Decades later, Massad struggles to explain the impulse that stopped him from snagging that easy target. A soldier was considered the enemy. But a young woman? Massad says there was a certain moral code that he just couldn’t cross. And, he notes thankfully, in all his years as an activist in the terror infrastructure, he never killed anyone — soldier or civilian.

Maybe there was another reason as well, a memory buried in his conscience. “When I was around six years old,” he says, “the army installed a checkpoint at the entrance to the village, right across from our house. There was a female soldier there who would give me a treat every day — a slice of bread with chocolate spread, and sometimes also candy. She’d even come to our yard, drink coffee, and chat with my mother. When I saw the hitchhiker, I had a flashback to the young soldier who gave me treats.”

In retrospect, it was one of a few similarly humanitarian impulses that would eventually set the young terrorist on a radically different path: to collaboration with the Shin Bet, and ultimately, a rejection of Palestinian authority altogether.

Massad was a cell commander in the Fatah Black Panthers and eventually spent two years in an Israeli prison. But that was decades ago. Today, he’s an Israeli citizen, lives in Haifa, and is working toward his dream of bringing a level of democracy and self-determination to the Arab sector, which has always been — and still is — manipulated by its leadership.

“From the time I was little, we would sing songs with words like, ‘My soul will be happy when I spill Jewish blood,’ ” Massad says. “Our schools and our mosques sent us off to wipe out the Jews.”

As much as he feels betrayed by the narrative he grew up with, Massad has not rejected his Palestinian roots or his larger community. He’s a proud Arab, but says he discovered early on in his terror career that the corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Authority and its predecessor, the PLO, were “doing business with the blood of my people. Who is preventing us from living side by side in peace? It’s our own corrupt, bloodthirsty leadership. They get terrorists to gather their entire family together, the brothers, the in-laws, the children, bring them all together in one building and then they go on the roof and shoot, using their own families as their shields. The PA and Hamas have destroyed our people, having forced us into a pattern of terror and suppressing any voices of real peace.”

Kaffiyeh-clad, heavily Arab-accented Massad says the Simchas Torah massacre didn’t surprise him at all. “I knew it would happen, and I even prepared for it, because I hear things in Arabic, and what they were saying was being aired everywhere. Today Israelis are in shock because of the recent news revelations of how Hamas had been planning the massacre for the last seven years at least, yet they made it very clear that Israel would be destroyed, and I believed them. I used to be on the inside. I know what they’re capable of. G-d forbid that the Palestinians should have any control over Gaza after this war. Actually, I believe all the Gazans should be moved to the wide-open Sinai desert.”

Since October 7, Mohammed Massad has been sharing his views with anyone who will listen. Having served in the inner circles of the Palestinian Authority, he believes he is uniquely positioned to view current events and the ongoing war through an accurate lens. Arabs living in Eretz Yisrael — both under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and under Hamas in Gaza — are far more oppressed and suffering than under any Israeli “occupation.” He claims that after years of fighting to throw off Israel’s rule, many Palestinians living in the PA yearn for those days when life was better for them than it is now.

In recent years, Mohammed Massad has lectured in locations around the world, even with the knowledge that he’s being watched by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, although hundreds of thousands of Muslims around the world have taken an interest in his views. As the Palestinian Authority is touted once again as a solution for Gaza in the post-Hamas era, Massad says it’s the worst move possible.

“Abu Mazen is a dictator and a murderer. I lived through the evil, the corruption firsthand. Back then, we thought we were fighting to get rid of the ‘occupation,’ but we got something much worse.”

My Terror Contribution

Mohammed Massad was born in 1975 in the village of Burkin to an elite, well-connected Palestinian family. Already as a child, he displayed leadership abilities. He was 13 when the First Intifada broke out, and he and his friends would stand on hilltops throwing firebombs and grenades on army jeeps and on Israeli drivers,

Massad was a founding member of the Jenin branch of the Black Panthers. One of the notorious bomb makers of the time invited them to join a suicide brigade, but Massad and his buddies declined — they were willing to risk death, but they preferred to live.

“Despite my young age, I was behind many of the terror activities that were carried out in the area,” Massad says. It didn’t take long until the stone-throwing, lethal as it was, morphed into usage of real weapons. By the time he was 15, he was carrying his own weapon.

“This was in the early 90s and the Intifada was raging all over the country. I was proud of my personal contribution to those acts of terror that were being carried out, even though my gun was more of a status symbol than an actual weapon, having earned me a place of honor in the eyes of the village residents,” he relates.

He describes an incident that took place around that time, perhaps the first emergence of a deeper moral conviction, even if at the time he couldn’t define it as such. “I was riding my bike when I saw a commotion up ahead. A yellow Subaru station wagon pulled up — I remember the color to this day — and in the front seat were a mother and daughter, a settler and her ten-year-old daughter who had gotten lost and landed up in our village. Unfortunately for them, a mob of teens noticed them and began to stone them. They tried to flee, but they were just driving in circles in the alleyways of the village.

“The car was driving on a dead-end road, followed by a mob of inflamed young terrorist-wannabes. I knew what would be next, but I couldn’t let it happen. For some reason, I started shouting at the youths to get away, but when they ignored me, I took out my gun. ‘If anyone gets close, I’ll shoot,’ I shouted.”

The sight of the gun made the mob sober up and realize they were facing a Fatah operative, and they had to retreat, disappointed. Massad then decided that if he’d come this far, he’d make sure the mother and daughter would get out of the town safely.

“I motioned for them to follow me. Luckily, the engine didn’t stall. I escorted the car until the village exit and pointed them in the right direction. To this day I have no idea who they were.”

Yet when he came back to the village, he discovered guests waiting for him in his uncle’s house. “My supervisor in the Black Panthers had heard from the kids in the village that I hadn’t let the mob storm that car. He hurried to my uncle, Jamil Massad, one of the village leaders, screaming and pointing at me, ‘We had a chance! We could have gotten rid of them! And instead, that nephew of yours saved them!’

“In my defense, I said that our prophet Mohammed himself would not have allowed them to harm women, especially if they were not soldiers. Moreover, they were passersby, and according to Muslim religion, if someone gets lost on his way there is a mitzvah to help him.

“My uncle took my side and added, ‘My nephew saved the whole village today, because if that mob would have harmed the Jews, the army would have swarmed in here, killing people and destroying homes, and he prevented that. He made the right decision and I back him.’ ”

Kidnapping Gone South

Massad might have had stirrings of sympathy and kindness up close, but that didn’t stop him from throwing stones at Israeli cars traveling on “occupied” roads. He was arrested and thrown into prison for three months. “I was 16 at the time,” he relates, “but I emerged three months later as a senior PLO operative. I connected with leaders and cell commanders in Fatah, and by the time I was released, my status rose to a totally different level.”

When Massad was 18, he and his friends decided to make the move of their career: They carjacked an Israeli driver, stole the vehicle with its yellow Israeli license plates, and drove around looking for Israeli soldiers to abduct. But the car caught the attention of an alert security officer who called for backup, and Massad and his friends abandoned the car and made a run for it back to their village.

The IDF caught up with him, though, and he was arrested and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison. About two years after his arrest, however, he was released as part of the Oslo Accords, when he was invited to join the Tanzim, the military arm of Fatah under the leadership of Marwan Barghouti. Responsible for his village, he served as a bridge between the local towns and the high-ranking terrorist leaders of the movement who were loyal to arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, freshly-rehabilitated head of the new Palestinian Authority.

After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, the area where Massad lived became part of the Palestinian autonomous region, and he was integrated into the PA’s presidential security staff, working with a team out of the PA offices in Jenin.

While Arafat and other PLO senior operatives arrived in the territories from their forced exile in Tunis and settled into their offices in the nascent Palestinian Authority, Massad discovered that the new reality for his people was not what he had been hoping for.

Yet at that point, Massad faced a new and shocking reality: Far from the open, independent society he and others like him thought they were hailing when they jubilantly welcomed Arafat, Massad found the new regime characterized by brutality and sanctioned crime. There was no room for debate or criticism in this new-and-improved PA.

“They were riding on the backs of our people,” Massas says. “We yearned for their leadership, but instead, they drove our society into the ground. I could have acted like them and become corrupt, but I was raised with principles and I still had values. And I knew that the corruption they brought with them — bribery, immorality, drugs, and substance abuse, torture, and brutality — were not the ideals of Islam.

“Suddenly I discovered that we’d fought for years to get rid of the ‘occupation,’ but we got something much worse instead. I saw how people were tortured for no reason, how they were thrown into prison, looted and extorted, all under the auspices of the PA — and I didn’t want to be part of that.”

No Blood on My Hands

Despite Massad’s relatively high-ranking position, confrontations between him and his friends in the PA leadership grew more frequent.

Massad left the Tanzim and began working illegally in Israel in a number of jobs, including construction. One day he was asked to come in to the police station in Jenin. Thinking nothing of it, he showed up, but to his surprise, he was immediately arrested and thus began 23 days of torture and investigations, having been accused of collaboration with the Israeli Shin Bet.

“Each day of interrogations by the PA was harder than all those three months in an Israeli prison,” Massad relates. “They beat me with anything that came to hand. They insulted the honor of my sisters and mother with curses. I expected the Israeli enemy to humiliate me, but those I had helped bring into the land over the dead bodies of my friends, I did not expect them to humiliate me or my family. This was unbearable. There is a certain level of force meted out by Israeli jailers, but it’s within the parameters of the law. Here, though, beatings had no boundaries. In my cell, I would shudder as I heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten, begging for mercy.”

Finally, after 23 days, with no evidence and no confessions under duress, Massad’s interrogators backed down.

“They apologized to me and to my family. They expected me to just accept it and move on, as if it was a minor error that could be forgiven. But I will never forgive them. I was able to stand up to them because I am honest and strong, but others — after two slaps — will confess to anything just to avoid more beatings,” he says. “You just want to stop the pain, so if someone is told, ‘you killed twenty people, right?’ he’ll say he killed twenty-two, just to end the torture. After this, they execute him and claim he confessed.”

In this environment, Massad says, many gangs emerged who took advantage of the lawlessness. There were those who collected money claiming that it was for the purposes of freeing the land, but it was really protection money. Anyone who refused to contribute was accused of being against the regime.

“When I understood that the very people I was ready to die for had brought corruption, alcohol, and oppression of the people, it was devastating for me.

“My luck is that I never killed anyone — not a Jew and not an Arab. True, I burned vehicles, but today I take the fact that I have no blood on my hands as a sign that G-d loves me and had protected me.”

No Fear

After his release, Massad spent the next eight months holed up at home. The insult and betrayal he had experienced were still too painful, and he didn’t want to see anyone. He spent a lot of time thinking about where he had come from and what he should do next. He came to the glaring conclusion that he had spent his entire life until that point fighting against the “occupier” — but for what? Israeli “occupation” was so much better than this new regime of terror he fought so hard to help install.

At some point, Massad made contact with the Israeli security services and became a collaborator for the Shin Bet. He would cross into Israeli cities and work in various construction jobs, eventually received asylum in Israel, married an Israeli Arab, and petitioned and received Israeli citizenship.

In addition to pursuing academic studies, Massad worked as a contractor, hiring workers from across the border, as he himself had been not too long before. One day, when waiting at the checkpoint for his workers to come across, he spotted a terrorist a few hundred meters away who had knocked a soldier to the ground and was wrestling to take his rifle from him. Mohammad rushed up and chased the Arab away, saving the soldier’s weapon and his life, for which he was awarded a certificate of appreciation from the IDF.

“Even though I’m a believing Muslim,” he says, “I know that the Muslims have no better place to live than the State of Israel.”

As a student of Middle East Studies at the University of Haifa, Massad even published a study proving from the writings of Islam that suicide attacks are forbidden. “I believe that this has helped change the view of many Muslims around the world, who have always considered suicide attacks as a virtue,” he says.

Today, he says, Hamas and the PA work completely in contravention to his understanding of the principles of Islam, which, in his view, is a religion that in fact promotes tolerance. In this, Massad isn’t exactly mainstream, nor is his position on Jerusalem. He’s even been active in organizations that consider the rebuilding of the Beis Hamikdash as a global universal aspiration. “Jerusalem belongs to the Jews, and that is according to what is says in Islam,” he says. “My dream is to see the Beit Hamikdash rebuilt, a place for all the nations of the world to pray, as it says in the Torah and in the holy books of all the religions.”

Until that happens, he hopes to stay out of the crosshairs of those who are out to get him.

“I’m careful,” he says, and then clarifies, “but I have nothing to be afraid of. If, when I was a kid, I didn’t know what the right way was and I wasn’t afraid, then today — when I know that I’m doing the right thing and following the right path — I should be afraid?

“You know, the enemy is thrilled when they see the demonstrations in Israel. I watch their media, and how they exult and say, ‘Israel is collapsing on the inside.’ I laugh at them because I know the truth. They don’t know Israel — Israel will never collapse, because G-d is behind it and He will keep it strong.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1021)