Palestine Speaks, page 22
The courtyard was mostly covered, so there was barely any sunlight even on bright days. Most of the prisoners started to feel sick, just from lack of sun. There were some small windows in the hallways outside the rooms, and if you wanted to get sun, you had to go there in the morning. But there was a pecking order. I was new to the prison, and there were older people who had been in jail for twenty years and they were sick, so it was more important for them to be in the sun than me. I didn’t really see any sun for over a year.
Slowly, my mind started to bend and adapt to life inside cell walls. Jail is a time for each Palestinian to sit with himself, a time to make an evaluation of his life. And it’s an important, powerful experience to have the time to learn and share stories with people in jail.
Sometimes we found somebody sitting by himself in the room with his mind on the outside world, and we knew we had to keep him from feeling alone. If any of us prisoners began to live with our mind outside the jail, we would start to feel down, depressed. So we would give each other a little time to think those thoughts, but if we saw someone looking pensive, we would go to him after maybe half an hour and start joking, discussing things, anything, just to keep him from getting lost within himself.
I was in isolation a few times—sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a week. This could be for something like having contraband, like cell phones. It was very bad in isolation. There was no bed, just a small room with a mat on the floor that you slept on. You had five minutes to go to the bathroom and do what you want, shower, clean—just five minutes. And then you came back to the small cell. Some people spend years in isolation.
There were often conflicts with the guards inside the jail. We would begin to shout or knock on the door and they would come and shoot us with pepper bullets.17 The bullets cut your skin and the pepper goes in.
The guards searched the room several times each day. When they did these searches, they would bring at least nine or ten soldiers to every room. Sometimes they came just to search. Sometimes they came to bother us. They might come at three in the morning, when we were sleeping. Within a second they’d open the door and nine soldiers would enter with their guns, shouting, “Get down! Put your hands up!”
Still, we were able to hide things sometimes. One thing that was important to us was a cell phone. We used the phone to get news, to talk to our families. At one point, it was my job to hide the phone every evening. We would take it out at six o’clock in the evening and use it until ten, twelve at night, and then hide it. I hid it in a lot of places—for example, we put it in the floor. We cut out a little bit of tile and put it underneath. But you had to be very fast and careful because when the guards came, they searched everything, even the floor sometimes. One time, they brought in a metal detector, and they were able to find our phone that way. They took it, and as punishment they took away visits for two months.
THEY WANTED MY FAMILY TO FEEL LIKE THEY WERE IN JAIL TOO
During the whole time I was under interrogation in Jerusalem, my family had no idea where I was or what was happening to me. Toward the end of my time in Jerusalem, someone who knew me from the camp spotted me as I was being escorted down the halls to or from interrogation. This guy told his mother about me when he got out, and then his mother told my mother where I was. Then my mother and father went to the International Red Cross to ask for permission to see me.18 Finally, two months after I was transferred to Be’er Sheva, they came to visit me.
When I first saw them, my mother had been crying. She was behind a pane of glass and we spoke into telephones. It was difficult for me and it was difficult for her, because we knew she was going to leave after forty-five minutes. During the visit I told them, “It’s okay, I’m good. We have a big space, and TV, and the food is good. We have meat, we have chicken every day, we have juice, we can drink what we want.” And all of that was a lie to make her feel better about the situation. It wasn’t easy, because I knew if anybody was released from jail, they would tell her what was really going on. And I knew that she knew I was lying, but she didn’t want to say it.
But she wanted to keep my spirits up as well. I kept asking about what was happening outside, and she told me everything was good—this friend was getting married, this one was about to graduate from college. There were a lot of bad things she didn’t tell me about. I know she lied because she wanted to give me a nice picture of the outside. So we were lying to each other just to keep each other happy.
My parents came twice a month. It was hard for them to visit the jail. They’d get on the bus at four in the morning and wouldn’t arrive until noon, and the visits were only forty-five minutes long. They wouldn’t get home until at least seven or eight at night. Sometimes when they came, the prison guards told them, “He’s not here, we took him to another jail,” or “He’s in court.” It wasn’t true. Once, another prisoner coming back from a visit told me, “Muhanned, your family is waiting outside.” I changed my clothes for the visit and waited for my turn. But every time I asked the soldier about it, he said, “Not now, not now.” Finally, visiting hours ended and the soldier said, “Your family didn’t come.” I told him my family was outside, and he went to check. When he came back he told me they had been there, but that they had to leave because visiting time was over.
You know, I didn’t want my family to come. I didn’t want them to spend all these hours just to come for forty-five minutes and sometimes not even see me. It was a punishment for my family. The Israeli authorities wanted to make my family feel like they were in jail too. So, one night, I used the mobile that we had hidden to tell them not to come anymore.
A couple of months after my parents first started visiting, my two younger brothers were arrested as well. The older of the two was sentenced to two years. He was nineteen. My youngest brother was given administrative detention for a few months—he was just sixteen at the time.19 I was the first, but my father and mother now say the Israelis have a map of the house since they’ve visited so many times.
When I was arrested, it was hard for my family. My mom didn’t leave the house for a while. But after she came to visit me the first time, she began to meet people and she began to see there were people who would spend all their lives in jail. They had families, wives, and children that they’d never see. So this gave her some perspective. She thought, My son, at least he will get released. And she felt the same way about my brothers. I felt the same way, too. There were a lot of people who had twenty-year sentences. So I felt I was just in prison as a tourist.
After a year and a half, in the spring of 2006, I was moved again, this time to the prison in Naqab.20 There I lived in a tent in the desert for eight months. There’d be maybe twenty of us in each tent, and huge walls around each section of tents. The walls were the same height as the apartheid wall.21 We were in the desert in June and July, the hottest time of year, under the sun all the time. It was like 104 degrees Fahrenheit, but we were just out in the sun. All the prisoners, they spent their time close to the wall trying to get shade. And there were so many bugs—mosquitoes, bed bugs. It was terrible. The only good thing was the other people, the other prisoners I met.
After the prison in the desert, I was transferred again to Shate Prison, near Nazareth, not long before my release.22 I spent a few months there. Then finally, in 2007, I was released.
I MADE MY ROOM LOOK LIKE THE ROOM IN JAIL
I knew the date I would be released, but not the place. They released me in Jenin.23 It was very far from home, and I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have anything. In 2007, the situation in Jenin was not easy. I borrowed a phone from a taxi driver to call my family and tell them to come and take me back to Bethlehem.
When I got home, I found a hundred friends, family, and neighbors waiting for me at the camp. All of them wanted to carry me on their shoulders or to hug me. I had spent the last three years speaking and living with a maximum of seven people, and to be around so many people all of a sudden, so much commotion, was overwhelming. I was happy, but it was a little too much. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, and I couldn’t focus.
The first day I slept in my own house, I woke up at six in the morning, alone. I had gone to sleep at four or five o’clock in the morning because I was celebrating with my family and friends, but I woke up at six because every day while I was in jail, we woke up at six to do the count.
For three or four months, I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to speak with anybody. I didn’t want to meet anybody. I made my room look like the room in jail—I filled it with some boxes to make myself a smaller space, and I had coffee and everything I needed around me in that one room.
Everybody who goes to jail has a lot of problems when they get released. For me, I had trouble speaking with more than one person at the same time, and sometimes I needed a long time to focus on all the details of a conversation. Also, sometimes I had a problem with—I don’t know how to say it—feeling secure. For example, if I heard a voice outside, I had to go and see who was talking. If somebody opened the door to my family’s house, I had to go and see who it was. Sometimes I’d be sitting in some public space with friends and I’d notice a person sitting behind us, staring at us. My friends, who hadn’t been to jail, wouldn’t notice that.
But still, I tried to get back into my life. I wasn’t as active anymore with friends or politics. But I started school at Abu Dis again in 2008. I was going back to my old art program, the one I’d been in when I was arrested in 2004. My family is educated, as are many people in the camp. Work is not easy to find, and we are not in a normal country. So you must study to have something to do. Having a B.A. here in Palestine is like the same level of qualifications as finishing high school somewhere else. I have four uncles—one has a Ph.D. from Rice University, one has a Ph.D. in education, one is an engineer, the other finished his master’s. Two of my aunts are getting their master’s. It’s the only way to make a living. My twin sister finished her master’s and is working for her Ph.D. So getting a degree was very important to me.
Still, it sometimes felt like the hardest thing in my life to go back to university. I had been out of university for almost five years, and when I came back, all my old friends were gone. People who had been studying with me, they were now my professors at the school. I couldn’t spend time with other students to discuss anything because they were five or six years younger than me. They felt the things they were discussing were very important, but I didn’t care if I had Ray-Ban sunglasses or how much my watch cost or whatever. So I found a distance between myself and others. To be honest, I skipped a lot of classes.
I wasn’t like that before jail. Before jail I was happy and proud to go in the morning to lectures, to attend university. I was proud of the books I was reading. But after jail, I was ashamed. I didn’t want anybody to see me going to school. I felt too old and that this time was finished for me.
But I also met someone, a woman who was about six years younger than me named Aghsan. Before long, we got engaged. But for me, having a girlfriend didn’t change much—it was still hard to adjust to being out of prison. For the Palestinian, the occupation changes everything, controls everything—your mind, your life. Aghsan is from Ramallah, and it should have taken me one hour to go and visit her coming from Bethlehem. 24 But at the checkpoint, Palestinians are stopped for hours, even if you are just going to meet your girlfriend. At the checkpoint you don’t know how long you will stay.25
I had to tell the soldiers at the checkpoint that I had been in jail, because if I had not been honest when they asked, they would have checked and it would have been a problem for me. They asked a lot of questions. And sometimes they didn’t ask anything, they just told me to get out of my car and made me wait. It depended on the soldier. If the soldier had a problem with his girlfriend, if he was having a bad day, he would make it a bad day for me. So during our engagement I would just go from Bethlehem to Ramallah to see my fiancée for a couple of hours and then head the opposite way to come back, and this was my whole world. After a while, I started to think the story of Romeo and Juliet was easier than my story. I thought, Why am I in love with a girl in Ramallah? London and Ramallah seem like the same distance. Is this really worth it? Sometimes I think the occupation will even stop love.
I also have had trouble at work because of my time in prison. I got a job at an organization called Addameer, a prisoner support and human rights association, a little after I started school.26 It’s difficult for me when I feel I’m under someone else’s control. I don’t want to be under control. This is a problem I have at work. I don’t like signing in every day, having my actions determined by someone else.
I BELIEVE ART IS RESISTANCE
When I came back to university at Abu Dis, I spoke with my art teacher. I told her that I wanted to make art about the jail. She supported me because she said there were few artists like me who had experienced jail, even if there were a lot of artists who made prison the focus of their work. Palestinians and international organizations are always speaking about political prisoners in Palestine. Some Palestinian artists make posters, drawings, paintings, and they often depict prisoners as very big and strong, as guys who can destroy the walls of the jail. But I wanted to do something different. I wanted to speak about prison, about life from the eyes of a prisoner. My art was about how the prisoners see the outside world. I painted the bars of the windows, because that’s the view we knew. We never saw a view without the fence, without the windows. And when I went to visit my family, my mother, she was on the other side of the glass. So when I was looking at my mother, I saw my mother, but her face was never completely in view. I’ve painted glimpses of faces and people and houses and cars on small square canvasses to represent the way the outside world appears to prisoners, seeing the world through these little screens, through small glimpses.
I had an exhibition in London in 2011, and also one in Jerusalem, and a third one in Bethlehem. I am proud of that. But I know these paintings I made, somebody can take them for money and put them in his house and close them up. So the maximum number of people who will see these paintings is ten people, twenty people. But I believe that art is for all levels of society. I am from a refugee camp, and I am drawing for the poor people in Palestine, not for the bourgeoisie. I’m not doing a painting to keep it inside the house.
After I was released from jail, I started doing graffiti. Sometimes I and a couple of other artists used stencils, because we did a lot of painting in places where we are not allowed to paint, so we had to go fast. I did graffiti in the main street to let everybody see the drawing.27
I believe art is resistance. The graffiti in Palestine, it’s not like the graffiti in any other place in the world. Because when you write something on the wall, this means it has a connection with the First Intifada and the revolutionary time.
When I make my art, it feels that I am giving something to my homeland and sending my message to the rest of the world. I paint because I’m speaking for thousands of people nobody knows about—the people in jail. Many of them have been living for thirty years or more in jail. Few people speak for or about them. There are 12,000 people incarcerated in military jails. Why people don’t know about them, I don’t know.
If you live in Palestine, you have big problems—much pain, much suffering. I am painting to change that, to help ease the pain. Many of us are not fighting with guns, but we find our own way to resist. We may lose our lives or freedom, but we are working for the lives of our next generation.
1 Naji Al-Ali (1938–1987) was a political cartoonist who criticized Palestinian politicians and the state of Israel. A recurring character in his artwork was Handala, a faceless ten-year-old Palestinian boy whose story represented the Palestinian refugee experience.
2 Members of the Al-Azzah family had been leaders in the region of their former village ever since revolting against Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century. After many of the residents in their community fled to Bethlehem in 1948, the refugee camp was named after them, in recognition of their prominence. For more on the Arab-Israeli War and Nakba, see Appendix I, page 295.
3 For more on the two-state solution, see the Glossary, page 304.
4 Beit Jibrin was an Arab village located thirteen miles northwest of Hebron and twenty-five miles southwest of Jerusalem. Before 1948, the population was a little under 3,000. The village was depopulated during Israeli raids in the 1948 war, and there is currently an Israeli settlement on its former location called Beit Guvrin.
5 For more information on the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, see the Glossary, page 304.
6 For more on the Oslo Accords, see the Glossary, page 304.
7 The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was formed in 1967. For more information, see the Glossary, page 304.
8 The “right of return” refers to a political position that Palestinian refugees and their descendants should be permitted to reclaim land and property that they were driven from in the wars in 1948 and 1967. For more information, see the Glossary, page 304.
9 For more information on Hamas, Fatah, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, see the Glossary, page 304.
10 The First Intifada was an uprising throughout the West Bank and Gaza against Israeli military occupation. It began in December 1987 and lasted until 1993. Intifada in Arabic means “to shake off.” For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
