Now But Not Forever - A Glimpse of One Man's Story
(Published April 2001 - Web-posted
6 February 2002)
This interview was conducted during two visits with this young man in March and April, 2001. Because of its sensitive and often graphic dialogue, I decided not to post it on Postcards from Palestine until I had received enough feedback from all concerned.
Hashem’s Birzeit flat would fall under the category of what I’ve known to be a studio apartment – a small, L-shaped room combining a kitchen, a desk, a few bookshelves, and a pull-out sofa for a bed. The bathroom concludes the rectangular home on the second
floor of a three-story building, and as I arrive at his place for dinner and a chat I immediately need to use it. Above the sink in the bathroom is a small cartoon of several boys urinating in the dirt, and one of them is writing the phrase, “Peace in the Middle East.” I remark to Hashem about the ironic drawing.
“You know, that one gets plenty of laughs,” he says. “Three years ago when Israeli soldiers came here and searched my house, one of them saw it and even he laughed.” My response was a look of bewilderment, and he caught it. Yes, there were Israeli soldiers in Birzeit three years ago. “Too many people think that ever since Oslo [Peace Accord] there are no soldiers in Palestinian areas – that the occupation is over and the two sides are just arguing over extra land. But that night there were soldiers all through the village. They wore face paint and carried all kinds of weapons.” The soldiers came in the spring of 1998 to arrest Gazan students who were illegally studying at Birzeit University (which is basically all students from the Gaza Strip). They arrested over 200 people and loaded them on buses for Gaza. Most of them made it back within a few days, including Hashem’s neighbors downstairs. “It was just a display of power,” he tiredly comments.
Hashem invited us to his home for a chance to get to know him more deeply than we previously did – as a 30 year old, well presented financial consultant, happily married to a Dutch woman and looking forward to one day living in Holland. He graduated from Birzeit University during the first Intifada (1987-1993), finishing his final years underground after the Israelis closed down all Palestinian universities. He completed his final year in almost total hiding, as it was particularly illegal for former prisoners to be enrolled in school. As he tells it, Hashem’s family are technically refugees; his father and uncles lost considerable amounts of land in the 1967 Six-Day War, and they became city-dwellers in the northernmost West Bank town of Jenin.
We eat a delicious Arabic meal and then ascend to the roof of the apartment building to have a chat under the stars. Directly east from his home, the Israeli settlement of Bet El occupies most of the horizon, and adjacent to it we see the refugee camp of Jalazone and the glow of the lights from Ramallah otherwise obscured by a hill. It’s difficult to understand how an occupation like this can exist in the world today, he remarks as we gaze across the valley. We quickly discern Hashem’s extensive education and his liberal, pragmatist persona. “The Arabs occupied Spain for eight hundred years, but they got kicked out. The Israelis can occupy us for eight million years maybe, but not forever.”
I’ve been to Bet El, I tell him. I walked around it one afternoon last September – before the current Intifada. Hashem assures me he’s been there, too. In addition to being a settlement of several thousand Jewish immigrants, mostly from America, Bet El is the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] headquarters in the West Bank. Hashem was in prison there ten years ago. “You know, I think it has more than doubled in size in the past five years,” he says, “during the so-called peace process.”
The conversation immediately evolves into the story of Hashem during the first Intifada. The first time he was arrested, it was for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in Jenin. Late at night, the customary time for arrests, the soldiers came to his house. “They came in and started smashing everything. They tied me down in a chair and started hitting me. I saw them push my mother to the ground, and I yelled at them that if they were real men they would fight me fair.” Eventually they took him, with several others, to a remote hill outside of Jenin, where the group was beaten with clubs and guns. “Then they gave me administrative detention, and I was sent to a prison in Haifa. I was sixteen years old.” Much like a bypass road circumvents Palestinian villages for Israeli settler traffic, administrative detention circumvents democratic law for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. With such a label, the Israeli authorities may lock up anyone for up to six months without formally charging him. Hashem served four such terms in five years, in Haifa, Bet El, and in the Negev Desert.
Prison was as educational as it was tortuous. Upon arrival at a prison, he was tortured for days – tied to a chair with a black hood over his head, beaten and interrogated about whom he knew. “They wanted to turn me into a collaborator, like they had done to whoever it was that turned me in. They told me that they knew my family and they would hurt them, or tell my father things about me that weren’t true.” At any given point in his sentence he might be pulled in for this type of bellicose questioning. Other times he was confined by himself and forced to try to sleep with constant bright light.
But while he was in prison, several of his friends fared much worse at the hands of the occupation army. Once, after his release from his six-month detention, he returned home to news that two of his good friends had been shot dead by IDF soldiers. “They died believing in something, but they didn’t deserve to die. I’m haunted by the loss of them. One time, several years ago, I was at a party and I swore I saw one of them across the room. Of course I was wrong, but I cried for days. I’ll always remember them as living, and so I won’t visit their graves until what they died for becomes a reality – Palestine is free of occupation.”
Another time, while he was living in Ramallah just before the Oslo announcement, Hashem notes another encounter with Israeli soldiers. “I lived with several other students in a small place. On the weekend evenings we would sit around and play cards and drink beer. Every time we ran out [of beer] someone had to go for more, and that was dangerous. One night it was my turn.” He described going to a shop inside a building that I now know well to contain two Internet cafes, Checkers Hamburgers, and the French Cultural Center, among many others. A group of IDF soldiers was stationed inside. “I was carrying a big bag of beer and food, and they stopped me on the way out. I didn’t say anything to them before they began harassing me. I dropped the bag when they hit me, and all the bottles broke. They said I shouldn’t be out this late, and they wanted to know why I was buying beer since I’m a Muslim. I ran away after awhile, and when I got home my friends saw that I was covered in blood. The next day, I threw stones,” he says with a smile that only surfaces long after time and reflection have diluted the pain.
Hashem is quick to note his perseverance. His education blossomed in prison while it couldn’t anywhere else. In meetings with other prisoners, he started learning the English and Hebrew languages. He first read the bible and works by Marx, Lenin, and Che Guevara. His father is a religious Muslim man, but Hashem was certain from an early age that he would become a leftist – prison only solidified that. His fellow prisoners were from all sorts of Palestinian socio-political backgrounds at a time when the PLO and its factions were still just fighting a war of rhetoric from their base in Tunisia. “I’m not with any faction,” he says. “I’m with myself.” And Hashem learned valuable lessons about the will of the people in overcoming a hostile environment, which is why he believed in the Intifada, not in the PLO. “Revolution is a crop planted by the people but reaped by those hungry for power,” he quotes Mao Tse Tung. “Who started the first Intifada? The people, here in Palestine. And who took over…?” he alludes to Yasser Arafat and the return of the PLO from exile.
Once he was on vacation with his wife in London, and a friend of hers offered to introduce Hashem to a former IDF soldier now living in England. “Principally, I told her there was no way I could face him.” He was very skeptical, but after learning a little more about the man he agreed to a meeting. “I told them that I will first ask him straight out if he’s ever killed any Palestinians. If he says yes, I will leave.” The former soldier never killed anyone. He served in the IDF during the first Intifada, ironically in Jenin for a time and then later in Hebron. While in Hebron, he was ordered to shoot on unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, and he refused. For this he was sentenced to a month in prison and later discharged from the army. “I asked him where he served his time, and he said ‘Haifa’.” Further dialogue amazingly revealed that Hashem and this soldier served in the Haifa prison at the same time, though they never met as Jewish prisoners are kept separate from others. “He told me he was proud to be Jewish, but not to be Israeli. He was never going back, and he was even writing his doctoral thesis on his experience in the army and he’s trying to get British citizenship. I learned a lot from that experience.”
“I have nothing against the Jews,” he says as the evening winds down and we’ve finished our beers. “I don’t believe in God, but I respect those who do – like my father, and the Jews and Christians. My problem is with Israelis; people who not only confiscate our land and our water, but also confiscate our futures.” We start talking about the current Intifada. It’s not like the first one, he tells us, though we’re not surprised. There are different participants, different leaders, and different methods. Only the problem is the same. One nation is kept stateless by another nation who gained a state after thousands of years of Diaspora.
I.D. cards, checkpoints, growing settlements, one-sided negotiations, a stunted economy, a bleak future - the occupation puzzles even an educated man like Hashem. “The Israelis came from all over the world – from America, Russia, South Africa – and they took the land here. And now they want more. I’m not happy about the violence. I don’t like to hear that a settler baby [in Hebron on April 1] was killed any more than Muhammad Al Durra [the ten-year-old Palestinian boy killed by the IDF on 30 September 2000]. But why do these people come here and think they can love the land as much as we do? Why don’t people in other countries love their land, their trees, their crops and wells, like Palestinians do? Because their not in danger of losing them.”
We say our goodnights and free Hashem to call his wife in Amsterdam. A man who has every right in the world to be filled with immeasurable hatred, anger, and frustration, is simply eager to tell his wife about the raise he got at work and time he spent with us. He carries his past around at arm’s length – it’s a part of him forever, but he feels blessed rather than burdened by it. He was born Palestinian, and that which was once equated to being a crime – the only crime he ever committed – is now certainly something with which he hopes for a better future for himself and his family, if not everyone in Palestine.
Richard Johnson - Ramallah
(c) 2002 canadazone.com