"I am so sorry to be late," he said. "I had to travel out of town to resolve a dispute between two families. Why didn"t you eat?"
He changed his clothes quickly, washed his hands, and came to the table.
"I"m starving," he said with a smile. "I haven"t eaten a thing all day." This was not unusual because he could never afford to eat out. The delicious aroma of my mother"s stuffed zucchini filled the house.
As we settled in and began to eat, I felt a rush of admiration for my father. I could see the exhaustion on his face, yet I knew how much he loved what he did. The grace he showed toward the people he served was matched only by his devotion to Allah. As I watched him talking with my mother and my brothers and sisters, I thought about how different he was from most Muslim men. He never thought twice about helping my mother around the house or taking care of us children. In fact, he scrubbed his own socks in the sink every night, just so my mother would not have to deal with them. This was unheard of in a culture where women considered it a privilege to scrub their husbands" legs after a long day.
Now as we went around the table, each of us took turns telling our father all about what we were learning at school and what we had been doing with our time. Since I was the oldest, I let the little ones talk first. But just when it was my turn to speak, I was interrupted by a knock at the back door. Who could be visiting at this time? Maybe somebody had a big problem and had come to ask for help.
I ran to the door and opened the small window that served as a peephole. I did not recognize the man.
"Abuk mawjood?" he asked in fluent Arabic, meaning, "Is your father here?" He was dressed like an Arab, but something about him did not seem right. he asked in fluent Arabic, meaning, "Is your father here?" He was dressed like an Arab, but something about him did not seem right.
"Yes, he is," I said. "Let me call him." I did not open the door.
My father had been standing behind me. He opened the door, and several Israeli soldiers came into our home. My mother quickly put a scarf on her head. Being uncovered in front of the family was okay, but never in front of others.
"Are you Sheikh Ha.s.san?" asked the stranger.
"Yes," my father said, "I am Sheikh Ha.s.san."
The man introduced himself as Captain Shai and shook my father"s hand.
"How are you?" the soldier asked politely. "How is everything? We are from the IDF, and we would like you to come with us for five minutes."
What could they want with my father? I searched his face, trying to read his expression. He smiled kindly at the man, with no hint of suspicion or anger in his eyes.
"Okay, I can go with you," he said, nodding at my mother as he walked toward the door.
"Wait here at home and your father will be back shortly," the soldier said to me. I followed them outside, scanning the neighborhood for more soldiers. There were none. I sat down on the front steps to wait for my father to return. Ten minutes pa.s.sed. An hour. Two hours. Still he did not come back.
We had never spent the night without our father before. Even though he was busy all the time, he was always home in the evening. He woke us for dawn prayer every morning, and he was the one who took us to school every day. What would we do if he didn"t come home tonight?
When I came back inside, my sister Tasneem was asleep on the couch. The tears were still wet on her cheeks. My mother tried to busy herself in the kitchen, but as the hours dragged on, she became more and more agitated and upset.
The next day, we went to the Red Cross to see if we could get any information about my father"s disappearance. The man at the desk told us that he had definitely been arrested but that the IDF would not give the Red Cross any information for at least eighteen days.
We went back home to count off the two and a half weeks of waiting. During all that time, we heard nothing. When the eighteen days were up, I went back to the Red Cross to see what they had learned. I was told they had no new information.
"But you said eighteen days!" I said, struggling to fight back the tears. "Just tell me where my father is."
"Son, go home," the man said. "You can come back next week."
I did go back, again and again for forty days, and each time I received the same answer: "There is no new information. Come back next week." This was very unusual. Most of the time, families of Palestinian prisoners learned where their loved one was being held within a couple of weeks of detention.
When any prisoner was released, we made a point of asking him if he had seen my father. They all knew he had been arrested, but no one knew anything else. Even his lawyer knew nothing because he was not allowed to visit him.
We learned only later that he had been taken to Maskobiyeh, an Israeli interrogation center, where he was tortured and questioned. The Shin Bet, Israel"s internal security service, knew my father was at the top level of Hamas and a.s.sumed that he knew everything that went on or was planned. And they were determined to get it out ofhim.
It wasn"t until many years later that he told me what really happened. For days, he was handcuffed and hung from the ceiling. They used electric shock on him until he pa.s.sed out. They put him in with collaborators, known as "birds," hoping he would talk to them. When that failed, they beat him some more. But my father was strong. He remained silent, never giving the Israelis any information that could hurt Hamas or his Palestinian brothers.
Chapter Five
Survival19891990.
The Israelis thought if they captured one of the leaders of Hamas, things would get better. But during the time my father was in prison, the intifada only became more violent. In late 1989, Amer Abu Sarhan of Ramallah had seen all the Palestinian deaths he could take. Since no one had guns, he grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed three Israelis to death, in effect launching a revolution. This incident marked the start of a significant escalation of violence.
Sarhan became a hero to the Palestinians who had lost friends or family members, whose land had been seized, or who had any other reason to want revenge. They were not terrorists by nature. They were just people who had run out of hope and options. Their backs were to the wall. They had nothing left and nothing to lose. They cared nothing for the world"s opinion or even their own lives.
For us kids in those days, going to school became a real problem. It was not uncommon for me to walk out of school to find Israeli jeeps driving up and down the streets, announcing an immediate curfew through loudspeakers. Israeli soldiers took curfews very seriously. These were not like curfews in American cities, where authorities call a teenager"s parents if he"s caught driving around after 11p.m. In Palestine, if a curfew had been declared and you were on the street for any reason, you were shot. No warning, no arrest. They just shot you.
The first time a curfew was called while I was at school, I didn"t know what to do. I had a four-mile walk ahead of me and knew there was no way I could make it home before curfew. The streets were already empty, and I was scared. I couldn"t stay where I was, and even though I was just a kid trying to get home from school, if the soldiers saw me, I knew they would shoot me. A lot of Palestinian kids got shot.
I began to dodge from house to house, creeping through backyards and hiding in bushes along the way. I tried to avoid barking dogs and men with machine guns as best I could, and when I finally turned the corner onto our street, I was so thankful to see that my brothers and sisters had already made it home safely.
But curfews were just one change we dealt with as a result of the intifada. On many occasions, a masked man would show up at school and tell everybody that a strike had been called and to go home. The strikes, called by one of the Palestinian factions, were designed to hurt Israel financially by reducing the sales tax revenue the government collected from store owners. If the stores were not open, the owners would have to pay less tax. But the Israelis were not stupid. They just started arresting shopkeepers for tax evasion. So who was hurt by the strikes?
On top of that, the various resistance organizations were incessantly fighting with one another for power and prestige. They were like kids sc.r.a.pping over a soccer ball. Nevertheless, Hamas was steadily growing in power and had begun to challenge the dominance of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The PLO had been founded in 1964 to represent the Palestinian people; its three largest member organizations include: Fatah, a left-wing nationalist group; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a communist group; and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), also communist in ideology.
The PLO demanded that Israel return all of the land that had belonged to the Palestinian territories prior to 1948 and grant Palestine the right to self-determination. To this end, it fought a global campaign of public relations, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism from its base, first in neighboring Jordan, then in Lebanon and Tunisia.
Unlike Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the PLO was never an inherently Islamic organization. Its groups were made up of nationalists, not all of them practicing Muslims. In fact, many of them did not believe in G.o.d. Even as a young boy, I saw the PLO as corrupt and self-serving. Its leaders sent people, many of whom were just teenagers, to carry out one or two high-profile terrorist attacks a year in order to justify fund-raising for the struggle against Israel. The young feda"iyeen were little more than fuel to stoke the fires of anger and hatred and to keep the donations flowing into the personal bank accounts of PLO leaders.2 In the initial years of the First Intifada, ideological differences kept Hamas and the PLO on very separate paths. Hamas was largely animated by religious fervor and the theology of jihad, while the PLO was driven by nationalism and the ideology of power. If Hamas called a strike and threatened to burn the stores of anyone who stayed open, PLO leaders across the street threatened to burn the stores of anyone who closed.
What the two groups shared, however, was a deep hatred for what they labeled "the Zionist ent.i.ty." Finally, the two organizations agreed that Hamas would have its strike on the ninth of every month, and Fatah-the PLO"s largest faction-would have its strike on the first. Whenever a strike was called, everything stopped. Cla.s.ses, commerce, cars-everything. n.o.body worked, earned, or learned.
The whole West Bank was shut down, with masked men demonstrating, burning tires, writing graffiti on walls, and shutting down businesses. But anyone could put on a ski mask and say they were PLO. No one ever really knew who was under the masks; everybody was simply driven by individual agendas and personal vendettas. Chaos reigned.
And Israel took advantage of the confusion. Since anyone could be an intifada fighter, Israeli security troops put on masks and infiltrated the demonstrations. They could walk into any Palestinian city in the middle of the day and pull off amazing operations dressed as masked feda"iyeen. And since no one could be certain who any particular masked man was, people did what they were told rather than risk a beating, having their business burned, or being called an Israeli collaborator, which often resulted in a hanging.
After a while, the chaos and confusion even reached the point of silliness. Once or twice when an exam was scheduled, my fellow students and I persuaded older kids to come to school wearing masks and say there was a strike. We thought it was fun.
In short, we were becoming our own worst enemies.
Those years were especially hard for our family. My father was still in prison, and the endless succession of strikes kept us kids out of school for nearly a full year. My uncles, religious leaders, and everyone else, it seemed, decided it was their job to discipline me. Because I was the firstborn son of Sheikh Ha.s.san Yousef, they held me to very high standards. And when I didn"t meet their expectations, they beat me. No matter what I did, even if I went to the mosque five times a day, it was never good enough.
Once I was running in the mosque, just playing with a friend, and the imam chased me down. When he caught me, he lifted me over his head and threw me to the floor onto my back. It knocked the breath out of me, and I thought I was going to die. Then he kept punching me and kicking me. Why? I really wasn"t doing anything that any of the other kids weren"t doing. But because I was the son of Ha.s.san Yousef, I was expected to be above that.
I was friends with a boy whose father was a religious leader and big shot in Hamas. This man used to encourage people to throw stones. But while it was okay for other men"s sons to get shot at for pelting settlers with rocks, it was not okay for his only son. When he found out we had been throwing stones, he called us to his place. We thought he wanted to talk to us. But he ripped the cord out of a s.p.a.ce heater and started to whip us with all his might until we bled. He broke up our friendship in order to save his son, though my friend would eventually leave home, hating his father more than the devil.
Apart from trying to keep me in line, no one helped our family while my father was in prison. With his arrest, we lost the extra income he earned teaching at the Christian school. The school promised to hold his job for him until his release, but in the meantime, we did not have enough money to buy what we needed.
My father was the only one in our family with a driver"s license, so we couldn"t use our car. My mother had to walk long distances to go to the market, and I often went along to help her carry the parcels. I think the shame was worse than the want. As we went through the market, I crawled under the carts to pick up broken, rotting produce that had fallen on the ground. My mother negotiated a lower price for these unappetizing vegetables n.o.body else wanted, telling the vendors we were buying them to feed livestock. She still has to negotiate for everything to this day because my father has been in prison thirteen times-more times than any other Hamas leader. (He is in prison as I write this.) I think maybe no one helped us because everybody believed that our family had plenty of money. After all, my father was a prominent religious and political leader. And people undoubtedly trusted that our extended family would help us. Surely Allah would provide. But our uncles ignored us. Allah did nothing. So my mother took care of her seven children alone (our little brother Mohammad had arrived in 1987).
Finally, when things got really desperate, my mom asked a friend of my father"s for a loan-not so she could go shopping and buy clothes and cosmetics for herself, but so she could feed her children at least one meal a day. But he refused her. And instead of helping us, he told his Muslim friends that my mother had come to him begging for money.
"She has a salary from the Jordanian government," they said, judging her. "Why is she asking for more? Is this woman taking advantage of her husband"s imprisonment to become rich?"
She never asked for help again.
"Mosab," she said to me one day, "what if I make some baklava and other homemade sweets and you go and sell them to the workers in the industrial area?" I said I would be glad to do anything to help our family. So every day after school, I changed my clothes, filled a tray with my mother"s pastries, and went out to sell as many as I could. I was shy at first, but eventually I went boldly to every worker and asked him to buy from me.
One winter day, I left as usual to sell my pastries. But when I got to the area, I found that it was empty. No one had come to work that day because it was so cold. My hands were freezing, and it had started to rain. Holding the plastic-covered tray over my head as an umbrella, I noticed a car containing several people parked on the side of the street. The driver spotted me, opened his window, and leaned out.
"Hey, kid, what have you got?"
"I have some baklava," I said, walking over to the car.
Looking inside, I was shocked to see my uncle Ibrahim. His friends were shocked to see Ibrahim"s nephew all but begging on a cold, rainy day, and I was ashamed to be an embarra.s.sment to my uncle. I didn"t know what to say. They didn"t either.
My uncle bought all the baklava, told me to go home, and said he would see me later. When he arrived at our house, he was furious with my mother. I couldn"t hear what he said to her, but after he left, she was crying. The next day after school, I changed and told my mom I was ready to go back out to sell pastries.
"I don"t want you to sell baklava anymore," she said.
"But I"m getting better every day! I am good at it. Just trust me."
Tears came into her eyes. And I never went out again.
I was angry. I didn"t understand why our neighbors and family wouldn"t help us. And on top of that, they had the nerve to judge us for trying to help ourselves. I wondered if the real reason they would not lend a hand to our family was that they were afraid of getting into trouble themselves if the Israelis thought they were helping terrorists. But we weren"t terrorists. Neither was my father. Sadly, that would change too.
Chapter Six
A Hero"s Return1990.
When my father was finally released, our family was suddenly treated like royalty after being shunned for a year and a half. The hero had returned. No longer the black sheep, I became the heir apparent. My brothers were princes, my sisters princesses, and my mother was the queen. No one dared to judge us anymore.
My father got his job back at the Christian school, in addition to his position at the mosque. Now that he was home, my father tried to help my mom around the house as much as possible. This eased the workload we kids had been carrying. We certainly weren"t rich, but we had enough money to buy decent food and even an occasional prize for the winner of Stars. And we were rich in honor and respect. Best of all, my father was with us. We didn"t need anything else.
Everything quickly returned to normal. Of course, normal normal is a relative term. We still lived under Israeli occupation with daily killing in the streets. Our house was just down the road from a cemetery gorged with b.l.o.o.d.y corpses. Our father had horrifying memories of the Israeli prison where he had been incarcerated for eighteen months as a suspected terrorist. And the occupied territories were degenerating into little more than a lawless jungle. is a relative term. We still lived under Israeli occupation with daily killing in the streets. Our house was just down the road from a cemetery gorged with b.l.o.o.d.y corpses. Our father had horrifying memories of the Israeli prison where he had been incarcerated for eighteen months as a suspected terrorist. And the occupied territories were degenerating into little more than a lawless jungle.
The only law respected by Muslims is Islamic law, defined by fatwas fatwas, or religious rulings on a particular topic. Fatwas are intended to guide Muslims as they apply the Qur"an to daily living, but because there is no central unifying rule maker, different sheikhs often issue different fatwas about the same matter. As a result, everyone is living by a different set of rules, some much more strict than others.
I was playing indoors with my friends one afternoon when we heard screaming outside. Yelling and fighting were nothing new in our world, but when we ran outside, we saw our neighbor, Abu Saleem, waving a big knife around. He was trying to kill his cousin, who was doing his best to avoid the shiny blade as it slashed through the air. The entire neighborhood tried to stop Abu Saleem, but this man was huge. He was a butcher by trade, and I once watched him slaughter a bull in his backyard, which left him covered from head to foot in sticky, steaming blood. I couldn"t help but think about what he had done to that animal as I watched him running after hiscousin.
Yes, I thought to myself, I thought to myself, we are truly living in a jungle. we are truly living in a jungle.
There were no police to call, no one in authority. What could we do but watch? Fortunately, his cousin ran away and did not return.
When my father came home that night, we told him what had happened. My father is only five foot seven and not what you would call athletic. But he went next door and said, "Abu Saleem, what"s going on? I heard there was a fight today." And Abu Saleem went on and on about wanting to kill his cousin.
"You know that we are under occupation," my father said, "and you know that we don"t have time for this foolishness. You"ve got to sit down and apologize to your cousin, and he has to apologize to you. I don"t want any more problems like this."
Like everyone else, Abu Saleem respected my father. He trusted in his wisdom, even in matters such as this. He agreed to work things out with his cousin, and then he joined my father in a meeting with the other men in the neighborhood.
"Here is the situation," my father said quietly. "We don"t have a government here, and things are getting completely out of control. We can"t keep fighting each other, shedding the blood of our own people. We are fighting in the streets, fighting in our homes, fighting in the mosques. Enough is enough. We are going to have to sit down at least once every week and try to solve our problems like men. We don"t have police, and we don"t have room for anybody to kill anybody. We have bigger problems to deal with. I want your unity. Iwant you to help each other. We need to be more like a family."
The men agreed that what my father was proposing made sense. They decided to meet together every Thursday night to discuss local issues and resolve any conflicts they might be having with one another.
As imam of the mosque, it was my father"s job to give people hope and help them resolve their problems. He was also the closest thing they had to a government. He had become just like his father. But now he also spoke with the authority of Hamas-with the authority of a sheikh. A sheikh has more authority than an imam and is more like a general than a priest.
Since my father had come home three months before, I had tried to spend as much time as I could with him. I was now president of the Islamic student movement in our school, and I wanted to know all I could about Islam and the study of the Qur"an. One Thursday evening, I asked if I could join him at the weekly neighborhood meeting. I was nearly a man, I explained, and I wanted to be treated as such.
"No," he said, "you stay here. This is for men. I will tell you later what went on."
I was disappointed, but I understood. None of my friends were allowed to attend the weekly meetings either. At least I would be privy to what happened at the meeting once my father returned home.
So he left for a couple of hours. While my mother prepared a delicious fish dinner, somebody knocked at the back door. I opened the door just wide enough to peek through and saw Captain Shai, the same man who had arrested my father nearly two years earlier.
"Abuk mawjood?"
"No, he"s not here."
"Then open the door."
I didn"t know what else to do, so I opened the door. Captain Shai was polite, just as he had been the first time he came for my father, but I could tell he didn"t believe me. He asked if he could look around, and I knew I didn"t have a choice but to let him. As the soldier began to search our house, moving from room to room, looking in closets and behind doors, I wished that somehow I could keep my father from coming home. We didn"t have a cell phone back then, so I couldn"t warn him. But the more I thought about it, I realized that it wouldn"t have mattered if we had. He would have come home anyway.
"Okay, everybody stay quiet," Captain Shai said to a group of soldiers who had been stationed outside. They all ducked down behind bushes and buildings, waiting for my dad. Feeling helpless, I sat down at the table and listened. After a while, a loud voice shouted, "Stop right there!" Then came the sound of movement and men talking. We knew this couldn"t be good. Would my father have to go back to prison?
Within minutes, he slipped back inside, shaking his head and smiling apologetically at each of us.
"They are taking me back," he said, kissing my mother and then each one of us. "I don"t know how long I will be gone. Be good. Take care of one another."
Then he put on his jacket and left as his fried fish grew cold on his plate.
Once again we were treated like refugees, even by the men in the neighborhood he had tried to protect from themselves and others. Some people would ask about my father with feigned concern, but it was clear to me they really didn"t care.
Although we knew my father was being held in an Israeli prison, no one would tell us which one. We spent three months looking for him in every prison, until we finally heard that he was being held in a special facility where they interrogate only the most dangerous people. Why? Why? I wondered. Hamas had made no terrorist attacks. It wasn"t even armed. I wondered. Hamas had made no terrorist attacks. It wasn"t even armed.
Once we found out where my father was being held, the Israeli officials allowed us to visit him once a month for thirty minutes. Only two visitors could go in at once, so we took turns going with our mother. The first time I saw him, I was surprised to see that he had let his beard grow long, and he looked exhausted. But it was so good to see him, even like that. He never complained. He only wanted to know how everything was for us, asking us to tell him all the little details of our lives.