Son of Hamas (26 page)

The fact was, however, that after a decade of arrests, imprisonments, and assassinations, the Shin Bet still had no clue who was actually in charge of Hamas. None of us did. I had helped them arrest known activists, men heavily involved in the resistance movement, all the while hoping they were the ones. We put people under administrative detention for years, sometimes based on suspicion alone. But Hamas never seemed to notice their absence.

So who was really in charge?

The fact that it wasn’t my father came as a big surprise to everyone—even me. We bugged his office and car, monitored every move he made. And there was absolutely no doubt that he was not pulling the strings.

Hamas had always been something of a ghost. It had no central or branch offices, no place where people could drop by to talk to movement representatives. A lot of Palestinians came to my dad’s office, shared their problems, and asked for help, especially the families of prisoners and martyrs who lost their husbands and fathers during the intifadas. But even Sheikh Hassan Yousef was in the dark. Everybody thought he had all the answers, but he was no different than the rest of us: all he had were questions.

Once he told me he was thinking of closing his office.

“Why? Where will you meet with the media?” I asked.

“I don’t care. People are coming from everywhere, hoping I can help. But there is no way I can provide for everyone who needs help; it’s simply too much.”

“Why doesn’t Hamas help them? These are the families of the movement members. Hamas has lots of money.”

“Yes, but the organization doesn’t give it to me.”

“So ask for some. Tell them about all the people in need.”

“I don’t know who
they
are or how to get hold of
them
.”

“But you’re the leader,” I protested.

“I am not the leader.”

“You founded Hamas, Father. If you’re not the leader, who is?”

“No one is the leader!”

I was shocked. The Shin Bet was recording every word, and they were shocked as well.

One day, I received a call from Majeda Talahme, Saleh’s wife. We hadn’t spoken since her husband’s funeral.

“Hi, how are you? How are Mosab and the other kids?”

She started to cry.

“I don’t have money to feed the children.”

I thought,
God forgive you, Saleh, for what you did to your family!

“Okay, my sister, calm down, and I will try to do something.”

I went to my dad.

“Saleh’s wife just called. She doesn’t have money to buy food for her children.”

“Sadly, Mosab, she is not the only one.”

“Yes, but Saleh was a very good friend of mine. We have to do something right away!”

“Son, I told you. I don’t have any money.”

“Okay, but somebody’s in charge. Somebody has plenty of money. This isn’t fair! This man died for the sake of the movement!”

My father told me he would do what he could. He wrote a letter, sort of a “to whom it may concern,” and sent it to a drop point. We couldn’t track it, but we knew the recipient was somewhere in the Ramallah area.

A few months earlier, the Shin Bet had sent me to an Internet café downtown. We knew that someone using one of the computers there was in communication with Hamas leaders in Damascus. We didn’t know who all these leaders were, but there was no denying that Syria was a hub of Hamas’s power. It made sense for Hamas to maintain a whole organization—an office, weapons, and military camps—somewhere it could be out from under the Israeli hammer.

“We don’t know who it is communicating with Damascus,” Loai said, “but he sounds dangerous.”

As I walked into the café, I found twenty people sitting at computers. None had beards. Nobody looked suspicious. But one of them caught my attention, though I have no idea why. I didn’t recognize him, but my instinct told me to keep an eye on him. I knew it wasn’t much to go on, but over the years, the Shin Bet had learned to trust my hunches.

We were convinced that, whoever this man at the Internet café was, he was probably dangerous. Only highly trusted people were able to communicate with Hamas leaders in Damascus. And we hoped that he might also lead us to the elusive, shadowy elite who actually ruled Hamas. We circulated his photograph, but no one recognized him. I began to question my instincts.

A few weeks later, I held an open house for some property in Ramallah that I had put up for sale. Several people came, but no one made an offer. Late that afternoon, after I had closed up, I got a call from a man who asked if he could still see the house. I was really very tired, but I told him to go on over and I would meet him there. I returned to the property, and he showed up a few minutes later.

It was the man from the Internet café. He told me his name was Aziz Kayed. He was clean shaven and very professional looking. I could tell he was educated, and he said he ran the respectable Al-Buraq Center for Islamic Studies. He didn’t seem to be the link we were looking for. But rather than confuse the Shin Bet even more, I kept the discovery to myself.

Sometime after my encounter with Kayed, my father and I set out to visit cities, villages, and refugee camps throughout the West Bank. In one town, more than fifty thousand people gathered to see Sheikh Hassan Yousef. They all wanted to touch him and hear what he had to say. He was still deeply loved.

In Nablus, a Hamas stronghold, we met with top organization leaders, and I figured out which of them were members of the
shurah
council—a small group of seven men who make decisions on strategic issues and daily activities for the movement. Like my dad, they were among the eldest Hamas leaders, but they were not the “executives” we were looking for.

After all these years, I could not believe that control of Hamas had somehow, somewhere along the line, slipped into unknown hands. If I, who was born and raised in the heart of the movement, had no idea who pulled the strings, who knew?

The answer came out of the blue. One of the shurah council members in Nablus mentioned the name of Aziz Kayed. He suggested that my father visit Al-Buraq and meet this “good man.” My ears perked up immediately. Why would a local Hamas leader make such a recommendation? There were simply too many coincidences: first, Aziz caught my eye in the Internet café; then he showed up at my open house; and now, the council member was telling my dad he should meet this man. Was this a sign that my hunch was correct and Aziz Kayed was someone important in the Hamas organization?

Could we even be so fortunate as to have found the person in charge? As unlikely as it sounded, something inside me said to follow my instinct. I raced back to Ramallah, where I called Loai and asked him to order a computer search for Aziz Kayed.

Several Aziz Kayeds popped up, but none who fit the description. We had an emergency meeting, and I asked Loai to widen the name search to the entire West Bank. His people thought I was crazy, but they went along with me.

This time, we found him.

Aziz Kayed was born in Nablus and was a former member of the Islamic student movement. He had discontinued his activities ten years earlier. He was married with children and free to travel out of the country. Most of his friends were secular. We found nothing suspicious.

I explained to the Shin Bet everything that had happened, from the moment I stepped into the Internet café to the visit to Nablus with my father. They said that although they definitely trusted me, we simply didn’t have enough to go on yet.

While we were talking, I thought about something else.

“Kayed reminds me of three other guys,” I said to Loai. “Salah Hussein from Ramallah, Adib Zeyadeh from Jerusalem, and Najeh Madi from Salfeet. All three of these guys have advanced university degrees and were at one time very active in Hamas. But for whatever reason, they simply dropped out of sight about ten years ago. Now, they all live very normal lives, completely removed from political involvement. I always wondered why someone who was so passionate about the movement would just quit like that.”

Loai agreed that I might be onto something. We began to study the movements of each man. It turned out that all three of them were in communication with one another and with Aziz Kayed. They all worked together at Al-Buraq. That was way too coincidental.

Could these four unlikely men be the real puppet masters running Hamas, controlling even the military wing? Could they have been flying under the radar while we had been targeting all the high-profile guys? We continued to dig, monitor, and wait. Finally our patience paid off with an enormous intelligence breakthrough.

We learned that these deadly thirtysomethings had gained total control of the money and were running the entire Hamas movement in the West Bank. They brought in millions of dollars from the outside, which they used to buy arms, manufacture explosives, recruit volunteers, support fugitives, provide logistic support, everything—all under the cover of one of Palestine’s numerous and seemingly innocuous research centers.

No one knew them. They never appeared on TV. They communicated only by letters through drop points. They obviously trusted no one—as evidenced by the fact that even my father had no clue about their existence.

One day, we followed Najeh Madi from his apartment to a commercial garage a block away. He walked to one of the units and lifted the door. What was he doing there? Why would he lease a garage that far from his home?

For the next two weeks, we never took our eyes off that stupid garage, but nobody came again. Finally, the door opened—from the inside—and Ibrahim Hamed stepped out into the sunlight!

The Shin Bet waited just long enough for him to return to the building before launching an arrest operation. But when Hamed was surrounded by special forces, he did not fight to the death as he had ordered Saleh and the others to do.

“Take off your clothes and come out!”

No response.

“You have ten minutes. Then we will demolish the building!”

Two minutes later, the leader of the military wing of Hamas in the West Bank walked through the door in his underwear.

“Take off
all
your clothes!”

He hesitated, stripped, and stood before the soldiers, naked.

Ibrahim Hamed was personally responsible for the deaths of more than eighty people that we could prove. It may not be a very Jesus-like impulse, but if it had been up to me, I would have put him back in his filthy garage, locked him in for the rest of his life, and saved the state the expense of a trial.

Capturing Hamed and exposing the real leaders of Hamas proved to be my most important operation for the Shin Bet. It was also my final one.

Chapter Twenty-Six

A Vision for Hamas

2005

During his most recent imprisonment, my father had had a sort of epiphany.

He had always been very open-minded. He would sit down and talk with Christians, nonreligious people, even Jews. He listened carefully to journalists, experts, and analysts, and he attended lectures at the universities. And he listened to me—his assistant, adviser, and protector. As a result, he had a much clearer, broader vision than other Hamas leaders.

He saw that Israel was an immutable reality and recognized many of the goals of Hamas as illogical and unattainable. He wanted to find some middle ground that both sides could accept without losing face. So in his first public speech following his release, he suggested the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict. No one in Hamas had ever said anything like that. The closest they ever got to a handshake was to declare a truce. But my father was actually acknowledging the right of Israel to exist! His phone never stopped ringing.

Diplomats from every country, including the United States, contacted us to request secret meetings with my father. They wanted to see for themselves if he was for real. I served as translator, never leaving his side. My Christian friends supported him unconditionally, and he loved them for it.

Not surprisingly, he had a problem. While he spoke in the name of Hamas, he definitely did not speak from the heart of Hamas. Yet it would have been the worst possible time for him to move away from the organization. The death of Yasser Arafat had created a huge vacuum and left the streets of the occupied territories boiling. Radical young men were everywhere—armed, hate filled, and leaderless.

It wasn’t that Arafat was so difficult to replace. Any corrupt politician would do. The problem was that he had completely centralized the PA and the PLO. He wasn’t what you would call a team player. He had held all the authority and all the connections. And his name was on all the bank accounts.

Now Fatah was infested with Arafat wannabes. But who among them would be acceptable to the Palestinians and the international community—
and
strong enough to control all the factions? Even Arafat had never really accomplished that.

When Hamas decided to participate in the Palestinian parliamentry elections a few months later, my father was less than enthusiastic. After the military wing had been added to Hamas during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, he had watched his organization turn into an awkward creature, hobbling along with one very long militant leg and one very short political leg. Hamas simply had no idea how the governing game was played.

Being a revolutionary is all about purity and rigidity. But governing is all about compromise and flexibility. If Hamas wanted to rule, negotiation would not be an option; it would be a necessity. As elected officials, they would suddenly be responsible for budget, water, food, electricity, and waste removal. And everything had to come through Israel. Any independent Palestinian state would have to be a cooperative state.

My father remembered his meetings with Western leaders and how Hamas had rejected every recommendation. It was reflexively closed-minded and contrarian. And if it had refused to negotiate with the Americans and the Europeans, my father reasoned, what was the likelihood that an elected Hamas would sit down at the table with the Israelis?

My father didn’t care if Hamas fielded candidates. He just didn’t want to fill the ticket with high-profile leaders like himself who were loved and admired by the people. If that happened, he feared, Hamas would win. And he knew a Hamas victory could prove to be a disaster for the people. Events proved him right.