Blow the House Down (16 page)

CHAPTER 22

Tel Aviv, Israel

A
S 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 eye, tooth for tooth, a message to any would-be suicide bombers: You spend eternity in a celestial garden, but your family pays the price in the here and now. Long ago the Israelis had figured out that the Palestinians' Achilles' heel is the family. Palestinians—all Arabs, really—are bonded to their families in ways we can't begin to understand in the West. Find some way to tap into those bonds, and you knock the wind out of the resistance. Or so the Israelis were counting on.

Nabil's father, Muhammad, was standing out in front of his house when we pulled up. With his sad eyes and in his dirty dishdash and frayed silk cap, he looked tired, defeated maybe, another victim of a war that seemed to have no winners.

I told Nabil's father I was a German journalist doing a profile on his son.

The father shook my hand and motioned me to a cement bench running along the side of the house. He pulled up an old rickety table as his wife brought us two cups of tea that were more sugar than tea and a plate of cookies. She went back inside to leave us alone to talk.

“Nabil was a good boy,” the father said. “A good student, a good son.”

It sounded practiced and probably was. Nabil was a hero in the Arab world. Hundreds of journalists came to Rafat to interview his father.

“A brilliant electrical engineer, I heard,” I said, encouraging him to talk.

One of the first things they taught us about interrogation at the Farm is to enter the logic of whoever you're talking with. If you're interrogating Icarus, don't confront him on how smart it was to jump off a cliff with wings made of feathers, wax, and linen, and fly into the sun. Instead, ask him about the various qualities of wax, the best feathers, the weight of the linen. You always want to make someone feel you're on his side.

The father motioned me to get up and follow him inside. There was a small bookcase filled with college textbooks. I pulled one out. Neatly written on the flyleaf was
Nabil Muhammad Shahadah
and a year,
1994.
I pulled out a loose piece of paper; it was a drawing for the firing mechanism of a rocket-propelled grenade.

I looked around the room; there was no memento from Nabil's time with bin Laden. I remembered that after Afghanistan—he'd been there less than six months—Nabil returned to Rafat, finished high school, and went to Birzeit University. Three years later, he had his degree in electrical engineering. He had joined Hamas at some point when he was at the university, but the Israelis first found out about him, or rather his handiwork, when they were hit by a series of roadside bombs set off by remote-control detonators—detonators designed and built by Nabil.

“Nabil always held a suit so well,” the father said, pointing to a picture of his son hanging over the sofa. “He was a handsome boy. He has so many of them.” He motioned me to follow him again, this time upstairs.

In a back bedroom the father opened a closet door to reveal a rack of suits. He shook the hangers gently, dusted the shoulders of the suits with a cloth from his pocket.

Back outside, I told the father I intended to find Nabil and interview him.

“I haven't talked to him in two years,” he said.

“But you know how to get in touch with him, don't you?”

“No.”

The father was probably lying, but I couldn't blame him. He was just being cautious. Nabil had a friend in Hamas who talked with his own father by phone nearly every day. Israeli intelligence didn't know where the son was hiding, but they did know which part of Gaza he'd gone to ground in. So they arranged to have phone service cut off for that area, then convinced an informant to carry an explosive-trapped cell phone to the son. The phone rang, the informant answered, and he handed it to the son, telling him it was his father. The son couldn't resist: “Daddy, is that you?” Instantly, the Israelis detonated the phone over the signal, peeling half the son's head away.

“Maybe I could find him through a friend,” I offered. “One of them must know where he is.”

The father looked at me as if I were some sort of improbable daydreamer.

“They're all dead or in jail,” he said.

“Surely there must be one.”

“No.”

“Wasn't there a boy from Salfit that Nabil almost got arrested with?” I said. I'd read about him in an intelligence report. “They were friends.”

“Hassan Saleh? He's in Bir Shiva. He'll never get out. And you'll never be allowed to see him.”

He was right about not getting out. Saleh was serving a life sentence for organizing a pair of suicide bombings in Jerusalem and one in Haifa. Bir Shiva prison was where Israel housed its “national security” prisoners, the Hamas and Islamic suicide bombing networks.

“Let me try,” I said. “If I see Nabil, can I give him a note from you?”

The father looked at me for a moment and then called his wife. They went off in the corner of the garden and had an animated conversation, then came back and sat down. The father asked me for a piece of paper and wrote a one-page letter to Nabil. He handed it to his wife so she could read it. She folded it up and gave it to me. They must have decided writing a note to their son wasn't going to make it any easier for the Israelis to find him.

Before I left I pulled out a disposable camera I'd bought at Larnaca Airport and took a picture of them for their son. It was the first time they smiled since I'd arrived.

CHAPTER 23

Bir Shiva, Israel

A
 
BLAST OF WIND
roared off the Negev desert just as I exited the taxi in front of Bir Shiva prison. Plastic trash bags were plastered against the outer chain-link fence and the rolls of razor wire that topped it. The sun was almost blocked out by the swirling sand. A hundred feet south of the prison I could just make out a Bedouin encampment, camels and all.

The guard in the booth at the outer perimeter was on the phone talking. I pounded on the door to get his attention, waving a letter from the Israeli Prison System. He slid open the window, took it, and called someone on his walkie-talkie.

“Wait,” he told me, pointing to an open shed covered by a tin roof.

Peri, my retired Shin Bet friend who had arranged the letter for me, advised me not to bother going to see Hassan Saleh. An unrepentant mass murderer, he wasn't going to tell me anything useful.

“I can make him sit down with you, but that's all,” Peri said.

I didn't really have any other choice. It was the only name Nabil's father gave me. The rest of Nabil's group was either dead or, like Nabil, on the run.

“He'll never say a word,” Peri insisted. “Don't waste your time.”

Peri didn't need to say it, but I knew he was also nervous about being the one who was getting me into Wing Six. Leftist journalists, especially the Scandinavians, were known for passing messages from inmates to the outside. If the prison officials suspected that's what I was doing, I'd wind up in a cell myself.

 

I shared the waiting shed with a Palestinian family who looked as if they'd been there for days. At noon, when the sandstorm finally seemed to pass, the old lady opened a satchel of partially burnt wood and charcoal and prepared tea. She saw me watching and prepared a cup for me. By the time the tea was ready, the wind had picked up again.

We huddled together in the shed, barely able to hear one another over the wind. The woman told me she was there to visit her son, who was doing three years for theft. When I told her I was waiting to see someone in Wing Six, I'm sure she thought I was lying or crazy. No visitor ever got to see the prisoners in Wing Six, including parents. Prisoners weren't allowed to make or receive phone calls, either.

More than an hour later the Israeli guard walked over to the shed and crooked a finger my way: “Mr. Arends, you can go in.”

At the main guardhouse they took everything: cell phone, keys, belts, even my Bic pen, giving me one of theirs for the interview. The guard let me take in my yellow eighty-by-eleven pad after he fanned it to make sure nothing was in it. Fortunately, I had the photo of Muhammad Shahadah and his wife and their letter to Nabil in my pocket.

The guard waved me into an air lock. After the door closed behind me, the one in front clicked open and a voice came over the loudspeaker in German telling me to come through. On the other side, I walked through a metal detector and then an organic strip searcher, which detects explosives secreted on the body.

I felt as if I was about to enter the
Death Star
and come face-to-face with Darth Vader. Instead, a striking, petite woman in a sky-blue prison-guard uniform met me on the other side. She looked Moroccan. We walked side by side, not saying a word, until we came to a two-story blue pastel building surrounded by rolls of razor wire and an electrified fence. Wing Six.

The woman and I waited silently in Wing Six's air lock for another five minutes while they locked down the prisoners. A guard then led me out into the prison exercise yard while my escort stayed behind. A thick metal screen and razor wire covered the yard. No Hollywood helicopter rescues from this place.

A minute later Hassan Saleh appeared, shackles on his legs, cuffed from behind. The guards pushed him through into the exercise area, then waited while Hassan turned his back so his shackles could be removed through two holes in the bottom of the door. Freed for the moment, he walked over and sat down in the chair next to mine. He didn't offer his hand or say a word.

Saleh was a small man with small hands. His prison uniform hung on him loosely. His green eyes, the color of antifreeze, were fixed on mine. Both of his hands were badly burned, no doubt from chemicals.

I started by telling him I was doing a profile on him for
Der Spiegel,
the German weekly. I could have told him I was writing an article on floor waxes for
Good Housekeeping
for all the reaction I got. I hadn't expected this guy to be a complete mute. My experience had been that prisoners locked down for three years welcomed conversation with a stranger, even with a journalist. Not this one.

I threw out a couple banal questions, like were the prisoners treated well, was the food okay, did the guards speak Arabic. The more I willed him to respond, the harder Saleh studied the mesh wire above us. Finally, I pulled out the picture of Nabil's father and mother and nudged Saleh with my foot. “Look at this.”

Nabil's father had told me he'd known Saleh from when he was a child. Saleh had played with Nabil in Nabil's parents' living room. When Saleh was arrested, Nabil's father had gone to Saleh's parents' house to offer his sympathy.

Saleh took the picture from me and stared at it. He then looked back up at me.

“Your brother graduated from high school two weeks ago,” I said, another piece of information I'd gotten from Nabil's father. He told me Saleh and his brother were very close. “He's doing fine. He'll be at the university this year.”

Saleh now blinked. “What do you want?” he said, speaking for the first time.

“Let me ask you what you want. Would you like me to call your brother and tell him you're okay?”

“You know what they do here? They steal your time. But we do just the same. We read. We recite the Koran. We strengthen our faith. We steal our time back. I'm not just okay, I'm at peace.”

I noticed the guard was pacing impatiently back and forth on the other side of the mesh wire watching us, no doubt surprised I'd gotten Saleh to talk.

“Do you want me to call your brother or not?”

Saleh didn't answer.

“I already have his phone number.”

Saleh looked over at the guard, leaned closer to me, and whispered in my ear. “Okay. In two days it's his birthday. Wish him happy birthday.”

“I will. Now a question you won't like. How do I find Nabil Shahadah?”

Saleh stood up abruptly and motioned to the guard that he wanted to go back to his cell.

As the guard started to unbolt the metal door to the exercise yard, I held the picture of Nabil's parents up to his face.

“I saw them yesterday,” I said. “They haven't talked to Nabil in three years. Are you telling me you don't care whether Nabil gets the picture or not?”

“I don't know who Nabil Shahadah is.”

I pulled out the letter Nabil's parents had written from my pocket and handed it to Saleh.

As Saleh read it, he shifted from foot to foot, no longer calm. The guard was now in the exercise yard walking toward us.

“Let me write my parents' telephone number,” he said, grabbing my eighty-by-eleven pad. He quickly wrote something and then handed the pad back.

The guard led him away as I read what he'd written:
Gaza. Beach Camp. Port Video.