my own.
But as I prepared the meal with him, knowing that these were the last hours we would have together for a long time, my heart broke. I decided not to let him go through the arrest alone.
After dinner, I called Loai.
“All right,” I told him. “I will go back to prison.”
It was September 25, 2005. I hiked to my favorite spot in the hills outside Ramallah where I often went to spend time praying and reading my Bible. I prayed more, wept more, and asked the Lord for his mercy on me and my family. When I got home, I sat down and waited. My father, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen, had already gone to bed. A little after midnight, the security forces arrived.
They took us to Ofer Prison, where we were herded into a big hall with hundreds of others who had been picked up in a citywide sweep. This time, they also arrested my brothers Oways and Mohammad. Loai told me secretly that they were suspects in a murder case. One of their schoolmates had kidnapped, tortured, and killed an Israeli settler, and the Shin Bet had intercepted a call the killer made to Oways the day before. Mohammad would be released a few days later. Oways would serve four months in prison before being cleared of any involvement in the crime.
We sat on our knees in that hall for ten hours with our hands cuffed behind us. I thanked God silently when someone gave my father a chair, and I saw that he was being treated with respect.
I was sentenced to three months in administrative detention. My Christian friends sent me a Bible, and I served my sentence, studying Scripture and going through the motions. I was released on Christmas Day 2005. My father was not. As I write this, he is still in prison.
Parliamentary elections were coming up, and every Hamas leader wanted to run for office. They still disgusted me. They all walked around free, while the only man who was actually qualified to lead his people languished behind razor wire. After all that had led up to our arrests, it didn’t take much to convince my father not to participate in the elections. He got word to me, asking me to release his decision to Mohammad Daraghmeh, a political analyst with the Associated Press and a good friend.
The news report broke a couple of hours later, and my phone started ringing. The Hamas leaders had tried to contact my father in prison, but he refused to talk to them.
“What’s going on?” they asked me. “This is a disaster! We will lose because if your father doesn’t run it will appear that he has withdrawn his blessing from the whole election!”
“If he doesn’t want to participate,” I told them, “you have to respect that.”
Then came a call from Ismail Haniyeh, who headed the Hamas ticket and would soon become the new PA prime minister.
“Mosab, as a leader of the movement, I am asking you to schedule a press conference and announce that your father is still on the Hamas ticket. Tell them that the AP story was a mistake.”
On top of everything else, now they wanted me to lie for them. Did they forget that Islam forbids lying, or did they think it was okay because politics has no religion?
“I can’t do that,” I told him. “I respect you, but I respect my father and my own integrity more.” And I hung up.
Thirty minutes later, I received a death threat. “Call the news conference immediately,” the caller said, “or we will kill you.”
“Come and kill me then.”
I hung up and called Loai. Within hours, the guy who made the threat was arrested.
I really didn’t care about death threats. But when my father found out, he called Daraghmeh personally and told him he would participate in the election. Then he told me to calm down and wait for his release. He would deal with Hamas, he assured me.
Naturally, my father could not campaign from prison. But he didn’t need to. Hamas put his picture everywhere, tacitly encouraging everyone to vote the organization ticket. And on the eve of the election, Sheikh Hassan Yousef was swept into parliament, carrying everyone else along like so many burrs in a lion’s mane.
I sold my share of Electric Computer Systems to my partner because I had a feeling that a lot of things in my life would soon be coming to a close.
Who was I? What kind of future could I hope for if things kept on this way?
I was twenty-seven years old, and I couldn’t even date. A Christian girl would be afraid of my reputation as the son of a top Hamas leader. A Muslim girl would have no use for an Arab Christian. And what Jewish girl would want to date the son of Hassan Yousef? Even if someone would go out with me, what would we talk about? What was I free to share about my life? And what kind of life was it anyway? What had I sacrificed everything for? For Palestine? For Israel? For peace?
What did I have to show for being the Shin Bet’s superspook? Were my people better off? Had the bloodshed stopped? Was my father home with his family? Was Israel safer? Had I modeled a higher path for my brothers and sisters? I felt that I had sacrificed nearly a third of my life for nothing, a “chasing after the wind,” as King Solomon describes it in Ecclesiastes 4:16.
I couldn’t even share all I had learned while wearing my different hats—and hoods. Who would believe me?
I called Loai at his office. “I cannot work for you anymore.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Nothing. I love you all. And I love intelligence work. I think I may even be addicted to the job. But we are not accomplishing anything. We’re fighting a war that can’t be won with arrests, interrogations, and assassinations. Our enemies are ideas, and ideas don’t care about incursions and curfews. We can’t blow up an idea with a Merkava. You are not our problem, and we are not yours. We’re all like rats trapped in a maze. I can’t do it anymore. My time is over.”
I knew this was a hard blow to the Shin Bet. We were in the middle of a war.
“Okay,” Loai said, “I will inform the agency leadership and see what they say.”
When we met again, he said, “Here is the offer from the leadership. Israel has a big communications company. We will give you all the money you need to start one just like it in the Palestinian territories. It’s a great opportunity and will make you secure for the rest of your life.”
“You don’t understand. My problem is not money. My problem is that I’m going nowhere.”
“People here need you, Mosab.”
“I’ll find a different way to help them, but I’m not helping them like this. Even the agency can’t see where it’s going.”
“So what do you want?”
“I want to leave the country.”
He shared our conversation with his superiors. Back and forth we went, the leadership insisting that I stay as I insisted that I had to leave.
“Okay,” they said. “We’ll let you go to Europe for several months, maybe a year, as long as you promise to come back.”
“I am not going to Europe. I want to go to the United States. I have friends there. Maybe I’ll come back in a year or two or five. I don’t know. Right now, I only know that I need a break.”
“The United States will be difficult. Here, you have money, position, and protection from everybody. You’ve developed a solid reputation, built a nice business, and live very comfortably. Do you know what your life will look like in the United States? You will be very small and have no influence.”
I told them I didn’t care if I had to wash dishes. And when I continued to insist, they planted their feet.
“No,” they said. “No United States. Only Europe and only for a short time. Go and enjoy yourself. We’ll keep paying your salary. Just go and have fun. Take your break. Then come back.”
“Okay,” I said finally, “I’m going home. I’m not doing anything for you anymore. I’m not going to leave the house because I don’t want to accidentally discover a suicide bomber and have to report it. Don’t bother calling me. I don’t work for you anymore.”
I went to my parents’ house and turned off my cell phone. My beard grew long and thick. My mother was very worried about me, often coming into the room to check on me and ask if I was okay. Day after day, I read my Bible,
