Son of Hamas

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.

“There certainly exists among us concern that Israel, and perhaps others also, will impose punishments on the Palestinians because they voted for Hamas,” I heard him tell a Haaretz reporter. “They will say ‘you decided to choose Hamas and therefore we will intensify the siege over you and make your lives difficult.’”[13]

But many in Hamas smelled money, power, and glory. Even former leaders who had given up on the organization came out of nowhere to grab a piece of the pie. My father was disgusted with their greed, irresponsibility, and ignorance. These guys couldn’t tell the difference between the CIA and USAID. Who was going to work with them?

I was frustrated with just about everything. I was frustrated with the corruption of the PA, the stupidity and cruelty of Hamas, and the seemingly endless line of terrorists who had to be taken out or put down. I was becoming exhausted by the pretense and risk that had become my daily routine. I wanted a normal life.

Walking along the streets of Ramallah one day in August, I saw a man carrying a computer up a flight of stairs to a repair shop. And it occurred to me that there might be a market for in-home computer maintenance, kind of a Palestinian version of the American Geek Squad. Since I was no longer working for USAID and I had a good business mind, I thought I might as well put it to profitable use.

I had become good friends with the IT manager at USAID, who was a computer wizard. And when I told him about my idea, we decided to become partners. I put up the money, he provided the technological expertise, and we hired a few more engineers, including females so we could serve women in the Arab culture.

We called the company Electric Computer Systems, and I came up with some advertising. Our ads featured a caricature of a guy carrying a computer up some stairs, with his son telling him, “Papa, you don’t have to do that” and urging him to call our toll-free number.

Calls poured in, and we were suddenly very successful. I bought a new company van, we got a license to sell Hewlett-Packard products, and we expanded into networking. I was having the time of my life. At this point I didn’t need the money, but I was doing something productive and having fun.

Since I had begun my spiritual odyssey, I’d had some interesting conversations with my Shin Bet friends about Jesus and my developing beliefs.

“Believe whatever you want,” they said. “You can share it with us. But don’t share it with anyone else. And don’t ever get baptized, because that would make a very public statement. If anybody found out you became a Christian and turned your back on your Islamic beliefs, you could be in big trouble.”

I don’t think they were as worried about my future as they were about theirs if they lost me. But God was changing my life too much for me to hold back anymore.

One day, my friend Jamal was cooking dinner for me.

“Mosab,” he said, “I have a surprise for you.”

He flipped the channel and said with a gleam in his eye, “Check out this TV program on Al-Hayat. It might interest you.”

I found myself looking into the eyes of an old Coptic priest named Zakaria Botros. He looked kind and gentle and had a warm, compelling voice. I liked him—until I realized what he was saying. He was systematically performing an autopsy on the Qur’an, opening it up and exposing every bone, muscle, sinew, and organ, and then putting them under the microscope of truth and showing the entire book to be cancerous.

Factual and historical inaccuracies, contradictions—he revealed them precisely and respectfully but firmly and with conviction. My first instinct was to lash out and turn the television off. But that lasted only seconds before I recognized that this was God’s answer to my prayers. Father Zakaria was cutting away all the dead pieces of Allah that still linked me to Islam and blinded me to the truth that Jesus is indeed the Son of God. Until that happened, I could not move ahead in following him. But it was not an easy transition. Just try to imagine the pain of waking up one day to discover that your dad is not really your father.

I cannot tell you the exact day and the hour that I “became a Christian” because it was a six-year process. But I knew that I was, and I knew I needed to be baptized, no matter what the Shin Bet said. About that time, a group of American Christians came to Israel to tour the Holy Land and to visit their sister church, the one I was attending.

Over time, I became good friends with one of the girls in the group. I enjoyed talking with her, and I trusted her immediately. When I shared a bit of my spiritual story with her, she was very encouraging, reminding me that God often uses the most surprising people to do his work. That was certainly true in my life.

One evening as we were having dinner at the American Colony Restaurant in East Jerusalem, my friend asked me why I had not yet been baptized. I couldn’t tell her that it was because I was an agent for the Shin Bet and involved up to my eyebrows with every political and security activity in the region. But it was a valid question, one I had asked myself many times.

“Can you baptize me?” I asked.

She said she could.

“Can you keep it a secret between us?”

She said she would, adding, “The beach is not too far away. Let’s go now.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Okay, why not?”

I was a little giddy when we boarded the shuttle to Tel Aviv. Had I forgotten who I was? Was I really putting my trust in this girl from San Diego? Forty-five minutes later, we were walking along the crowded beach, drinking in the sweet, warm evening air. No one in the crowd could have known that the son of the leader of Hamas—the terrorist group responsible for slaughtering twenty-one kids at the Dolphinarium just up the road—was about to be baptized as a Christian.

I stripped off my shirt, and we walked into the sea.

On Friday, September 23, 2005, as I drove my father back from one of the refugee camps near Ramallah, he received a phone call.

“What is going on?” I heard him bark into the phone. “What?”

My dad sounded very agitated.

When he hung up, he told me it had been Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri in Gaza, who informed him that the Israelis had just killed a large number of Hamas members during a rally in the Jebaliya refugee camp. The caller insisted he had seen the Israeli aircraft launch missiles into the crowd. They broke the truce, he said.

My father had worked very hard to negotiate that truce just seven months before. Now it appeared that all his efforts were wasted. He hadn’t trusted Israel in the first place, and he was furious at their thirst for blood.

But I didn’t believe it. Though I didn’t say anything to my father, something about the story smelled wrong.

Al-Jazeera called. They wanted my father on the air as soon as we reached Ramallah. Twenty minutes later, we were in their studios.

While they fitted my father with a microphone, I called Loai. He assured me that Israel had not launched any attack. I was livid. I asked the producer to let me see the news footage of the incident. He took me to the control room, and we watched it over and over. Clearly, the explosion had come from the ground up, not out of the sky.

Sheikh Hassan Yousef was already on the air, ranting at treacherous Israel, threatening to end the truce, and demanding an international investigation.

“So do you feel better now?” I asked him as he walked off the set.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean after your statement.”

“Why shouldn’t I feel better? I can’t believe they did that.”

“Good, because they didn’t. Hamas did. Zuhri is a liar. Please come to the control room; I have something to show you.” My father followed me back to the small room where we watched the video several more times.

“Look at the explosion. Look. The blast goes from bottom to top. It didn’t come from the sky.”

We learned later that the Hamas military guys in Gaza had been showing off, flaunting their hardware during the demonstration, when a Qassam missile in the back of a pickup truck exploded, killing fifteen people and wounding many more.

My father was shocked. But Hamas was not alone in its cover-up and self-serving deceptions. Despite what it displayed on its own news footage, Al-Jazeera continued to broadcast the lies. Then everything got worse. Much worse.

In retaliation for the phony attack on Gaza, Hamas fired nearly forty missiles at towns in southern Israel, the first major attack since Israel had completed its withdrawal from Gaza a week earlier. At home, my father and I watched the news along with the rest of the world. The next day, Loai warned me that the cabinet decided that Hamas had broken the truce.

A news report quoted Major General Yisrael Ziv, the head of operations for Israel’s army: “It was decided to launch a prolonged and constant attack on Hamas,” hinting, added the reporter, “that Israel was preparing to resume targeted attacks against top Hamas leaders,” a practice suspended after the cease-fire.[14]

“Your father has to go in,” Loai said.

“Are you asking my approval?”

“No. They’re asking for him personally, and we can’t do anything about it.”

I was furious.

“But my father didn’t launch any missiles last night. He didn’t order it. He had nothing at all to do with it. It was all those idiots in Gaza.”

Eventually, I ran out of steam. I was crushed. Loai broke the silence.

“Are you there?”

“Yes.” I sat down. “This is not fair … but I understand.”

“You, too,” he said, quietly.

“Me, too, what? Prison? Forget it! I’m not going back. I don’t care about cover. It’s over for me. I’m through.”

“My brother,” he whispered, “do you think I want you to be arrested? It is up to you. If you want to stay out, you stay out. But this time is more dangerous than any other time. You have been at your father’s side over the past year more than ever before. Everyone knows you are completely involved with Hamas. Many believe you are even part of its leadership…. If we don’t arrest you, you will be dead within a few weeks.”