The following day I returned to Jerusalem with Biba, her friend Chen, and her husband and my close friend Orni Petruschka. Orni, a nephew of the novelist A. B. Yehoshua, is a former fighter pilot in the Israeli air force, a graduate of the Technion in Haifa and of Cornell University, a successful high-tech entrepreneur, and my partner with the People’s Voice. It was Orni who facilitated the press interview that gave the inspiration for the making of the Academy Award–nominated documentary from 2012, The Gatekeepers. Directed by Dror Moreh, the film features five other former Shin Bet heads and me candidly discussing our contrarian views about the organization’s, and Israel’s, successes and failures since the Six-Day War.
A Palestinian driver was tasked with meeting us at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem and taking us through the Qalandiya checkpoint to the office of the Palestinian pollster Dr. Khalil Shikaki in downtown Ramallah. Each time I cross into Palestinian territory I need to apply for a permit from the IDF. Sometimes I get one, sometimes I don’t. The security chiefs no doubt worry that I’ll end up in a Hamas dungeon somewhere in a refugee camp, hands and ankles duct-taped together.
The line at the checkpoint was backed up, which gave me the chance to get to know our driver, Ihsan, and to hear his assessment of the political situation in Jerusalem. In flawless Hebrew he told me how little faith he had that life would improve for Palestinians. His kids are studying at German universities. “What kind of future do they have in this country?” he asked. I had no ready reply for him.
Although I met Khalil for the first time at the same meeting in London where I met Sari, I’d studied him and his work since early in my tenure at the Shabak. I had found our spy toolbox — the wiretaps, electronic surveillance, informants, and interrogation rooms — lacking, because no amount of intelligence-gathering can predict a popular and unplanned outbreak like the Intifada. I began to listen to what Palestinian writers, poets, and social scientists were saying about their own people. The opinion polls Khalil and his team carried out at the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research were professional, scientific, and revealing.
I also found Khalil personally fascinating. He and his brother Fathi, a pediatrician, had responded to the Israeli–Arab conflict in radically different ways. In 1948 their parents fled their homes in Zarnuqa, a former village near the city of Rehovot. Khalil studied political science at the American University in Beirut before going on to get his PhD at Columbia University. Fathi, meanwhile, cofounded the terror group Islamic Jihad, with support from Iran. Shortly after Fathi’s group carried out a suicide attack against Israeli soldiers at the Beit Lid Junction in January 1995, his name ended up on our hit list.
Later that year, in October 1995, a couple of months before I took over the Shabak, the Mossad tracked Fathi to Malta. Two hit men, riding a blue Yamaha, shot him in the head after he bought a gift for his wife at Marks & Spencer.
Passing through Qalandiya, I noticed signs of recent rioting: tear-gas canisters, rocks strewn about, and what looked like bullet casings. Graffiti portraits of Yasser Arafat and the imprisoned Palestinian Marwan Barghouti decorated the Separation Wall, which runs through the checkpoint and cuts off the West Bank from Israel.
The border police manning the checkpoint barely looked at us. “Okay,” they said, waving us through. I cracked the window, and the stench of burning garbage flooded the car. A bright-red sign, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, warned us like tourists on a safari that we were “risking our lives” by entering a Palestinian-controlled area.
We drove for another twenty minutes or so before reaching the office building in downtown Ramallah, where Khalil’s office is located on the second floor. After ushering us inside, Khalil apologized for having to meet in such a formal setting. “We have no electricity at home,” he explained. Blackouts and dry water taps are a daily occurrence in the Palestinian West Bank, an archipelago of apartheid-style Bantustans split up and surrounded by territory controlled by Israel. “As soon as power is restored,” he said hopefully and in colloquial American English, we could “move the party” over to his house in the village of Atara, where his wife was preparing a feast.
Stocky and broad shouldered, Khalil has iron-gray hair and a square chin well engineered for absorbing whatever blows come his way. Yet he doesn’t display any of the signs of a man living under an oppressive occupation, neither ours nor the Palestinian Authority’s corrupt dictatorship. After greeting Orni, Chen, and Biba for the first time, he eased himself into a chair and motioned for the three of us to sit as well.
He nodded along as I acknowledged in detail how much his work as a pollster had influenced me during my years in the counterterrorism business. The analysts working for me during my time at the Shabak, professionals who had mastered Arabic well enough to pick up the slang spoken over tapped phone lines, never provided the same level of intelligence as Khalil’s small team of people going door-to-door in refugee camps, equipped with clipboards and questionnaires. Khalil once told me, and I think he was right, that his public opinion polls could have alerted us that the First Intifada was about to erupt — if only my predecessors had been paying attention.
I also wanted to explore what, for me, had been an enduring mystery. Though I had known Khalil for years, we had never discussed the circumstances that led to his brother’s death. Sitting around a long conference table under tubes of fluorescent lights, I asked myself why one brother, Khalil, opted for peaceful means of resisting tyranny, while his brother the pediatrician raised his sword?
I decided to ask Khalil about his upbringing. What was it that formed him as a person, a scholar, a researcher, and a humanist?
In his answer he mentioned how his years studying at the American University of Beirut, before the civil war, had introduced him to an open, free, cosmopolitan culture. Living in New York and studying at Columbia for his PhD — fellow Palestinian Edward Said taught there at the time — completed the journey he had begun in Beirut. He emerged as a scholar committed to using ideas and reason to liberate his country from occupation and feudal backwardness.
I sought to establish a connection by revealing a relevant feature of my own past. During my first days at the Shabak, Hamas had carried out a series of suicide attacks, murdering dozens of Israelis, including the daughter of a friend. I knew my biggest challenge would be to comprehend the source of the hatred and desperation behind such barbaric attacks. But how? It was clear to me that Israel could not defeat terror without understanding the psychology and culture of the terrorists — what produces and fuels hatred and violence? But it was equally obvious to me that it was difficult to get reliable information, and hence to develop an accurate picture of a world I knew nothing about.
“That was the point at which I discovered your polls,” I said.
“And what did they tell you?”
“That Palestinians wanted peace with us, if we’d only lift our boots from your necks.”
“And that was how people felt,” he said, “back when there was a viable political process that people trusted.” When Rabin and Arafat shook hands in the Rose Garden in front of President Clinton, most Palestinians accepted and supported the idea of two states for two peoples.
Orni, the ex–fighter pilot, had been listening keenly without comment. “And what about today?” he now asked.
Khalil leaned back in his chair and raised his eyebrows; for maybe ten seconds he seemed lost in thought. Finally, he cracked a half smile and responded. “Look, people behave according to what they expect. In our last poll we found that most Palestinians no longer support a two-state solution; they want a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. They want to go back to 1948. We also conducted a poll among Israelis. For the first time since I began polling Jewish Israelis seventeen years ago, most Jews no longer have faith that politicians will reach a two-state solution. For once, Jews and Palestinians agree on something.”
Khalil asked his secretary to get us a copy of the report, titled “Israel and the Palestinians: Sliding Toward a One-State Reality,” which had been produced for the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.
“As you’ll read here” — Khalil gestured to the report — “Palestinians no longer think Abbas and his cronies are serving their interests. Ten years ago only a minority considered our leaders to be collaborators with the Israeli occupation; now 60 percent do. The security coordination, in particular, is widely seen to be a joint Israeli–Palestinian plot to prevent our independence.”
There was a hint of melancholy in Khalil’s voice. Biba, noting the change in tone, asked why he believed people had lost hope.
“Back in the 1990s everyone knew how corrupt Arafat’s regime was. Corruption wasn’t just a by-product of Arafat’s incompetence; he used corruption as a means of building loyalty. Every vegetable monger in the souk knew this. I got a glimpse into the slime because the Council on Foreign Relations asked me to write a report that assessed the strength of Palestinian public institutions. Let me tell you, it was a horror show. Point is, despite all the corruption, most people trusted Arafat because he never took a dollar for himself.”
“And today?” Biba asked.
“Today? Just look around Ramallah at how many shiny black Mercedes there are belonging to government insiders. I’ll tell you a story. Not long ago our government arrested some Hamas activists for holding illegal arms, then released them due to family pressure. The minute they got out of jail, Israel killed them. You can guess what the rumor mill did with this.”
“They must have said your security forces lined them up against a wall, and let us be the firing squad,” I said.
“That’s right. It gets even worse. In a move straight out of Kafka, our government is still pressing charges against the men in the courts, though they are dead. Just this past Monday there was a big antigovernment demonstration in Ramallah because of this.”
Khalil grabbed for a shot glass of strong Arabic coffee and stirred in a packet of sugar. “The polls we do are political — we want to wake up our leaders,” he said. “I know them all personally. How do you think Abbas got his job? It was because the Europeans, shocked at my corruption report, put Arafat under fire to hire a competent prime minister. These days I tell Abbas and his men: ‘To keep people’s support, you have to show more backbone. Stand up to settlers, blockade the settlements, and without using violence stand up to Israeli colonization.’ ” Khalil tossed back the coffee and smacked his lips. “And they also have to do something about our crooks.”
Per Oslo, Area C, which is most of the West Bank, is under full Israeli control, and the Palestinian police can’t so much as hand out a traffic ticket. And since Israeli cops don’t venture into those areas, much of Area C has become a paradise for organized crime.
“How does our government respond?” said Khalil. “With words and slogans, and maybe Abbas makes another speech in front of the UN. You ask me why people are giving up on the two-state solution, well, now you know. They’d rather have a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River because at least for its citizens, Israel has the rule of law.”
“Which means the end of Israel as a Jewish state,” I said.
Khalil poured himself another cup of coffee. “Ami, my dear friend,” he said, “most Palestinians don’t even think that far ahead. They just want out from under the boots of the IDF.”
Khalil’s wife phoned to tell him that the electricity was back on in Atara and lunch would soon be ready. Our driver followed Khalil north out of Ramallah into the hill country made famous by Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks. The crimes against these ancient hills, which as Shehadeh says in 1967 would have been recognizable to Jesus Christ and Rabbi Hillel two thousand years ago, are many: settlements, Israeli bypass roads, IDF bases, and a sprawl of unregulated Palestinian construction have laid waste to the landscape.
Atara is situated on the spine of a high mountain ridge half a mile above the sweltering coastal plain, and I felt the first cool breeze in a month. The village, like so many in our part of the world, sits on strata upon strata of history from the Iron Age through the kingdom of Judea, the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Mamluks. The nineteenth-century American explorer and biblical scholar Edward Robinson associated the village with the Ataroth from the Book of Joshua. Local Muslims pray at a shrine to a Sufi dervish. Christians in the area flock to a pile of rocks dedicated to Saint Catherine, a fourth-century martyr killed by a Roman emperor.
The bones of saints didn’t lure Khalil and his wife into buying their plot of land, with its hilltop view of the distant Mediterranean. They came here, Khalil explained, because of his wife. Her family arrived from Bosnia a hundred years ago, established a village on the port of Caesarea, only to end up as refugees in the West Bank city of Tulkarem. Stories her parents told her of the gentle waves of the sea, invisible from their shantytown, turned her into as fanatical a lover of water as I am. When she and Khalil got married, she insisted that they build a house on a hill so high they could see the coast.
From the top balcony of their home, Khalil and his wife, wearing a silk hijab and fitted jeans, pointed to the hazy western sky and assured us that on a clear day they could see the beachside Israeli luxury hotels. After our tour of the house we sat down to lunch served Palestinian-style: a main course of chicken and rice accompanied by multiple salads, hummus, falafel, stuffed zucchini, and peppers. I again put off asking Khalil about his assassinated brother — it didn’t seem like a suitable lunchtime topic — but I silently marveled at the fact that this friend heaping food onto my plate had grown up with a boy who in March 1996 dispatched a suicide bomber that killed the daughter of a friend of mine.