprawled on that roof—a brave SAS operative with an M800 assault rifle held tightly in his hands. Or the concealed forms of snipers watching from surrounding rooftops, peering through infrared scopes. And in all the surrounding noise of other helicopters, they surely would not have heard the sleek black two-man chopper, its nearly silent rotors plying the darkness in tight circles a mere three hundred yards above.

  In all, this ordinary-looking departure featured twice the security measures of its more public counterpart on the other side of the embassy. The difference: these were deliberately and cunningly concealed.

  Without even a single pair of hostile or curious eyes watching it, the van turned right, away from busy Kensington High Road to Kensington Church Street, then drove the long way to Notting Hill Gate and the A40 dual carriageway to M25.

  Inside the darkened van, far more comfortably appointed than its exterior might have suggested, four people huddled around a hospital bed strapped to the floor. One of them held tightly to the hand of the immobilized patient.

  Another, a woman, leaned forward to catch a view of the retreating masses through the back mirrored windows. She leaned toward him and whispered, “I think it’s working.”

  Ari Meyer nodded seriously without taking his eyes from his father on the hospital bed.

  “I was sure it would. It’s a lot easier to fool a bunch of ticked-off crazies than a dedicated terrorist squad. We’ll be all right.”

  “Call me Hadassah, by the way. After all, we’re cousins.”

  “Can I wait until you’re not angry with me anymore?”

  She didn’t answer but nodded. She wasn’t quite ready yet to surrender her irritation.

  “When all hell broke loose, your father was in the middle of telling me the whole story of our two families,” she told him.

  “You mean you don’t know it?” he exclaimed with a small, incredulous laugh.

  She shook her head. “Why don’t you start by telling me what happened between your father and mine.”

  “My mother happened, that’s what. She and my father started to see each other after meeting at the embassy.”

  “Even though he’d told her and everyone he wasn’t a Jew?”

  “Yes. He’d been forced to say that to protect his family still in Iraq. From what he’s told me, their attraction was an incredible, impractical affection that flamed quickly and never wavered. It wasn’t three months before everything exploded. Your father, David, struck the match, in fact.”

  “It feels like we’re not talking about the same man. My father always seemed conciliatory, forgiving and open-minded.”

  “People have a way of mellowing with age,” he agreed. “I know my father did. But at the time, Father fell hard and fast for Rivke Kesselman. It took only a week or two before he’d told her his secret—although he swore her to silence, including her promise never to tell the rest of her family. This of course placed her in a horrible dilemma. David Kesselman objected in the worst way to her seeing a Gentile, especially an Arab one who seemed to be passing himself off as a Jew. My dad even thinks David may have suspected him in some more sinister way—at least at first.”

  “What? Of being a spy?”

  “Perhaps. The town was full of them—in fact, that’s largely why the problem started in the first place. The Edict was placed on my father because of Arab spies.”

  Ari swayed backward on a sudden turn and caught himself against the van’s wall, then reached out and straightened his father’s stretcher. The vehicle now sped up considerably—they apparently had reached the M25.

  “When it became clear this was a serious relationship, Rivke begged her brother David to trust her choice. She as much as told him there was a secret at the heart of it all, but he would not put any stock in her hints. He seemed to channel his grief at the destruction of their family into some newfound rigidity, an absolute unwillingness to bend the rules of their faith. He insisted that she not see him anymore, and forbade him from coming inside their house. When she would sneak out to see him, he threatened to kick her out, although he didn’t follow through.

  “Then your father learned that they had become betrothed. He completely lost it. He did throw her out then, and she had no choice but to move in with Dad. She had not been able to find work, as only the brothers had succeeded in finding very strenuous construction jobs. She found the arrangement shameful,
but according to the old ways, betrothal is equivalent to marriage, so they treated it that way.

  “When David learned they’d made a household together, he made one last overture. He came to their house one night and asked if Anek would be converting to Judaism. Now it was my father’s turn to be caught in an unbearable dilemma. His answer was no, because of course he was already a Jew. Not an observant one, but he’d hoped to fix that also, as soon as possible. Yet he could say nothing of this to David. The only thing he thought of to say, which was halfway truthful, is what he swallowed hard and told him in a firm voice: ‘She will follow me in my faith.’ And that is what he told him. My dad was proud of himself; he had honestly answered the question without betraying the Esther Edict.

  “But to David, it was the worst reply imaginable. He assumed Rivke would be converting to Islam, and he did the unthinkable. He returned home and said Shiva over Rivke, declaring that she was dead to him, to all of them. Forbade any member of the family from ever having contact with her again. Cut her out of the few pictures they’d taken with them. She had married out of the faith, and for members of his Jewish generation, that meant her ‘death.’”

  The van sped on at unusual speeds toward Gatwick Airport while inside, Ari’s tale continued to deepen. . . .

  Chapter Twenty-four

  THE M25 DUAL CARRIAGEWAY—LONDON—MINUTES LATER

  Upon becoming betrothed to Anek, Rivke Kesselman had hoped that soon her beloved’s family would be whisked from Iraq,” Ari continued as the fast-moving van swayed around corners on its way to the airport. “That evacuation could happen either through secret channels by the Mossad, or publicly through the Nehemiah Airlift. Anek’s claims of a family fortune would soon be vindicated, allowing him to not only finally explain his Jewish identity to her family, but provide for them all in a way that would make her proud.

  “But after hearing that her beloved brother had declared her ‘dead,’ Rivke was totally devastated. Desperate to reverse the family’s verdict, she brought Anek to the family home late one Shabbat evening, when she knew that all the siblings and cousins would be in the apartment.