Son of Hamas by Yousef Mosab Hassan & Brackin Ron

Author:Yousef, Mosab Hassan & Brackin, Ron [Brackin, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Terrorism, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781414364025
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2010-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

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Throughout the first years of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, I accompanied my father everywhere he went. As his eldest son, I was his protégé, his bodyguard, his confidant, his student, and his friend. And he was my everything—my example of what it meant to be a man. Though our ideologies were clearly no longer the same, I knew that his heart was right and his motives were pure. His love for Muslim people and his devotion to Allah never waned. He ached for peace among his people, and he had spent his entire life working toward that goal.

This second uprising was mostly a West Bank event. Gaza had a few demonstrations, and the death of the young Mohammed al-Dura had touched the flame to the tinder. But it was Hamas that fanned that fire into an inferno in the West Bank.

In every village, town, and city, angry crowds clashed with Israeli soldiers. Every checkpoint became a bloody battlefield. You could scarcely find an individual who had not buried dear friends or family members in recent days.

Meanwhile, the leaders of all the Palestinian factions—top-level, high-profile men—met daily with Yasser Arafat to coordinate their strategies. My father represented Hamas, which had again become the largest and most important organization. He, Marwan Barghouti, and Arafat also met weekly, apart from the others. On several occasions, I was able to accompany my father to those private meetings.

I despised Arafat and what he was doing to the people I loved. But given my role as a mole for the Shin Bet, it clearly wasn’t prudent for me to show my feelings. Still, on one occasion, after Arafat kissed me, I instinctively wiped my cheek. He noticed and was clearly humiliated. My father was embarrassed. And that was the last time my father took me along.

The intifada leaders invariably arrived for those daily meetings in their seventy-thousand-dollar foreign cars, accompanied by other cars filled with bodyguards. But my father always drove in his dark blue 1987 Audi. No bodyguard, just me.

These meetings were the engine that made the intifada run. Although I now had to sit outside the meeting room, I still knew every detail that went on inside because my father took notes. I had access to those notes and made copies. There was never any supersensitive information in the notes—like the who, where, and when of a military operation. Rather, the leaders always spoke in general terms that revealed patterns and direction, such as focusing an attack inside Israel or targeting settlers or checkpoints.

The meeting notes did, however, include dates for demonstrations. If my father said Hamas would have a demonstration tomorrow at one o’clock in the center of Ramallah, runners would quickly be sent to the mosques, refugee camps, and schools to inform all the Hamas members to be there at one o’clock. Israeli soldiers showed up too. As a result, Muslims, refugees, and, all too often, schoolchildren were killed.

The fact is, Hamas had been all but dead before the Second Intifada. My father should have left it alone.

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