He began to question me. Did the Shin Bet give me a contact inside the prison? Did I meet this particular Israeli guy or that security guy? What was I told? What did I tell others? The more he interrogated me, the angrier I became. Finally, I just blew up in his face.
“Why don’t you stick to your religious stuff and leave security alone! All these guys are torturing people for nothing. They have no idea what they’re doing. Look, I have nothing else to say. I am going to do what I want, and you do what you want.”
I knew that things didn’t look good for me. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t torture or interrogate me because of my father, but I could tell that my uncle Ibrahim didn’t know if I was telling the truth or not.
At that point, I wasn’t sure either.
I recognized that I had been foolish to trust the maj’d. Had I been just as foolish to trust the Israelis? They still hadn’t told me anything. They had given me no contacts. Were they playing a game with me?
I went to my tent and felt myself beginning to shut down mentally and emotionally. I no longer trusted anyone. Other prisoners saw that something was wrong with me, but they didn’t know what it was. Though the maj’d kept what I told them to themselves, they never took their eyes off of me. Everyone was suspicious of me. Likewise, I suspected everyone. And we all lived together in an open-air cage with no place else to go. No place to get away or hide.
Time dragged on. Suspicion grew. Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people! As much as I wanted to, I simply could not find a way to justify that.
Soon it got even worse. Instead of one person, three would be under investigation at the same time. One morning at four o’clock, a guy ran through the section, scrambled up and over the perimeter fence, and in twenty seconds was outside the camp, his clothes and his flesh shredded by the razor wire. An Israeli tower guard swung his machine gun around and took aim.
“Don’t shoot!” the guy screamed. “Don’t shoot! I’m not trying to escape. I’m trying to get away from them!” And he pointed to the panting maj’d who glared out at him through the fence. Soldiers ran out the gate, threw the inmate to the ground, searched him, and took him away.
Was this Hamas? Was this Islam?
Chapter Fourteen
RIOT
1996–1997
My father was Islam to me.
If I were to put him on the scale of Allah, he would weigh more than any other Muslim I had ever met. He never missed a prayer time. Even when he came home late and tired, I often heard him praying and crying out to the god of the Qur’an in the middle of the night. He was humble, loving, and forgiving—to my mother, to his children, even to people he didn’t know.
More than an apologist for Islam, my father lived his life as an example of what a Muslim should be. He reflected the beautiful side of Islam, not the cruel side that required its followers to conquer and enslave the earth.
However, over the ten-year period that followed my imprisonment, I would watch him struggle with an inner, irrational conflict. On the one hand, he didn’t see those Muslims who killed settlers and soldiers and innocent women and children as wrong. He believed that Allah gave them the authority to do that. On the other hand, he personally could not do what they did. Something in his soul rejected it. What he could not justify as right for himself he rationalized as right for others.
But as a child, I saw only his virtues and assumed they were the fruit of his beliefs. Because I wanted to be just like him, I believed what he believed without question. What I didn’t know at the time was that no matter how much we weighed on Allah’s scale, all of our righteousness and good works were like filthy rags to God.
Even so, the Muslims I saw in Megiddo bore no resemblance to my father. They judged people as if they thought they were greater than Allah himself. They were mean and petty, blocking a television screen to prevent us from seeing a bareheaded actress. They were bigots and hypocrites, torturing those who got too many red points—though only the weakest, most vulnerable people seemed to accumulate these points. Prisoners who were well connected walked with immunity—even a confessed Israeli collaborator, if he was the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef.
For the first time, I began to question things I had always believed in.
“Eight twenty-three!”
It was time for my trial. I had been in prison for six months. The IDF drove me to Jerusalem, where the prosecutors asked the judge to sentence me to sixteen months.
Sixteen months! The Shin Bet captain had promised me I would have to stay in prison for only a short time! What did I do to deserve such a harsh sentence? Sure, I had a crazy idea and bought a few guns. But they were worthless guns that didn’t even work!
“Sixteen months.”
The courts gave me credit for the time I already had served, and I was sent back to Megiddo for my final ten months.
“Okay,” I told Allah. “I could serve another ten months, but please not there! Not in hell!” But there was no one I could complain to—certainly not the Israeli security guys who had recruited and then abandoned me.
At least I was able to see my family once a month. My mother made the grueling trip to Megiddo every four weeks. She was permitted to bring only three of my brothers and sisters, so they took turns. And every time, she brought me a fresh batch of delicious spinach patties and baklava. My family never missed a visit.
Seeing them was a great relief for me, even though I couldn’t share what was happening inside the fence and behind the curtains. And seeing me seemed to ease their suffering a little as well. I had been like a father to my little brothers and sisters—cooking for them, cleaning up after them, bathing and dressing them, taking them to and from school—and in prison I had also become a hero of the resistance. They were very proud of me.
During one visit, my mother told me that the Palestinian Authority had released my dad. I knew that he had always wanted to make hajj—a pilgrimage to Mecca—and my mother said he had set out for Saudi Arabia shortly after returning home. Hajj is the fifth pillar of the Islamic religion, and every Muslim who is physically and financially able is required to make the trip at least once during his or her lifetime. More than two million go every year.
But my father never made it. Crossing the Allenby Bridge between Israel and Jordan, he was arrested again, this time by the Israelis.
One afternoon, the Hamas faction at Megiddo presented prison officials with a list of petty demands, gave them twenty-four hours to meet them, and threatened to riot if they didn’t.
Obviously, prison officials didn’t want an uprising. A riot might end up with prisoners being shot, and the government bureaucrats in Jerusalem didn’t want to have to deal with the big fuss that would be made by the Red Cross and the human rights organizations if that happened. Riots were a lose-lose scenario for everybody concerned. So the Israelis met with the main shaweesh, who was billeted in our section.
“We cannot work like this,” the prison officials told him. “Give us more time, and we’ll work something out.”
“No,” he insisted. “You have twenty-four hours.”
Of course, the Israelis could not show weakness by giving in. And, frankly, I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Even though I was miserable here, compared to other facilities I had heard about, Megiddo was a five-star prison. The demands seemed silly and pointless to me—more phone time, longer visiting hours, that sort of thing.
Throughout the day, we waited as the sun moved across the sky. And as the deadline passed, Hamas told us to prepare to riot.