Blow the House Down by Robert Baer

Author:Robert Baer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307347459
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Tel Aviv, Israel

AS THE YOUNG IMMIGRATIONS GIRL at Ben Gurion Airport read my German passport and tapped in the name and birthday, I kept my fingers crossed that, one, she didn’t speak German (mine was seriously flawed); two, she didn’t notice I didn’t look like a Horst Friedrich Arends; and, three, the Germans were as lazy as the Irish and hadn’t sent a notification around that the passport was stolen. In the middle of her tapping she made a call, turned away from me, and whispered into the telephone handset. I figured I’d been spotted and wondered how many years I would get for trying to enter Israel on phony paper. But the call apparently had nothing to do with me, and she waved me through without looking at me a second time.

I didn’t tell the Palestinian taxi driver I wanted to go to the West Bank until we were out of the airport and it was too late for him to tell me to fuck off. June had been an especially bad month for taxis getting stoned and shot up in the West Bank, even ones with Palestinian plates. I didn’t mention the word Rafat, where Nabil was from and where I was going, until we were well past Jerusalem.

The driver knew Rafat was a fire-breathing Hamas stronghold. Several commanders of Hamas’s military wing and a half dozen suicide bombers came from there. The Israeli army entered it only in force and backed up with heavy armor. The driver agreed to keep going only after I handed him $250 and promised to pay him another $250 when we got back to Tel Aviv.

Two hours east of Tel Aviv, we cut off the main highway and bumped down a dirt road. A thirty-minute drive over barren, hardscrabble hills, and we came to Rafat, which sits on top of a windswept ridge. It looks pretty much like every other poor village in that part of the West Bank: unpaved, dusty streets, stone houses, groves of terraced olive trees in ground more rock than dirt.

The driver had to ask three times before we found where Nabil Shahadah’s father lived, and then we found it only by spotting the heap of rubble and grove of ploughed-up olive trees in front of the house just below his. I didn’t need to be told the story. As soon as the Israelis found out Nabil was a new impresario of suicide bombings, army bulldozers showed up and flattened everything that belonged to him. The house, I’d read somewhere, had been built by Nabil’s father in the hope that Nabil would marry one day and come back to Rafat to live. I suppose Nabil’s father was lucky; if Nabil had been living at home, the father’s house would have been bulldozed, too.

Razing houses, displacing families, and generally spreading misery among the brothers and sisters, the fathers and mothers of suicide bombers was Old Testament justice, the way the Israelis looked at it. An eye for an

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