JERUSALEM — Twenty years ago this week, a deadly suicide bombing in Jerusalem plunged Israel into grief and, for its citizens, crystallized a feeling articulated by the city’s mayor: “We are in a war.”
Israeli medics and volunteers treat the injured at the site of a Palestinian suicide bombing at Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Getty Images)
The attack at Sbarro pizzeria on Aug. 9, 2001, which killed 15 civilians and injured more than 100, occurred in a world and an Israel that looked very different from today’s.
Less than a year earlier, President Bill Clinton was still making a final push for a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who had taken office just months before, was still known as a fierce pro-settlement hawk — not the leader who would one day evacuate Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.
And the date of September 11, 2001 — more than a month away — didn’t yet signify anything.
In the months and years afterward, the Sbarro bombing would come to be seen as a turning point in a renewed period of terrorism, in which Palestinians carried out major suicide bombings regularly and hopes for peace crumbled.
‘There was not enough time’
When a suicide bomber tripped the device that tore through the pizzeria, Israelis were already grappling with the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising — and reeling from a series of bombings across Israel.
But aside from a June suicide attack at the Dolphinarium, a Tel Aviv disco, which killed 21 people, most of the bombings had few casualties.
The Sbarro attack’s death toll was the second-highest of any attack thus far that year and showed that the Dolphinarium bombing was no longer an isolated event.
“I saw so many babies in an awful state,” one emergency volunteer told JTA at the time. “I wanted so much to help save them all, but there was not enough time. I saw dead and wounded, an experience I’ll never forget.”
In the days and months after the attack, Israeli officials appeared to hold out hope that Israeli-Palestinian peace talks would resume, and one Israeli government minister said Israel’s response to the attack should be “reasoned.” But Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert suggested in a statement near the scene of the tragedy that Israelis would have to steel themselves for more attacks.
“We tried to do everything to prevent it. Unfortunately, this time we were not successful,” said Olmert, who would later become prime minister before resigning in the face of corruption charges.
“I fully understand the pain and concern and fear of many people,” he said, adding that “we are strong” and “nothing will break us.”
A sense of familiarity
The bombing struck at the heart of Jerusalem’s touristy commercial district and resonated with American Jews more than previous ones. It occurred at a busy intersection, near Ben Yehuda Street, familiar to American Jewish tourists. Sbarro was a familiar brand back home.
One victim was Shoshana Greenbaum, 31, pregnant, from New Jersey. She was spending the summer in Jerusalem as part of a master’s degree program.
Another American immigrant to Israel, the New York City-born Chana Tova Chaya Nachenberg, is still in a coma 20 years after the attack as a result of her injuries.
“She spent her whole life helping people,” said one of Greenbaum’s childhood friends. “She was beautiful inside and out.”
A third victim, Malki Roth, 15, was also American.
From Sbarro to 9/11
Thirty-three days after the Sbarro bombing, the world was shaken by a far deadlier attack — on Sept. 11, 2001.
For American pro-Israel advocates at the time, 9/11 was a symbol of how the two countries were in a shared fight against terrorism. Three days after hijackers brought down Manhattan’s World Trade Center towers, the Sbarro branch would reopen following repairs.
About a month after 9/11, JTA reported that pro-Israel advocates “hoped the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington would increase empathy for the Jewish state’s plight and loosen the reins in Israel’s fight against terror.”
When the US continued to criticize Israel’s targeted assassinations of terror group leaders, pro-Israel officials accused the Bush administration of “hypocrisy,” and one cited Sbarro.
“Why is it wrong or, in State Department terms, counterproductive, for Israel to target the terrorists who bombed the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem and the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv, but right for us to target the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia?” said Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY). “Is it hypocrisy, or is it just inconsistency?”
‘Grappling with grief’
The Sbarro bombing was the second attack in Israel that year with more than 10 dead. Others would follow in the months ahead — sending Israel into the worst wave of terrorism it had ever experienced and prompting a military offensive against Palestinian terror groups in the West Bank.
In 2004, the Sbarro franchise relocated to another spot in Jerusalem. By the attack’s twelfth anniversary, Sbarro had encountered financial issues and closed its branches in Israel, which had been taken over by another licensee and renamed “Il Fresco.”
In a first-person reflection published five years after the bombing, Frimet Roth, the mother of a teenage victim, Malki Roth, acknowledged that Israel was then in the midst of fighting a different enemy — Hezbollah, in Lebanon.
Roth also worried that one of the perpetrators of the Sbarro attack, Ahlam Tamimi, would be released in exchange for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. That ended up happening five years later, when Israel swapped more than 1,000 prisoners for Shalit, who was held by Hamas. Tamimi now lives in Jordan.
Roth wrote in 2006 that the families of the victims “have been grappling with grief.” Even as the years pass, she wrote, “Encountering other Sbarro victims strengthens my resolve to keep the memory of this crime alive.”
