After a quarter century of seeking justice for their daughter Malka Chana “Malki” Roth, who was 15 when she was murdered in a suicide bombing at Sbarro in Jerusalem on Aug. 9, 2001, Arnold and Frimet Roth feel abandoned—by their American government and by many whom they expected to keep fighting with them.
“We’re alone in every meaningful sense, fighting powerful people who never, ever, at any stage, say what they actually mean or what they intend to do,” Arnold Roth told JNS. “Quite the opposite. They say things that are superficial and that are calculated to keep us in the dark and never lead to where we want to go.”
Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas terrorist who lives freely in Jordan, brags openly on television about helping plan the pizzeria bombing, in which Judith Shoshana Greenbaum and Chana Nachenberg, both American citizens like Roth, and 13 other civilians were killed. Some 130 were injured in the attack.
In 2013, the United States charged Tamimi with participating in the attack. She is listed on the “Most Wanted” FBI terrorist list, and the U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice program has offered up to $5 million for information leading to her arrest.
Jordan, which has an extradition agreement with the United States dating back to 1995, has refused to comply in Tamimi’s case, and successive U.S. administrations seem to have been unable to enforce the treaty.
Jordan has said that handing Tamimi over would lead to riots in the streets, but those involved with the case have told JNS repeatedly that Jordan’s claim is a convenient excuse for Washington, which is loath to rock the U.S.-Jordan relationship.
Roth has visited Jordan several times and had business relations there before his daughter was murdered.
He told JNS that he can’t fathom how extraditing Tamimi would suddenly harm the U.S.-Jordan relationship, given already high levels of Jew-hatred in the Hashemite Kingdom and Israel’s measures to shore up its defense of the border with Jordan.
Stuck in a perpetual state of mourning for his daughter, Arnold Roth’s pain and quiet anger are palpable in his voice.
“No one ever, in my experience, who is seriously in a position to do something about it, calls out the regime that runs Jordan, which is essentially a family business,” he told JNS. “Nobody’s calling on the parties that own that family business to do something.”
“The notion, the very idea, that the woman who murdered Jewish children should be the reason why we leave the king alone, why we don’t push Jordan, makes me sick,” he said. “It’s absurd.”
The lack of a resolution after 25 years “leaves us with no choice but to recognize that only we care about this murder and this loss, and only we—and this is the hard part—care about what it says about American justice,” Roth told JNS.
“It is a terrible thing to have to face up to,” he said. “The only thing that’s worse than it is the idea that other people don’t understand it or are pretending not to.”
The families of the other two American victims “give us their quiet support but prefer not to take a public position,” Roth said. (He said the other 13 families may not have opinions on the extradition, but “I’m not aware of anybody who’s opposed.”)
He told JNS that the lack of attention from elected U.S. officials is “a failure of American values and a failure of the professed commitment to justice.”
No Democrats and just a few Republicans have backed seeking extradition, and Roth said that he has ongoing struggles with American Jewish leaders, including rabbis and nonprofit officials.
Several American Jewish leaders have told JNS that they broached the subject with Abdullah when he held court on frequent visits to the United States. But they wouldn’t characterize the Jordanian king’s responses in the off-the-record meetings.
Roth thinks that much of it is lip service.
“There are prominent Jewish organizations, who’ve taken large amounts of money over the years from people of good nature and of philanthropic bent in the name of defending and protecting America’s Jewish interests, who have done either absolutely nothing or have pretended to do something,” he told JNS.
Those groups have “then said, ‘Don’t ask me any questions. This is the way we operate,’” he said. “Those people enrage me.”
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which represents more than 50 Jewish groups across the political spectrum, is an exception, according to Roth.
The umbrella group “has consistently been doing things that we’ve appreciated,” he told JNS.
The Conference of Presidents shared a letter, which it plans to deliver to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday, exclusively with JNS.
“This case directly concerns the murder of American citizens abroad, the enforcement of a binding extradition treaty and the principle that those responsible for terrorist attacks against Americans cannot evade accountability,” William Daroff and Betsy Berns Korn, CEO and chair, respectively, of the Conference of Presidents, state in the letter.
“Accordingly, we respectfully urge the State Department to make Tamimi’s extradition a priority in the U.S.-Jordan relationship, raise the matter directly with King Abdullah II and demand her immediate extradition in compliance with the treaty,” the two leaders write.
“Justice for the Americans murdered in the Sbarro pizzeria bombing requires sustained U.S. leadership, respect for treaty obligations and accountability for terrorism,” they added.
A State Department spokesman told JNS on Tuesday that “the United States has continually emphasized to the government of Jordan the importance of holding” Tamimi “accountable in a U.S. court.”
Washington “continues to impress upon the government of Jordan that Tamimi” is a “brutal murderer who should be brought to justice,” the Foggy Bottom spokesman said.
It wasn’t immediately clear why the spokesman added that Tamimi “was released by Israel in a 2011 prisoner swap” for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
No evidence has been presented publicly that the U.S. government has pressured Abdullah, and if such pressure was placed, it is not clear that it had any tangible impact.
Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, stated on Sunday that Malki Roth’s “picture sits on a shelf in my office as reminder.” He added that “after 25 years, the Sbarro bombing and its aftermath still matter.”
“That’s not a test of who’s good and who’s less good, but it’s an impressive thing to say,” Roth said of Huckabee’s comment.
Roth said that there have been “positive developments” but declined to elaborate.
Discussions with U.S. officials haven’t yielded “any real momentum towards a resolution,” he told JNS. “It really just amounts to ‘We’re on this.’”
After 25 years, Roth said that it’s important to remember that the case is about more than “a pair of parents who lost a child.”
“It’s about a total failure of two systems that are very meaningful to me: justice and America’s public Jewish life,” he said. “A total failure.”
“Everybody should be enraged by this,” he added, “because ultimately, if this is the trampling of American justice in the interests of somebody’s perception of what is politically smart, we’re all lost.”
