When I was released, the tawjihi exam was in a month’s time, and I had studied nothing. So I decided to do it the next year. But then one of my relatives sort of challenged me. He said, “You can’t do it, you’re not ready.” I hated anybody telling me I couldn’t do something, so I took the exam right away, and I earned higher marks than my classmates.
YOU DON’T SHUT UP IN TIMES OF WAR
After I passed my high school exams, I went to Baghdad to study physics. It was the most challenging topic in school, and I like challenges. Also, I learned about religions early in my life, but they never gave me answers. I started looking more to science as the way to understand what was around me. Iraq when I lived there was paradise. I lived the best times of my life there. Then in 1976, a couple of years after I started college, I volunteered to go to Lebanon during the civil war.8 I was twenty years old. I’d been raised as a committed nationalist, and I believed at the time that I needed to liberate Palestine through guns. I believed that I shouldn’t stay silent about what was going on in Lebanon, the refugee camps, and the massacres. So I volunteered to go. I went with my best friends who I had met in Baghdad. My family didn’t know. I actually wrote several letters and gave them to somebody to send—one every two weeks—saying that I was getting some training in one of the factories in Iraq and that was why I couldn’t come back to visit that year. If my mother knew I was in Lebanon, she would have had a heart attack, so I thought, Why put her in that situation?
We were part of a unit and we got some weapons training because otherwise we would have probably died immediately. You have to understand the environment. The minute we stepped into Beirut, we were in a battlefield.9 If a Palestinian refugee camp was here, then a few meters over was a Phalangist Christian neighborhood.10 There was no place you could be where you were not part of the war. My group was supposed to protect Palestinian refugee camps if they were attacked and help the civilians cope by providing some medical aid and food. Sometimes we would go out and look for snipers. There was no clear long-term plan, but every minute we had something to do. Every minute there was shooting, or someone injured, or people trapped somewhere who needed to be evacuated.
One of the most tragic things that I faced was when Maronite militias managed to overrun a refugee camp called Tel Al-Zaatar.11 Many of the men in the camp were killed. We met the women and children coming out of there after being under siege for eighty days. They were starving. They looked like ghosts. That scene shocked me. So after seeing those refugees, my friends took me to Al-Hamra Street, which was where all the nightclubs were. It was neutral territory. You could sit there and the one you had been fighting in the morning was sitting next to you with a drink.
I never killed someone as far as I know. I never saw someone, pointed a gun at him, and shot him. When there were enemies, what we would do is to engage in heavy shooting to prevent them from shooting us. In the fighting, my friends and I were pretty much useless. We weren’t trained enough to protect anybody. But I think we compensated for that by helping people. I cannot stay silent when my flesh and blood is being attacked and killed. Otherwise I will not have peace inside knowing that happened and I did nothing.
After spending three months in Lebanon, I started thinking, What the hell are we doing here? It was obvious to me that in Lebanon, nobody could achieve any kind of victory. So why fight? I saw a few of my closest friends lose their lives. I was ready to die, but it was extremely hard to witness the death of my friends.
Also, my image of the ideal freedom fighter that I had developed in prison started to have cracks in it.
Being a soldier is a specific lifestyle. You have a gun, you fight, you kill and sometimes get killed, and you get a salary at the end of the month. As a soldier, you just do your job, but people like me who volunteered would sometimes ask a hell of a lot of questions. It seems as though people often think, In times of war, everybody should shut up. But no, in times of war, everybody should speak. That’s what I believe. You shut up in times of peace, but you don’t shut up in times of war. After three months, I decided that I wanted to continue my studies. I didn’t want to be commanded by people who didn’t accept questions and didn’t answer them. So I went back to Baghdad.
By 1977, I was twenty-one years old and done with my bachelor’s degree. I didn’t want to stay in Baghdad or Lebanon. I was very committed to the Palestinian cause. I knew that the only places I could be effective in the Palestinian resistance was in the occupied territories or in Jordan, and so I decided to go back, even though I knew I could be arrested by the Israelis or the Jordanians because of my time in Lebanon.
We knew that because there were so many Jordanian students at our university—some of whom probably worked for the Jordanian secret service—that the authorities knew about our trip to Lebanon. I was always questioned by Jordanian intelligence when I was crossing from Amman back to the West Bank, and this time I suspected it would be worse. They took my passport at the airport in Amman and summoned me to interrogation. I lied, and I don’t feel proud of that, but it was necessary. I almost got away with it, but then one of my friends came into Jordan earlier than expected and the intelligence connected our stories. The officer said, “I’m not going to arrest you. I’ll give you one night of sleep and then tomorrow you come to my office, beg me to listen to your story, and tell me everything you know, and maybe I’ll allow you to go home to Beit Sahour. Otherwise, I might arrest you.” When he let me go, I just took off. With help from one of my uncles, I was able to bribe an officer at the bridge over the Jordan River and cross into the West Bank the next day.
WHEN IS THIS GOING TO STOP?
Ten days after I arrived in Beit Sahour, in the summer of 1977, I was arrested. Israeli soldiers came to my home at midnight and I was taken to Al-Muskubiya in Jerusalem.12 I spent three months under interrogation. At nights, I would be taken to the old stables the police used as cells and there would be questioning with beatings. They had some information about the Lebanon trip, but they weren’t sure about it. They asked about names that it wasn’t possible for them to invent, two names in particular of individuals who had come to Lebanon with me but weren’t part of my group of friends. But they didn’t have enough information to know that I was in Lebanon. They were guessing. After the initial questioning, I spent at least forty-five days in solitary confinement, then they released me without asking me another question. I don’t know why. It was either a mistake and they forgot about me, or it was a punishment or some kind of revenge. I’m still puzzled about this.
I came back to Beit Sahour, but I had trouble settling in. I spent a couple of years trying to figure out what to do next. Then I was arrested again at age twenty-four. At this point, nobody in my family knew I had been to Lebanon—that was my secret.
I was taken back to Al-Muskubiya. Instead of taking me to one of the cells, I was taken to the yard. My hand was cuffed to a water pipe that was so high I couldn’t sit. I had to be standing all the time, and they put a sack over my head. I was left there for five consecutive days and nights, standing, no sleep at all and without anybody talking to me. The pain in my legs was bad because all the blood sort of settled down there, and I got disoriented after five days and nights without sleeping. Every now and then I would collapse from exhaustion and I’d be dangling from my wrists. After that I was taken immediately to the interrogation office. I was afraid. Every now and then they’d strike me in the head without warning, so I was tense all the time. I remember the only thing in my mind was, When is this going to stop?
In the interrogation center they wasted no time. The interrogator told me about the confession of the man who had been with me in Lebanon. He said, “Listen, I don’t need your confession.” At that time, Israel had issued what was called the Tamir Law. Tamir Law was an amendment to the laws of the military court laws that allowed the judge to sentence people based on the confessions of other people, not the accused. If the judge was convinced that the informant was telling the truth, then he didn’t need the confession of the accused. The interrogator told me, “Listen, you are going to court whether you confess or not. We have enough evidence to send you to jail for a long period of time. It’s up to you to decide.”
So I told them about my involvement. I said I’d volunteered to do humanitarian work in the refugee camps in Lebanon, and that, after spending three months there, I decided to go back and continue my studies. The interrogator said, “We know that you did more, but we’ll accept your confession.” And I signed my confession and it was sent to court. I was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of probation. After the sentencing, my family knew that I had been in Lebanon. My mother told me that she had sensed there had been something wrong and she never believed the letters that I sent, but she was happy that I was safe and that she saw me in front of her and not in a grave.
TOTAL CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
After I was released from prison around 1980, I got a job teaching at the Lutheran school in Beit Sahour.13 It was around that time that I met a woman named Selwa—she was studying at Bethlehem University then.14 We got to like each other. She was one of the prettiest girls in Beit Sahour. Before too long, Selwa and I got married.
Then in 1983, I managed to get a scholarship from the British Consulate and went to do my master’s degree in physics at the University of Reading in England.15 I didn’t like Reading. It’s a very conservative town and there was a big drinking culture. I also don’t like British tea. I got used to Iraqi tea where you get the tea and boil it until it’s black like tar and then you pour some of the tea in a cup with some water and ten spoons of sugar. I got addicted to it, and so British tea seemed tasteless. But I completed my master’s degree. My wife didn’t come with me, but she visited two times.
When I finished my master’s, I returned to the West Bank. Then I talked to a university in Amsterdam, and they invited me there to pursue my Ph.D. and do research with them. But when I applied to leave, I was refused. The Amsterdam university communicated directly with the foreign ministry in Israel and were sent a letter that said without any reservations, “If Mr. Andoni leaves the country, he will be a threat to the security of the state of Israel.” So I was forced to stay. I was living an ordinary, frustrated life. Something inside me was boiling.
Not long after that, in 1987, the First Intifada erupted.16 Suddenly the environment changed. A few months before the Intifada, people in Beit Sahour had been busy going to parties and shopping. Suddenly, everybody was talking about occupation and politics. Everybody became a committed nationalist and a lover of Palestine. Yesterday, they were shopping in Tal Piyot and the day before they were in Eilat giving money to Israel.17 Now these same people were in the streets in the thousands. I had seen small demonstrations that started and ended, but I hadn’t seen a whole nation standing on its toes as they were in 1987. I was inspired.
And then it really began—demonstrations, marches, occasional clashes with soldiers and settlers. Soldiers came and abused people. We started organizing, and I started to have meetings with my friends and community leaders. I didn’t want the common way of doing things where somebody throws a stone and the soldiers come and attack them. To my understanding, we were trying to convince the Israelis that occupation was not sustainable. In the back of our minds, some of us thought—and I was one of them—that we needed to move carefully towards total civil disobedience. I can’t claim that I had done any reading on this. I knew about Gandhi and the civil rights movement in the United States, but I had never studied them in-depth. But it was obvious to me that with thousands of people, the approach could be powerful. There was almost a consensus in Beit Sahour that in order to ensure community involvement in the Intifada, we had to inject some democracy. And from that came the idea to let each neighborhood elect its own committee. And then out of those committees we would have a central committee that would have authority in town during this period. The elections were like the traditional Greek election. There were no ballots or boxes. It was out in the open. Each neighborhood gathered and agreed on the people to represent them. Then those committees decided on a group of four or five people to become the central committee. I was one of the members of the central committee. Since we didn’t have courts, this committee had the power to determine law.
The business owners of Beit Sahour decided to stop paying their taxes to Israel. People were very enthusiastic about the tax strike. Almost everyone in town participated. The military government started confiscating people’s cars as a way to pressure them to pay their taxes. Or they would confiscate everything in someone’s shop or home.
One of the leaders of the strike, Elias Rishmawi lost around $100,000 worth of goods, and at that time $100,000 dollars was like $1 million today. But nobody gave into the pressure. Probably because Elias lost so much, others felt ashamed if they complained about losing $5,000. He set an example. It was during this time that the people of Beit Sahour gathered in front of the municipal building and threw out their identity cards. Our message was, we don’t recognize Israeli authority, and if this ID represents their authority over us, then we don’t want it.
The tax revolt led to a curfew for all of Beit Sahour. So schools were closed, universities were closed, kindergartens were closed, and we started realizing that this would go on for a long time. It wasn’t going to be two or three weeks. So we established what we called underground schools. With little effort, different neighborhoods started organizing teachers and students and then opening schools in homes, apartments, any empty place, and students started going there. We realized that what our community was doing had to be reported so that it could spread to other communities. And that’s why we started investing real effort in attracting the attention of media, people interested in the region, visiting groups, and fact-finding and human rights organizations. And this I can claim I played a major role in because I knew English, and I was a good communicator. We started an organization called the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between Peoples, a group designed to start a dialogue between Palestinians and people of other nationalities. International media started paying attention to our cause.
Perhaps as a consequence, the military started cracking down on our town. Beit Sahour was placed under a siege and nothing was allowed in or out. So then came the idea of victory gardens, just like in World War II. Suddenly each neighborhood had a garden. Beit Sahour was under siege, but everybody in town was sitting on balconies and having barbecues. That drove the soldiers crazy. And then came the idea of the cows.
EIGHTEEN WANTED COWS
I want to warn you that I’ve told this story so many times that probably each time something gets added in order to make it more funny. It’s a community story, because everybody’s added a bit to it. But the bulk of the story is true. It goes like this.
One of the hardships we faced during the First Intifada was a lack of milk. Most milk in the region was produced in Israel, and we were boycotting Israeli products. Some of the leaders of the Beit Sahour resistance decided to start a ranch, get cows, milk them, and provide milk to the community for free. In order to make it more symbolic, we wanted the milk to be distributed at three in the morning at the doorsteps of each family, and the bottle would be distributed by a young person masked with a keffiyeh. That was the concept. But we needed cows. Where would we find the cows? The only cows around were in an Israeli kibbutz.18 So we needed to buy cows from the kibbutz and bring them to Beit Sahour. Finally, a group of people who had some money volunteered to pay for eighteen cows. The group went together and bought the cows, loaded them in trucks, and brought them to Beit Sahour around midnight.
Now, the people who bought the cows were doctors, engineers, business people, university professors—not dairy farmers, okay? So the trucks arrive in Beit Sahour and someone says, “Guys, let’s get the cows out of the trucks.” But the cows didn’t want to get out of the trucks. One clever man came up with the idea of making a loud noise to scare them. Unfortunately, the plan worked too well. The cows jumped out of the trucks and ran away into the hills. Imagine teachers, scholars, doctors, and business people in suits running after cows at midnight in the mountains. The story goes that one teacher—a small man—chased a cow and nearly cornered it before the cow turned around and started chasing him! So it was all chaos until neighbors were awakened by the noise and came out. They were Bedouin farmers and they knew about livestock, so they managed to control the cows and get them into pasture.
A few days after the cows arrived near Beit Sahour, the military governor of the region and a big force of soldiers came to town. Each cow from the kibbutz had a number branded on it to identify the cow. A soldier photographed each cow, a personal portrait with its face and number, like wanted criminals. The military governor said the cows were a security threat to the state of Israel, and if they were still there in twenty-four hours, he would arrest everyone. You would have to ask him why he was so upset. There was nothing we had done that was illegal. I think what bothered him was purely our defiance. Anyway we figured, Let’s stick to our plan and see what he does. The military general didn’t take the cows, but he arrested a few people for punishment and threatened the villagers who were providing water for the animals. So the pressure was mounting, and finally we decided to evacuate the place. There was a hidden cave that would be suitable for the eighteen cows, and we decided to move them there.
It happened that the owner of the land that the cave was on was a butcher, and if those cows were discovered, he would say that he’d bought them for slaughter. There was nothing illegal about this, so that was a good cover. And we kept up with our milk deliveries.
The military governor couldn’t let go of the problem of the cows. He knew he was being disobeyed, and he wanted badly to know where the cows were. So he laid siege to the town, and he started a search from home to home, from hill to hill, from cave to cave in the entire area of Beit Sahour, searching for the cows. Even helicopters filled the air above the hills, trying to see if there was any strange movement. In town, soldiers walked around with photos of each cow, stopping people in the street and asking them, “Have you seen this cow?” The people they stopped would joke, “Well, the face is familiar. I’m not sure. The nose I remember was a little smaller.”
The search continued for a couple of days. Finally the soldiers arrived at the butcher’s place, but the cave was well hidden so you couldn’t discover it easily. They looked carefully and found nothing and were about to leave when one of the cows made a noise. So the soldier who heard the noise went back to the cave, looked here and there—nothing. Then he found another cave and stuck his flashlight into it and here were the eighteen wanted terrorist cows sitting there. So he started shouting “Eureka, eureka!” When the military governor arrived, he asked the butcher, if he had enough money to buy eighteen cows, why didn’t he pay his taxes? At that time, the tax revolt was still in process. The law allowed the military to arrest anybody for forty-eight hours who didn’t pay taxes. Then he had to be released, but they could arrest him again. So he started this procedure against the butcher. Forty-eight hours, released for a day, forty-eight hours, released for a day.
So we moved the cows to farms in Beit Sahour and in nearby villages. The cows were distributed at different homes, two in each place. That was less threatening than a single mob of cows, and the governor was finally satisfied that he should stop there.
But three or four years later I was summoned to the headquarters of the regional Israeli civil administration. When I arrived, a man stood to greet me. It was the military governor. He had done well with the cows, so he was promoted very quickly. I didn’t know why I was summoned, but after he finished speaking about all sorts of things, he said, “Ghassan, I want to ask you a question. Where are the cows now?” I couldn’t help but laugh. He was obsessed with the cows even years later.
WE MIGHT BE ANNOYING, BUT WE’RE GOOD-HEARTED PEOPLE
During the first two years of the First Intifada I was in and out of jail. I started getting arrested more and more under administrative detention.19 I was beaten frequently. I could figure out immediately that they didn’t have enough information to be able to squeeze me. So I didn’t lie, but I didn’t volunteer information. They would detain me for eighteen-day stretches, which was the legal limit at the time before receiving a military charge. Then two days later they would come and arrest me for eighteen days, and then release me.
Finally, the military governor’s assistant wrote me a summons for “day arrest.” I had to sit at the civil administration building from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, and was then released after the Beit Sahour curfew. I had to find my way back to my home from Bethlehem, so if any soldier saw me walking the streets, I might have been shot. It continued like that for about ten days. All of my brothers were jailed at some point, too. In total, I have been to jail nine times, around four years all together.
