16

Hussam Mashrawi was not poor.

He was not uneducated. Neither was he an orphan or someone who had been physically, emotionally, or sexually abused as a child or in his teenage years.

To the contrary, he had been born to a large and well-to-do Palestinian family in Nablus, the third-largest city in the West Bank. The baby of the family —the youngest of nine siblings —Mashrawi felt close to every one of his three brothers and five sisters and closer still to the taciturn yet well-meaning parents who worked hard to instill in him and all their children the religious and cultural values they held so dear.

Mashrawi’s mother, veiled and pious, was the eldest daughter of a prominent sheikh from the city of Jenin, whose population of some thirty-four thousand was a mere fraction of that of Nablus. Though she had little formal education, she had memorized the Qur’an by the age of twelve. As a teenager she was highly regarded as one who took her Muslim faith seriously, and as an adult she served as model and mentor to the young women in their community.

Mashrawi’s father was the dominant force in the house. He, too, was devout in his faith and religious duties, having been raised by one of the most respected sheikhs in Nablus. He, too, had memorized the entire Qur’an and for a season in his youth had seriously considered following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and becoming a cleric. He had even applied and been accepted to study at Al-Azhar. However, his dreams had been crushed when he was denied an exit permit by the Israeli government. He had been forced to take a job working for the small construction company started by one of his uncles.

As it turned out, he had a knack for the business, and soon he began helping his uncle chart a path to extraordinary growth. At first they had merely built small homes and shops and gas stations. Before long, however, they were winning contracts to build apartment complexes and hotels and hospitals. More recently, they had been selected to build the new palace for the president of the Palestinian Authority, a contract that brought the company a tremendous financial windfall and widespread respect throughout the P.A.

Hussam Mashrawi was far too young to have experienced the trauma of the 1948 war with the Jews, widely known among the Palestinians as Al Nakba —“the catastrophe.” Nor had he experienced the humiliations of the ’67 war or the one in ’73. He didn’t remember the election of Ronald Reagan in the States or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in ’82. The First Intifada, the violent popular uprising against the Israeli occupation that had erupted in the West Bank in December of 1987 and spread like wildfire to Gaza, had barely made an impact on him. Such events were mere legends for Mashrawi. He’d studied them in school and absorbed the stories from countless dinnertime conversations with his father and his older brothers. But at the time they’d meant little to him.

It was the Second Intifada, which erupted in the fall of 2000, just as he was preparing to complete his undergrad degree, that changed everything. All these years later, he could still remember the acrid stench of the tear gas the Israeli soldiers had fired into his neighborhood. He could still feel his eyes sting and his nose run. He could still hear the rumble of Israeli Merkava battle tanks roaring down the streets of his city and the chain saw–like buzz of machine-gun fire and the chilling snap, snap of Israeli sniper rifles as night fell and the curfews began. Even now he could see the bloody, shredded body of his oldest brother, Ibrahim, after he was shot to death running from an IDF patrol. He had never learned why his brother had been running that night. But for as long as he lived, he would never be able to silence his mother’s bloodcurdling shriek from echoing in his ears.

Mashrawi’s father had moved quickly to send him out of the country —to Cairo, then Al-Azhar. He had no idea how much his father had paid to secure him an exit permit in such tumultuous times. But in his heart, Mashrawi knew his father didn’t simply want his youngest son to get the elite religious education he never got. The man could see his son’s pain turning so rapidly into rage and was desperate to prevent him from joining Hamas or Islamic Jihad or the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade or any one of a number of other extremist groups in order to avenge Ibrahim’s death.

Looking back, Hussam Mashrawi knew that single decision had saved his life. Rather than throw himself into the fight against the Jews, Mashrawi had thrown himself into his studies. The Muslim Brotherhood, the parent of Hamas, had been banned in Egypt during the reign of Hosni Mubarak. University campuses were closely monitored by the secret police. It was difficult, if not impossible, therefore, for Mashrawi to find like-minded conspirators in Cairo who shared his seething anger. The only place he could find solace, it seemed, was in the library. His only source of peace was the writings of the Qur’an and the hadiths, and so it was to these that he turned his full attention.

By the time he returned to Palestine, Mashrawi was no longer the grieving teenager with the volcanic temper. He had instead become a disciplined and highly focused young man. He had learned in the suffocating political environment of Cairo what was acceptable to say and what not to say, whether around the family dinner table or in the mosque or café or with his closest friends hanging out on a street corner. Upon reentering Nablus, he had no desire to draw the attention, much less the wrath, of the IDF or the Shin Bet —Israel’s equivalent of the FBI —or even the Palestinian Authority, whose intelligence services were on high alert for Hamas sympathizers and were determined to prevent Hamas from attracting new recruits.

Hussam Mashrawi, in short, had learned to be circumspect. Yet no one could tell him what to think. Nor could they prevent him from striking when the moment was right. And Mashrawi had come to believe that moment was very near.