Son of Hamas

Chapter Fifteen DAMASCUS ROAD 1997–1999

Two months after my release, my cell phone rang.

“Congratulations,” said a voice in Arabic.

I recognized the accent. It was my “faithful” Shin Bet captain, Loai.

“We would love to see you,” Loai said, “but we cannot talk long on the phone. Can we meet?”

“Of course.”

He gave me a phone number, a password, and some directions. I felt like a real spy. He told me to go to a specific location, and then to another, and then to call him from there.

I followed his instructions, and when I made the call, I was given more directions. I walked for about twenty minutes until a car pulled up beside me and stopped. A man inside the car told me to get in, which I did. I was searched, told to lie down on the floor, and covered with a blanket.

We drove for about an hour, during which time no one spoke. When we finally stopped, we were inside a garage at somebody’s house. I was glad it wasn’t another military base or a detention center. Actually, I learned later that it was a government-owned house in an Israeli settlement. As soon as I arrived, I was searched again, this time much more thoroughly, and led into a nicely furnished living room. I sat there for a while, and then Loai came in. He shook my hand—and then he hugged me.

“How are you doing? How was your experience in prison?”

I told him I was doing fine and that my prison experience had not been very good, especially since he had told me that I would spend only a short time there.

“I am sorry; we had to do that to protect you.”

I thought about my comments to the maj’d about being a double agent and wondered whether Loai knew about them. I figured I had better try to protect myself.

“Look,” I said, “they were torturing people in there, and I had no choice but to tell them that I had agreed to work for you. I was afraid. You never warned me about what was going on in there. You never told me I would have to watch out for my own people. You didn’t train me, and I was freaking out. So I told them that I promised to be a collaborator so I could become a double agent and kill you guys.”

Loai looked surprised, but he wasn’t angry. Though the Shin Bet could not condone torture within the prison, they certainly knew about it—and understood why I might have felt afraid.

He called his supervisor and told him everything I had said. And maybe because it was so hard for Israel to recruit members of Hamas or maybe because, as the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, I was a particularly valuable prize, they let it go at that.

These Israelis were nothing like I had expected them to be.

Loai gave me a few hundred dollars and told me to go buy myself some clothes, take care of myself, and enjoy my life.

“We’ll be in touch later,” he said.

What? No secret assignment? No codebook? No gun? Just a wad of cash and a hug? This made no sense at all.

We met again a couple of weeks later, this time at a Shin Bet house in the heart of Jerusalem. Every house was completely furnished, loaded with alarms and guards, and so secret that not even the next-door neighbors had a clue what was going on inside. Most of the rooms were set up for meetings. And I was never allowed to move from one room to another without an escort, not because they didn’t trust me, but because they didn’t want me to be seen by other Shin Bet guys. Just another layer of security.

During this second meeting, the members of Shin Bet were extremely friendly. They spoke Arabic well, and it was clear they understood me, my family, and my culture. I had no information, and they asked for none. We simply talked about life in general.

This was not at all what I had expected. I really wanted to know what they wanted me to do, though because of the files I had read in prison, I was also a bit afraid they might tell me to do something like have sex with my sister or my neighbor and bring them the video. But there was never anything like that.

After the second meeting, Loai gave me twice as much money as the first time. In a month’s time, I had gotten about eight hundred dollars from him, an awful lot of money for a twenty-year-old to earn at the time. And still I had given the Shin Bet nothing in return. In fact, during my first few months as a Shin Bet agent, I learned much more than I shared.

My training started with some basic rules. I was not to commit adultery because this could expose—or burn—me. In fact, I was told not to have any out-of-wedlock relationship with a woman at all—Palestinian or Israeli—while I was working for them. If I did, I would be gone. And I wasn’t to tell anyone my double-agent story anymore.

Every time we met, I learned more about life and justice and security. The Shin Bet was not trying to break me down to make me do bad things. They actually seemed to be doing their best to build me up, to make me stronger and wiser.

As time went on, I began to question my plan to kill the Israelis. These people were being so kind. They clearly cared about me. Why would I want to kill them? I was surprised to realize that I no longer did.

The occupation had not gone away. The cemetery in Al-Bireh was still being filled with the bodies of Palestinian men, women, and children killed by Israeli soldiers. And I had not forgotten the beating I suffered on the way to prison or the days I was chained to that little chair.

But I also remembered the screams from the torture tents at Megiddo and the man who nearly impaled himself on the razor-wire fence trying to escape his Hamas tormentors. Now I was gaining understanding and wisdom. And who were my mentors? My enemies! But were they really? Or were they only nice to me so they could use me? I was even more confused than before.

During one meeting, Loai said, “Since you are working with us, we are thinking about releasing your father so you can be close to him and see what is going on in the territories.” I didn’t know that had even been a possibility, but I was happy to be getting my dad back.

In later years, my father and I would compare notes about our experiences. He did not like to go into detail about the things he suffered, but he wanted me to know that he had set some things right during his time at Megiddo. He told me about a time when he had been watching television in the mi’var when somebody dropped a board over the screen.

“I am not going to watch TV if you keep covering the screen with that board,” he told the emir. They hauled up the board, and that was the end of that. And when he was moved to the prison camp, he was even able to put an end to the torture. He ordered the maj’d to give him all their files, studied them, and found that at least 60 percent of the suspected collaborators were innocent. So he made sure their families and their communities were told about the false accusations. One of the innocent men was Akel Sorour. The certificate of innocence my father sent to Akel’s village could not erase what he had suffered, but at least he was able to live in peace and honor.

After my father was released from prison, my uncle Ibrahim came to visit. My dad also wanted him to know that he had ended the torture at Megiddo and found that most of the men whose lives and families had been ruined by the maj’d were innocent. Ibrahim pretended to be shocked. And when my father mentioned Akel, my uncle said he had tried to defend him and told the maj’d there was no way Akel was a collaborator.

“Allah be praised,” Ibrahim said, “that you helped him out!”

I couldn’t stand his hypocrisy, and I left the room.

My father also let me know that during his time at Megiddo, he had heard about the double-agent story I had told the maj’d. But he wasn’t angry with me. He simply told me that I had been foolish to even talk with them in the first place.

“I know, Father,” I said. “I promise you don’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “Please just be more careful from now on. There is no one I trust more than you.”

When we met later that month, Loai told me, “It’s time you get started. Here is what we want you to do.”

Finally, I thought.

“Your assignment is to go to college and get your bachelor’s degree.”

He handed me an envelope filled with money.

“That should cover your schooling and your expenses,” he said. “If you need more, please let me know.”

I couldn’t believe it. But for the Israelis, it made perfect sense. My education, inside and outside the classroom, was a good investment for them. It wouldn’t be very prudent for national security to work with someone who was uneducated and had no prospects. It was also dangerous for me to be perceived as a loser because the wisdom on the streets of the territories was that only losers worked with the Israelis. Obviously, this wisdom had not been very well thought out because losers had nothing to offer the Shin Bet.

So I applied to Birzeit University, but they would not accept me because my high school grades were too low. I explained that there had been exceptional circumstances and that I had been in prison. I was an intelligent young man, I argued, and would be a good student. But they didn’t make exceptions. My only option was to enroll at Al-Quds Open University and study at home.

This time, I did well in school. I was a little bit wiser and a lot more motivated. And who did I have to thank? My enemy.

Whenever I met with my Shin Bet handlers, they told me, “If you need anything, just let us know. You can go purify yourself. You can pray. You don’t need to be afraid.” The food and drink they offered me did not violate Islamic law. My handlers were very careful to avoid doing anything they knew to be offensive to me: They didn’t wear shorts. They didn’t sit with their legs on the desk and their feet in my face. They were always very respectful. And because of this, I wanted to learn more from them. They didn’t behave like military machines. They were human beings, and they treated me like a human being. Nearly every time we met, another stone in the foundation of my worldview crumbled.

My culture—not my father—had taught me that the IDF and the Israeli people were my enemies. My father didn’t see soldiers; he saw individual men doing what they believed to be their duty as soldiers. His problem was not with people but with the ideas that motivated and drove the people.

Loai was more like my father than any Palestinian I had ever met. He did not believe in Allah, but he respected me anyway.

So who was my enemy now?

I talked with the Shin Bet about the torture at Megiddo. They told me they knew all about it. Every move of the prisoners, everything anyone said, was recorded. They knew about the secret messages in dough balls and the torture tents and the hole cut in the fence.

“Why didn’t you stop it?”

“First of all, we cannot change that kind of mentality. It is not our job to teach Hamas to love one another. We cannot come in and say, ‘Hey, don’t torture one another; don’t kill each other,’ and make everything okay. Second, Hamas destroys itself more from the inside than anything Israel can do to it from the outside.”

The world I knew was relentlessly eroding, revealing another world that I was just beginning to understand. Every time I met with the Shin Bet, I learned something new, something about my life, about others. It wasn’t brainwashing through mind-numbing repetition, starvation, and sleep deprivation. What the Israelis were teaching me was more logical and more real than anything I had ever heard from my own people.

My father had never taught me any of this because he had always been in prison. And honestly, I suspected he could not have taught me these things anyway because my father did not know much of it himself.

Among the seven ancient gates that offer access through the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, one is more ornate than all the others. The Damascus Gate, constructed by Suleiman the Magnificent nearly five hundred years ago, is situated near the middle of the northern wall. Significantly, it brings people into the Old City at the border where the historic Muslim Quarter meets the Christian Quarter.

In the first century, a man named Saul of Tarsus passed through an earlier version of this gate on his way to Damascus, where he planned to lead a brutal suppression of a new Jewish sect he considered heretical. The targets of this persecution would come to be called Christians. A surprising encounter not only kept Saul from reaching his destination, it also forever changed his life.

With all the history that permeates the atmosphere in this ancient spot, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to have a life-changing encounter there myself. Indeed, one day my best friend Jamal and I were walking past the Damascus Gate. Suddenly I heard a voice directed toward me.

“What’s your name?” a guy who looked to be about thirty asked in Arabic, though clearly he was not an Arab.

“My name is Mosab.”

“Where are you going, Mosab?”

“We’re going home. We’re from Ramallah.”

“I’m from the United Kingdom,” he said, switching to English. Though he continued speaking, his accent was so thick that I had trouble understanding him. After a little back-and-forth, I figured out he was talking about something to do with Christianity and a study group that met at the YMCA by the King David Hotel in West Jerusalem.

I knew where it was. I was a little bored at the time and thought it might actually be interesting to learn about Christianity. If I could learn so much from the Israelis, maybe other “infidels” might have something valuable to teach me as well. Besides, after hanging out with nominal Muslims, zealots, and atheists, the educated and the ignorant, right-wingers and left-wingers, Jews and Gentiles, I wasn’t picky anymore. And this guy seemed like a simple man who was inviting me just to come and talk, not to vote for Jesus in the next election.

“What do you think?” I asked Jamal. “Should we go?”

Jamal and I had known each other since we were very young. We went to school together, threw stones together, and attended mosque together. Six foot three and handsome, Jamal never spoke much. He rarely started a conversation, but he was an outstanding listener. And we never argued, not even once.

In addition to growing up together, we had been together in Megiddo Prison. After Section Five burned during the riots, Jamal was transferred with my cousin Yousef to Section Six and released from there.

Prison, however, had changed him. He stopped praying and going to mosque, and he started smoking. He was depressed and spent most of his time just sitting at home watching TV. At least I had beliefs to hold on to while I was in prison. But Jamal was from a secular family that didn’t practice Islam, so his faith was too thin to hold him together.

Now Jamal looked at me, and I could tell he wanted to go to the Bible study. He was clearly just as curious—and bored—as I was. But something inside him resisted.

“You go on without me,” he said. “Call me when you get home.”

There were about fifty of us who met inside an old storefront that night, mostly students about my age of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. A couple of people translated the English presentation into Arabic and Hebrew.

I called Jamal when I got home.

“How was it?” he asked.

“It was great,” I said. “They gave me a New Testament written in both Arabic and English. New people, new culture; it was fun.”

“I don’t know about this, Mosab,” Jamal said. “It could be dangerous for you if people discovered you were hanging out with a bunch of Christians.”

I knew Jamal meant well, but I wasn’t really very worried. My father had always taught us to be open-minded and loving toward everyone, even those who didn’t believe as we did. I looked down at the Bible in my lap. My father had a huge library of five thousand books, including a Bible. When I was a kid, I had read the sexual passages in the Song of Solomon, but never went any further. This New Testament, however, was a gift. Because gifts are honored and respected in Arab culture, I decided the least I could do was to read it.

I began at the beginning, and when I got to the Sermon on the Mount, I thought, Wow, this guy Jesus is really impressive! Everything he says is beautiful. I couldn’t put the book down. Every verse seemed to touch a deep wound in my life. It was a very simple message, but somehow it had the power to heal my soul and give me hope.

Then I read this: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43-45).

That’s it! I was thunderstruck by these words. Never before had I heard anything like this, but I knew that this was the message I had been searching for all my life.

For years I had struggled to know who my enemy was, and I had looked for enemies outside of Islam and Palestine. But I suddenly realized that the Israelis were not my enemies. Neither was Hamas nor my uncle Ibrahim nor the kid who beat me with the butt of his M16 nor the apelike guard in the detention center. I saw that enemies were not defined by nationality, religion, or color. I understood that we all share the same common enemies: greed, pride, and all the bad ideas and the darkness of the devil that live inside us.

That meant I could love anyone. The only real enemy was the enemy inside me.

Five years earlier, I would have read the words of Jesus and thought, What an idiot! and thrown away the Bible. But my experiences with my crazy butcher neighbor, the family members and religious leaders who beat me when my father was in prison, and my own time at Megiddo had all combined to prepare me for the power and beauty of this truth. All I could think in response was, Wow! What wisdom this man had!

Jesus said, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7:1). What a difference between him and Allah! Islam’s god was very judgmental, and Arab society followed Allah’s lead.

Jesus rebuked the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees, and I thought of my uncle. I remembered a time when he received an invitation to attend a special event and how angry he had been that he was not given the best seat. It was as though Jesus was talking to Ibrahim and every sheikh and imam in Islam.

Everything Jesus said on the pages of this book made perfect sense to me. Overwhelmed, I started to cry.

God used the Shin Bet to show me that Israel was not my enemy, and now he put the answers to the rest of my questions right in my hands in that little New Testament. But I had a long way to go in my understanding of the Bible. Muslims are taught to believe in all of God’s books, both the Torah and the Bible. But we are also taught that men have changed the Bible, making it unreliable. The Qur’an, Mohammad said, was God’s final and inerrant word to man. So I would first have to abandon my belief that the Bible had been altered. Then I would have to figure out how to make both books work in my life, to somehow put Islam and Christianity together. No small challenge—reconciling the irreconcilable.

At the same time, while I believed in the teachings of Jesus, I still did not connect him with being God. Even so, my standards had changed suddenly and dramatically, because they were being influenced by the Bible instead of the Qur’an.

I continued to read my New Testament and go to the Bible study. I attended church services and thought, This is not the religious Christianity I see in Ramallah. This is real. The Christians I had known before had been no different from traditional Muslims. They claimed a religion, but they didn’t live it.

I began spending more time with people from the Bible study and found myself really enjoying their fellowship. We had such a good time talking about our lives, our backgrounds, our beliefs. They were always very respectful of my culture and my Muslim heritage. And I found that I could really be myself when I was with them.

I ached to bring what I was learning into my own culture, because I realized that the occupation was not to blame for our suffering. Our problem was much bigger than armies and politics.

I asked myself what Palestinians would do if Israel disappeared—if everything not only went back to the way it was before 1948 but if all the Jewish people abandoned the Holy Land and were scattered again. And for the first time, I knew the answer.

We would still fight. Over nothing. Over a girl without a head scarf. Over who was toughest and most important. Over who would make the rules and who would get the best seat.

It was the end of 1999. I was twenty-one years old. My life had begun to change, and the more I learned, the more confused I became.

“God, the Creator, show me the truth,” I prayed day after day. “I’m confused. I’m lost. And I don’t know which way to go.”