Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (19 page)

T
he chase that brought me
into Ayn al-Hilwah was exhausting. I stood next to my bodyguard on the side of one of the main streets of the camp. The dirt road was uneven and filled with ditches and holes. Cars drove by, but slowly and carefully; the streets were packed with refugees and the road was only a few inches wider than the vehicles driving on them. There were two-and three-story buildings along both sides of the street. In the camp, as in the alleyways outside, dangling electric wires formed a ceiling over the street. On every wall and every building, I saw pictures of either Yasir Arafat or Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the late Hamas spiritual leader killed by Israeli Defense Forces in March 2004. As an American Jew, I was not very comfortable with this iconography; suffice it to say that there aren’t many posters of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in the Connecticut suburb I grew up in. The portraits of exalted extremists heightened my sense of anxiety and feelings of fear.

I tried making small talk with my bodyguard. Since we had just snuck into a Palestinian refugee camp together and I was counting on him to protect me in a highly volatile environment, I figured simple introductions seemed appropriate.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“I am called Ayman,” he answered, turning away. Apparently, Ayman was not one for small talk.

We stood in silence. Ayman would eventually become a friend, inviting me to his home, introducing me to his children, and showing off his collection of rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, Kalashnikov rifles, and pistols. He even placed his children on proud display with these weapons and made his daughter sing a song to me about Yasir Arafat. What I saw represented a tenuous bridge between Western youth and Middle Eastern youth. But at the same time, the scene was sickening, as the youngest boy, no older than three or four, began hysterically crying. The more he cried, the more guns were placed at his side, as if they were some kind of medicine or pacifier.

But as we stood there anxiously waiting on the side of the street, there was a vanishing gap between us. A black Mercedes pulled in front of us. The Mercedes had dark tinted windows and fancy rims on the wheels; it looked like it could have rolled out of a rap video. The window in front rolled down. It was my friend Achmad. He smiled at me. “I told you I had a way to get you in the camp,” he said. It was only several hours earlier that I had expressed my frustration to Achmad that the local authorities had denied my request for an entry permit. He had assured me that I need not worry and that he had a plan. Riding around in a poor refugee camp in a black Mercedes hardly seemed like a “plan,” but he then gestured for me to get in the car and said, “Let’s go; we have many people to talk to today.” The car took two quick turns and drove about two hundred feet before stopping. As it turned out, the black Mercedes with the tinted windows—like many other things I’d see that day in Ayn al-Hilwah—was more symbol than fact.

Achmad, Ayman, and I got out of the car and were greeted by a tall, powerful-looking man. He wore a white T-shirt with Arabic slogans and baggy army cargo pants. His face was youthful and though he could not have been more than twenty-five years old, his full beard and mustache gave the appearance that he was older. “Are you Mr. Cohen?”

I
was less nervous
at this moment than I had been in a previous visit to the smaller adjacent camp of Mia Mia. There, I was aggressively surrounded by a group of about fifteen to twenty young Palestinians. They were Hamas supporters, wearing T-shirts with a picture of the late Sheikh Yassin, and there were images of him on all the local buildings. They were in total control, some even holding chains. I knew they had no intention of hurting me, but their curiosity led them to inch closer to me. The conversation degenerated immediately into a group tirade about the United States and Israel. In the middle of this rant I asked the group what they would do if a Jewish person were to enter their camp and identify himself as such. A voice spoke up from the back of the group.

“We would cut his head off.” They laughed; I cringed.

We kept our silence for a moment, all standing on the rough dirt road that weaved throughout Mia Mia. This part of the camp looked like an impoverished village, with metal-sheeted shacks lining both sides. The city of Saida is the only thing that separates the Ayn al-Hilwah and Mia Mia Palestinian camps from one another. From where I stood, I caught a glimpse of the low-budget housing that filled the city. Random cement walls, roadblocks, and garbage blocked the roadway from clear passage.

But my fear subsided as the conversation progressed. It became abundantly clear that not only did these young Palestinians differentiate between Jews and governments, but their earlier remark had been motivated by little more than a somewhat questionable desire to frighten me. Once I realized this, I took the risk of telling them the truth. I was with my Palestinian friend, and while he was just one person, I assumed he could intervene if things really got out of hand. I addressed my growing audience of Palestinian teenagers. I asked them if it would surprise them if I told them I was Jewish. There was a silence and then I heard a couple of the kids mutter something in Arabic. Though I hadn’t explicitly revealed myself as a Jew, they could certainly draw that conclusion from what I had said.

They didn’t respond with anger. They didn’t threaten me. And they didn’t cut off my head. But they were embarrassed. They knew I was a foreigner and they had just wanted to say something outrageous. While none of them said so directly, I know they valued the experience of having someone like me come in to listen, and I think they deeply regretted having used such harsh language. They talked to me about the needs in the camp and the lack of opportunities. I learned that in their classrooms there are not enough books to go around and sometimes the teachers don’t even show up. They shared stories of their boredom and expressed a desire for more recreation. As I left, I received several hugs and shook hands with my Palestinian peers. As I walked out the entrance of my first Palestinian refugee camp, Mia Mia, I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not they would be more careful with their words the next time someone from the outside came to visit. It reminded me in so many ways of my experience with the youth in Beirut. We are all young, but we are at the mercy of politics and longstanding hatreds.

T
he experience in Mia Mia
was fresh on my mind when I was on my way to meet the genuine article: the military head of Fatah for Lebanon and the man in charge of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp. General Mounir Maqdah is the chief military authority over the 350,000 Palestinians residing in Lebanon. It was hardcore and frightening, but my recent experiences gave me courage.

With alleged links to Osama bin Laden, General Maqdah is notorious for atrocities committed against the Lebanese army and was given a death sentence in absentia by the Lebanese government. The Israeli government attempted a number of assassination attempts on him, most notably a 1996 missile attack on his compound, an event that he would later describe for me in detail. The death sentences did not stop with Lebanon or Israel. On March 28, 2000, Jordan’s Security Court indicted General Maqdah on charges that he had provided military training to a group of Osama bin Laden’s followers for future attacks against the Kingdom of Jordan. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia.

There is no shortage of individuals, organizations, and governments interested in killing General Mounir Maqdah, and I had to be taken through a complex route to get to his compound. I was initially led by the serious bearded man, who wore a large automatic pistol strapped over his right shoulder. As with the chase into the camp, the whole thing felt strangely cinematic: going through secret passageways, passing through people’s homes, turning sharp corners, and climbing through all of these different back routes. As we got closer to the compound, additional men joined us, each one brandishing a weapon (or two or three). By the time we arrived, there was a full-fledged battery. Once I realized they were in fact taking me to meet the general, I actually felt energized by the big fuss over my visit. It was just by chance that I had gotten the interview. Achmad came from a very prominent family in Ayn al-Hilwah and he knew the general personally. Several days prior to my visit, he had approached the general with the proposed interview.

The compound was not as large as I had anticipated, although it is possible there were parts of it I did not see. I didn’t actually know where the compound was because they spent forty-five minutes taking me through a maze, spinning me around, putting me in cars, and doing all sorts of things so that I wouldn’t know the general’s location. But it was somewhere in the heart of Ayn al-Hilwah and not actually very far from where I’d started, as evidenced by a couple points of reference I had made note of when I first snuck into the camp. I was first taken to the general’s private home. The house was extremely well protected and I saw armed men standing at every corner. Some wore yellow bands around their heads, emblazoned with the words
Allahu Akbar,
the Arabic script for “God is great.” Others had the recognizable black-and-white checkered headbands, a common symbol of the late Yasir Arafat’s Fatah Party. After walking by a half-dozen guards, I arrived at the general’s porch. On the porch, there were two rocket-propelled grenade launchers that had been converted into flower vases, an ironic, if strangely fitting, metaphor for a group that claimed its use of violence was all in the name of a brighter, more peaceful future.

If I didn’t know better, I would have thought the general was a decent man. He was friendly, willing to speak, and ceremoniously offered to give me tea. I had to remind myself that this man was allegedly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. This was a man who vocally and actively believed in, and subsidized, what Christopher Hitchens rightly calls “suicide-murderers.”

We introduced ourselves and began the interview right away. I asked him for his opinion on the future of the Arab-Israeli conflict and he declared that a two-state solution was impossible. Throughout our interview, he also expressed respect and admiration for Hezbollah, Osama bin Laden, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I remained cool but struggled to hide my true emotions. Showing my emotions at this point would be stupid at best. I wanted to kick him in the face, but I remained calm, nodded politely, and kept myself out of trouble. With regard to Al-Qaeda, the general remarked that “they have their own swords and their own strategies, but I hope their destination is to free Palestine. My destination is Palestine and anyone that is willing to help me, even Al-Qaeda, I will accept and work with them.” I asked him if he thought Zarqawi was giving Muslims a bad name by decapitating innocent civilians. He did not denounce Zarqawi but instead cited a proverb that “everyone who is from their country has the right to decide and therefore, every Arab or Muslim has the right to defend their country if it is occupied.”

I pressed him. “But don’t you think this is excessive brutality?”

“Let me ask you this,” he responded, “what is the difference between cutting by knife and cutting by bomb? Yesterday there was a bombarding by Israeli aircrafts in Gaza and the people who were killed were torn apart; their legs and heads and hands were all blown to bits. How is that any different than cutting off someone’s head?” It was chilling to hear someone justify Zarqawi’s actions. Even the Hezbollah fighters I spoke to condemned such action, stating that it was beyond extremism and gave Islam a bad name.

His answers, though shocking at times, were unremarkable. They were uniformly illogical, intolerant, brutal, and stupid. What I found more interesting was what the young men around him said to me after the general had left. I sympathized with these youth in some respects. Did they even know what they were doing, or was this the result of having grown up without an alternative?

After an hour into the interview, I asked him if some of the young militants, indolently strolling around the compound, could join in the conversation. He was amused by the request, but gestured for them to come over.

We all sat around a round plastic table on the general’s porch. The group of boys looked like typical militants, with all the expected attire of headbands and weaponry. But they showed a childish excitement about being part of the interview, as if they thought this opportunity was uncharacteristic for them. The porch was more of a cement patio than anything, and it was a mere segment of the general’s backyard. The only decorations I noticed, besides the plastic furniture, were a couple of vases, only some of which actually had plants growing out of them. Closer to the entrance to his home, but still on the porch, was some kind of a bazooka that had been transformed into a potted plant. The youth around the table had begun their military training at ten years old. At this young age, they began attending two types of schools, one for military service and the other to study the geography and history of their homeland. After six to ten months, they began their “military” training period: There, they learned combat techniques, as well as moral codes, obedience, and mutual respect for their fellow soldiers. They practiced with live bullets and used real weapons. I was shocked to hear that they trained on the same field that other kids played soccer on. Sometimes, they brought children as young as seven years old to the training, to help them become acquainted with—and used to—the weapons inside the camp.

One of the guys who spoke up in front of the general said, “We are street fighters; this is our army. Our training is designed to teach us army tactics, and street fighting tactics, but also it must be stuck in our minds and hearts that all Palestine is for us.” When I asked them why they fight, the answer I got from each of them was a rambling, probably rehearsed tirade that focused on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.