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 now 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 til we were out of the airport and it was too late for him to tell me to ck off. June had been an especially bad month for taxis getting stoned nd 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 Sha-hadah'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 I vve 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 I 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 carus, 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
I University. Three years later, he had his degree in electrical engineering. He ad joined Hamas at some point when he was at the university, but the 'raelis first found out about him, or rather his handiwork, when they were it by a series of roadside bombs set off by remote-control detonators- etonators 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. Bit 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.