Food takes on nationalist importance in prison. Long years of struggle were needed to improve its quality; even so, Arab prisoners insisted on spicing up what they got with Palestinian flavor. During my stint in Ramle I learned a raft of recipes, such as how to turn juice into marmalade and milk into yogurt and even how to bake cakes. I felt like a child in chemistry class as I watched wide-eyed as my Hamas cell mate turned an empty Coke can into a stove. He spread out margarine on a thin sheet of toilet paper as if it were a piece of bread, then rolled the sheet up and stuffed it into the soda can. Leaving a wick on top, he lit it up with a matchstick. Now the contraption was ready to heat up whatever assortment of vegetables or tinned products or eggs the prison authorities provided us with.
Prison culture itself was bafflingly rich, and in unexpected ways. There was the Russian Jewish guard who befriended a prisoner who had studied in Moscow and therefore spoke Russian. The prisoner was serving a twenty-seven-year sentence. The homesick guard was even lonelier than the prisoner, and the two spoke for hours through metal bars in the neighboring cell.
Just as you would expect in a high-security prison, roll call took place three, four, or fives times a day. As the sound of the truncheon banged against the iron bars of one cell after another, we had to stand up to be counted. When the guards came to our area, we stood up straight, no one bent his head, no one deferred to them. What was astonishing for me was that the officers and the prisoners showed no outward signs of disdain for one another.
I was full of ideas in prison, and with so much time on my hands—and no telephone calls or disruptions, and with the comfort of knowing I couldn’t be thrown into prison because I was already there—I read and wrote more than I had in a decade. Besides the books I had taken with me the first night of my arrest, and the religious texts I borrowed from the Hezbollah inmates, my reading list included War and Peace. Jamal wanted me to read it. I had always admired Tolstoy’s ruminations on freedom and the will, and now with my outward freedom taken from me, I reread the relevant passages with special relish. During a visit, Jamal also gave me volume two of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Mother, perhaps as a joke inspired by my birth in Damascus, sent me her old battered copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
The galley proofs for No Trumpets, No Drums were ready, and I read through them sitting on my bunk, which was something my Hamas cell mate found amusing. “They stick you in jail and you still want peace with them?” My other, more academic, pursuit was to write a review for the journal History and Philosophy of Logic on a book on al-Farabi by Fritz Zimmerman, my German friend from the Warburg Institute. I signed the review and gave “Ramle Prison” as my return address. (When the review appeared, the editor had regrettably replaced “Ramle Prison” with “Jerusalem.”)
My thoughts also turned to religion and Islam, not because of a blinding light but because of my roommate, who, like true believers everywhere, was so convinced that the daily weather report could be gleaned from his holy writ that he read it incessantly.
I had never shaken off my belief in Islam’s basic humanism and its essential harmony with rational thought. Thanks to Mother, God and I had a long relationship behind us, interrupted by years of relative indifference and skepticism, He for me, I for Him. Now here we were again, together in the same cell.
While an Israeli prison may not be the most obvious place to ponder the divine, over the three months, I read my cell mate’s Koran over and over, not skipping around, but in one go, from cover to cover. Each time I finished I was left with the impression of an extremely rational text in which you are guided through a very elaborate and clever system. The whole business of divine rewards and punishments, which at face value seems like a gruesome mixture of terror and pleasure, in fact fits into a psychological regimen engineered to guide humans away from wrongdoing, and to encourage them to be good.
The other thing I noticed is something Islamic scholars have a way of glossing over, and for good reason, given its radical implications. Islam’s message to Man is that he’s on his own; he can no longer count on miracles or divine revelation or the deus ex machina. I gleaned this from the fact that Mohammed marked the end of the long period in mankind’s infancy during which angels whispered in our ears as parents do to their children. After eons of messengers, oracles, and prophets, Man’s age of intellectual puberty had come. The time had arrived for Man to throw off the training wheels and look to Reason for future deliverance.
One other message I got from my reading was one regarding human dignity. If an illiterate camel driver named Mohammed could close the final chapter of Revelation, then, according to Islam, one person wasn’t inherently better than the next. All were equally capable of achieving true knowledge and living a good life.
Once a week Lucy and the children came to visit, and brought me books and news from the world outside. Making the arrangements for the visits was a bureaucratic headache of the first order. Lucy first had to get a permit to drive during curfew hours, and then another one to visit the jail. Once there, she and the children were frisked, searched, identified, and vetted, and suffered interminable delays until we got our fifteen minutes of talking and touching fingers through holes in a wire screen. By this point, prison officials knew about the capsule-in-the-mouth trick and didn’t allow kissing.
For me, the week began and ended with these fifteen minutes. My family came and went, and I was led back to my cage to worry about them all alone in the house in Abu Dis, in the midst of curfews and political chaos. Jacob’s dark intimations were more alive than ever in my imagination.
When I urged her to be careful, Lucy reassured me. With my arrest, she said, she suddenly felt more secure than ever. Our neighbors had become an extended family, and kept an eye on them. One night they even deposited two sacks of sugar and rice on our doorstep. “You have no reason to worry about us.”
One day the communist serving the twenty-seven-year sentence gave me a book his brother, serving a sentence in another jail, had sent him to pass on to me. “To Sari, the humanistic nationalist,” ran the dedication, “the steadfast olive tree, with my heartiest wishes, Mahmoud Safadi, Nafha Jail, 1991.”
It was a journal, fifty blank pages bound with sturdy cardboard. Mahmoud had made it with the thought that I could write something for my family. On the cover he had pasted together a collage of an Arab peasant woman walking as though in the midst of a forest of barbed wire. Above the image, he had glued the word FREE in red, cut out from an English magazine. On the spine he added the phrase CHILDREN ARE THE ULTIMATE VICTIMS.
I ended up filling the book with a letter to my three sons. I write to them about my arrest and life in prison; about what I wish for them in life; and what I wish for our people. The book begins with a preface:
Ramle Prison, January 29, 1991. I give this letter as a present to my children who will also be my friends in the future. This gift will not give you pleasure like other presents I’ve brought back from trips to London or Paris. However, it may last longer than those other gifts, and it may be more useful to you in the coming years, though I would not dare to make that judgment. It is a collection of thoughts to you and about you that have crossed my mind while away from you.
My first aim was to assure them that prison wasn’t such a terrible place. I refer them to my cousin Salim, who served sixteen years of a life sentence for planting a bomb in 1969. “Give him a ring. He’ll tell you what it’s like.”
The letter describes the lives and fates of my fellow prisoners, such as a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon who had served out his sentence and was now waiting in vain for a country to receive him. “He wants to go to Algiers, but he can’t arrange it. He said to the representative of the Red Cross, ‘Take me anywhere, Cuba or Tanzania, fly me out or by foot, or on a limping donkey, take me to Hell, just get me out of here.’ ‘Unfortunately, Hell does not have a government immigration office to look into your request,’ replied the Red Cross worker.”
I write about a pitched battle between a Fatah man and an aggressive rat, with the former, after a long touch-and-go fight, finally winning the day. Then come the cockroaches. “Today we’re launching a campaign against cockroaches. Comrade Mohammed has promised to clean up the crumbs from his table …
“So you can see,” I conclude after a few more stories like these, “things aren’t so awful. Look at it as a place of rest and recuperation. Here I can lie down for hours, there are no telephone calls, no meetings, and the food comes to our room, like room service at a hotel.”
I assure them that I also have access to newspapers, radio, and TV, luxuries available to me thanks to a generation of political struggle inside the prison system. “You might think that once someone ends up here the struggle is over. In fact, he continues his struggle, now for a bar of soap, now for a book, a visit, a cigarette, for decent food. Many men have died confronting the prison authorities … It seems to be our destiny as Palestinians to hop from one struggle to the next …
“Prison is not for us,” begins another page of reflections, quoting a fellow prisoner. “It is for thieves and murderers and drug addicts and smugglers, just not for the honest student and the businessman, the father and mother whose only crime is to fight for their freedom.
“Why was I arrested?” I ask rhetorically.
Thousands, tens of thousands of Palestinians share my fate; over half a million since 1967. In my case, they couldn’t pin anything on me earlier, so they used the Gulf War as a pretext … They’ve become so loony that someone in the Ministry of Defense has said I’m the brains behind a spy ring; Bibi Netanyahu is still telling the world that his government is investigating other members of the same ring. The truth is that I am for peace, but that the Israelis don’t like my voice of moderation. I want a true, balanced peace that isn’t capitulation and that preserves our dignity and serves the interests of the two sides, not just one at the expense of the other. This is what I’ve been writing, speaking, and living for.
The truth prevails … we will soon have victory, we will be free and our people will have their independence. If we today are paying the price for this it is so that you and your sons will not need to go through the same suffering, and that you will breathe freedom and advance the progress of mankind through your creativity.
I feel guilty that you don’t have a normal life like everyone else. Perhaps the fact that your mother is English might make it more difficult for you by alienating you from your society. This is the reason why you must have a strong will. To search and find the solid rock within you. Once you find it, you will find yourself. This rock consists of being honest with yourself—and coming to terms with yourself. It is a matter of hanging on to what is right, and with sovereignty deciding your own thoughts and actions.
This was the rock that my father always talked about when I asked him about the source of his strength. He was one of the few people I’ve ever known who had this strength, as if he carried it around in his pocket. This is the rock of the self that you, perhaps even more than others, need to discover. Maybe the difficult conditions in which you find yourself may help you by making you stronger. I wish for all of you to be creative without any restrictions or fears—to determine your identities as you yourselves wish them to be determined.
Above all, I want you to know that I love you and your mother, and it is because of this love that I am now in prison.
Chapter Twenty-two
Madrid
THE LETTER TO MY CHILDREN also recounts the sense of irony I felt when reading War and Peace. How can it be, I ask them, that Tolstoy has had a more lasting impact on culture than the great Napoleon, whose shadow falls on every battle scene in the book? In prison I thought a hundred times about leaving politics behind and devoting myself to philosophy and teaching, maybe even branching off into fiction writing. One of my literary ideas was to finish my fairy tale, another belletristic invention that came to mind was a Graham Greene–style detective story. The plot I sketched out centered on the backpacker shot to death on the Via Dolorosa in front of my home. I also pledged to spend more time with my children, perhaps even talk Lucy into having another child, this time, I hoped, a daughter.
Running away from politics has been an ingrained habit since youth, and I would have heeded the wise counsel of childhood if it hadn’t been for the fickle Middle Eastern climate pulling me forcibly back into it.
The Gulf War ended in February 1991, while I was still in jail, and right away the American administration turned its attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Americans had a debt to pay to the Egyptians, the Saudis, and to the Arab world at large for having supported the war, and one way they paid it was by launching a Middle East peace initiative. Out of the blue George Bush, Sr., made a stunning policy statement: “A comprehensive peace must be grounded in … resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of territory for peace.” He went so far as to couple Israeli security to Palestinian political rights. And if that wasn’t enough for Prime Minister Shamir, James Baker made it clear to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: “I don’t think that there is any bigger obstacle to peace than the settlement activity.” I was dancing in my tiny cage after hearing this.
On the surface, Shamir was distinctly unsettled. After a war that had promised him so much—the destruction of the mighty Iraqi army and, more important, the sidelining of Arafat on the outside, with us on the inside—President Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, were coming at him with talk of “linkages,” a “Middle East International Conference,” and UN Resolution 242. Shamir took on a grim public pose. Certain Arab and Palestinian leaders came out in support of the new American policy, if only because it seemed to make the Israeli prime minister squirm.
Based on my earlier Likud contacts, my gut feeling was that Shamir wanted negotiations and was only pretending to kick and scream in order to improve his hand. But having to be dragged into something puts you in a better position than someone who shows up eagerly with his hands out, as if he’ll take whatever he can get.
The experience with Amirav and the prisoners in the Petah Tikva prison taught me to see behind Likud’s fiction of a life-or-death struggle against the “gang of PLO thugs.” What was driving Israeli policy was an objective demographic interest in maintaining a Jewish state. Like any market haggler, Shamir wanted to get the best deal possible, and if we let him he’d walk away with the store, a radiant smile pasted on his face. But if we were smart, we could cut a good deal.
With this in mind, I cautioned Faisal against jumping too eagerly into negotiations. I was afraid that with Arafat desperate for diplomatic redemption after his disastrous dalliance with Saddam, he’d give too much away.
Faisal had asked a visiting Arab member of the Knesset to get my opinion on whether or not to meet with Baker during his upcoming visit. “Let’s wait,” was my message to Faisal. “We have an excellent negotiating position, and have to make the most of it.” Israel had a keen self-interest in getting a peace process off the ground. Solving the conflict with us promised Israel a prize of incalculable political, economic, and security value: it guaranteed the demographic survival of the Jewish state and the normalization with the entire Arab world. One mustn’t give all this away for cheap.
To drive the point home I asked Lucy to deliver some reflections to the London daily The Independent:
Palestinians and Israelis today stand on the threshold of what may be a very promising future. But Israel cannot have its cake and eat it too. To expect that Israel can become a full and productive partner among the Middle Eastern states without either simultaneously or in advance accepting to resolve the Palestinian problem is to expect a miracle. The Palestinian problem, in turn, cannot be addressed except through the recognition of the Palestinian people’s sovereign right to live in freedom, as masters of their destiny.
I hadn’t yet finished my three-month sentence when Secretary of State James Baker held his first meeting with Palestinians.
It took place at the American consulate in West Jerusalem. Faisal led a Palestinian team that included Hanan Ashrawi and Saeb Ereikat, a fellow academic best known at the time for his work as editor at Al-Quds. Saeb and I had a lot in common. His uncle had been a military attaché and government minister in the British Mandate and then the Jordanian administration. His father had run a big bus company, only to lose it in 1967. Like me, Saeb had gone off to Britain and to America to study, and we had both returned to teach around the same time. He had gotten into trouble with fanatics on both sides of the conflict. In 1982 he called for dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, and was at once labeled a traitor. The following year the military government arrested him for “fomenting dissent” among Israelis by inviting some Israelis to meet with his students at his university in Nablus. Fostering sympathy between the two peoples was—and in certain Israeli circles still is—tantamount to a crime.
It was a stormy meeting at the American consulate. Baker didn’t pull a magic wand out of his briefcase to end occupation with the same finesse and speed with which American troops had cleared the Iraqis out of Kuwait. He showed up speaking of a “staggered” approach. UN Resolution 242 was the general yardstick for a final peace deal, Baker said to Faisal, but for now the Palestinians had to make do with “autonomy.”
After years of Israeli machinations and the various permutations of the term (the Village League’s, to name one), autonomy had turned into a four-letter word in the Palestinian lexicon. It’s hardly surprising that Faisal and his group of negotiators left the consulate grumbling.
The follow-up session two days later left everyone happy. Baker had had time to ruminate over the failure of the first meeting, and his advisers had probably given him a primer on Palestinian sensibilities. Whatever the reason, both sides felt that things were moving ahead.
Once Upon a Country Page 36