Then they questioned me for two days straight. They’d be asking me questions for twenty or more hours a day, with three or four officers asking the same sorts of questions. They weren’t really about anything particular—just questions about my life. They didn’t even accuse me of anything. I started to get very confused and disoriented. I fell asleep hundreds of times, but just for a second each time. When they saw that I was nodding off, they’d throw water on me to wake me up. They pushed me very hard. Twice a day, they brought me beans and released one of my hands. They said I had two minutes to eat. After two days of being awake, sitting upright, not moving, my legs and hands became numb.
They’d also tell me things to break me down. They told me that my house had been demolished, that my family had been killed. They brought pictures of my younger brothers and told me they’d been shot. I didn’t really doubt them, and I assumed I’d be killed too. Sometimes people just disappear, and I thought I’d be one of those people. I started to feel lost, just completely out of focus.
Finally on the third day, they let me know I was being held because of my association with the PFLP and because they suspected the PFLP was planning an attack on Israel. They wanted me to talk about it. I didn’t know anything about an attack, but I also didn’t want to give them any names of other people in the PFLP that I knew, so I stayed quiet. If I gave them names of other PFLP members, they would arrest them too. Sometimes they’d interrogate me for just a few hours a day, sometimes for twenty hours or more. When I wasn’t being interrogated, they sent me to a small, gray room—less than six feet by six feet. If I tried to lie down to sleep, my head and legs would be pressed against opposite walls. If I caused a problem in this room, like making too much noise, they’d cuff me and leave me bound up for five or six hours. They gave me just enough food to keep me alive. After a week, they gave me a few cigarettes but no lighter.
Sometimes in between long sessions, they’d put me in a cell with other Arab men. These men would tell me their stories, say they were from Hebron or whatever, and then start asking a lot of questions about me. It was pretty obvious that these men were informants, part of the interrogation, and that their job was to get me to talk when I was feeling less scared, more relaxed. They’d say things like, “I told the Israelis everything, and now I can sleep. If you tell them everything, they’ll be easier with you.”
I never saw sunlight. I never knew what time it was—evening, morning? I would sleep for a few hours, and I didn’t know whether I slept for one hour or for one hundred hours. I didn’t know what day it was. I didn’t know anything. I spent a lot of time alone, and my mind was going, but I had something inside that pushed me to stay strong.
JAIL IS A TIME TO MAKE AN EVALUATION OF YOUR LIFE
After about four months in Al-Muskubiya, I was taken to military court.15 There were around twenty soldiers there, all with guns. I felt alone and threatened, and I think this was part of the game. They wanted to scare me in any way they could. But I felt strong, because I was not just one person, I was one with the Palestinian cause. I was a civilian, I had the right to resist occupation, and I didn’t care about what they would accuse me of. I didn’t listen to what they said, really. They charged me with political activism, activity against the Israeli state, and being a member of an illegal political party—the PFLP. They had no evidence against me that I was part of any attacks on Israel, just that I had promoted the PFLP. They gave me three years.
I was taken to a prison near Be’er Sheva around August of 2004, not quite four months after my arrest.16 The amazing thing was that the route that the prison bus took to get to Be’er Sheva took me right through the site where my home village, Beit Jibrin, used to be. I had never seen it before, so I tried to see as much as I could as we passed through. When I saw the village, I was shaken. My grandparents had said so many good things about it, about the good old days. I had dreamt of it as a paradise. But the land was barren except for a few trailers that make up an Israeli settlement. There was an old mosque, and lots of ruins—old stones and parts of buildings that were thousands of years old.
My grandparents had been driven from their home by force, and here I was seeing it, again only by force. It was hard. I was alone. It reminded me that I wasn’t with my family, and I always imagined I’d see the village some day with them. It was a bad, lonely feeling. It was almost like I had woken up from a coma—I couldn’t make sense of everything that must have changed from that time before 1948, a time I knew only in my dreams.
Life at the prison at Be’er Sheva took some time to get used to. I spent most of my days inside my cell. The cells were about ten feet by fifteen feet, and there were seven people living in each one. There were bunk beds for each of us, but we couldn’t come down from the beds all together at the same time because there wasn’t enough space to stand. For example, when we wanted to clean the room, only two people could do the cleaning.
Everyone was from different places. Some people were very old, some people were young. Some had ten or twenty years in jail, and some had one year. If you wanted time alone, you had to pretend you were sleeping. From the first day, I began to get to know the other prisoners pretty well. Social relations in Palestine are very close—there are strong connections between Palestinian people. So you can find somebody in jail whose brother or friends you know and you can speak with him.
We had two opportunities to leave our room—once in the morning and once for an hour in the evening. We walked outside in the prison courtyard. In my section there were over a hundred people, but only forty people could fit in the courtyard. So forty people entered and walked in a circle in rows, four to a row. We had one hour, so we walked half an hour clockwise and half an hour counter-clockwise. One of the prisoners would clap when half an hour was up and then we’d walk in the opposite direction. As we walked, I thought, This is the circle of our life, of every day. And when we start at this point, after one hour we will be back at the same point.
The courtyard was mostly covered, so there was barely any sunlight even on bright days. Most of the prisoners started to feel sick, just from lack of sun. There were some small windows in the hallways outside the rooms, and if you wanted to get sun, you had to go there in the morning. But there was a pecking order. I was new to the prison, and there were older people who had been in jail for twenty years and they were sick, so it was more important for them to be in the sun than me. I didn’t really see any sun for over a year.
Slowly, my mind started to bend and adapt to life inside cell walls. Jail is a time for each Palestinian to sit with himself, a time to make an evaluation of his life. And it’s an important, powerful experience to have the time to learn and share stories with people in jail.
Sometimes we found somebody sitting by himself in the room with his mind on the outside world, and we knew we had to keep him from feeling alone. If any of us prisoners began to live with our mind outside the jail, we would start to feel down, depressed. So we would give each other a little time to think those thoughts, but if we saw someone looking pensive, we would go to him after maybe half an hour and start joking, discussing things, anything, just to keep him from getting lost within himself.
I was in isolation a few times—sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a week. This could be for something like having contraband, like cell phones. It was very bad in isolation. There was no bed, just a small room with a mat on the floor that you slept on. You had five minutes to go to the bathroom and do what you want, shower, clean—just five minutes. And then you came back to the small cell. Some people spend years in isolation.
There were often conflicts with the guards inside the jail. We would begin to shout or knock on the door and they would come and shoot us with pepper bullets.17 The bullets cut your skin and the pepper goes in.
The guards searched the room several times each day. When they did these searches, they would bring at least nine or ten soldiers to every room. Sometimes they came just to search. Sometimes they came to bother us. They might come at three in the morning, when we were sleeping. Within a second they’d open the door and nine soldiers would enter with their guns, shouting, “Get down! Put your hands up!”
Still, we were able to hide things sometimes. One thing that was important to us was a cell phone. We used the phone to get news, to talk to our families. At one point, it was my job to hide the phone every evening. We would take it out at six o’clock in the evening and use it until ten, twelve at night, and then hide it. I hid it in a lot of places—for example, we put it in the floor. We cut out a little bit of tile and put it underneath. But you had to be very fast and careful because when the guards came, they searched everything, even the floor sometimes. One time, they brought in a metal detector, and they were able to find our phone that way. They took it, and as punishment they took away visits for two months.
THEY WANTED MY FAMILY TO FEEL LIKE THEY WERE IN JAIL TOO
During the whole time I was under interrogation in Jerusalem, my family had no idea where I was or what was happening to me. Toward the end of my time in Jerusalem, someone who knew me from the camp spotted me as I was being escorted down the halls to or from interrogation. This guy told his mother about me when he got out, and then his mother told my mother where I was. Then my mother and father went to the International Red Cross to ask for permission to see me.18 Finally, two months after I was transferred to Be’er Sheva, they came to visit me.
When I first saw them, my mother had been crying. She was behind a pane of glass and we spoke into telephones. It was difficult for me and it was difficult for her, because we knew she was going to leave after forty-five minutes. During the visit I told them, “It’s okay, I’m good. We have a big space, and TV, and the food is good. We have meat, we have chicken every day, we have juice, we can drink what we want.” And all of that was a lie to make her feel better about the situation. It wasn’t easy, because I knew if anybody was released from jail, they would tell her what was really going on. And I knew that she knew I was lying, but she didn’t want to say it.
But she wanted to keep my spirits up as well. I kept asking about what was happening outside, and she told me everything was good—this friend was getting married, this one was about to graduate from college. There were a lot of bad things she didn’t tell me about. I know she lied because she wanted to give me a nice picture of the outside. So we were lying to each other just to keep each other happy.
My parents came twice a month. It was hard for them to visit the jail. They’d get on the bus at four in the morning and wouldn’t arrive until noon, and the visits were only forty-five minutes long. They wouldn’t get home until at least seven or eight at night. Sometimes when they came, the prison guards told them, “He’s not here, we took him to another jail,” or “He’s in court.” It wasn’t true. Once, another prisoner coming back from a visit told me, “Muhanned, your family is waiting outside.” I changed my clothes for the visit and waited for my turn. But every time I asked the soldier about it, he said, “Not now, not now.” Finally, visiting hours ended and the soldier said, “Your family didn’t come.” I told him my family was outside, and he went to check. When he came back he told me they had been there, but that they had to leave because visiting time was over.
You know, I didn’t want my family to come. I didn’t want them to spend all these hours just to come for forty-five minutes and sometimes not even see me. It was a punishment for my family. The Israeli authorities wanted to make my family feel like they were in jail too. So, one night, I used the mobile that we had hidden to tell them not to come anymore.
A couple of months after my parents first started visiting, my two younger brothers were arrested as well. The older of the two was sentenced to two years. He was nineteen. My youngest brother was given administrative detention for a few months—he was just sixteen at the time.19 I was the first, but my father and mother now say the Israelis have a map of the house since they’ve visited so many times.
When I was arrested, it was hard for my family. My mom didn’t leave the house for a while. But after she came to visit me the first time, she began to meet people and she began to see there were people who would spend all their lives in jail. They had families, wives, and children that they’d never see. So this gave her some perspective. She thought, My son, at least he will get released. And she felt the same way about my brothers. I felt the same way, too. There were a lot of people who had twenty-year sentences. So I felt I was just in prison as a tourist.
After a year and a half, in the spring of 2006, I was moved again, this time to the prison in Naqab.20 There I lived in a tent in the desert for eight months. There’d be maybe twenty of us in each tent, and huge walls around each section of tents. The walls were the same height as the apartheid wall.21 We were in the desert in June and July, the hottest time of year, under the sun all the time. It was like 104 degrees Fahrenheit, but we were just out in the sun. All the prisoners, they spent their time close to the wall trying to get shade. And there were so many bugs—mosquitoes, bed bugs. It was terrible. The only good thing was the other people, the other prisoners I met.
After the prison in the desert, I was transferred again to Shate Prison, near Nazareth, not long before my release.22 I spent a few months there. Then finally, in 2007, I was released.
I MADE MY ROOM LOOK LIKE THE ROOM IN JAIL
I knew the date I would be released, but not the place. They released me in Jenin.23 It was very far from home, and I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have anything. In 2007, the situation in Jenin was not easy. I borrowed a phone from a taxi driver to call my family and tell them to come and take me back to Bethlehem.
When I got home, I found a hundred friends, family, and neighbors waiting for me at the camp. All of them wanted to carry me on their shoulders or to hug me. I had spent the last three years speaking and living with a maximum of seven people, and to be around so many people all of a sudden, so much commotion, was overwhelming. I was happy, but it was a little too much. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, and I couldn’t focus.
The first day I slept in my own house, I woke up at six in the morning, alone. I had gone to sleep at four or five o’clock in the morning because I was celebrating with my family and friends, but I woke up at six because every day while I was in jail, we woke up at six to do the count.
For three or four months, I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to speak with anybody. I didn’t want to meet anybody. I made my room look like the room in jail—I filled it with some boxes to make myself a smaller space, and I had coffee and everything I needed around me in that one room.
Everybody who goes to jail has a lot of problems when they get released. For me, I had trouble speaking with more than one person at the same time, and sometimes I needed a long time to focus on all the details of a conversation. Also, sometimes I had a problem with—I don’t know how to say it—feeling secure. For example, if I heard a voice outside, I had to go and see who was talking. If somebody opened the door to my family’s house, I had to go and see who it was. Sometimes I’d be sitting in some public space with friends and I’d notice a person sitting behind us, staring at us. My friends, who hadn’t been to jail, wouldn’t notice that.
But still, I tried to get back into my life. I wasn’t as active anymore with friends or politics. But I started school at Abu Dis again in 2008. I was going back to my old art program, the one I’d been in when I was arrested in 2004. My family is educated, as are many people in the camp. Work is not easy to find, and we are not in a normal country. So you must study to have something to do. Having a B.A. here in Palestine is like the same level of qualifications as finishing high school somewhere else. I have four uncles—one has a Ph.D. from Rice University, one has a Ph.D. in education, one is an engineer, the other finished his master’s. Two of my aunts are getting their master’s. It’s the only way to make a living. My twin sister finished her master’s and is working for her Ph.D. So getting a degree was very important to me.
Still, it sometimes felt like the hardest thing in my life to go back to university. I had been out of university for almost five years, and when I came back, all my old friends were gone. People who had been studying with me, they were now my professors at the school. I couldn’t spend time with other students to discuss anything because they were five or six years younger than me. They felt the things they were discussing were very important, but I didn’t care if I had Ray-Ban sunglasses or how much my watch cost or whatever. So I found a distance between myself and others. To be honest, I skipped a lot of classes.
I wasn’t like that before jail. Before jail I was happy and proud to go in the morning to lectures, to attend university. I was proud of the books I was reading. But after jail, I was ashamed. I didn’t want anybody to see me going to school. I felt too old and that this time was finished for me.
But I also met someone, a woman who was about six years younger than me named Aghsan. Before long, we got engaged. But for me, having a girlfriend didn’t change much—it was still hard to adjust to being out of prison. For the Palestinian, the occupation changes everything, controls everything—your mind, your life. Aghsan is from Ramallah, and it should have taken me one hour to go and visit her coming from Bethlehem. 24 But at the checkpoint, Palestinians are stopped for hours, even if you are just going to meet your girlfriend. At the checkpoint you don’t know how long you will stay.25
I had to tell the soldiers at the checkpoint that I had been in jail, because if I had not been honest when they asked, they would have checked and it would have been a problem for me. They asked a lot of questions. And sometimes they didn’t ask anything, they just told me to get out of my car and made me wait. It depended on the soldier. If the soldier had a problem with his girlfriend, if he was having a bad day, he would make it a bad day for me. So during our engagement I would just go from Bethlehem to Ramallah to see my fiancée for a couple of hours and then head the opposite way to come back, and this was my whole world. After a while, I started to think the story of Romeo and Juliet was easier than my story. I thought, Why am I in love with a girl in Ramallah? London and Ramallah seem like the same distance. Is this really worth it? Sometimes I think the occupation will even stop love.
