Son of Hamas

by Mosab Hassan Yousef

  I learned later that intelligence had received a message that al-Faransi had been spotted getting into a dark blue Audi A4. There were many just like it in town. Loai wasn’t in the operations room at the time to check my location, and no one knew to ask whether this Audi might belong to the Green Prince. Few members of the Shin Bet even knew of my existence.

  Somehow, I seemed to always benefit from divine protection. I wasn’t even a Christian yet, and al-Faransi certainly didn’t know the Lord. My Christian friends were praying for me every day, however. And God, Jesus said in Matthew 5:45, “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” This was certainly a far cry from the cruel and vengeful god of the Qur’an.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  PROTECTIVE CUSTODY

  Fall 2002—Spring 2003

  I was exhausted. I was tired of playing so many dangerous roles at once, tired of having to change my personality and appearance to fit the current company I was keeping. When I was with my father and other Hamas leaders, I had to play the part of a dedicated member of Hamas. When I was with the Shin Bet, I had to play the part of an Israeli collaborator. When I was at home, I often played the part of father and protector of my siblings, and when I was at work, I had to play the part of a regular working guy. I was in my last semester of college, and I had exams to study for. But I couldn’t concentrate.

  It was the end of September 2002, and I decided that it was time for act 2 of the play that had opened with the Shin Bet’s phony attempt to arrest me.

  “I can’t keep up like this,” I told Loai. “What will it take? A few months in prison? We go through the motions of interrogation. You release me. Then I can go back and finish school. I can go back to my job at USAID and live a normal life.”

  “What about your father?”

  “I’m not going to leave him behind to be assassinated. Go ahead and arrest him too.”

  “If that’s what you want. The government will certainly be happy that we finally caught Hassan Yousef.”

  I told my mother where my father was hiding, and I let her visit him. Five minutes after she arrived at the safe house, special forces poured into the area. Soldiers ran through the neighborhood, shouting at all the civilians to get inside.

  One of those “civilians,” smoking a narghile (Turkish water pipe) in front of his house, was none other than master bomb maker Abdullah Barghouti, who had no idea that he had been living across the street from Hassan Yousef. And the poor IDF soldier who told him to get inside had no idea that he had been shouting at Israel’s most wanted mass murderer.

  Everybody was clueless. My father had no idea that his son had given him up in order to protect him from being assassinated. And the IDF had no idea that the Shin Bet had known the whereabouts of Hassan Yousef all along and that some of their soldiers had even eaten lunch and enjoyed a nap in the house where he was hiding.

  As usual, my father surrendered peacefully. And he and the other Hamas leaders assumed the Shin Bet had followed my mother to his hideout. Naturally, my mother was sad, but she was also relieved that her husband was somewhere safe and no longer on Israel’s assassination list.

  “We’ll see you tonight,” Loai told me after the dust settled.

  As the sun began to set on the horizon, I sat inside my house, looking out the window, watching as about twenty special forces troops moved in fast and took their positions. I knew I needed to get my head down now and prepare for a little rough treatment. A couple of minutes later, jeeps drove in. Then a tank. The IDF sealed the area. Somebody jumped onto my balcony. Somebody else banged on my door.

  “Who is it?” I called out, pretending I didn’t know.

  “IDF! Open the door!”

  I opened the door, and they pushed me down onto the floor, quickly searching me for weapons.

  “Is anybody else here?”

  “No.”

  I don’t know why they bothered to ask. They started kicking in doors anyway and searching the house, room by room. Once outside, I found myself face-to-face with my friend.

  “Where have you been?” Loai asked, talking harshly to me, as if I truly were what I pretended to be. “We’ve been looking for you. Are you trying to get yourself killed? You must have been crazy to run from your father’s house last year.”

  A bunch of angry soldiers looked on and listened.

  “We got your father,” he said, “and we finally got you! Let’s see what you have to say under interrogation!”

  A couple of soldiers threw me into a jeep. Loai came over, leaned in so no one could hear him, and asked, “How are you doing, my friend? Is everything okay? Handcuffs too tight?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “Just get me out of here, and don’t let the soldiers beat me during the ride.”

  “Don’t worry. One of my guys will be with you.”

  They brought me to Ofer Military Base, where we sat in the same room in which we used to meet for a couple of hours of “interrogation,” drinking coffee and talking about the situation.

  “We’re going to take you to Maskobiyeh,” Loai said, “just for a short time. We’ll pretend that you went through a tough interrogation. Your father is already there, and you’ll get to see him. He is not being questioned or tortured. Then we’ll take you to administrative detention. You’ll spend several months there, and after that, we’ll ask to extend your sentence for three more months because anybody with your status would be expected to spend a respectable time in prison.”

  When I saw the interrogators, even those who had tortured me during my previous stay, I was surprised to discover that I felt no bitterness whatsoever toward these men. The only way I could explain it was using a verse I had read: Hebrews 4:12 says that “the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” I had read and pondered these words many times, as well as Jesus’ commands to forgive your enemies and love those who mistreat you. Somehow, even though I was still unable to accept Jesus Christ as God, his words seemed to be alive and active and working inside me. I don’t know how else I would have been able to see people as people, not Jew or Arab, prisoner or torturer. Even the old hatred that had driven me to buy guns and to plot the deaths of Israelis was being displaced by a love I didn’t understand.

  I was put into a cell by myself for a couple of weeks. And once or twice a day, when they weren’t busy interrogating other prisoners, my Shin Bet friends came to check on me and chat. I ate well and remained the prison’s best-kept secret. This time, there were no stinking hoods or crazy hunchbacks or Leonard Cohen songs (although he would one day become my favorite recording artist—weird, huh?). In the West Bank, word circulated that I was a really tough guy who gave no information to the Israelis, even under torture.

  A few days before my transfer, I was moved into my father’s cell. A look of relief swept over my father’s face as he held out his arms for an embrace. He held me away from him and smiled.

  “I followed you,” I said, laughing. “I couldn’t live without you.”

  Two others were in the cell, and we joked around and had a good time together. To be honest, I was very happy to see my dad safely behind bars. No mistakes would be made. No missiles would come from the sky.

  Sometimes while he read the Qur’an to us, I just enjoyed looking at him and listening to his beautiful voice. I thought about how gentle he was when we were growing up. He never forced us to get out of bed for early morning prayers, but we all did it because we wanted to make him proud. He had given his life to Allah at a very early age and passed along that devotion to the rest of us by example.

  Now I thought: My beloved father, I am so glad to be sitting here with you. I know prison is the last place you want to be right now, but if you weren’t here, your shattered remains would probably be in a little vinyl bag somewhere. Sometimes he looked up and saw
me smiling at him with love and appreciation. He didn’t understand why, and I couldn’t tell him.

  When the guards came to transfer me out, my father and I hugged tightly. He seemed so frail in my embrace, and yet I knew how strong he was. We had been so close over the past few days that I felt as if I was being torn apart. I even found it difficult to leave the Shin Bet officers. We had developed an incredibly close relationship over the years. I looked at their faces and hoped they knew how much I admired them. They looked back at me apologetically. They knew the next stop on my journey wouldn’t be so easy.

  The faces of the soldiers who handcuffed me for transfer had a completely different look. To them, I was a terrorist who had escaped the IDF, made them look stupid, and evaded capture. This time, I was taken to Ofer Prison, part of the military base where I had met regularly with the Shin Bet.

  My beard grew long and thick like everyone else’s. And I joined the other prisoners in the daily routine. When prayer times came, I bowed and knelt and prayed, but no longer to Allah. I prayed now to the Creator of the universe. I was getting closer. One day, I even found an Arabic-language Bible stashed in the world religion section of the library. It was the whole thing, not just the New Testament. No one had ever touched it. I’ll bet no one even knew it was there. What a gift from God! I read it again and again.

  Every now and then, somebody would come over to me and gently try to find out what I was doing. I explained that I studied history and that since the Bible was an ancient book, it contained some of the earliest information available. Not only that, but the values it teaches are also great, I said, and I believed that every Muslim ought to read it. People were usually okay with that. The only time they got a little sore was during Ramadan, when it seemed I was studying the Bible more than the Qur’an.

  The Bible study I had attended in West Jerusalem was open to everybody—Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist, whatever. Through this group, I had had opportunities to sit down with Jewish people who came with the same purpose as I did: to study Christianity and learn about Jesus. It was a unique experience for me as a Palestinian Muslim to study Jesus with an Israeli Jew.

  Through this group, I had gotten to know a Jewish man named Amnon pretty well. He was married and had two beautiful children. He was very smart and spoke several languages. His wife was a Christian and had encouraged him for a long time to be baptized. Finally, Amnon decided to do it, so the group gathered one evening to witness his baptism in the pastor’s bathtub. By the time I arrived, Amnon had finished reading some Bible verses and had begun to cry very hard.

  He knew that when he allowed himself to be lowered under the water, he was not only declaring his allegiance to Jesus Christ through the identification with his death and resurrection, he was also divorcing his culture. He was turning his back on the faith of his father, a professor at Hebrew University. He was abandoning Israeli society and religious traditions, destroying his reputation, and jeopardizing his future.

  Not long after, Amnon received notice to begin serving his tour with the IDF. In Israel, every non-Arab citizen, male or female, over the age of eighteen is required to serve in the military—men for three years, women for two. But Amnon had seen enough checkpoint massacres to feel that, as a Christian, he could not allow himself to be placed in a position where he might be required to shoot unarmed civilians. And he refused to put on a uniform and go to the West Bank.

  “Even if I could do my job by shooting a stone-throwing child in the leg instead of in the head,” he argued, “I don’t want to do it. I am called to love my enemy.”

  A second notice came. Then a third.

  When he still refused to serve, Amnon was arrested and imprisoned. What I didn’t realize was that Amnon was living in the Jewish section of the prison the entire time I was at Ofer. He was there because he refused to work with the Israelis; I was there because I had agreed to work with them. I was trying to protect Jews; he was trying to protect Palestinians.

  I didn’t believe that everybody in Israel and the occupied territories needed to become a Christian in order to end the bloodshed. But I thought that if we just had a thousand Amnons on one side and a thousand Mosabs on the other, it could make a big difference. And if we had more … who knows?

  A couple of months after arriving at Ofer, I was taken to court, where no one knew who I was—not the judge or the prosecutors, not even my own lawyer.

  At my trial, the Shin Bet testified that I was dangerous and requested that I be kept longer. The judge agreed and sentenced me to six months in administrative detention. Again, I was transferred.

  Five hours drive from anywhere, in the sand dunes of the Negev Desert and very near the Dimona nuclear plant, stood the tent prison of Ktzi’ot, where you melted in the summer and froze in the winter.

  “What’s your organization?”

  “Hamas.”

  Yes, I still identified myself as part of my family, as part of my history. But I was no longer like the other prisoners.

  Hamas was still the majority. But since the start of the Second Intifada, Fatah had grown significantly, and each group had about the same number of tents. I was tired of pretending, and my newfound ethical code kept me from lying. So I decided to keep mostly to myself while I was there.

  Ktzi’ot was serious wilderness. The night air echoed with the sounds of wolves and hyenas and leopards. I had heard stories of prisoners who had escaped Ktzi’ot, but no stories of anyone having survived the desert. Winter was worse than summer—freezing air and drifting snow and nothing but canvas to keep out the wind. Each tent had a moisture barrier across the roof. But some of the prisoners tore down pieces of it to make privacy curtains around their cots. The moisture from our breath was supposed to be trapped in that liner. But it just floated up and stuck to the naked canvas until it got too heavy. Then all that spit rained down on us throughout the night as we slept.

  The Israelis virtually papered the camp with glue boards to try to keep the mouse population under control. Early one frosty morning while everyone else was still asleep, I was reading my Bible when I heard a squeaking sound, like a rusty bedspring. I looked under my cot and saw a mouse stuck to a glue board. What surprised me, though, was that another mouse was trying to save him without getting stuck himself. Was it his mate or a friend? I don’t know. I watched for about half an hour as one animal risked its life to save another. It moved me so much that I freed them both.

  At the prison, reading materials were pretty much limited to the Qur’an and Qur’anic studies. I had only two English-language books that a friend had smuggled to me through my lawyer. I was deeply grateful to have something to read and to strengthen my English skills, but it didn’t take long for me to wear out the covers from reading the books so much. One day, I was walking around by myself when I saw two prisoners making tea. Beside them was a huge wooden box filled with novels sent by the Red Cross. And these guys were tearing up the books for fuel! I couldn’t control myself. I shoved the box away from them and started scooping up the books. They thought I wanted them so I could make my own tea.

  “Are you insane?” I told them. “It took me forever to smuggle in two English-language books so I could read them, and you’re making tea with these!”

  “Those are Christian books,” they argued.

  “They are not Christian books,” I told them. “They’re New York Times best sellers. I’m sure they don’t say anything against Islam. They’re just stories about human experiences.”

  They probably wondered what was wrong with the son of Hassan Yousef. He had been so quiet, mostly keeping to himself and reading. Suddenly, he was raving about a box of books. If it had been anybody else, they probably would have fought to keep their priceless fuel. But they let me have the novels, and I returned to my bed with a whole box of new treasures. I piled them around me and wallowed in them. I didn’t care what anybody thought. My heart was singing and praising God for providing me with something to read while I tried to pass the ti
me in this place.

  I read sixteen hours a day until my eyes grew weak from the poor light. During the four months I spent at Ktzi’ot, I memorized four thousand English vocabulary words.

  While I was there, I also experienced two prison uprisings, far worse than the one we had at Megiddo. But God got me through it all. In fact, I experienced God’s presence more strongly in that prison than any time before or since. I may not have known Jesus as the Creator yet, but I was certainly learning to love God the Father.

  * * *

  On April 2, 2003—as Coalition ground troops raced toward Baghdad—I was released. I emerged as a respected leader of Hamas, a seasoned terrorist, and a wily fugitive. I had been tried by fire and proven. My risk of being burned had decreased significantly, and my father was alive and safe.

  Once more I could walk openly down the streets of Ramallah. I no longer had to act like a fugitive. I could be myself again. I called my mother; then I called Loai.

  “Welcome home, Green Prince,” he said. “We missed you very much. A lot has been happening, and we didn’t know what to do without you.”

  A few days after my return, I had a reunion with Loai and my other good Israeli friends. They had only one news item to report, but it was a huge one.

  In March, Abdullah Barghouti had been spotted and arrested. Later that year, the Kuwaiti-born bomb maker would be tried in Israeli military court for killing sixty-six people and wounding about five hundred. I knew there were more, but those were all we would be able to prove. Barghouti would be sentenced to sixty-seven life terms—one for each murder victim and an extra one for all those he had wounded. At his sentencing, he would express no remorse, blame Israel, and regret only that he had not had the opportunity to kill more Jews.

  “The spate of murderous terror that the accused let loose was one of the most severe in the blood-soaked history of this country,” the judges said.[12] Barghouti flew into a rage, threatening to kill the judges and to teach every Hamas prisoner how to make bombs. As a result, he would serve his terms in solitary confinement. Ibrahim Hamed, my friend Saleh Talahme, and the others, however, still remained at large.