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Spy: Arafat Plotted the Second Intifada

(Wall Street Journal) Matthew Kaminski - Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in the West Bank, and the author of Son of Hamas. Throughout the last decade, he was one of the top spies for Israel's internal security arm. "There is a logical explanation," he says. "Simply my enemies of yesterday became my friends. And the friends of yesterday became really my enemies." In 1996 while at the Megiddo prison in northern Israel, "every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people!" A few months before the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000, at Camp David PLO chief Yasser Arafat had turned down the Israeli offer of statehood on 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital. According to Yousef, Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention. So he sought out Hamas' support through Sheikh Yousef, writes his son. Those meetings took place before the Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the second Intifada. It came when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Yousef's account helps to set straight the historical record that the uprising was premeditated by Arafat. Yousef claims that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group born during the second Intifada, was made up of Arafat's guards, who were directly funded by international donors.
2010-03-12 09:27:28
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