Son of Hamas Page 8

  It must have been morning when I heard a guard moving around. One by one, he opened handcuffs and shackles and led people away. After a few minutes, he brought them back, chained them up to the little chairs again, and went on to the next one. Finally, he came to me.

  After he unlocked my chains, he grabbed my hood and pulled me through the corridors. He opened a cell door and told me to go in. When he removed the hood, I saw that it was the same hunchbacked, apelike guard with my breakfast. He shoved the blue tray with egg, bread, yogurt, and olives toward me with his foot. Nearly an inch of stinking water covered the floor and splashed into the tray. I would rather have starved than eaten it.

  “You have two minutes to eat and use the toilet,” he told me.

  All I wanted to do was to stretch, lie down, and sleep, just for two minutes. But I just stood there as the seconds slipped away.

  “Come on! Come here!”

  Before I could grab a bite, the guard pulled the bag over my head again, led me back through the halls, and chained me to the little chair.

  First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin!

  Chapter Eleven

  THE OFFER

  1996

  All day long, doors opened and closed, as prisoners were pulled by their foul hoods from one interrogator to another. Uncuffed, cuffed, questioned, beaten. Sometimes an interrogator would shake a prisoner hard. It usually took only ten shakes before he passed out. Uncuffed, cuffed, questioned. Doors opened and doors closed.

  Every morning we were taken for our two-minute blue breakfast tray, and then hours later, for our two-minute orange dinner tray. Hour after hour. Day after day. Blue breakfast tray. Orange dinner tray. I quickly learned to long for mealtimes—not because I wanted to eat, but just for the chance to stand erect.

  At night after we were all fed, the opening and closing of doors stopped. The interrogators went home. The business day was over. And the endless night began. People cried and moaned and screamed. They no longer sounded like human beings. Some didn’t even know what they were saying. Muslims recited verses from the Qur’an, begging Allah for strength. I prayed, too, but I didn’t get any strength. I thought about stupid Ibrahim and the stupid guns and the stupid calls to my father’s cell phone.

  I thought about my father. My heart ached when I realized all that he must have endured while imprisoned. But I knew my father’s personality well. Even while being tortured and humiliated, he would have accepted his fate quietly and willingly. He probably even made friends with the guards assigned to carry out the beatings. He would have taken a genuine interest in them as people, asking about their families, their backgrounds, their hobbies.

  My father was such an example of humility, love, and devotion; even though he was only five foot seven, he stood head and shoulders above anyone else I had ever known. I very much wanted to be like him, but I knew I still had a long way to go.

  One afternoon, my routine was unexpectedly interrupted. A guard came into the cell and unchained me from my chair. I knew it was much too early for dinner, but I didn’t ask questions. I was just happy to go anywhere, to hell even, if it meant getting off that chair. I was taken to a small office where I was chained again, but this time to a regular chair. An officer of the Shin Bet entered the room and looked me up and down. Though the pain wasn’t as sharp as it once had been, I knew my face still bore the marks from the soldiers’ rifle butts.

  “How are you?” the officer asked. “What happened to your eye?”

  “They beat me.”

  “Who?”

  “The soldiers who brought me here.”

  “That’s not allowed. It’s against the law. I’ll look into it and find out why this happened.”

  He seemed very confident and spoke kindly and respectfully to me. I wondered if it was a game to get me to talk.

  “You have exams soon. Why are you here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know. You are not stupid, and we are not stupid. I am Loai, Shin Bet captain of your area. I know all about your family and your neighborhood. And I know everything about you.”

  And he really did. Apparently, he was responsible for every person in my neighborhood. He knew who worked where, who was in school, what they studied, whose wife just had a baby, and no doubt what the baby weighed. Everything.

  “You have a choice. I came all the way here today to sit down with you and talk. I know that the other interrogators have not been so nice.”

  I looked closely into his face, trying to read between the lines. Fair skinned and blond, he spoke with a sense of calm I had not heard before. His expression was kind, even a little concerned for me. I wondered if this was part of the Israeli strategy: throwing off the prisoner by beating him one minute, then treating him kindly the next.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked.

  “Listen, you know why we brought you here. You’ve got to bring everything out, whatever you have.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay, I want to make this easy for you.”

  On a whiteboard behind the desk he wrote three words: Hamas, weapons, and organization.

  “Go ahead and tell me about Hamas. What do you know about Hamas? What is your involvement in Hamas?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know anything about the weapons they have, where they come from, how they get them?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anything about the Islamic youth movement?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. It’s up to you. I don’t know what to tell you, but you are really choosing the wrong path…. Can I bring you any food?”

  “No. I don’t want anything.”

  Loai left the room and returned minutes later with a steaming plate of chicken and rice and some soup. It smelled wonderful, causing my stomach to grumble involuntarily. No doubt the food had been prepared for the interrogators.

  “Please, Mosab, eat. Don’t try to be a tough guy. Just eat and relax a little bit. You know, I have known your father for a long time. Your father is a nice guy. He is not a fanatic, and we don’t know why you got yourself into trouble. We don’t want to torture you, but you need to understand that you are against Israel. Israel is a small country, and we have to protect ourselves. We cannot allow anybody to hurt Israeli citizens. We suffered enough our whole lives, and we will not be easy on those who want to hurt our people.”

  “I never hurt any Israeli. You hurt us. You arrested my father.”

  “Yes. He is a good man, but he is also against Israel. He inspires people to fight against Israel. That’s why we have to put him in prison.”

  I could tell that Loai really believed I was dangerous. I knew from talking to others who had been inside Israeli prisons that Palestinians weren’t always treated as harshly as I had been. Nor were they all interrogated at such lengths.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that Hassan Salameh had been arrested about the same time I was.

  Salameh had carried out numerous attacks in revenge for master bomb maker Yahya Ayyash’s assassination. And when the Shin Bet heard me talking to Ibrahim on my dad’s cell phone about getting weapons, they assumed I wasn’t working alone. In fact, they were sure I had been recruited by Al-Qassam.

  Finally, Loai said, “This is the last time I will make this offer, then I will be gone. I have a lot to do. You and I can resolve this situation right now. We can work something out. You do not have to go through more interrogation. You’re just a kid, and you need help.”

  Yes, I had wanted to be dangerous, and I had dangerous ideas. But clearly, I wasn’t very good at being a radical. I was tired of the little plastic chair and smelly hoods. The Israeli intelligence was giving me more credit than I deserved. So I told him the whole story, leaving out the part about my wanting the weapons so I could kill Israelis. I told him I had bought the weapons to help my friend, Ibrahim, protect his family.

  “So there a
re weapons now, I see.”

  “Yes, there are weapons.”

  “And where are those weapons?”

  I wished they had been at my house because I would gladly have surrendered them to the Israelis. But now I had to involve my cousin.

  “Okay, here’s the thing. Somebody that has nothing to do with this has the weapons.”

  “Who is he?”

  “My cousin Yousef has them. He is married to an American, and they have a new baby.” I hoped they would take his family into account and just go get the weapons, but things are never that easy.

  Two days later, I heard scuffling on the other side of the wall in my cell. I leaned down and toward the rusted-out pipe that connected my cell with the one next to it.

  “Hello,” I called. “Is anybody there?”

  Silence.

  And then…

  “Mosab?”

  What?! I couldn’t believe my ears. It was my cousin!

  “Yousef? Is that you?”

  I was so excited to hear his voice. My heart started beating wildly. It was Yousef! But then he started cursing me.

  “Why did you do this? I have a family….”

  I started to cry. I had wanted so much for a human being to talk to while I was in prison. Now a member of my own family sat just on the other side of the wall, and he was yelling at me. And then it hit me: the Israelis were listening; they had put Yousef right next to me so they could listen to our conversation and find out whether I was telling the truth. That was fine by me. I had told Yousef I wanted the guns to protect my family, so I wasn’t worried.

  Once the Shin Bet realized that my story was true, they moved me to another cell. Alone once again, I thought about how I had screwed up my cousin’s life, how I had hurt my family, and how I had thrown away twelve years of school—and all because I trusted a jerk like Ibrahim!

  I stayed in that cell for weeks with no human contact. The guards slid food under the door but never said a word to me. I even began to miss Leonard Cohen. I had nothing to read, and my only sense of passing time was the daily rotation of colored food trays. Nothing to do but think and pray.

  Finally one day I was again taken to an office, and again, Loai was waiting to talk to me.

  “If you decide to cooperate with us, Mosab, I will do my best to see that you don’t have to spend more time in prison.”

  A moment of hope. Maybe I could make him think I was going to cooperate and then he would let me out of here.

  We talked a little about general things. Then he said, “What if I offer you a job with us? Israeli leaders are sitting down with Palestinian leaders. They have fought for a long time, and at the end of the day they are shaking hands and having dinner together.”

  “Islam forbids me to work with you.”

  “At some point, Mosab, even your father will come and sit down and talk to us and we will talk to him. Let’s work together and bring peace to people.”

  “Is this how we bring peace? We bring peace by ending the occupation.”

  “No, we bring peace through people with courage who want to make change.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s not worth it.”

  “Are you afraid of being killed as a collaborator?”

  “It’s not that. After all our suffering, I could never just sit down and talk with you as a friend, much less work with you. I am not allowed to do this. It is against everything I believe.”

  I still hated everything around me. The occupation. The PA. I had become a radical just because I wanted to destroy something. But it was that impulse that had gotten me into this whole mess. Here I was sitting in an Israeli prison, and now this man was asking me to work for them. If I said yes, I knew I would have to pay a terrible price—both in this life and in the next.

  “Okay, I need to think about it,” I heard myself saying.

  I went back to my cell and thought about Loai’s offer. I had heard stories about people who agreed to work for the Israelis but were double agents. They killed their handlers, stashed weapons, and used every opportunity to hurt the Israelis at an even deeper level. If I told him yes, I figured Loai would most likely release me. He would probably even give me the opportunity to have real weapons this time, and with those weapons I was going to kill him.

  The fires of hatred burned inside me. I wanted revenge on the soldier who had beaten me so badly. I wanted revenge on Israel. I didn’t care about the cost, even if it cost me my life.

  But working for the Shin Bet would be a lot riskier than buying weapons. I probably should just forget it, just finish my time in prison, go home and study, be close to my mother, and take care of my brothers and sisters.

  The following day, the guard took me back to the office one last time, and a few minutes later Loai came in.

  “How are you today? You seem to be feeling much better. Would you like something to drink?”

  We sat there drinking coffee like two old friends.

  “What if I get killed?” I asked, though I really didn’t care about getting killed. I only wanted to make him think I did so he would believe that I was for real.

  “Let me tell you something, Mosab,” said Loai. “I’ve been working for the Shin Bet for eighteen years, and during all that time, I know of only one person who was discovered. All those people you have seen getting killed had no relationship with us. People became suspicious of them because they had no families and they did suspicious things, so people killed them. Nobody will know about you. We will cover you so you aren’t found out. We will protect you and take care of you.”

  I stared at him a long time.

  “All right,” I said. “I will do it. Will you release me now?”

  “That’s great,” Loai said with a big smile. “Unfortunately, we cannot release you right now. Since you and your cousin were arrested right after Salameh was nabbed, the story was on the front page of Al-Quds [the main Palestinian newspaper]. Everybody thinks you were arrested because you were involved with a bomb maker. If we release you so soon, people will be suspicious, and you might be exposed as a collaborator. The best way to protect you is to send you to prison—not for long, don’t worry. We’ll see if there’s a prisoner exchange or release agreement we can use to get you out. Once you are there, I’m sure that Hamas will take care of you, especially since you are the son of Hassan Yousef. We’ll see you after your release.”

  They took me back to my cell, where I stayed for another couple of weeks. I couldn’t wait to get out of Maskobiyeh. Finally one morning, the guard told me it was time to go. He handcuffed me, but this time my hands were in front of me. No stinking hood. And for the first time in forty-five days, I saw the sun and felt the outside air. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs and relishing the breeze on my face. I climbed into the back of a Ford van and actually sat down on the seat. It was a hot summer day, and the metal bench I was cuffed to was blistering, but I didn’t care. I felt free!

  Two hours later, we arrived at the prison in Megiddo, but then we had to sit in the van for another hour, waiting for permission to enter. Once we finally got inside, a prison doctor examined me and announced that I was fine. I took a shower with real soap and was provided with clean clothes and other toiletries. At lunchtime, I ate hot food for the first time in weeks.

  I was asked what organization I was affiliated with.

  “Hamas,” I answered.

  In Israeli prisons, every organization was allowed to police its own people. The hope was that this would either cut down on some of the social problems or create more conflict among the factions. If prisoners focused their anger on one another, they’d have less energy to fight against the Israelis.

  Upon entering a new prison, all prisoners were required to declare an affiliation. We had to choose something: Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), or whatever the case might be. We couldn’t simply say we were nothing. Prisoners who re
ally were nothing would be given a few days to choose an organization. At Megiddo, Hamas was in total control inside the prison. Hamas was the largest and strongest organization there. Hamas made the rules, and everybody else played their game.

  When I entered, the other prisoners welcomed me warmly, patting me on the back and congratulating me for joining the ranks. In the evening, we sat around and shared our stories. After a while, though, I started to feel a little uncomfortable. One of the guys seemed to be kind of a leader for the inmates, and he was asking a lot of questions—too many. Even though he was the emir—the Hamas leader within the prison—I just didn’t trust him. I had heard many stories about “birds,” another word for prison spies.

  If he’s a Shin Bet spy, I thought, why doesn’t he trust me? I’m supposed to be one of them now. I decided to play it safe and say nothing more than I had told the interrogators at the detention center.

  I stayed at Megiddo Prison for two weeks, praying and fasting and reading the Qur’an. When new prisoners came through, I warned them about the emir.

  “You’ve got to be careful,” I said. “That guy and his friends sound to me like they might be birds.” The new arrivals immediately told the emir about my suspicions, and the next day I was sent back to Maskobiyeh. The following morning, I was brought to the office.

  “How was your trip to Megiddo?” Loai asked.

  “It was nice,” I said sarcastically.

  “You know, not everybody can spot a bird the first time he meets one. Go and rest now. Soon we will send you back to spend a little more time there. And one day we will do something together.”

  Yeah, and one day I will shoot you in the head, I thought as I watched him walk away. I was proud of myself for having such radical thoughts.

  I spent twenty-five more days at the detention center, but this time I was in a cell with three other prisoners, including my cousin Yousef. We passed the time talking and telling stories. One guy told us how he had killed somebody. Another boasted about sending suicide bombers. Everybody had an interesting story to tell. We sat around, praying, singing, and trying to have fun. Anything to get our minds off our current surroundings. It was not a place for humans.