With that in mind, we have given awards to a young man who resigned his U.S. Army officer’s commission to join the rabbinical program at Hebrew Union College, to a young woman who attended a conservative day school, and to a woman who had recently discovered she was Jewish.
And then there’s the lawsuit. A law with an unwieldy name – the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 – was enacted a year after Alisa’s murder. Although we were invited to attend the bill-signing on the White House Lawn, Rosalyn and I declined. The Clinton administration had done so little to address the terror attacks in Israel that had the fingerprints, if not the outright complicity, of the Palestinian Authority and Yasir Arafat that we thought our attendance would be nothing more than window dressing for the president. So, instead of traveling to Washington, we went to our daughters’ yeshiva in Suffern to attend an open house for prospective students.
But one of the provisions of the law caught my eye because it gave victims of “state sponsors of terrorism” the right to sue those states in an American court. We knew that Palestinian Islamic Jihad had conducted the attack and we soon learned that the Islamic Republic of Iran, a “state sponsor of terrorism,” was its financial backer.
I was introduced to Steven Perles, a lawyer in Washington who was interested in representing our family. This was the genesis of a pursuit that, as far as I am concerned, is not yet finished. But before we could get started, we had to resolve some questions posed by the recently passed law. Where could we file our lawsuit? What damages could we ask for? The law didn’t say.
My introduction to how things get done in Washington began as we walked the halls of Congress to lobby for support of an amendment to the law that would answer those questions.
The months of lobbying paid off in September 1996, when Congress enacted another law with an unwieldy name, the Civil Liability for Acts of State Sponsored Terrorism amendment, which quickly became known as the Flatow Amendment. It gave us and other victims the tools we needed to go after Alisa’s murderers.
Unknown to us at the time, the amendment would lay the groundwork for a battle within the government. In effect, Congress had given the courts control of these terrorism cases and gently moved foreign policy away from the State Department and to my lawyers and me.
Our lawsuit was filed on February 26, 1997, and 13 months later our family was awarded almost $250,000,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. But that award was only the beginning of a battle – not with the Iranians, but with the U.S. government as we attempted to seize Iranian assets located in the United States and our own government took steps to protect those assets.
One asset we located was an office building at 650 Fifth Avenue in New York City. The 34-story building was owned by the Alavi Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting Persian culture and scholarship. We believed the foundation was a façade for the Iranian government’s goal of setting up Islamic centers in the U.S. that would be favorable to the ayatollahs in Tehran.
Reporter Kenneth Timmerman had previously detailed how Ayatollah Khomeini had forced the Alavi Foundation board of directors to resign, replacing them with sympathizers to the new Islamic Republic.
The U.S. government appeared in court time and again on the side opposite ours and our lawyers were not surprised when the judge released the Alavi Foundation’s property in New York from the levy we had made and granted a motion to keep us from trying to go after any of its other properties. But 15 years later we would receive a small sense of vindication regarding the Alavi Foundation.
In 2006, Eitan Arusy, an intelligence analyst at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan who specialized in illegal Middle Eastern financing, contacted me about the 1999 Alavi case we had lost. I didn’t realize it at the time but Eitan had been one of the first responders to the bus bombing in Kfar Darom that killed Alisa.
Arusy’s research caused the district attorney’s office to look closer at the Alavi Foundation. They soon discovered that the foundation had received millions of dollars from the Iranian-owned Bank Melli. There was another surprise, other banks were involved in these transfers but had removed their names in order to avoid detection. As a result, the federal government obtained $12 billion in settlements with the banks, including $8.9 billion from BNP Paribas, a French bank, alone.
And in April 2014, Preet Bharara, the Manhattan U.S. attorney, announced that the Alavi Foundation skyscraper, the property the U.S. had protected from our levy, was seized and would be sold. Our family won’t see a dime from that seizure, but other terror victims might and knowing that we were right to pursue the building is satisfactory compensation.
* * * * *
In the years since Alisa’s murder, our four other children married and began their own families. We now have 16 grandchildren, two of them sabras.
Four of the girls are named after Alisa, whose Hebrew name is Chana Michal. We have a Chana Michal Nechama, whom we call Michal; a Chana Michal Ahuva, whom we call Hannah; a Maayan Alisa; and an Aliza Chana.
Life is good.
