HAMASturbators
Recently I’ve been reading Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef the oldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the founders of Hamas. Yousef is a Christian convert who worked for years for the Israeli Shin Bet, feeding them information about planned terrorist attacks and so preventing countless deaths. However, the fact that he wound up alienated from Hamas does not stop him from seeing the faults of Israel or understanding the suffering of his fellow Palestinians, who he clearly loves, even if most of them have disowned him. In short, Mosab is a brave and independently minded individual who risked his life to do good — not that this stopped some witless fucks in the administration from trying to deport him to certain death a few months back (fortunately some vestigial lizard intelligence prevailed).
Anyway, the book is fascinating on many levels and you should all read it. But I’d like to focus here on one short chapter set in a more or less Hamas-run prison. Don’t misread that: Mosab was not jailed by Hamas but rather by Israel for procuring weapons. But within the jails, the Israelis permit the members of the various Palestinian factions to police themselves. As the son of a Hamas leader, Mosab naturally wound up among Koran-thumping, Jew-hating theocrats, and quickly discovered that Hamas treated their own people worse than the Israelis did, torturing anybody suspected of collaboration like so:
“They usually put needles under his fingernails and melt plastic food trays onto his skin. Or they burn off his body hair. Sometimes they put a big stick behind his knees, force him to sit on his ankles for hours, and don’t let him sleep.”
Due to Israel’s success at uncovering Hamas members, the men in prison assumed that their organization was ‘riddled with spies’. Paranoia was all pervasive and torture rife. What Mosab noticed however was that those tortured for “collaboration” were rarely guilty of anything but rather were too weak to defend themselves — or without a family to seek revenge on their behalf. Internal Hamas security was thus largely inspired by fantasy and sadism — and something else, as Mosab notices when he is given the job of writing up the confessions:
Written on the thinnest paper available, the files read like the worst kind of pornography. Guys confessed to having had sex with their mothers. One said he had had sex with a cow. Another had had sex with his daughter. Yet another had had sex with his neighbor, filmed it with a spy camera, and given the photographs to the Israelis. The Israelis, the report said, showed the pictures to the neighbor, and threatened to send them to her family if she refused to work with their spy. So they kept having sex together and collecting information and having sex with others and filming it, until the entire village seemed to be working for the Israelis. And this was just the first file I was asked to copy.
Mosab quickly realizes that the confessions are totally absurd — the result of men in extreme pain giving their torturers what they want to hear in the hope that the suffering will stop. However, he has a further insight:
I also suspected that some of these bizarre interrogations served no purpose other than to feed the sexual fantasies of the imprisoned maj’d (the Hamas security wing).
Reading this I immediately thought of a pathetic scene in the preceding chapter. Mosab is watching TV when suddenly a wooden board attached to a rope drops from the ceiling to obscure the screen.
At the side of the room, a prisoner held tightly to the end of the rope. His job, apparently, was to watch for anything impure and drop the screen in front of the TV to protect us.
‘Why did you drop the board?’ I asked.
‘Your own protection’ the man said gruffly.
‘Protection? From what?’
‘The girl in the commercial,’ explained the board banger. She was not wearing a head scarf.’
Later Mosab reveals that some of the moral guardians were so zealous they would drop the board if even a cartoon character appeared without a scarf, as if the mere sight of Daphne from Scooby Doo could induce major wood in a Hamas man thus condemning his soul to an eternity in hell. In fact, there was a still greater fear lying behind this clumsy method of censorship as one of the emirs explains to Mosab:
‘Being in prison presents unusual challenges’ he explained. ‘We don’t have women. And things they show on television can cause problems for prisoners and lead to relationships between them that we don’t want.’
Mosab’s point in telling both stories is to reveal the fanaticism, irrationalism and cruelty that turned him away from Hamas. And yet for me, it was the space between these two stories that proved revealing, startling even. I found myself developing, if not sympathy, at least an understanding for the board wielding fanatic and even the sadistic torturers, sweating over their victims, squeezing their own fetid fantasies out from between their lips.
They were trapped inside not one prison but two. The first was external and physical, and it was possible, even likely that most of them would be released. The second however was the inner prison of a repressive moral code, and it was much harder to leave that one behind as it conditioned how they viewed their own selves and others. Place one prison within another and it produced an unbearable tension that resulted in the savage cruelty and bizarre porn Mosab transcribed for the files. Far more humane to let them whack off over the Teen Angels or explore the love that dare not speak its name.
But all that aside — do you think that after a sadist tortures his brother man into confessing his own secret yearnings for orgies, or sex with farm animals, he is able to stroll away and forget about it? I doubt it very much. Desire will continue to throb until it has been beaten into sticky submission. And guilt, and shame and fear of damnation will follow. And on top of that, the prison walls still stand. And God is distant, and an end to this suffering is far, far away. Such is the private loneliness, grief and anguish of the devout but sinful Hamasturbator.
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I am in no way sympathetic to Hamas … but I did ponder for a moment your suggestion that these men were trapped in two prisons and wondered if they might not be trapped in third or even a fourth prison.
The third prison is Palestine beyond the penitentiary walls, the one over which the Israeli government (and the IDF) has had significant power and control. Violence does beget violence but in my experience, it gets passed down the line: the strong beat the weak; in response the weak, knowing they cannot return violence to the strong, turn and beat the vulnerable. You know the kind of thing – policeman beat and humiliate a man; the man goes home and beats his wife, children, dog etc.
But then there could be a fourth prison – and that’s the one in which a significant part of the Arabo-Muslim world seem to need Palestinians to sweat and suffer in the most wretched conditions for their own ends – for political manoeuvring with the US; to indulge their own sense of belonging to victimised people; to fan the flames of their hated for Israel and Judaism.
Anyway, I’ll definitely be checking out Mosab
Prisons within prisons within prisons within prisons: its like something out of Borges or Kafka with a dash of MC Escher, only with added beatings, torture, rape, religious fanaticism and jizzum.
Great review, Daniel.
Thanks, Calvin.