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 assumed that he knew everything that went on or was planned. And they were determined to get it out of him.
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 passed 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
SURVIVAL
1989–1990
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 11 p.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 scrapping 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 God. 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 entity.” 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. Classes, commerce, cars—everything. Nobody 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 Hassan 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.
2
The PLO’s first high-profile plane hijacking had occurred on July 23, 1968, when PFLP activists diverted an El Al Boeing 707 to Algiers. About a dozen Israeli passengers and ten crew members were held as hostages. There were no fatalities. But eleven Israeli athletes were killed four years later in a PLO-led terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics. And on March 11, 1978, Fatah fighters landed a boat north of Tel Aviv, hijacked a bus, and began an attack along the Coastal Highway that killed about thirty-five people—and wounded over seventy others.
The organization had had an easy time recruiting from among the Palestinian refugees who made up two-thirds of Jordan’s population. With money flooding in from other Arab countries in support of the cause, the PLO became stronger and better-armed than even the police and the Jordanian army. And it wasn’t long before its leader, Yasser Arafat, was in striking distance of taking over the country and establishing a Palestinian state. King Hussein of Jordan had to act quickly and decisively or lose his country. Years later, I would be amazed to learn through an unforeseeable relationship with the Israeli security service that Jordan’s monarch had entered into a secret alliance with Israel at this time—even as every other Arab country was committed to its destruction. It was the logical thing to do, of course, because King Hussein was unable to protect his throne and Israel was unable to effectively patrol the long border between their two countries. But it would have been political and cultural suicide for the king had this information ever leaked out.
So in 1970, before the PLO could grasp any more control, King Hussein ordered its leaders and fighters out of the country. When they refused, he drove them out—with the aid of weapons provided by Israel—in a military campaign that came to be known among Palestinians as Black September. Time magazine quoted Arafat as telling sympathetic Arab leaders, “A massacre has been committed. Thousands of people are under debris. Bodies have rotted. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless. Our dead are scattered in the streets. Hunger and thirst are killing our remaining children, women and old men” (“The Battle Ends; The War Begins,” Time, October 5, 1970).
King Hussein owed a great debt to Israel, which he would try to repay in 1973 by warning Jerusalem that an Arab coalition led by Egypt and Syria was about to invade. Unfortunately, Israel did not take the warning seriously. The invasion came on Yom Kippur, and an unprepared Israel suffered heavy and unnecessary losses. This secret, too, I would learn one day from the Israelis.
Following Black September, PLO survivors fled to southern Lebanon, which was still reeling from a deadly civil war. Here the organization initiated a new power grab, growing and gaining strength until it virtually became a state within a state. From its new base of operations, the PLO waged a war of attrition against Israel. Beirut was too weak to stop the endless shelling and missile attacks against Israel’s northern communities. And in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, driving out the PLO in a four-month campaign. Arafat and a thousand surviving fighters went into exile in Tunisia. But even from that distance, the PLO continued to launch attacks on Israel and amass an army of fighters in the West Bank and Gaza.