Part 11 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+n 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 a.s.sisted by Sayyed al-Sheikh Qa.s.sem 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 s.h.i.+n 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 t.i.tle, 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. Emba.s.sy, 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 s.e.xy 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 establis.h.i.+ng independent sources of water for my people.
USAID was actually more than just a cover for me. The men and women who worked there became my friends. I knew that G.o.d had given me this job. It was USAID's policy not to employ anyone who was politically active, much less someone whose father led a major terrorist organization. But for some reason my boss decided to keep me. His kindness would soon pay off in ways he would never know.
Because of the intifada, the U.S. government allowed its employees to enter the West Bank only for the day and only to work. But that meant they had to pa.s.s through dangerous checkpoints. They actually would have been safer living in the West Bank than running the gauntlet of checkpoints every day and driving the streets in 4x4 American jeeps with yellow Israeli tags on them. The average Palestinian didn't distinguish between those who had come to help and those who had come to kill.
The IDF always warned USAID to evacuate if it was planning an operation that would put them in danger, but the s.h.i.+n Bet didn't issue such warnings. After all, we were all about secrecy. If we heard that a fugitive was headed to Ramallah from Jenin, for example, we launched an operation without forewarning.
Ramallah was a small city. During these operations, security troops rushed in from every direction. People barricaded the streets with cars and trucks and set fire to tires. Black smoke choked the air. Crouched gunmen ran from cover to cover, shooting whatever was in their paths. Young men threw rocks. Children cried in the streets. Ambulance sirens mingled with screams of women and the crack of small-arms fire.
Not long after I started working for USAID, Loai told me the security forces would be coming into Ramallah the following day. I called my American manager and warned him not to come to town and to tell everyone else to stay home. I said I couldn't tell him how I had gotten this information, but I encouraged him to trust me. He did. He probably figured I had inside information because I was the son of Ha.s.san Yousef.
The next day, Ramallah was ablaze. People were running through the streets, shooting everything in sight. Cars burned along the side of the road and shop windows were broken, leaving the stores vulnerable to bandits and looters. After my boss saw the news, he told me, ”Please, Mosab, whenever something like that is going to happen again, let me know.”
”Okay,” I said, ”on one condition: You don't ask any questions. If I say don't come, just don't come.”
Chapter Nineteen
Shoes2001.
The Second Intifada seemed to roll on and on without even pausing to catch its breath. On March 28, 2001, a suicide bomber killed two teenagers at a gas station. On April 22, a bomber killed one person and himself and wounded about fifty at a bus stop. On May 18, five civilians were killed and more than one hundred wounded by a suicide bomber outside a shopping mall in Netanya.
And then on June 1, at 11:26 p.m., a group of teenagers were standing in line, talking and laughing and horsing around, eager to enter a popular Tel Aviv disco known as the Dolphi. Most of the kids were from the former Soviet Union, their parents recent emigres. Saeed Hotari stood in line, too, but he was Palestinian and a little older. He was wrapped in explosives and metal fragments.
The newspapers didn't call the Dolphinarium attack a suicide bombing. They called it a ma.s.sacre. Scores of kids were ripped apart by ball bearings and the sheer force of the blast. Casualties were high: 21died; 132 were wounded.
No suicide bomber had ever killed so many people in a single attack. Hotari's neighbors in the West Bank congratulated his father. ”I hope that my other three sons will do the same,” Mr. Hotari told an interviewer. ”I would like all members of my family, all the relatives, to die for my nation and my homeland.”7 Israel was more determined than ever to cut off the head of the snake. It should have learned by then, however, that if imprisoning faction leaders did nothing to stop the bloodshed, a.s.sa.s.sinating them was unlikely to work either.
Jamal Mansour was a journalist, and like my father, was one of the seven founders of Hamas. He was one of my father's closest friends. They had been exiled together in south Lebanon. They talked and laughed on the phone nearly every day. He was also the chief advocate of suicide bombings. In a January interview with Newsweek Newsweek, he defended the killing of unarmed civilians and praised the bombers.
On Tuesday, July 31, after a tip from a collaborator, a pair of Apache helicopter guns.h.i.+ps approached Mansour's media offices in Nablus. They fired three laser-guided missiles through the window of his second-floor office. Mansour, Hamas leader Jamal Salim, and six other Palestinians were incinerated by the blasts. Two of the victims were children, aged eight and ten, who had been waiting to see the doctor on the floor below. Both were crushed beneath the rubble.
This seemed crazy. I called Loai.
”What in the world is going on? Are you sure those guys were involved in suicide bombings? I know they supported the attacks, but they were in the political wing of Hamas with my father, not the military wing.”
”Yes. We have intelligence that Mansour and Salim were directly involved in the Dolphinarium ma.s.sacre. They have blood on their hands. We had to do this.”
What could I do? Argue with him? Tell him he didn't have the right information? It suddenly dawned on me that the Israeli government must also be determined to a.s.sa.s.sinate my father. Even if he hadn't organized the suicide bombings, he was still guilty by a.s.sociation. Besides, he had information that could have saved lives, and he withheld it. He had influence, but he didn't use it. He could have tried to stop the killing, but he didn't. He supported the movement and encouraged its members to continue their opposition until the Israelis were forced to withdraw. In the eyes of the Israeli government, he, too, was a terrorist.
With all my Bible reading, I was now comparing my father's actions with the teachings of Jesus, not those found in the Qur'an. He was looking less and less like a hero to me, and it broke my heart. I wanted to tell him what I was learning, but I knew he would not listen. And if those in Jerusalem had their way, my father would never get the opportunity to see how Islam had led him down the wrong path.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that my father would be safe at least for a while because of my connection with the s.h.i.+n Bet. They wanted him alive as much as I did-for very different reasons, of course. He was their main source of inside information regarding Hamas activities. Of course, I couldn't explain that to him, and even the s.h.i.+n Bet's protection could end up being dangerous to him. After all, it would seem pretty suspicious if all the other Hamas leaders were forced into hiding while my father was allowed to walk freely down the street. I needed to at least go through the motions of protecting him. I immediately went to his office and pointed out that what had just happened to Mansour could just as easily have happened to him.
”Get rid of everybody. Get rid of your bodyguards. Close the office. Don't come here again.”
His response was as I expected.
”I'll be okay, Mosab. We'll put steel over the windows.”
”Are you crazy? Get out of here now! Their missiles go through tanks and buildings, and you think you're going to be protected by a sheet of metal? If you could seal the windows, they would come through the ceiling. Come on; let's go!”
I couldn't really blame him for resisting. He was a religious leader and a politician, not a soldier. He had no clue about the army or about a.s.sa.s.sinations. He didn't know all that I knew. He finally agreed to leave with me, though I knew he wasn't happy about it.
But I was not the only one who came to the conclusion that Mansour's old friend, Ha.s.san Yousef, would logically be the next target. When we walked down the street, it seemed that everyone around us looked worried. They quickened their pace and glanced anxiously at the sky as they tried to move away from us as quickly as possible. I knew that, like me, they were listening closely for the chug of incoming helicopters. n.o.body wanted to end up as collateral damage.