Pressure on Israel to hold direct talks was increasing. But a PLO willing to sit and negotiate wasn’t something Begin or Defense Minister Sharon could easily countenance. Even worse for the Israeli government, our West Bank strategy of civil disobedience and nonviolence was gaining traction, and had turned Birzeit University into the Palestinian Berkeley circa 1968. The student movement was spreading to other universities. Moreover, the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq (“The Law”) began issuing statements in English on human rights abuses. Their materials were finding their way into foreign newspapers and reports by Amnesty International. The moral high ground Israel had managed somehow to occupy since 1948 was suddenly getting more slippery.
My optimism was mixed with increasing alarm at the growing Islamist movement. While Military Order 854 and the Village Leagues hadn’t worked as planned, the occupation had managed to foster the Islamists through the indirect support of the quadriplegic guru Ahmad Yassin. Yassin initially did precisely what the Israeli overlords expected: he and his Islamists went after secular nationalists who weren’t “pure” and therefore impeded rather than hastened salvation. As time went on, their anger with the secularists grew. These bearded students came into my class with a glimmer of righteous anger in their eyes.
The ideological competition between the PLO and Islamists had begun. At universities in Gaza, Nablus, and Birzeit, verbal quarrels turned into fistfights.
Thus, with the nationalist movement in the West Bank increasingly opting for nonviolent means to carry on the fight for liberation, and the Islamists opposing them, General Sharon launched his invasion. Sharon sold his war as a necessary step in securing the border against terrorist attacks. Yet despite the talk of “terrorism,” the true scope of Sharon’s ambitions soon became clear. The invasion was a part of a much larger strategy to destroy any hope of our independence.
The war was planned long before the assassination attempt of the Israeli ambassador in London. For several months military fortifications were being prepared in northern Israel. A month before the invasion, obviously aware that a war in Lebanon would arouse violence, Military Order 1143 created a new prison near Nablus called Al-Fara. To help fill up the new facility, the “Order Concerning Organizing Guards in Settlements” gave vigilante groups operating out of Jewish settlements the right to “detain any persons who are acting suspiciously.”
The initial phase of the war was swift and effortless, and once again the Arab world was left wringing its hands. For the Palestinians, watching the Israeli war machine chase four hundred thousand Lebanese and Palestinians from their homes in villages and refugee camps was a sobering sight, as were the warplanes that pulverized parts of Beirut. Defiant PLO statements coming out of basements of bombed-out apartment buildings didn’t fool anyone. The rounds of Arab gunfire accompanying the PLO’s evacuation belied the total disarray of the movement.
Under the cover of war, Sharon pushed through a number of military laws that vastly increased the scope of the occupation. Some of his actions went back to the defunct Village League, which the notoriously tenacious Sharon was unwilling to let die. He ordered his people in the West Bank Civil Administration to give some compliant local leaders massive support. More support flowed into the coffers of Sheikh Yassin’s “charity” in Gaza—and just as the sheikh’s ideological brothers in Iran were looking for ways to extend their influence into Lebanon and occupied Palestine.
In June, Military Order 994 allowed the head of the West Bank Civil Administration to assume all the power of local Palestinian authorities if he was convinced that even a single member of the municipal council was being uncooperative. In July another new law forbade Palestinians from living on their own expropriated land: “Any person occupying state property without permission will be prosecuted.” In August, Military Order 1147 went a step further by prohibiting the planting of fruit trees without first obtaining the permission of military authorities. In September, Military Order 1020 gave military commanders the right to designate certain areas as closed military areas. In October, the “Order Concerning Provocation and Hostile Propaganda” made it illegal to “support a hostile organization by holding a flag or listening to a nationalist song.” In theory, anyone within earshot of a radio tuned to any of the Arab stations, excluding Cairo, could be locked up.
In the summer of 1982, our life was busy with two children and a third on the way. The Lemon Tree was doing well enough, considering the Old City’s continuous downward spiral. We normally had a full house, and the evening discussions often reminded me of Café Troubadour. It became a common sight to see an Arab student leave the café shaking his head, his smug nationalist presuppositions having been shattered by a conversation with an Israeli humanist, of which there were plenty at the Lemon Tree.
The day the war broke out, Lucy and I took the kids over to visit our Harvard friend Guy Stroumsa. “What will come of this war,” I asked him, “besides a few thousand dead?” Guy was just as aghast. Neither of us was a prophet enough to foresee how the war would spawn demons such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and a twenty-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.
Indeed, initially the venture backfired badly for Begin and Sharon. The day the invasion began, my friend Daniel Amit at the Hebrew University transmogrified his Committee in Solidarity with Birzeit University into the Committee Against the War in Lebanon. The committee’s first demonstration attracted a few thousand protesters. Peace Now, which until then had been a small clutch of leftists led by the likes of Amos Oz and my friend from Oxford Avishai Margalit, followed the committee’s lead, and a few days later a mass demonstration drew ten times as many.
Then came the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in mid-September. With Sharon’s army outside sealing off all the roads in and out of the camps, the Lebanese militias aligned with Israel methodically cut the throats of hundreds of old men, women, and children. The killing took place across the street from the national sports stadium, Beirut’s second most popular recreation site after the beach.
Outrage over the massacres at Sabra and Shatila swelled the numbers of Israeli opponents to the war, and soon approximately four hundred thousand chanting people were crowded into a square in Tel Aviv. Protesters demanded the resignations of Begin and Sharon and the establishment of a judicial commission of inquiry to investigate the massacres. More important for the region, Sharon’s reckless war gave birth to Peace Now as a mass movement. Over the years, I would learn many things from Peace Now, for it was the first peace movement in Israel-Palestine that succeeded in mobilizing masses for nonviolent protests.
The massacres at Sabra and Shatila were, from the Palestinian perspective, the grim culmination of weeks of wanton destruction in Lebanon, and Sharon’s heavy-handed tactics in the West Bank. At Birzeit the union responded with more assertive nonviolence, strikes, demonstrations, and the like.
The occupiers soon had plenty of new inmates at Al-Fara prison. Try as we could, television images of apartment buildings in Beirut going up in flames made discipline impossible to maintain. Fierce rioting erupted all over the territories. Stones flew; burning tires blocked roads; walls were covered with nationalist graffiti; and of course Palestinian flags defiantly popped up everywhere.
The army cracked down with lethal force. Soldiers closed Birzeit indefinitely after a confrontation one morning left two Muslim students dead. Lucy and I were in our car waiting at a checkpoint at the entrance to the university when I heard the news. At once I realized that a pivotal juncture in the conflict had been reached. With the shooting of its members, the Islamic faction would change its tune. No longer would it regard the PLO as its true enemy; Israel would increasingly get this role. Regardless of what its leaders said, the youth now regarded the occupation as their real enemy.
Outrage over the shooting that morning soon turned into incandescent vitriol. It increased when vigilantes from the settlements went onto the campus of the Hebron Islamic College in Hebron and sprayed a
crowd of students with machine guns. Three students were killed and twenty-eight wounded. With the shooting, the mass arrests of activists, and the repression, a more radical student leadership developed. Sheikh Yassin, buoyed by the example of Iran, began winning more disciples, especially in Gaza. Patiently building his organization, Yassin still steered clear of anything smacking of anti-Israeli resistance.
For Fatah activists, time in prison became a rite of passage. By the war’s end nearly every male under the age of thirty had either been in prison or had had a friend or family member who had been. Sometimes prison was a revolving door; other times it was more of a one-way trip, or a trip with a very delayed return. Some of my students vanished for years into this far-flung penal colony—without charges, without trial. Gone, just like that.
The long closures at the university forced us professors to improvise. Lucy and I held courses privately at home, in restaurants, at the Lemon Tree, at my father’s office in Salaheddin Street—wherever we could.
With the revolving door of the prison system, my improvised courses on political ethics or the Great Books inevitably led to long discussions of my students’ experiences. I learned from these talks to see in prison a paradoxical parallel reality in which something established on the basis of oppression could actually be the best proof that nonviolence was the only effective instrument against our nation’s jail keepers.
An organized prisoners’ movement grew up after 1967. After their arrest, dissidents and trained guerrilla fighters were stripped of the guns they had thought could win them basic rights. Incarceration forced them to adopt a disciplined and nonviolent strategy to get what they wanted. What evolved out of this necessity was a well-organized leadership with an elaborate system of communication (mainly capsules passed while prisoners embraced their wives during visits) linking them with the outside, and with inmates in other prisons. It was astounding for me to imagine these wretched and forgotten men, guilty mostly of defiance rather than of terrorism, organizing themselves and, through intelligent and coordinated action, prying concessions from authorities. Over time, hunger strikes pressured the jailers into giving their prisoners soap, books, and writing materials, and permission to listen to the radio.
I was even more astounded by my students’ accounts of their interrogations. Given the situation at the time, it was hardly surprising that they brought back harrowing tales of sadistic manhandling like something out of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, or the Brothers Grimm. I heard about electric shocks to the genitals, beatings with truncheons, savage attacks by dogs, and what the Israelis called “shaking,” in which the interrogator, with a physician’s pliant help, clutched a prisoner by the lapels and shook him violently into unconsciousness.
It wasn’t always easy to estimate just how truthful such accounts were. What I accepted more or less at face value was what I heard from the students closest to me. From their total absence of shame, I knew intuitively that I was getting the truth.
They described in detail the lice, rats, and rancid food, the excrement-smeared walls, the cold showers, and the vomit-filled black hoods pulled over their heads and padlocked around their necks. The accounts of prisoners forced to strip naked brought to mind the obsession with Arab male sexuality in Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind. The most hair-raising story was of a student who was nailed into a casket for days.
But the details of one torture technique or another were secondary for me. It was the psychological dynamic of the interrogation process that I found intriguing. These village boys, who before their arrest couldn’t make heads or tails out of Kant or Sartre, returned from the interrogation room with a deep understanding of freedom. As paradoxical as it sounds, they reemerged from the Israeli prison camp emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually freer than they were when they went in. As far as I could gather, all the skill and brutality of the Israeli security system rarely achieved the desired results. If the harvest in information was meager, the unintended consequence was to turn these students into the full-fledged human beings I had tried with spotty success to produce through formal instruction. These young men exercised their wills by defying their interrogators, and in so doing the students became the teachers. I was again learning from them, not they from me.
I imagine an eighteen-year-old from a refugee camp sitting opposite his interrogator. The prisoner hasn’t slept for days. Hungry and cold, frightened and alone, he has no lawyer, no legal system behind him, and no one to speak up for him. No one really knows where he is or why he was arrested. Parents and friends are as far away as the moon. And the interrogator, twice his age and trained to break the will of those under his control, goes to work. He wants information, and from one direction and then another he probes the prisoner’s defenses. His logical tools, more effective than the medieval rack, hammer away at the prisoner’s mind.
But the teenager refuses to submit to the will of the interrogator. By overcoming his natural biological instinct for survival, he becomes aware of his own freedom—because he is no longer a slave to his physical needs. Somehow he finds the inner strength to say no. His body wants food and warmth and sleep; he wants to be back with his family and friends; he wants to live. Still, he refuses.
Chapter Fourteen
Murder on the Via Dolorosa
PONDERING THE STORIES OF PRISONERS reminded me of Avicenna’s notion of the will. It brought me firmly over into the existentialist doctrine of taking control of your existence and of creating yourself.
At Oxford, I had picked up the Rousseauian philosophical assumptions that regarded every man as free by virtue of merely being. It was a technical freedom, a theoretical postulate that regarded freedom as a natural condition willingly sacrificed to avoid the dangers of nature or of other men. According to this bourgeois myth, people gave up their native liberty and joined together in a society in exchange for property and security. The tales I heard from my pupils went directly counter to this: people stripped of every scrap of worldly freedom were becoming free. This would have made a lot more sense to Sartre or Albert Camus than to John Locke or for that matter my stuffed friend in London Jeremy Bentham.
“The prisoner”—I said in a lecture presented at Pavia University in Italy, shortly after the outbreak of the intifada—”first develops a consciousness of the need to rebel, to reject, to refuse to submit his will to that of the interrogator.”
This is the revolution of consciousness, where he develops the consciousness of the necessity to rebel … A person, a human being with a distinct individual identity, with a distinct personality, with a distinct individual will, is the total sum or collection of those acts of his which reflect the supremacy of his will, of his inner freedom. A person has identity to the extent that he has made his inner existential decision, and has decided to become master of himself, and has acted upon this decision. A person therefore is a function of his freedom acts, and personal identity is a function of freedom … We make our own essence; existence is prior to essence.
I realized that the interrogation room was really a contest of wills, and that if Palestinians as a nation refused to be broken, we would prevail over the interrogators. Once we chose to exercise inner sovereignty, we would prevail over the diktats of the military government.
With the frequent closures and the attendant difficulties of teaching on campus, those of us who lived in Israel’s “Eternal and Undivided Capital” increasingly shifted our teaching, but also our political activities, to restaurants, cafés, and our homes. During one of the closures, I set up my temporary office in Father’s law office on Salaheddin Street. There I had my classes, received visitors, held meetings, and pondered my riddles.
A course I came up with, together with a fellow Birzeit philosopher, deserves mention. Called Freedom, the class attracted some of the brighter students and activists. With tear gas circulating through the students’ lungs, we didn’t analyze freedom autopsy-like, as in a survey course; we hopscotched from topic to topic, unpacking fr
eedom by identifying its most salient features for people living in a repressed, and repressive, society.
When we talked about freedom of speech, for instance, students didn’t start off with J. S. Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Isaiah Berlin, as their peers at Harvard do. We gave them local newspaper articles, such as the broadsides that appeared in Al-Quds after I had defended the blaspheming student poet. We did the same thing in discussing academic freedom. Instead of asking the students to crack open thick tomes on the subject, we presented them with Military Order 854, and an anthology of homegrown pamphlets and leaflets put out at Birzeit in our various and sundry protests. Then we moved on to sexual freedom, a taboo topic if ever there was one in our culture.
My own classroom for the topic of freedom was Jerusalem and its environs. There were days I spent hours wandering the city, smoking water pipes in my favorite café—my “grapevine”—and listening to the locals, merchants, professionals, artisans, and day laborers. I established contact in particular with a group of cabdrivers, who gave me the latest word from the street and who also told me about their troubles with Teddy Kollek’s municipality, as well as with the tax authorities and the police.
Already immersed in the grassroots resistance throughout the West Bank, I started paying closer attention to the ways Israel was imposing its laws and procedures on the daily lives of average people, especially around Jerusalem.
This was brought home again and again just by driving around the countryside during university closures, visiting students and friends. In my red ‘77 Peugeot with yellow Jerusalem plates and my harmless look of a luftmensch, I usually breezed past the checkpoints erected along new highways tailor-made for Jewish settlements. The city of Maʾaleh Adumim came into being when the government seized the grazing lands of the Jahalin Bedouin tribe, ostensibly for use as an army firing range. Bulldozers started working in earnest in 1982. (It was a common trick to declare an entire area a closed military zone, clear the people out, and then later turn it into a settlement.) At the opening of a new settlement in October 1982, Begin’s minister of energy, Mordechai Zippori, explained the logic of settlement construction as “the backbone of the Zionist movement in the West Bank” and as the “only means to defeat any peace initiative which is intended to bring foreign rule to Judea and Samaria.”1
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