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 with 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.
6
Further confirmation of this connection would come the following year when Israel invaded Ramallah and raided Arafat’s headquarters. Among other documents, they would discover an invoice, dated September 16, 2001, from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to Brigadier General Fouad Shoubaki, the PA’s CFO for military operations. It requested reimbursement for explosives used in bombings in Israeli cities and asked for money to build more bombs and to cover the cost of propaganda posters promoting suicide bombers. Yael Shahar, “Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades—A Political Tool with an Edge,” April 3, 2002, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, IDC Herzliya.