WE WOULD DRAG THE MEN BACK
The empty half of the glass is that the occupation is crazy. But the good half, the full half, is that I met my husband, Hazem, and got to know him because of the occupation. He was my brother’s friend. It was in the early nineties, during the Intifada. My brother had come back from abroad, and he’d invited his friend Hazem to our house for a visit. Because our house was on the main street in town, there were Israeli soldiers constantly in the road. Palestinian boys would throw stones at the soldiers in their tanks from windows, and the soldiers would sometimes come down from their tanks to search the houses for the boys who struck their tanks. So just as Hazem was arriving at our house for a visit one day, some Israeli soldiers stopped him and started to arrest him.
It wasn’t uncommon during the Intifada for girls and women to try and stop arrests—it was rare for soldiers to arrest or beat up women. So women would sometimes try to intervene, argue, and drag men who were getting arrested into their houses. So I went out to help when I saw Hazem get picked up by the soldiers. Just as I started to argue, the soldiers let him go. So it was that moment when he saw me helping him, endangering myself for him, that he noticed me. And after a couple of months, he came to my family and proposed. I ended up leaving school just before graduating to marry Hazem.
We got married in 1992, when I was around eighteen, and I had a son in 1993 named Moad and a daughter in 1994 named Duha. My husband studied at a vocational school, and he got a job as a maintenance man at a factory in Ramallah that made sweets, cookies, chocolates, that sort of thing. It took me some time to learn to cook, but I eventually became very good at it.
Marriage didn’t really change me in terms of activism. Not a bit. I went to demonstrations even after I was married. One thing that did slow me down, though, was that I was diagnosed with lupus when I was twenty-six. I was pregnant, and I had a miscarriage. When I went to the hospital for tests, that’s when they discovered that something was wrong. I would get pain in my hands and feet, and swelling sometimes as well.9 The pain was constant, and the doctors tried a lot of medicines and did a lot of tests before they diagnosed me with lupus. The pain was especially bad in cold weather. Doctors tried to treat it, but the pain didn’t go away. I had to develop tricks to deal with the pain, just to keep going. I had to have faith in God. I stayed involved too—I could take my mind off the pain by seeing friends, seeing family, being out in the community.
After the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords were signed, the Palestinian Authority took over.10 There were fewer demonstrations, and I also had my kids, so I wasn’t as involved in street protests. But through our mosque, I started getting to know people whose family members had been killed in the Intifada, and many who had family members still in prison. So between the First Intifada and the Second Intifada, I spent a lot of time helping families who had been affected by the conflict. A lot of us did—we all felt it was right to help each other. That’s when I started getting involved with prisoner rights. I would go and see the families of prisoners to make sure they were doing well. So many young men were arrested in the Intifada, and it was really hard on the families. This is one of the things that helped keep me active and involved even after I was diagnosed with lupus.
I was involved in supporting families with prisoners especially after the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, and I became very well known in Al-Bireh and Ramallah. I got out as much as I could. I couldn’t do everything around the house that I wanted because of my disease, but luckily, my family helped out so much. My husband helped to take care of the house when I couldn’t, and my two kids were helpful from a young age as well. So I did my best to maintain my home, and I stayed involved in the community as much as I could as well.
I BECAME A SUSPECT
I am 100 percent sure that the Israeli police target religious people like me. If you want to go to the mosque and pray, that’s okay with Israeli soldiers. But after prayer in the mosque, I like to sit down and listen to a lesson or lecture and Islamic teachings. If it’s a lesson in the mosque about women’s issues, such as our periods, that’s okay. But if I wanted to learn something about what’s happening in Egypt or another political issue, for the Israelis, that’s not okay. Islam has two parts—your relationship with God, and your relationship with society. So if you want to focus on your relationship with God and pray, that’s okay. But once you focus on your relationship with society, that’s not okay, and it will probably get you noticed by the authorities. I think any mosque where there are lectures about politics—whether about Palestine or other Islamic countries like Egypt or Syria—Israeli authorities will be suspicious about what’s going on there.
Israel is an occupying country, and the most important thing for them is security. Therefore, if they suspect for a split second that someone is active against Israel, they don’t hesitate to go and arrest them. I think between my work with prisoners and my attendance at political lectures in the mosque, PA or Israeli police started to monitor me. The Israelis don’t want anyone to have anything to do with the prisoners because they want to cut the prisoners off from the community. So if you’re working on behalf of the prisoners, giving comfort to them, you become suspected as being someone working against Israel. So I became a suspect.
And unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority is actually the same way. I think sometimes they take their lead from the Israeli government in monitoring what goes on in mosques. This is especially true since Hamas took over in Gaza.11 The PA supervises lectures and monitors what gets said at mosques in the West Bank. They don’t want a religious party like Hamas to gain influence. They even target young men just for going to the mosque too much. They’ll watch and see who goes to the mosque in between the five daily prayer times. If they see people talking at the mosque in between prayer times, the PA will wonder if they’re conspiring to do something bad. They see Islam as a threat.
In 2005, there were municipal elections throughout the West Bank, and many of the families I worked with encouraged me to run for office in Al-Bireh. I submitted my name under the Change and Reform List.12 The party I was running with was interested in challenging Fatah, which controlled the PA. We thought they were too corrupt. I didn’t win the elections, but running for office made me more visible to authorities, I think.
The PA was worried about religion and politics, about Hamas, and about any challenge to their power. Sometime after the election, I began hearing from people I knew at the mosque that PA authorities had been asking questions about me. In fact, they seemed very interested in the network of women in the mosque who stayed connected to prisoners and worked with families of martyrs. I wasn’t the only person they were asking about.
Around that time, I decided to go back to school. First, I had to pass the tawjihi exams, and I had to be disciplined about studying material I’d been away from for so long.13 It was hard. I had my sister, who was a teacher, help me study. I passed in 2006, and in 2007 I enrolled in psychology and social work courses through Al-Quds Open University.14 I had ambitions for myself—I wanted to be a social worker. I didn’t have the time to be a full-time student, but I took classes for years and really enjoyed them.
Then, in April of 2008, Israeli officers raided my home. Luckily, none of us were home at the time. But they went through all our things, and they took all of our important documents—our passports, our UNRWA cards that allowed us to receive refugee benefits, my children’s birth certificates, even my medical records. We had to send requests to get them back, and eventually they returned some of my medical files and my children’s birth certificates. That was it.
GOING INTO THE UNKNOWN
I was arrested on August 1, 2010. Israeli soldiers came to our house at around one a.m. My family was sleeping. The soldiers knocked on the building door, and one of the neighbors let them in. And they came up to our floor and started pounding on the door—there were at least twenty soldiers.
I asked them to wait because I needed to put on my hijab and get dressed.15 After I opened the door, they told us to gather in the living room, and they took everyone’s IDs. My children were around sixteen, seventeen years old at this point. There were many soldiers, and they started searching the house. And then the one in charge came to me and told me, “Kifah, I want to talk to you in person,” and he took me into another room.
We sat down, and he told me he was going to start investigating me there. He asked questions about my activities, my affiliation with Change and Reform, connections I might have to Hamas. He was threatening me, saying if I didn’t answer him, he would arrest me. He really wanted to know if I knew anyone associated with Hamas. Then he told me, “I know you’re sick. You have a disease, and that’s why we have a doctor to oversee your situation.” After around thirty minutes, he told me to get ready to go with them. And so they arrested me, and they told me I was going to the station. The soldier in charge said, “We’re going to respect your disease and your age, and we’re going to let you bring your medicine with you,” and they didn’t handcuff me. But I was not allowed to talk to my family before I left. They allowed me to say goodbye very fast, and that’s it.
The officer who led me away told me, “You’re going to be in jail until your daughter gets married.” My daughter, Duha, was around sixteen and a half, and what he meant was, You’re going to be in jail for a very long time. Duha told the commander, “Bring my mom back soon because my brother’s a senior in high school, and he needs help preparing for his exams.” The captain told her, “You’re strong enough to take care of your brother.”
I mean, we’re Palestinians. Maybe we’re used to these things. You find that you have patience you didn’t know about. My children were strong, thank God. As a Muslim believer, I just thought, This is in God’s hands. I was afraid because I was going to the unknown. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I had my faith in God.
As the soldiers were driving me to the station in the car, they were very focused on the fact that I was sick. The commander kept saying, “Don’t think that because you’re sick it’s going to stop us from taking you.” They took me to Al-Muskubiya, in Jerusalem.16 Once there, they strip-searched me. The one who searched me was a female soldier, but it was still a strip search—I was mortified. And then after the search, they took me directly to the doctor. He took a look at my medicine and asked me about my disease. Then they took me to the investigation room. At around six a.m., the interrogation started.
They took general information about me and my family. They asked me again if I knew anyone in Hamas, who they were, how I knew them. I know a lot of people in Al-Bireh because I live here, I’m active in the community, and I stay connected to families that have suffered in the Intifadas. But my connections to people in town are all social, not through some political affiliation. I kept asking them, “Why are you afraid of these social relationships?” They wanted to know about my work with prisoners’ families, and they were trying to get me to confess that I had helped transfer money from Hamas to the families of political prisoners and martyrs. But I hadn’t done anything for Hamas, and they didn’t have any evidence. They interrogated me for two hours before I was allowed to rest.
They kept investigating me for four days. They had three shifts, so they would change the officer, but the questions would remain the same. They knew that, because of my disease, I am affected by the cold, and they had the air conditioning on the whole time in the cell. It wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was very painful. I studied some psychology at university before I left to marry, and I knew that folded arms meant there’s something you don’t want to say. So I would sit with my arms uncrossed because I didn’t have any secrets.
One of the times they interrogated me, an officer tied my hands to the chair and left for around fifteen minutes. When he came back and untied my hands, they had become almost black. My lupus causes a lot of circulatory problems, and I just wasn’t getting any blood to my hands. I told the officer, “You know that I’m sick and I have a problem with my hands.” So when he went out the next time, he told me he wouldn’t tie me up if I promised not to move. I was allowed to sleep during the investigation. At nighttime, they took me to the cell, and I slept there and then went back to the investigation room during the daytime.
I still had this feeling of going into the unknown. I didn’t know where they were going with their questions, and they kept threatening me, saying they were going to put me in jail. The interrogating officer kept threatening me with administrative arrest if I didn’t confess to connections with Hamas.17 That was the thing that scared me most because even with no charges, they could put me in prison. At that point, my faith in God kept coming back to me.
WE’D RACE TO WASH THE DISHES
After the four days of investigation, they took me from the station to the prison in HaSharon.18 When they took me to prison, they didn’t tell me it was administrative detention. I never had any charges.
It was very hard to be in prison because it’s a new place with new people you’ve just met. And it was very hard for me, as a mother, to leave my children behind. And another thing was that my disease made it very hard for me, and I suffered a lot. During the four days that they were investigating me, they showed some concern for my disease. They didn’t leave my hands bound, and they let me take my medicine. But after those four days, they didn’t pay any attention to my disease.
In prison, there were seventeen women, and about four women in a room. We had our cots, a few shelves for our clothes, and a couple of chairs. In the winter, we had a space heater.
We were together all the time, and we became friends. There was a woman there who I was friends with before, but we became better friends in prison. The fact that we knew each other before prison was the only thing that was lucky about my time there.
Our day started with the Fajr prayer.19 After that we would stay in our beds and put on our head scarves and veils, and then the officer came in and counted us. After that we would stay in our beds, praying and reciting from the Quran until noon, because there was not much to do. We couldn’t even spend much time cleaning up because it was a really small room. I remember I would keep the small shelf for my clothes unbelievably tidy because there was nothing else to do.
At twelve, we would say the noon prayer. We would pray all together. And after that we would prepare ourselves for the break, when we got to go for a walk outside. The break would be three hours. But it wasn’t something we always looked forward to. Break time was the worst during the summer, because the break was between noon and three p.m., when it was unbelievably hot. In the winter it would be cold and raining, and if we chose to go out, we had to stay out for three hours. So sometimes we’d be soaking wet in the rain or be very hot. We could choose to just stay inside for the whole day. But most of the time, we would go out because it was the only change we’d get. It was the better of two evils.
In my case, I would go out if it was sunny. If not, I wouldn’t take my chances. I would stay in my cell. I asked for gloves so I could protect my hands from the cold, but the guards denied them. For the whole three hours of the break, I would keep walking. The courtyard was only about thirty feet long, and we kept going back and forth in those thirty feet the whole time. But that was the only activity we got for our legs.
After that we would go back to our cells and start preparing for our main meal, which was lunch. They would bring us food three times a day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had a hot plate that we were allowed in the cell, and we would re-cook the food. We would never keep it the same way they brought it. The food they brought was often potatoes or spaghetti. And it was not completely cooked. We Arabs like our food well done, and we like our spices, so we would spice the food up and make it better.
After we had lunch, we would race to see who was going to do the dishes. Not because we loved doing the dishes so much, but because we wanted to keep busy. After that we would say the Asr prayer, and then we would go back to our recitations or watch some TV. The only channels available were Israeli TV channels and PBC because Israel and the Palestinian Authority have to approve what’s broadcast.20 Or we would just sit on the bed and read. In my case, I would keep walking so I could keep my blood circulating, and I would read books from the small library in the prison. I read almost fifty books while I was in prison. Some of the books were religious, but I really enjoyed the ones about social work or psychology.
MY DISEASE CAN BE FATAL, BUT IT DOESN’T KILL FAST
After three months, my daughter came to visit me. She came with my sister, and they were able to visit every couple of weeks. And after six months, my husband was allowed to visit once. But my son wasn’t allowed to visit me. My family needed permits to visit me because the prison was in Israel, and my family had to apply to visit. My son wasn’t granted a permit, maybe because it was harder for young Palestinian men to get permits to get into Israel. I also had contact with some human rights organizations, such as Addameer, a prisoner rights organization. They tried to get me a doctor, a specialist for my disease, but it was denied by the prison administration.
The main reason for my sickness is that I have a lack of immunity, and it’s difficult for me to fight off viruses. And I have a lack of sensation in my extremities. For example, one day when I was first in jail, I was cutting potatoes—not with a knife because you can’t have a knife, but with a can-opener. So I was using that to cut the potato, and I cut off part of my finger without even feeling it.21 It bled a lot, and I fainted because I was so worried about the situation. And the other women talked to the officers and asked them to take me to the infirmary. That did not go well at all. My finger took almost three months to heal. It became infected with gangrene and turned completely black. It was very, very painful. After that, the other women would not allow me to touch anything, especially that can-opener, or anything wet because I needed to heal.
When I got sick, I would sometimes have to wait two weeks to see a doctor. All the different prescriptions that I gave them, they never filled them and I didn’t get any medicine. The thing is, even if I get a flu, it’s really hard to recover because of my lack of immunity. So it wasn’t necessarily just emergencies, it was the simplest diseases, coughs or colds, that made me suffer. So one time I started screaming in the infirmary, and I told them, “You keep saying you’re all about human rights and treating people right, and you’re not giving me even minimal medical care.”
