Palestine Speaks, page 7
Growing up, we could hear our next-door neighbors every day. We knew their fights, conversations, everything. And there were so many places that you couldn’t get to by car because the spaces between buildings were too narrow. You had to walk between the houses.
As children from the camp, we’d feel different from other kids when we went out into Bethlehem, the city. We would see kids who had bicycles, but we didn’t have any. They had good clothes, but we didn’t have them. They even had Coca Cola! My parents weren’t accustomed to the kind of poverty we were living in. They were born in villages with homes on large pieces of land. When I was a kid, my father used to work in Israel. He was a stonecutter. But he wasn’t making enough money for the family—he had four boys and two girls to support. There was no one in Deheisheh with money. So everybody was struggling financially, but at least it gave us this feeling of being equal.
OUR WINDOWS WERE ALWAYS OPEN, SO WE GOT USED TO THE SMELL OF TEARGAS
I felt pressure from the Israeli army and Israeli settlers at an early age. The most difficult issue that we had to deal with was the settlers. I was only six years old when the settlers started coming through the camp in the early seventies, so I grew up seeing them. The main road from the settlements in the south runs through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and it goes right through the camp. I think the settlers who passed through saw Deheisheh as something they needed to control.
The settlers were led by a man named Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who saw all of the West Bank as part of Israel.8 They wanted Israel to claim the land around the camp, and they found ways to make life miserable for us. They would come in buses maybe once a week. They’d get off and start shooting randomly in the refugee camp with live bullets. They’d shout, throw stones, provoke fights. Whenever anyone tried to fight back, the settlers would alert Israeli soldiers who would chase us through the streets and fire tear-gas canisters. Our windows were always open, so we got used to the smell of teargas.
I remember settlers entering my UNRWA school and smashing desks, doors, windows. The teachers couldn’t protect us. There was always a sense of fear and insecurity. When I was younger, these things affected me tremendously. They affected my relationship with my teachers and the way I looked at them. I kind of lost respect for them because I’d seen them degraded. And after some time, other students and I stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.
Then in the early eighties, the military built a fence around the camp. It was twenty feet high, and the only way in and out was a gate leading to the Hebron–Jerusalem Road, the one that the settlers passed through. I once heard that some tourists who came to Bethlehem saw the fence and wondered if it was the wall of a city zoo! In the camp, we had a curfew—we had to be in by seven p.m., or the soldiers guarding the entryway wouldn’t let us back in through the gate. And we couldn’t leave after curfew under any circumstances. Some people died because they couldn’t go to the hospital after the gate closed at seven.
Around the same time, settlers brought trailers across from the camp and tried to establish an outpost there. I remember being stuck in the camp after curfew and hearing the patriotic music of the settlers blaring through the night.
The soldiers worked closely with the settlers most of the time. When I was fourteen, I got a backpack—the first I ever owned. Before that, I would carry my books in plastic bags, like most kids in the camp. I was so happy I finally had a backpack. It was green. My dad bought it for me. I was going to school one morning, and a group of six soldiers and an armed man in civilian clothes—a settler—called me over. The settler kicked me and slapped me and then took my backpack and threw it into the gutter. I tried to get it out of the gutter, but the soldiers hit me and threw the backpack back in. My books were wet and ruined, and they still didn’t allow me to get the pack. I watched them do the same thing to some of my friends—they threw their books in the gutter, too.
At the UNRWA school, they would give us the books for free. I told them what the soldiers had done, and they gave me new books. But I had to put them back in plastic bags again. Of course, the soldiers knew the backpack was important to me because they could see how impoverished we all were and that we were deprived of everything.
Refugees in the camp would retaliate against the settlers by throwing stones. I started throwing stones at age ten. Kids a little older might be a little more organized. Different groups of kids would decide to do something—a group of five over here, a group of six over there. By the time I was thirteen, I was among them. We started to incite other children to put flags up. At that time, it was illegal to hang the Palestinian flag.9 So, we would tell the kids to hang the flag and to write slogans on the walls. That was also illegal then. You could be arrested by the Israeli army and go to prison.
When they saw us throwing stones, the soldiers or settlers might shoot. When they shot at us, yes, we were afraid. But with time, with all the injustice and the frustration, we were just stuck, and we didn’t care if we died. But we thought throwing stones made a difference. We saw the settlers as the occupiers, and they were the source of injustice and deprivation, so we had to fight back. This was before the First Intifada, but for us in the camp it was already Intifada—it was always Intifada.10
“WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT DID YOU DO?”
Eventually, my friends and I graduated from throwing stones to thinking about throwing Molotov cocktails. It wasn’t hard to make a weapon out of a bottle of kerosene and a wick. We wanted to throw them at the outpost set up by Moshe Levinger and at the soldiers who were helping the settlers to come and wreck our neighborhood. By this point I was fifteen, almost sixteen. Some in our group were younger—one was fourteen. We made a couple Molotov cocktails and tested them out by smashing them against walls in the camp when we thought nobody was looking.
December 11, 1984, was a cold, snowy night. I was home asleep, and suddenly soldiers swarmed in. I was cuffed and put in a vehicle with some other boys from my group that had already been arrested. That night they picked up me and four of my friends, and we were driven to Al-Muskubiya.11
When we got to the interrogation center, it was very chaotic. There were maybe forty guys in all who had been arrested and brought to Al-Muskubiya that night. For the five of us, they took off all of our clothes, stripped us naked. Then they tightened our handcuffs, took us outside in an open area, and put bags on our heads. The snow was coming down, and we were naked out there. I couldn’t see the others, but I could hear their teeth chattering, and the sound of the handcuffs shaking was so loud. The cold weather still bothers me now—it makes me remember that night. This is where we stayed for forty-five days between interrogations. Our bodies turned blue, we were out in the cold so long.
My interrogation lasted two months. During the interrogations, they beat me, and there was loud music playing the whole time. We were allowed to go to the bathroom just once a day. They would tie our hands to the pipes. It was really painful for me. After some time, I stopped feeling my arms—sometimes I didn’t know if I still had them or if they had been amputated. There was constant beating, all over my body, to the point where my skin would be as black as my jacket. If I lost consciousness, they would throw water on me or slap me so I’d wake up.
This mark on my wrist is actually from the handcuffs during that time in prison. The handcuffs were so tight, they cut to the bone. I still have marks on my legs from the beatings. They wouldn’t give us any medical treatment. And the interrogators wouldn’t ask you direct, obvious questions. They would just keep saying, “What did you do? What did you do? What did you do?” And that was it. With all the beating, I couldn’t focus anymore, even if I was conscious. I couldn’t remember anything that I did from the time before prison, even if I had anything to confess. Most of the other kids told the police what they’d done—they made some Molotov cocktails and tested them out. I didn’t tell them anything. Not because I was being secretive, but because I was too confused and disoriented from the beatings. It was a very hostile environment.
Sometimes they would keep me awake for many days straight before they gave me four hours of sleep. And with the pressure of sleep deprivation, I started hallucinating, and I didn’t actually know what was happening around me. I would imagine I was in a kindergarten and there were a lot of crying kids causing all this chaos, but I couldn’t do anything to calm them down. I stopped knowing if what was happening was real or just a product of my imagination.
Eventually, a lawyer came to visit me. Her name was Lea Tsemel. She was an Israeli lawyer.12 She came to meet me in the visiting room one day and she gave me cigarettes. She told me she was taking on my case. I was so confused. I just asked her if what was happening to me was real, or was I just trapped in my imagination. So many times I was convinced that the prison was full of snakes. I asked her about that, and she told me I was just hallucinating. She told me about my charges and let me know we’d be in court soon.
There was one police officer who was nice. One morning, I asked to go to the bathroom, and the interrogators wouldn’t let me go until midnight. When this one police officer saw me in pain because I had to go so badly, he said, “Godammit! What happened to these people? Why do they torture people? Godammit!” He was angry, and he let me go to the bathroom. Then he brought me tea and cigarettes and said, “Rest, rest.” This was very risky for him, and I really appreciated it.
The whole interrogation was two months. I was afraid that they were going to kill me and my friends, because we had heard all these terrible stories of torture. I had an uncle who had been arrested a while before, and I knew that he’d died in prison. He participated in a hunger strike, and when the prison guards force-fed him, he choked to death.
The main thing that consumed my thinking was that these people were crazy, and they wanted to torture me and mentally destroy me. And they would actually say it right to our faces. They would tell us, “We want to ruin you psychologically.” In fact, many prisoners do become mentally ill. Some of them die. I didn’t go crazy. I focused on all the other people suffering besides me. And also, I think people who are really religious have a hard time with this kind of abuse sometimes. They pray to God for help, and when none comes, it breaks them mentally. But that wasn’t me, and I was able to focus on the future and what I needed to do to get myself out of that situation.
After two months of interrogation, my friends and I were taken to trial and charged with terrorist activities. The judge sentenced us to four to six years each. My mother was in the courtroom, and she fainted when she heard the sentence.
WE WERE ALL STILL DREAMING OF GROWING A MUSTACHE
After my sentence, I was sent to Damun Prison.13 I learned more in prison than I would have at a university. I met some leaders of the resistance. I was so proud of myself. They were the big fighters. And the other boys I was arrested with, they were all so happy. We thought we were so grown up, even though we were all still dreaming of growing a mustache. We’d actually shave four times a day to try to get our beards to grow in stronger so we could look older. I acted angry about my sentence—not because I thought it was too long, but because I thought it was too short! They gave me four years, I wanted twelve years. I thought it was sort of an honor.
In Damun, I was in with a bunch of Israeli mafia guys, drug dealers—all sorts of criminals. I think the soldiers wanted to put young guys in the resistance in with real degenerates, sort of to corrupt us. But we all got along, and before long I was one of the leaders in prison. I became the representative of a group of young prisoners in dealing with the guards. I’d voice our demands and objections to the ways we were being treated.
In 1986, I led a hunger strike. We were actually protesting about not getting enough food. Besides that, it was winter, and there was no heat, and we only had one thin blanket each. And we weren’t getting enough exercise time outside. So there were dozens of us not eating as a protest. I remember we used to dream of food at night. The Israeli soldiers, they would tease us. They’d have barbecues outside the walls of our cells, and the smell would come into our cells through the windows.
We stuck at it for eighteen days, and on the eighteenth day I announced we were going on a water strike as well. The guards quickly brought in doctors from the Red Cross, and they told us that we’d be dead in two days if we tried that. So I said, “Okay, we won’t do that.” But it was enough to make the guards think we were crazy enough to try. The next day, the prison administrators came and agreed to our demands—more food, two more blankets at night, and fifteen more minutes of exercise time a day. It felt like a big victory. For two weeks afterward, we had to relearn to eat, like we were babies all over again. All our stomachs could handle was milk, a little soft potato, that sort of thing.
So I had a reputation as a dangerous prisoner. Not because I was violent, but because I could lead the prisoners to rebel against our conditions. The authorities decided to transfer me to Ashkelon, which was where they put the prisoners they considered the most dangerous.14 Inside Ashkelon, there were a lot of leaders of Palestine’s resistance movement. To Israel, this was where the worst of the worst went. But as a Palestinian, I felt much safer in Ashkelon than I had at Damun.
Those of us who were young and in prison for the first time started to study. We wanted to know everything. We would sit with the older men in Ashkelon, and they told us about their experience. The older prisoners would even organize more formal education—lectures and lessons every day. These were guys who had been in prison forever. Some of them had been in since 1967. I think a few of those guys had been around to hear Jesus lecture! So they had a lot of wisdom to pass on.
We learned about history, economics, philosophy. We had to wake up at six in the morning and start reading and studying. At ten there was a lecture until noon, and then there was a ninety-minute break. After the break, we had to write an article—it could be political, educational, whatever. But we had to write something. Every day one of the inmates had to lecture the others about what he had written and read earlier. And then we would go back to reading. They served us dinner at seven, and then between seven and ten we could read, and then we would go back to sleep. If we didn’t finish our writing, we could stay up late and write. We didn’t have enough time for all our activities. It became an addiction, and I was consumed with, What am I going to read next? What am I going to write?
Every inmate had his own specialty. Some of them were political, some of them philosophical. One specialized in economics, another in Marx. Some people taught chemistry and explosives inside the prison. We also learned languages. Some of the prisoners knew Greek, Russian, Turkish, so they would pass on their languages. Getting into Ashkelon for me was like getting accepted to Harvard or Oxford, or even better!
But the treatment in the prison was still very harsh. Solitary confinement at Ashkelon was the worst in all the prisons in Israel. Prisoners could be isolated from others for years.15 One inmate I knew lost his mind because of all the pressure from solitary. He needed psychiatric help.
To protest this, we set all the cells on fire. Every prisoner was part of it. We all piled up clothes in the middle of our cells and lit them with smuggled matches. The smoke was terrible, and many of us suffocated. Forty-eight prisoners had to be hospitalized, but our protest got attention. They still used solitary confinement to torture people afterward, though.
The relationships you form inside the prison are very strong. There are a lot of people from different cities—Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, so many places. So there’s a lot to learn, and you become more knowledgeable about the situations in other cities. When you get out of prison, you’re going to stay friends with them. And they’re really influential in their own societies. So many of the leaders of the First Intifada met in prison.
I got out of prison in 1989, during the First Intifada. I was still only twenty, but I was more influential in our society because people respect someone who’s been in jail—we weren’t seen as criminals, but leaders.
I WAS JUST LIKE THE POPE
I didn’t stay out long after my release in 1989. I was only out for six months. I hadn’t done anything this time, but because of my record and people I knew, and because it was the Intifada, I was rounded up.16
This time after my trial I was sent to Ktzi’ot Prison.17 In Ktzi’ot, I improved my Hebrew. Ktzi’ot was like a big open-air prison with lots of tents, and one of the tents was the “Hebrew tent,” where only Hebrew was spoken. I taught Hebrew lessons there and translated Hebrew-language newspapers for the other inmates.
I had a lot of experience and I knew a lot, so the new inmates would ask me how to do things. I was just like the Pope. They would respect me and ask me for things. In prison culture, if you’re an alumnus of prison, you get special treatment from both the inmates and the wardens and guards. I would get the best bed in the tent, you know, the one in the corner. The guards also gave me special treatment because I was an asset to the prison. They knew that I could influence everyone else, and if I said something, everyone was going to listen to me. It was a give and take.
I was out of prison in 1994, but of course, the Israeli authorities kept an eye on me. The authorities have this obsession, that once someone like me has been to prison, then we’re a terrorist for life. I got picked up a few times, and sometimes I’d be held for a day, sometimes for two weeks. Then, in 1995, I was arrested, and this time they took me to Al-Muskubiya. They didn’t have charges, they just wanted to interrogate me about people I knew. During the interrogation, I was tortured.
After twelve days of not being allowed to sleep, not getting enough to eat, that’s when the interrogators started shaking me. There are two kinds of shaking they’d do—one of the head and neck only, and one for the whole body. Of course when they start after nearly two weeks of no food or no sleep, you can’t really physically resist at all. You’re too weak, and your neck starts to flop around, you don’t get oxygen, and you pass out. They’d bring us prisoners close to death.
