Son of Hamas Page 13

  “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.

  Chapter Seventeen

  UNDERCOVER

  2000–2001

  What I am about to reveal has, until now, been unknown to all except a handful in Israeli intelligence. I am disclosing this information in the hope that it will shed light on a number of significant events that have long been shrouded in mystery.

  On the day of decision—the day I decided to do all I could to stop the madness—I began by learning everything I could about the activities and plans of Marwan Barghouti and the Hamas leaders. I told everything I learned to the Shin Bet, which was doing all it could to find these leaders.

  Within the Shin Bet, I had been assigned the code name the Green Prince. Green reflected the color of the Hamas flag, and prince was an obvious reference to the position of my father—a king within Hamas. Thus, at the age of twenty-two, I became the Shin Bet’s only Hamas insider who could infiltrate Hamas’s military and political wings, as well as other Palestinian factions.

  But this responsibility was not all on my shoulders. It was clear to me by now that God had specifically placed me at the core of both Hamas and Palestinian leadership, in Yasser Arafat’s meetings, and wi
th the Israeli security service for a reason. I was in a unique position to do the job. And I could feel that God was with me.

  I wanted to go deep, to know everything that was going on. I had been in the center of the First Intifada, surrounded by violence. The dead had filled to capacity a cemetery in which I had played soccer as a child. I threw stones. I violated curfew. But I didn’t understand why our people pursued violence. Now I wanted to know why we were doing it all over again. I needed to understand.

  From Yasser Arafat’s perspective, the uprising seemed to be all about politics, money, and holding on to power. He was a grand manipulator, the Palestinian puppet master. On camera, he condemned Hamas for its attacks against civilians inside Israel. Hamas did not represent the PA or the Palestinian people, he insisted. But he did little to interfere, content to let Hamas do his dirty work and take the heat from the international community. He had become a sly old politician who knew that Israel could not stop the attacks without partnering with the PA. And the more attacks there were, the sooner Israel would come to the bargaining table.

  During that time, a new group appeared on the scene. It called itself the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. IDF soldiers and settlers were its targets of choice. But nobody knew who these guys were or where they came from. They seemed religious, though nobody in Hamas or Islamic Jihad knew them. They didn’t appear to be nationalist offshoots of the PA or Fatah.

  The Shin Bet was as puzzled as everyone else. Once or twice a week, another settler’s car or bus was attacked with deadly accuracy. Even heavily armed Israeli soldiers were no match for this group.

  One day, Loai called me.

  “We have reports of some unidentified men visiting Maher Odeh, and we need you to find out who they are and what their connection to him is. You’re the only one we can trust not to screw it up.”

  Maher Odeh was a top Hamas leader who was wanted badly by the Shin Bet. He was a head of Hamas’s security wing within the prison system, and I knew he had been responsible for much of the torture that went on there. I suspected that he was the mover and shaker behind the suicide attacks. Odeh was also a very secretive person, which made it almost impossible for the Shin Bet to gather the evidence necessary to authorize his arrest.

  That evening, I drove through central Ramallah. It was Ramadan, and the streets were empty. The sun had set, so everybody was home breaking their daily fast as I pulled into a parking lot down the road from Maher Odeh’s apartment building. Though I hadn’t been trained for this kind of operation, I knew the basics. In the movies, guys sit in a car across the street from the suspect’s home and maintain surveillance with fancy cameras and other spy gear. Though the Shin Bet had extremely sophisticated equipment at their disposal, the only things I had for this mission were my car and my eyes. I simply needed to watch the building and keep track of who came and who went.

  After about half an hour, several armed men left the two-story building and entered a new green Chevy with Israeli tags. The whole scene was wrong. First of all, Hamas members, especially those from the military wing, never carried their weapons in public. Second, guys like Maher Odeh didn’t hang out with armed men.

  I started my car and waited for a couple of cars to pass between us before I pulled out. I followed the green Chevy for a short distance down the main street toward Betunia, where my parents lived, and then I lost them.

  I was angry at myself and at the Shin Bet. This was not like the movies. This was real life, and in real life, spying could get you killed. If they wanted me to follow armed men like that, especially at night, they needed to send me some help. This was a job for several people, not just one. I had always assumed that an operation like this would also involve air and satellite surveillance—cool high-tech stuff. But there was just me. I might have gotten lucky, or I might have gotten shot. In this case, I got nothing. I drove home feeling like a man who had just lost a million-dollar business deal.

  The next morning I got up, determined to find that car. But after driving around for hours, I came up empty. Frustrated once again, I gave up and decided to wash my car. And there it was—just sitting inside the car wash. Same green Chevy. Same guys. Same guns.

  Was this luck or God’s intervention or what?

  I got a much better look at them now that it was daylight, and I was much closer to them than I had been the night before. With their classy suits, AK-47s, and M16s, I recognized them immediately as Force 17, an elite commando unit that had been around since the early 1970s. These were the guys who watched Arafat’s back and protected him from a growing list of wannabes and usurpers.

  Something didn’t seem right. They couldn’t have been the same men I saw at Maher Odeh’s place, could they? What would Maher Odeh be doing with gunmen? He didn’t have anything to do with Arafat, did he? None of it made any sense.

  After they left, I asked the owner of the car wash who they were. He knew I was the son of Hassan Yousef, so he wasn’t at all surprised by my questions. He confirmed that they were Force 17 and told me they lived in Betunia. Now I was even more confused. Why did these guys live a couple of minutes from my parents’ house instead of in Arafat’s compound?

  I drove to the address I had gotten from the car-wash owner and found the Chevy parked outside. I hurried back to Shin Bet headquarters and told Loai everything I had discovered. He listened carefully, but his boss kept arguing with me.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why would Arafat’s guards be living outside the compound? You got something wrong.”

  “I got nothing wrong!” I snapped. I knew this wasn’t adding up, and I was frustrated by the fact that although I knew what I had seen, I couldn’t explain it. Now this guy was telling me that I hadn’t seen it.

  “The whole situation is wrong,” I told him. “I don’t care if this makes sense to you or not. I saw what I saw.”

  He was indignant that I talked to him like that and stormed out of the meeting. Loai encouraged me to calm down and to go back over all the details one more time. Apparently, the Chevy didn’t fit the information they had about the Brigades. It was a stolen Israeli car, which was what PA guys tended to drive, but we couldn’t figure out how it connected them with the new faction.

  “Are you sure it was a green Chevy?” he asked. “You didn’t see a BMW?”

  I was sure it was a green Chevy, but I went back to the apartment anyway. There was the Chevy, parked in the same spot. Beside the apartment, however, I saw another car covered by a white sheet. I carefully crept to the side of the building and lifted the back corner of the sheet. Underneath was a 1982 silver BMW.

  “Okay, we got ’em!” Loai yelled back into my cell phone when I called to tell him what I had found.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Arafat’s guards!”

  “What do you mean? I thought my information was all wrong,” I said with some sarcasm.

  “No, you were absolutely right. That BMW has been used in every shooting in the West Bank for the past couple of months.”

  He went on to explain that this information was a real breakthrough because it was the first proof that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was none other than Yasser Arafat’s own guards—funded directly by him with taxpayer money from America and international donors. Discovering this link was a huge step toward being able to put a stop to the horrific string of bombings that was killing innocent civilians. The evidence I gave to the Shin Bet would later be used against Arafat before the UN Security Council.[6] Now, all we had to do was catch the members of this new cell—cut off the head of the snake, as the Israelis liked to say.

  We learned that the most dangerous members were Ahmad Ghandour, a leader of the Brigades, and Muhaned Abu Halawa, one of his lieutenants. They had already killed a dozen people. Putting these guys out of business didn’t appear to be too difficult a task. We knew who they were and where they lived. And, crucially, they didn’t know that we knew.

  The IDF launched an unmanned drone
to circle the apartment complex and gather intelligence. Two days later, the Brigades made another attack inside Israel, and the Israelis wanted to hit back. The 120 mm cannon of a sixty-five-ton Israeli Merkava battle tank fired twenty shells into the Brigades’ building. Unfortunately, no one had bothered to check the surveillance drone to see if the guys were there. They weren’t.

  Even worse, now they knew that we were on to them. Not surprisingly, they took refuge in Yasser Arafat’s compound. We knew they were there, but at that time it was politically impossible to go in and get them. Now their attacks became more frequent and aggressive.

  Because he was a leader, Ahmad Ghandour was at the top of the wanted list. After he moved inside the compound, we figured we would never get him. And as it turned out, we didn’t. He got himself.

  Walking down the street one day, close to the old cemetery in Al-Bireh, I encountered a military funeral.

  “Who died?” I asked out of curiosity.

  “Somebody from the north,” a man said. “I doubt you know him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Ahmad Ghandour.”

  I tried to control my excitement and asked casually, “What happened to him? I think I’ve heard that name before.”

  “He didn’t know his gun was loaded, and he shot himself in the head. They say his brain stuck to the ceiling.”

  I called Loai.

  “Say good-bye to Ahmad Ghandour, because Ahmad Ghandour is dead.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Did you give me a gun? No, I didn’t kill him. He shot himself. The guy is gone.”

  Loai couldn’t believe it.

  “The man is dead. I’m at his funeral.”

  * * *

  Throughout the first years of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, I accompanied my father everywhere he went. As his eldest son, I was his protégé, his bodyguard, his confidant, his student, and his friend. And he was my everything—my example of what it meant to be a man. Though our ideologies were clearly no longer the same, I knew that his heart was right and his motives were pure. His love for Muslim people and his devotion to Allah never waned. He ached for peace among his people, and he had spent his entire life working toward that goal.