Son of Hamas (18 page)

Soon everybody was shooting. Stones hailed down on the checkpoint. Thousands lunged against the barriers, trying to force their way past the soldiers, straining with one obsession, one thought—to reach the settlement at Beit El and destroy everything and everyone in their path. They were insane with rage triggered by the sight of fallen loved ones and the smell of blood.

Just when it seemed things could not possibly become more chaotic, the 1200 hp diesel engine of a Merkava thundered into the fray. Suddenly, its cannon shattered the air like a sonic boom.

The tank was responding to the PA forces, who had begun shooting toward the IDF soldiers. As the tank advanced, bodyguards grabbed their charges and whisked them to safety. Chunks of bodies littered the hill under our feet as I tried to get my father to the car. When we finally reached it, we quickly raced toward Ramallah, headed for the hospital that was gorged with wounded, dying, and dead. There were not enough rooms. The Red Crescent set up outside in a desperate attempt to stop people from bleeding to death before they could get in. But it was simply not enough.

The hospital walls and floors were smeared with blood. People slipped on it as they made their way down the halls. Husbands and fathers, wives and mothers and children sobbed with grief and shrieked with rage.

Amazingly, in the midst of their sorrow and anger, the people seemed extremely grateful for the Palestinian leaders like my father who had come to share it with them. Yet these were the very Palestinian leaders who had led them and their children like goats to a slaughter and then ducked out of range to watch the carnage from a comfortable distance. That sickened me more than the gore.

And that was only one demonstration. Night after night, we sat in front of the television and listened to the open-ended litany of the dead. Ten in this city. Five there. Twenty more here.

I saw one report of a guy named Shada who was at work drilling a hole in the wall of a building across from a demonstration. An Israeli tank gunner saw him and thought the drill was a gun. He launched a cannon shell that hit Shada’s head.

My father and I went to the slain man’s house. He had a beautiful new bride. But that was not the worst of it. The Palestinian leaders who had come to comfort the widow began to fight with one another over who would preach at Shada’s funeral. Who would be in charge of receiving mourners for three days? Who would be in charge of food for the family? They were all calling Shada “our son,” trying to claim that he had been a member of their faction, and trying to prove that their faction was participating in the intifada more than the others.

The competing factions had been reduced to ridiculous bickering over the dead. And most of the time, the dead were people who had nothing at all to do with the movement. They were just people who had been swept up in the tide of emotion. Many others, like Shada, were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All the while, Arabs throughout the world burned American and Israeli flags, demonstrated, and poured billions of dollars into the Palestinian territories to crush the occupation. In the first two and a half years of the Second Intifada, Saddam Hussein paid thirty-five million dollars to the families of Palestinian martyrs—ten thousand dollars to the family of anyone killed fighting Israel and twenty-five thousand to the family of every suicide bomber. You could say a lot of things about this mindless battle over real estate. But you could never say that life was cheap.

Chapter Eighteen

Most Wanted

2001

Palestinians no longer blamed Yasser Arafat or Hamas for their troubles. Now they blamed Israel for killing their children. But I still couldn’t escape a fundamental question: Why were those children out there in the first place? Where were the parents? Why didn’t their mothers and fathers keep them inside? Those children should have been sitting at their desks in school, not running in the streets, throwing stones at armed soldiers.

“Why do you have to send children to die?” I asked my father after one particularly horrific day.

“We don’t send children,” he said. “They want to go. Look at your brothers.”

A chill went down my spine.

“If I hear that one of my brothers goes out there and throws stones, I’m going to break his arm,” I said. “I would rather that he suffer a broken arm than get killed.”

“Really? You might be interested to know that they were throwing stones yesterday.” He said it so casually; I couldn’t believe this was simply a way of life for us now.

Four of my brothers were no longer little children. Sohayb was twenty-one and Seif was eighteen, both old enough to go to prison. At sixteen and fourteen, Oways and Mohammad were old enough to get themselves shot. And all of them should have known better. But when I questioned them, they denied throwing rocks.

“Listen, I am very serious about this,” I told them. “I haven’t spanked you for a long time, because you’re grown-up now. But that will change if I hear you’re going out there.”

“You and Dad were there at the demonstrations too,” Mohammad protested.

“Yes, we were there. But we didn’t throw stones.”

In the midst of all this—especially with the big checks flowing from Iraq’s ruthless dictator, Saddam Hussein—Hamas found it had lost its monopoly on suicide bombing. Now the bombers also came from Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the secularists, the communists, and the atheists. And they all competed with one another to see who could kill the most Israeli civilians.

There was too much blood. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t see it just through the eyes of a Muslim or a Palestinian or even as the son of Hassan Yousef anymore. Now I saw it through Israeli eyes too. And even more importantly, I watched the mindless killing through the eyes of Jesus, who agonized for those who were lost. The more I read the Bible, the more clearly I saw this single truth: Loving and forgiving one’s enemies is the only real way to stop the bloodshed.

But as much as I admired Jesus, I didn’t believe my Christian friends when they tried to convince me that he was God. Allah was my god. But whether I realized it fully or not, I was gradually adopting the standards of Jesus and rejecting those of Allah. Accelerating my departure from Islam was the hypocrisy I saw all around me. Islam taught that a devoted servant of Allah who became a martyr went straight to heaven. No questioning by weird angels or torture in the grave. But suddenly it seemed that
anyone
killed by the Israelis—whether a nominal Muslim, a communist, even an atheist—was being treated as a holy martyr. The imams and the sheikhs told the families of the dead, “Your loved one is in heaven.”

Of course, the Qur’an didn’t support their rhetoric. The Qur’an is clear about who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. But these leaders didn’t seem to care. This wasn’t even about truth or theology; it was about lying to people for strategic advantage and political expediency. It was about Islamic leaders drugging their people with lies to make them forget the pain those leaders were causing them.

As the Shin Bet passed on more and more information to me, I was consistently amazed at what they knew about the people in my life—often old friends who had become very dangerous individuals. Some had even become part of the hard core of the Hamas military wing. One of those people was Daya Muhammad Hussein Al-Tawil. He was a handsome young man whose uncle was a Hamas leader.

In all the years I knew him, Daya had never been religiously motivated. In fact, his dad was a communist, so he really had had nothing to do with Islam. His mom was a Muslim in the cultural sense, but she was definitely not a radical. And his sister was an American-educated journalist, a U.S. citizen, and a modern woman who did not wear a head scarf. They lived in a nice home and were all well educated. Daya had studied engineering at Birzeit University, where he was first in his class. To my knowledge, he had never even participated in a Hamas demonstration.

Given all of that, I was shocked when on March 27, 2001, we heard that Daya had blown himself up at the French Hill junction in Jerusalem. Though no one else was killed, twenty-nine Israelis were injured.

Daya wasn’t a stupid kid who could easily be talked into doing something like this. He wasn’t a dirt-poor refugee who had nothing to lose. He didn’t need money. So what made him do it? Nobody understood. His parents were stunned, and so was I. Even Israeli intelligence couldn’t figure it out.

The Shin Bet called me in for an emergency meeting. They handed me a photograph of a decapitated head and asked me to identify it. I assured them that it was Daya. And I went home asking myself over and over,
Why?
I don’t think anyone will ever know. No one saw it coming. Not even his Hamas uncle.

Daya was the first suicide bomber of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. His attack suggested the existence of a military cell that seemed to be operating independently somewhere. And the Shin Bet was determined to find that cell before it launched another attack.

Loai showed me a list of suspects. At the top were five familiar names. They were Hamas guys whom the PA had released from prison before the beginning of the intifada. Arafat knew they were dangerous, but with Hamas all but in its grave, he couldn’t see any reason to hold them any longer.

He was wrong.

The main suspect was Muhammad Jamal al-Natsheh, who had helped found Hamas with my dad and ultimately became the head of its military wing in the West Bank. Al-Natsheh was from the largest family in the territories, so he feared nothing. About six feet tall, he was every inch a warrior—tough, strong, and intelligent. Paradoxically, though he was filled with hatred for the Jews, I knew him to be a very caring man.

Saleh Talahme—another name on the list—was an electrical engineer, very smart and well educated. I didn’t know it at the time, but the two of us would eventually become very close friends.

Another, Ibrahim Hamed, led the security wing in the West Bank. These three men were assisted by Sayyed al-Sheikh Qassem and Hasaneen Rummanah.

Sayyed was a good follower—athletic, uneducated, and obedient. Hasaneen, on the other hand, was a handsome young artist who had been very active in the Islamic student movement, especially during the First Intifada when Hamas was trying to prove itself on the streets as a force to be reckoned with. As a Hamas leader, my father had worked hard to obtain their release and return them to their families. And on the day Arafat let them go, my dad and I picked them up from prison, stuffed everybody into our car, and got them settled in an apartment at the Al Hajal in Ramallah.

When Loai showed me the list, I said, “Guess what? I know all those guys. And I know where they live. I was the one who drove them to their safe house.”

“Are you serious?” he said with a big grin. “Let’s go to work.”

When my father and I had picked them up from prison, I had no idea how dangerous they had become or how many Israelis they had killed. And now I was one of only a few people in Hamas who knew where they were.

I paid them a visit, carrying with me the Shin Bet’s most sophisticated spy toys so we could monitor every move they made, every word they said. But once I started talking with them, it was clear they weren’t going to give us any solid information.

I wondered if maybe they weren’t the guys we were looking for.

“Something is wrong,” I said to Loai. “These guys didn’t give me anything. Could it be another cell?”

“It could,” he admitted. “But those guys have the history. We need to keep watching them until we get what we need.”

They indeed had the history, but history wasn’t enough to arrest them. We needed hard evidence. So we patiently continued to collect information. We didn’t want to make a costly mistake and grab the wrong guys, leaving the real terrorists free to launch the next bomb.

* * *

Maybe my life wasn’t complicated enough, or maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time, but that same month I started a job in the Capacity-Building Office of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Village Water and Sanitation Program, headquartered in Al-Bireh. Long title, I know, but then again, it was a very important project. Because I didn’t have a college degree, I began as a receptionist.

Some of the Christians I attended Bible study with had introduced me to one of the American managers, who immediately took a liking to me and offered me a job. Loai thought it would make a great cover since my new ID card, stamped by the U.S. Embassy, would allow me to travel freely between Israel and the Palestinian territories. It would also keep people from getting too suspicious about why I always had plenty of spending money.

My father saw it as a great opportunity and was grateful to the United States for providing safe drinking water and sanitation to his people. At the same time, however, he could not forget that the Americans also provided Israel with the weapons used to kill Palestinians. This typifies the ambivalence most Arabs feel about the United States.

I jumped at the chance to be part of the biggest U.S.-funded project in the region. The media always seemed focused on the sexy bargaining chips—land, independence, and reparations. But water really was a much bigger issue than land in the Middle East. People have battled over it since Abram’s herdsmen fought with those of his nephew, Lot. The chief water source for Israel and the occupied territories is the Sea of Galilee, also known as Gennesaret or Tiberias. It is the lowest freshwater lake on earth.

Water has always been a complicated issue in the land of the Bible. For modern Israel, the dynamic has changed with the nation’s boundaries. For example, one of the outcomes of the Six-Day War in 1967 was that Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria. This gave Israel control of the entire Sea of Galilee, and with that came control of the Jordan River and every other spring and rivulet that flowed into and out of it. Violating international law, Israel diverted water from the Jordan away from the West Bank and Gaza Strip by means of its National Water Carrier, providing Israeli citizens and settlers with well over three-quarters of the water from West Bank aquifers. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars digging wells and establishing independent sources of water for my people.