I visited Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas, one desolate rainy morning during the first Intifada. I was a writer for Time, and on that day, Jamil Hamad, Time’s Palestinian stringer, drove me down to Gaza from my hotel in East Jerusalem.
On the Nablus Road, we passed the shell of a burnt-out Israeli school bus. Jamil’s car had blue Palestinian license plates and a big sign in the windshield that said PRESS. He spread a checkered black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyeh on the dashboard, just to make sure, but the shebab (young Palestinians) threw stones at us anyway. They did it satirically—their rough little joke. We ducked and flinched and laughed at them and waved. The boys had good arms. I told Jamil the Yankees could recruit pitchers here.
