Son Of Hamas Part 16

We were convinced that, whoever this man at the Internet cafe was, he was probably dangerous. Only highly trusted people were able to communicate with Hamas leaders in Damascus. And we hoped that he might also lead us to the elusive, shadowy elite who actually ruled Hamas. We circulated his photograph, but no one recognized him. I began to question my instincts.

A few weeks later, I held an open house for some property in Ramallah that I had put up for sale. Several people came, but no one made an offer. Late that afternoon, after I had closed up, I got a call from a man who asked if he could still see the house. I was really very tired, but I told him to go on over and I would meet him there. I returned to the property, and he showed up a few minutes later.

It was the man from the Internet cafe. He told me his name was Aziz Kayed. He was clean shaven and very professional looking. I could tell he was educated, and he said he ran the respectable Al-Buraq Center for Islamic Studies. He didn't seem to be the link we were looking for. But rather than confuse the s.h.i.+n Bet even more, I kept the discovery to myself.

Sometime after my encounter with Kayed, my father and I set out to visit cities, villages, and refugee camps throughout the West Bank. In one town, more than fifty thousand people gathered to see Sheikh Ha.s.san Yousef. They all wanted to touch him and hear what he had to say. He was still deeply loved.

In Nablus, a Hamas stronghold, we met with top organization leaders, and I figured out which of them were members of the shurah shurah council-a small group of seven men who make decisions on strategic issues and daily activities for the movement. Like my dad, they were among the eldest Hamas leaders, but they were not the "executives" we were looking for. council-a small group of seven men who make decisions on strategic issues and daily activities for the movement. Like my dad, they were among the eldest Hamas leaders, but they were not the "executives" we were looking for.

After all these years, I could not believe that control of Hamas had somehow, somewhere along the line, slipped into unknown hands. If I, who was born and raised in the heart of the movement, had no idea who pulled the strings, who knew?

The answer came out of the blue. One of the shurah council members in Nablus mentioned the name of Aziz Kayed. He suggested that my father visit Al-Buraq and meet this "good man." My ears perked up immediately. Why would a local Hamas leader make such a recommendation? There were simply too many coincidences: first, Aziz caught my eye in the Internet cafe; then he showed up at my open house; and now, the council member was telling my dad he should meet this man. Was this a sign that my hunch was correct and Aziz Kayed was someone important in the Hamas organization?

Could we even be so fortunate as to have found the person in charge? As unlikely as it sounded, something inside me said to follow my instinct. I raced back to Ramallah, where I called Loai and asked him to order a computer search for Aziz Kayed.

Several Aziz Kayeds popped up, but none who fit the description. We had an emergency meeting, and I asked Loai to widen the name search to the entire West Bank. His people thought I was crazy, but they went along with me.

This time, we found him.

Aziz Kayed was born in Nablus and was a former member of the Islamic student movement. He had discontinued his activities ten years earlier. He was married with children and free to travel out of the country. Most of his friends were secular. We found nothing suspicious.

I explained to the s.h.i.+n Bet everything that had happened, from the moment I stepped into the Internet cafe to the visit to Nablus with my father. They said that although they definitely trusted me, we simply didn't have enough to go on yet.

While we were talking, I thought about something else.

"Kayed reminds me of three other guys," I said to Loai. "Salah Hussein from Ramallah, Adib Zeyadeh from Jerusalem, and Najeh Madi from Salfeet. All three of these guys have advanced university degrees and were at one time very active in Hamas. But for whatever reason, they simply dropped out of sight about ten years ago. Now, they all live very normal lives, completely removed from political involvement. I always wondered why someone who was so pa.s.sionate about the movement would just quit like that."

Loai agreed that I might be onto something. We began to study the movements of each man. It turned out that all three of them were in communication with one another and with Aziz Kayed. They all worked together at Al-Buraq. That was way too coincidental.

Could these four unlikely men be the real puppet masters running Hamas, controlling even the military wing? Could they have been flying under the radar while we had been targeting all the high-profile guys? We continued to dig, monitor, and wait. Finally our patience paid off with an enormous intelligence breakthrough.

We learned that these deadly thirtysomethings had gained total control of the money and were running the entire Hamas movement in the West Bank. They brought in millions of dollars from the outside, which they used to buy arms, manufacture explosives, recruit volunteers, support fugitives, provide logistic support, everything-all under the cover of one of Palestine's numerous and seemingly innocuous research centers.

No one knew them. They never appeared on TV. They communicated only by letters through drop points. They obviously trusted no one-as evidenced by the fact that even my father had no clue about their existence.

One day, we followed Najeh Madi from his apartment to a commercial garage a block away. He walked to one of the units and lifted the door. What was he doing there? Why would he lease a garage that far from his home?

For the next two weeks, we never took our eyes off that stupid garage, but n.o.body came again. Finally, the door opened-from the inside-and Ibrahim Hamed stepped out into the sunlight!

The s.h.i.+n Bet waited just long enough for him to return to the building before launching an arrest operation. But when Hamed was surrounded by special forces, he did not fight to the death as he had ordered Saleh and the others to do.

"Take off your clothes and come out!"

No response.

"You have ten minutes. Then we will demolish the building!"

Two minutes later, the leader of the military wing of Hamas in the West Bank walked through the door in his underwear.

"Take off all all your clothes!" your clothes!"

He hesitated, stripped, and stood before the soldiers, naked.

Ibrahim Hamed was personally responsible for the deaths of more than eighty people that we could prove. It may not be a very Jesus-like impulse, but if it had been up to me, I would have put him back in his filthy garage, locked him in for the rest of his life, and saved the state the expense of a trial.

Capturing Hamed and exposing the real leaders of Hamas proved to be my most important operation for the s.h.i.+n Bet. It was also my final one.

Chapter Twenty-Six

A Vision for Hamas2005.

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 a.n.a.lysts, and he attended lectures at the universities. And he listened to me-his a.s.sistant, 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 Ya.s.ser 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. strong enough to control all the factions? Even Arafat had never really accomplished that.

When Hamas decided to partic.i.p.ate 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 Haaretz reporter. "They will say 'you decided to choose Hamas and therefore we will intensify the siege over you and make your lives difficult.'" 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 s.h.i.+n 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d. 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 s.h.i.+n 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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+n 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 a.s.sured 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 thesky.

Sheikh Ha.s.san 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 Qa.s.sam 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?"