Son of Hamas

Chapter Sixteen SECOND INTIFADA Summer–Fall 2000

Hamas—once the ascendant power among Palestinians—was in shambles. The shattered organization’s bitter rival for hearts and minds was now in complete control.

Through intrigue and deal making, the Palestinian Authority had accomplished what Israel had been unable to do through sheer might. It had destroyed the military wing of Hamas and thrown its leadership and fighters into prison. Even after they were released, the Hamas members went home and did nothing more against the PA or the occupation. The young feda’iyeen were exhausted. Their leaders were divided and deeply suspicious of one another.

My father was on his own again, so he went back to working in the mosque and the refugee camps. Now when he spoke, he did so in the name of Allah, not as the leader of Hamas. After years of separation through our respective imprisonments, I relished the opportunity to travel and spend time with him once again. I had missed our long talks about life and Islam.

As I continued to read my Bible and spend time learning about Christianity, I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love, and humility that Jesus talked about. Surprisingly, it was those same character traits that drew people to my father—one of the most devoted Muslims I had ever known.

As for my relationship with the Shin Bet, now that Hamas was virtually out of the picture and the PA was keeping things calm, there seemed to be nothing for me to do. We were just friends now. They could let me go whenever they wanted to, or I could say good-bye to them at any time.

The Camp David Summit between Yasser Arafat, American president Bill Clinton, and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak ended on July 25, 2000. Barak had offered Arafat about 90 percent of the West Bank, the entire Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state. In addition, a new international fund would be established to compensate Palestinians for the property that had been taken from them. This “land for peace” offer represented a historic opportunity for the long-suffering Palestinian people, something few Palestinians would have dared imagine possible. But even so, it was not enough for Arafat.

Yasser Arafat had grown extraordinarily wealthy as the international symbol of victimhood. He wasn’t about to surrender that status and take on the responsibility of actually building a functioning society. So he insisted that all the refugees be permitted to return to the lands they had owned prior to 1967—a condition he was confident Israel would not accept.

Though Arafat’s rejection of Barak’s offer constituted a historic catastrophe for his people, the Palestinian leader returned to his hard-line supporters as a hero who had thumbed his nose at the president of the United States, as someone who had not backed down and settled for less, and as a leader who stood tough against the entire world.

Arafat went on television, and the world watched as he talked about his love for the Palestinian people and his grief over millions of families living in the squalor of the refugee camps. Now that I was traveling with my father and attending meetings with Arafat, I began to see for myself how much the man loved the media attention. He seemed to relish being portrayed as some kind of Palestinian Che Guevara and a peer of kings, presidents, and prime ministers.

Yasser Arafat made it clear that he wanted to be a hero who was written about in the history books. But as I watched him, I often thought, Yes, let him be remembered in our history books, not as a hero, but as a traitor who sold out his people for a ride on their shoulders. As a reverse Robin Hood, who plundered the poor and made himself rich. As a cheap ham, who bought his place in the limelight with Palestinian blood.

It was also interesting to see Arafat through the eyes of my contacts in Israeli intelligence. “What is this guy doing?” my Shin Bet handler asked me one day. “We never thought our leaders would give up what they offered Arafat. Never! And he said no?”

Indeed, Arafat had been handed the keys to peace in the Middle East along with real nationhood for the Palestinian people—and he had thrown them away. As a result, the status quo of quiet corruption continued. But things would not remain quiet for long. For Arafat, there always seemed to be more to gain if Palestinians were bleeding. Another intifada would surely get the blood flowing and the Western news cameras rolling once again.

Conventional wisdom among the world’s governments and news organizations tells us that the bloody uprising known as the Second Intifada was a spontaneous eruption of Palestinian rage triggered by General Ariel Sharon’s visit to what Israel calls the Temple Mount complex. As usual, the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The evening of September 27, my father knocked at my door and asked if I would drive him to Marwan Barghouti’s house the next morning after dawn prayer.

Marwan Barghouti was secretary-general of Fatah, the largest political faction of the PLO. He was a charismatic young Palestinian leader, a strong advocate of a Palestinian state, and a foe of the corruption and human rights abuses of the PA and Arafat’s security forces. A short, casual man who wore blue jeans most of the time, Marwan was favored to be the next Palestinian president.

“What’s going on?” I asked my dad.

“Sharon is scheduled to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque tomorrow, and the PA believes this is a good opportunity to launch an uprising.”

Ariel Sharon was the leader of the conservative Likud Party and the political nemesis of Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s left-leaning Labor Party. Sharon was in the middle of a close political race in which he was challenging Barak for leadership of the Israeli government.

An uprising? Were they serious? The PA leaders who put my father into prison were now asking him to help start another intifada. It was galling, though it wasn’t difficult to deduce why they approached my father about this plan. They knew the people loved and trusted him as much as—if not more than—they hated and distrusted the PA. They would follow my father anywhere, and the leadership knew it.

They also knew that Hamas, like a worn-out boxer, was down for the count. They wanted my father to pick it up, splash water in its face, and send it in for another round so the PA could knock it cold again before a cheering crowd. Even the Hamas leaders—weary from years of conflict—warned my father to watch out.

“Arafat only wants to use us as fuel for his political furnace,” they told him. “Don’t go too far with this new intifada of his.”

But my father understood the importance of making this gesture. If he didn’t at least appear to be working with the PA, they would simply point the finger at Hamas, blaming us for disrupting the peace process.

Regardless of what we did, we seemed to be in a lose-lose situation, and I was deeply concerned about the plan. But I knew my father needed to do this, so the next morning I drove him to Marwan Barghouti’s house. We knocked on the door, got no immediate response, and eventually learned that Marwan was still in bed.

Typical, I said to myself. Fatah involves my father in their stupid plans and then can’t even be bothered to get out of bed to help carry them out.

“Never mind,” I told my father. “Don’t bother. Get into the car, and I’ll take you to Jerusalem.”

Of course, driving my father to the site of Sharon’s visit was risky, given that most Palestinian cars were not allowed to enter Jerusalem. Ordinarily, if a Palestinian driver was caught by the Israeli police, he would be fined, but given who we were, my father and I would probably be arrested on the spot. I had to be very careful, keeping to the side roads and trusting that my Shin Bet connections would protect me if necessary.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are built on the rubble and remains of two ancient Jewish Temples—the Temple of Solomon from the tenth century BC and Herod the Great’s Temple from the time of Christ. Thus it is with good reason that some have described this rocky hill as the most volatile thirty-five acres on earth. The place is holy to all three of the world’s great monotheistic religions. But from a scientific and historical standpoint, it is also a site of enormous archaeological significance—even to the most hardened of atheists.

In the weeks prior to Sharon’s visit to the site, the Muslim Waqf—governing Islamic authority there—had closed off the Temple Mount entirely to any archaeological oversight by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Then in carrying out construction work on new underground mosques at the site, they brought in heavy earthmoving equipment. The evening news in Israel carried images of bulldozers, backhoes, and dump trucks working in and upon the site. Over the course of several weeks, dump trucks moved some thirteen thousand tons of rubble from the Temple Mount complex to city garbage dumps. News reports from the dumps showed archaeologists shaking their heads in disbelief as they held up remnants of artifacts retrieved from the rubble, some of them dating back to the First and Second Temple periods.

To many Israelis, it seemed clear that the intention was to turn the entire thirty-five-acre compound into an exclusively Muslim site by erasing every sign, remnant, and memory of its Jewish past. This included the destruction of any archaeological findings that represented evidence of that history.

Sharon’s visit was designed to deliver a silent but clear message to Israeli voters: “I’ll put a stop to this unnecessary destruction.” In planning the trip, Sharon’s people had received assurances from Palestinian security chief Jibril Rajoub that his visit would not be a problem as long as he did not set foot in a mosque.

My father and I got to the site a few minutes before Sharon’s arrival. It was a quiet morning. A hundred or so Palestinians had come to pray. Sharon arrived during normal tourist hours with a Likud delegation and about a thousand riot police. He came, he looked around, and he left. He said nothing. He never entered the mosque.

It all seemed like a big nonevent to me. On the way back to Ramallah, I asked my father what the big deal had been.

“What happened?” I said. “You didn’t start an intifada.”

“Not yet,” he answered. “But I have called some activists in the Islamic student movement and asked them to meet me here for a protest.”

“Nothing happened in Jerusalem, so now you want to demonstrate in Ramallah? That’s crazy,” I told him.

“We have to do what we have to do. Al-Aqsa is our mosque, and Sharon had no business being there. We cannot allow this.”

I wondered if he was trying to convince me or himself.

The demonstration in Ramallah was anything but a dramatic spectacle of spontaneous combustion. It was still early in the day, and people were walking around town as usual, wondering what was up with these students and guys from Hamas who didn’t even seem to know what they were protesting.

A number of men stood up with bullhorns and made speeches, and the small group of Palestinians who had gathered around them occasionally broke out into chanting and shouting. But for the most part, nobody really seemed to care too deeply. Things had calmed down quite a bit within the Palestinian territories. Every day was simply occupation as usual. Israeli soldiers had become a fixture. Palestinians were allowed to work and go to school inside Israel. Ramallah enjoyed a thriving nightlife, so it was difficult to figure out what these guys were all worked up about.

As far as I was concerned, this demonstration seemed like another nonevent. So I called some of my friends from Bible study, and we headed up to Galilee to camp out at the lake.

Cut off from any source of news, I didn’t know that on the following morning a large number of rock-throwing Palestinian demonstrators clashed with Israeli riot police near the site of Sharon’s visit. The rock throwing escalated to lobbing Molotov cocktails, and then gunfire with Kalashnikovs. Police used rubber-coated metal bullets and, by some reports, live ammunition to disperse the demonstrators. Four protesters were killed, and about two hundred more were injured. Fourteen police personnel were injured as well. And all of this was precisely what the Palestinian Authority had counted on happening.

The next day, I received a telephone call from the Shin Bet.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Galilee camping with some friends.”

“Galilee! What? You’re crazy!” Loai started to laugh. “You are really unbelievable,” he said. “The whole West Bank is upside down and you’re out having fun with your Christian friends.”

When he told me what had been happening, I jumped in the car and immediately headed home.

Yasser Arafat and the other PA leaders had been determined to spark another intifada. They had been planning it for months, even as Arafat and Barak had been meeting with President Clinton at Camp David. They had simply been waiting for a suitable triggering pretext. Sharon’s visit provided just such an excuse. So after a couple of false starts, the Al-Aqsa Intifada began in earnest and the tinderbox of passions in the West Bank and Gaza were inflamed once again. Especially in Gaza.

There, Fatah launched demonstrations that resulted in the globally televised death of a twelve-year-old boy named Mohammed al-Dura. The boy and his father, Jamal, had gotten caught in the cross fire and taken cover behind a concrete cylinder. The boy was hit by a stray bullet and died in his father’s arms. The entire heartrending scene was captured by a Palestinian cameraman working for French public television. Within hours, the video clip had circled the globe and enraged millions against the Israeli occupation.

In the ensuing months, however, there would be a heated international controversy over this event. Some cited evidence that Palestinian gunfire was actually responsible for the boy’s death. Others continued to blame the Israelis. There were even some who argued that the film was a carefully staged hoax. Since the footage did not actually show the boy being shot or even his body, many suspected a propaganda ploy by the PLO. If the latter was the case, it was brilliant and effective.

Whatever the truth, I suddenly found myself caught awkwardly in the middle of a war in which my father was a key leader—albeit a leader who had no idea what he was leading or where it would lead him. He was simply being used and manipulated by Arafat and Fatah to start trouble, thereby providing the PA with fresh bargaining chips and fund-raising fodder.

Meanwhile, people were once again dying at the checkpoints. All sides were shooting indiscriminately. Children were being killed. Day after bloody day, a tearful Yasser Arafat stood before the Western news cameras wringing his hands and denying that he had anything to do with the violence. Instead, he pointed his finger at my father, at Marwan Barghouti, and at the people in the refugee camps. He assured the world that he was doing everything he could to put down the uprising. But all the time, his other finger was resting firmly on the trigger.

Soon, however, Arafat discovered he had released a terrible genie. He had shaken the Palestinian people awake and stirred them up because doing so suited his purposes. But it wasn’t long before they were completely out of control. As they saw IDF soldiers shoot down their fathers and mothers and children, the people became so enraged they wouldn’t listen to the PA or anybody else.

Arafat also discovered that the battered boxer he had set back on its feet was made of sterner stuff than he had imagined. The streets were the natural environment for Hamas. The boxer had gotten its start there, and it was there that it was at its strongest.

Peace with Israel? Camp David? Oslo? Half of Jerusalem? Forget all of it! Any mood for compromise had evaporated in the white-hot furnace of conflict. Palestinians were back to the all-or-nothing mentality of the past. And now it was Hamas rather than Arafat that was fanning the flames.

Tit for tat, the violence escalated. With each passing day, each side’s list of grievances grew even as their respective reservoirs of grief overflowed.

• October 8, 2000, Jewish mobs attacked Palestinians in Nazareth. Two Arabs were killed, and dozens were injured. In Tiberias, Jews destroyed a two-hundred-year-old mosque.

• October 12, a Palestinian mob killed two IDF soldiers in Ramallah. Israel retaliated by bombing Gaza, Ramallah, Jericho, and Nablus.

• November 2, a car bomb killed two Israelis near the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem. Ten others were injured.

• November 5, the thirty-eighth day of the Al-Aqsa Intifada is marked, with more than 150 Palestinians among the dead so far.

• November 11, an Israeli helicopter detonated an explosive device that had been planted in the car of a Hamas activist.

• November 20, a roadside bomb exploded alongside a bus carrying children to school. Two Israelis were killed. Nine others, including five children, were injured.[5]

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Something had to be done to stop this rolling madness. I knew the time had come for me to begin working with Shin Bet. And I went at it with all my heart.