During the time I was in prison, I kept seeing my lawyer, Allegra. She helped me appeal every six months during my administrative detention hearings, and she kept me thinking about the future. I must have proposed to her twenty times while I was at Megiddo. She told me I was crazy.
Finally, I got out of administrative detention in 1998, and I started working for human rights groups, like the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group and B’Tselem.19 We’d investigate cases of human rights abuses against Palestinians. And I stayed in touch with Lea and Allegra and other lawyers who were fighting in courts to end the torture of prisoners. In 1999, they took some cases to the high court in Israel, and they won a huge victory that made certain kinds of torture illegal.
It was also around this time that I got Allegra to agree to marry me. I think I just had to ask her enough times. As a prisoner, I’d learned to be persistent in speaking out for what I wanted, and I used the same tactics to win over Allegra. We just sort of agreed we might get married someday soon, and then she went to the U.S. on a fellowship. She was working on a book about how a Second Intifada might be right around the corner. But she didn’t finish it, because the Second Intifada started in 2000 while she was still writing and that spoiled the concept of her whole book!
During the Second Intifada, I was still working for B’Tselem, and sometimes I’d sneak into Jerusalem to talk to Palestinians for reports on human rights abuses. I also worked with Gideon Levy, a reporter for Ha’aretz, which is Israel’s major newspaper. I’d show him around the refugee camps and help with stories. When I went to Jerusalem, I’d always bring a really nice leather briefcase, so I’d look like a businessman. But in May 2001, I was stopped by a police officer in Jerusalem and arrested for not having a proper permit to travel into the city. So once again I was headed to prison.
I was taken back to Al-Muskubiya. Already, interrogation had changed, but not much. They still put me on a chair that was angled downward with tight cuffs. But now, instead of hitting, shaking, that sort of thing, they tried to mess with my mind more. They would do things like show me a photo of my house in ruins and tell me it had been demolished. But it was all Photoshop work.
At the time, Allegra was in the United States. She was supposed to be done with her fellowship and come back to Israel in June. She was in Boston trying on a wedding dress when she heard I’d been picked up. She got back just in time to represent me during my administrative detention hearing. She showed up along with Lea, her mentor and my first lawyer. They had a photographer from Ha’aretz with them who was going to testify on my behalf, and they brought a lot of snacks—burek, cola, and cigarettes.20 Allegra also brought wedding bands with her. We got to have a reunion in the lawyer’s meeting room, and that’s where we announced that we were engaged. We had a little party with the burek and cola, and then Lea took some pastry to the judges to tell them we were getting engaged, and she asked if we could have a little more time in the meeting room. Meanwhile, the Ha’aretz photographer took pictures of us exchanging rings. It was beautiful!
But the judges had no mercy. The prosecutors kept bringing up how I was mean to my interrogators, cursed at them, called them sons of bitches, and how I wouldn’t cooperate. That was their big case for me being a security risk to Israel, just that I wasn’t nice enough in the interrogation room. Allegra was wonderful—she demanded that the judges look at the deep grooves in my wrists from my recent interrogation. But they refused. And so I ended up spending another year in administrative detention.
When I got out in May 2002, Allegra and I were married, and she was five months pregnant when I was arrested again in November. This was right in the middle of the Second Intifada still, and a lot of former prisoners were being arrested. The night they picked me up, they were looking for my brother. But because I had a record, they decided they’d pick me up as well. I was sentenced to six months administrative detention and sent to Ofer Prison.21 I was in prison when our son Quds was born in April 2003. Allegra was all by herself during the birth. When June 2003 came around, I was up for another renewal of detention. This would have been the seventeenth six-month detention I’d been given during my lifetime. My lawyer Lea tried to bring photos of Quds into court near Ofer to show me. It would have been the first time I’d seen my son, but the judge refused to let me see the photos. He gave me another sentence of six months. During the hearing, I was able to slip the photos of my son into my prison uniform when nobody was looking, so I at least had the photos of my son in prison with me. My detention was renewed twice more for a year and a half total, so I didn’t get to go home and meet Quds until he was almost two. By that time I had spent almost seventeen years in prison all together, with at least thirteen of those years being in administrative detention without charges.
THIS IS LIFE FOR THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE
I’ve been out of prison since 2004. When I got out the last time, I started studying law, and now I’m a lawyer, like Allegra. Last January, I was in military court to help my friend. I argued his case in front of a judge who has sentenced me to administrative detention many times before. I was going to rub it into his face that I was a lawyer now. But they didn’t let me enter the courtroom.
I also defend prisoners who have been arrested by the Palestinian Authority.22 The conflict with the Palestinian Authority is even more complicated than the occupation. I make visits to the prisoners in the PA prisons, and in some cases they get tortured and humiliated there even more than with the Israelis. I visit my clients in prison every day. And I sit down and talk to them and listen to them. The conditions are extremely harsh. In the important cases, the information from the interrogation is shared among the intelligence agencies of the Americans, Israelis, and the Palestinians, together.
I still see many of the people from my time in prison, including other prisoners and my first lawyer, Lea Tsemel. She’s like a mother to my wife and me. She still visits me now. She’s a good person.
Now we have two girls and two boys. It’s even. The boys are ten and seven, and then the girls, five and two. To raise a baby girl is much easier than raising a boy. They’re much calmer, and they’re nicer, easier to deal with. Boys just want to rebel all the time. But my boys are not aggressive. The kids just want to play. They’re very sweet.
Of course, I worry about my kids and the situation they’re growing up in. I want my kids to grow up in a good atmosphere, with justice and liberty and freedom, and a life with no problems. We’ve been deprived of so many things, and that, of course, always takes its toll on you. So whatever my kids ask from me I get for them. I buy them expensive bicycles and that sort of thing. Allegra says no, but I spoil them because I was deprived of so many things when I was a child. I want my children to have what I never had. I admit, I have a psychological problem with shoes! I buy them for my kids all the time. Every one of my four children has dozens of pairs of shoes. Every time Allegra asks me, “Why did you buy that?” I say, “You can’t possibly understand.” One of my daughters also has five little backpacks.
I would like to go to the U.S. to visit my wife’s parents. My wife is an American, but the U.S. government rejected our visa application on security grounds.23 What’s the security problem? I haven’t been convicted of any crime by an Israeli court since I was a child. I’ve been trying to get a visa for a long time. The lawyer for the visa asked for $120,000. We’ve stopped trying.
From a physical aspect, I do still have effects from the torture. I still can’t feel my left hand completely due to the nerve damage I got from being handcuffed. And it’s not easy to live with the fact that I went through such a horrible experience. It has impacted me.
I probably would be different today if I hadn’t gone to prison. Probably I would’ve gone to med school instead of law school. But I’ve never really thought much about how my life would be different if I hadn’t gone to prison, because this is life for thousands—millions even—of people in refugee camps in Palestine, in Lebanon, or in Syria. It’s not a personal problem, it’s a broader thing. I want to solve it because it affects everybody else, not just me. If the situation doesn’t change, my son Quds may soon have the same experience. This is a problem for generation after generation—we’ve been fighting for sixty-five years. It’s going to be the same thing until we break the cycle.
1 Administrative detention is a system of incarceration without official charges used by occupying military forces. For more information, see the Glossary, page 304.
2 The war in 1967 is known as the Six-Day War. For more on the war and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank, see Appendix I, page 295.
3 The Deheisheh refugee camp was established for 3,000 refugees in 1949 and is one of three refugee camps in the Bethlehem metropolitan area. Deheisheh is located just south of the city. Current estimates of the camp’s population range up to 16,000 persons living in an area that is roughly one square mile.
4 Ramla is a city of 65,000 people in central Israel. Today the city is approximately 20 percent Muslim—most Arabs fled the city during the 1948 war.
5 Amman, the capital of neighboring Jordan, is a city of around 2 million residents. Amman grew rapidly with the influx of Palestinian refugees after 1967.
6 In 1967, the Israelis seized the West Bank from Jordan, which had administered the region since 1948. For more information on the wars in 1948 and 1967, see Appendix I, page 295.
7 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has provided services such as education and medical care to Palestinian refugees since 1949. For more information, see the Glossary, page 304.
8 Rabbi Moshe Levinger was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and helped lead the movement to settle the West Bank after the Six-Day War. He was especially active in asserting settler presence around Hebron, a large West Bank city fifteen miles south of the Deheisheh camp.
9 After the Oslo Accords were put into full effect in 1995, Bethlehem was administered by the Palestinian Authority. Between 1967 and 1995, however, Israel maintained full control of the region and outlawed symbols of Palestinian nationalism such as flags.
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.
11 Al-Muskubiya (“the Russian Compound”) is a large compound in Jerusalem that was built in the nineteenth century to house an influx of Russian Orthodox pilgrims into the city during the time of Ottoman rule. Today, the compound houses Israeli police headquarters, criminal courts, and a prison and interrogation center.
12 Lea Tsemel is a prominent human rights lawyer in Israel.
13 Damun Prison is in northern Israel, near Haifa. The facilities were once used as a tobacco warehouse during the British Mandate, but they were converted to a prison by Israel in 1953. It houses up to 500 prisoners.
14 Now called Shikma Prison, the facility is a maximum-security prison just outside Ashkelon, a city of 115,000 people just north of the Gaza Strip. Shikma was built following the Six-Day War in 1967 as a lockup for security prisoners in the newly occupied Palestinian territories.
15 In 1986, the same year Abdelrahman was transferred to Shikma Prison, Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu was captured by Israeli intelligence officers in Rome and sentenced by military tribunal to Shikma for leaking details of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He spent eleven of his eighteen years in prison in solitary confinement.
16 Abdelrahman was arrested under suspicion of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). For more information, see the Glossary, page 304.
17 The Ktzi’ot Prison is a large, open-air prison camp in the vast Negev desert, located forty-five miles southwest of Be’er Sheva. Ktzi’ot was opened in 1988 and closed in 1995 after the end of the First Intifada, and then reopened in 2002 during the Second Intifada. According to Human Rights Watch, one out of every fifty West Bank and Gazan males over the age of sixteen was held at Ktzi’ot in 1990 during the middle of the First Intifada.
18 Hadassah Medical Center is a health care complex in Jerusalem.
19 The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group was founded in 1996 partly by members of the Palestinian Authority to record instances of human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. B’Tselem was founded by Israeli citizens in 1989 to document human rights abuses in the occupied territories.
20Burek is a traditional Turkish pastry stuffed with cheese, potatoes, or other fillings.
21 Ofer Prison is a large open air prison near Ramallah. At the time of Abdelrahman’s arrest in 2003, there were approximately 1,000 Palestinian men and women serving administrative detention sentences.
22 The Palestinian Authority was chartered to administer parts of the West Bank and Gaza following the Oslo Accords in 1993. As part of the Oslo agreement, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for security control in parts of the West Bank such as Bethlehem. For more on the Palestinian Authority, see the Glossary, page 304.
23 It is very difficult for any Palestinians who have spent time in prison to travel, and especially to get visas to the United States, even if they were held under administrative detention and never charged with a crime.
