The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (29 page)

Just prior to coming to Beit Ummar, I had learned that in Beit Ummar, too, there were weekly protest marches. By that point I knew of about half a dozen towns and villages that had joined the popular resistance movement. I felt a strong bond with Beit Ummar, both because of the bond between my family and the Abu Awad family and also because I personally loved Khaled and Ali
and their family and it hurt me physically to see what was being done to them. So I wanted to protest.

The day after the trip to Nabi Saleh was a very windy, almost stormy Saturday and Khaled took me to meet Yunis, one of the men behind the popular resistance. Yunis and I walked together from his house to the main road, trying to look casual so as not to attract the attention of the soldiers who were manning the checkpoint at the entrance to the town. We walked into an orchard where we met about twenty other protesters—Israelis, Palestinians, and foreign nationals—some who had come from other parts of the country. We began walking as a group towards the main road leading to Hebron, several people carrying flags and one person with a megaphone. Yunis told everyone in English that we were to stay on the side of the road and not disturb the traffic, and that this protest was completely non-violent so no stone throwing under any circumstances.

We reached the main road and less than two minutes after we began to walk an ocean of fully armed combat soldiers appeared as though out of nowhere. “Get in formation already, hurry up” I heard one of the sergeants calling his men. In no time there were two rows of soldiers pushing and shoving us, and several officers were running around as though this was some battlefield. I immediately began to argue with the soldier in front of me and insisted that they stop pushing us and leave us alone, but to no avail. I began to tell them what they were doing was illegal and then mocked them for showing up dressed for combat only to push around a few peaceniks with a flag. My voice grew louder and the pushing got harder. “Get him out of here” I heard one of the officers, a tall army major, yelling at the top of his lungs as two soldiers grabbed me by the shirt, shoved me away from the rest of the group and placed me by an army Jeep. I stood there for a while looking as the soldiers proceeded to push the protesters first one way, and then another. Finally I began walking back toward the group as they were being led across the busy road and up a steep terrace towards the orchard where we all met initially. As soon as I was near the group I noticed several army majors and at some distance I could see the brigade commander, a lieutenant colonel. He was an Ethiopian immigrant with a small physique and I remembered reading a story about him in an Israeli paper: He was considered a success story, one of few Ethiopian immigrants who succeeded in the brutal environment of the IDF. I began to call to him and tell him he was a criminal and that he and the other officers were a shame to their country and to Jews everywhere. The major who ordered me removed the first time then came to me, and grabbed me himself, shouting, “He’s under arrest for incitement, get him the hell outta here, now.” Once again two soldiers dragged me to the Jeep but this time they proceeded to handcuff me. At one point a young blond soldier with a ski mask covering his face approached and stood very close to me. “Cowards and criminals always cover their face when they do dirty work,” I said to him. He yelled at me to shut up and I was
placed inside the Jeep, the door slammed in my face, with a single young soldier to guard me. A few moments later the major opened the door, warning, “Now you will pay for this!” “No,” I said. “You will pay when you are brought before the war crimes court at The Hague. You are not soldiers! You are a sad and pathetic excuse for soldiers. My father was a general and I can tell you that you are a sorry sight for an officer.” He slammed the door again and we drove off. Suddenly the Jeep came to a screeching halt. The door opened, “Which general is your father?” It was the major. He was so curious he couldn’t contain himself. “He was a real officer not like you, in fact he warned that the IDF would deteriorate and people like you would emerge as officers. You are a shame to all Jewish people. Oh, yes, and my father was Matti Peled.”

He slammed the door a final time, and off we went to the Hebron police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba.

Kiryat Arba is an Israeli settlement built in Hebron, one of the first ones built in the West Bank. It is a ghetto, albeit one that Jews impose on themselves, and the Hebron police station is a small ghetto within a ghetto. To enter the settlement, we had to pass through a fortified checkpoint and weave past large concrete blocks and an electronic gate guarded by sentries. As we rode through this very strange town, we drove past groups of religious Jewish kids and mothers with baby carriages to the police station, where we had to go through a sentry post and electronic gates all over again.

“Fuck these settlers,” I heard one soldier say to the other. “They treat us like shit here and we have to protect them.”

As I saw all this I began to think to myself,
Palestine’s landscape is the kind that beckons you to open doors and its people are hospitable and always welcome you with open arms. It is a land of hospitality and kindness
. Yet the settlers and their protectors have chosen to impose themselves on this land and its people, to take the land by force and close themselves within fortified ghettos, called settlements. Kiryat Arba, just like the other settlements in the West Bank, is an open wound in an otherwise peaceful and welcoming land. How or why people choose to live like this is beyond me.

The soldiers hustled me into the police station, where they were supposed to hand me over to the police. But the station commander, a short, athletic-looking police officer with cropped white hair and an air of self-importance, was adamant that he wouldn’t take me.

“I can’t arrest this man without the officer who arrested him present. He has to be here in person to give a statement.”

“They said they’ll send a fax from the brigade headquarters,” replied one of the soldiers, caught between the police and the army.

“Tell your commanders that this is a democracy,” the station chief said. “This man has rights. We have to follow the letter of the law or I will be forced to release him.”

The soldiers were baffled. The exchange between the two authorities, the army
and the police went on for hours, each side unwilling to budge while I sat in the middle, very calmly watching this unbelievable spectacle.

Finally, the station commander came out of his office, clearly exasperated, and explained in slow, simple terms to the soldiers, “Look, he is an Israeli citizen and he has rights. It’s not a Palestinian that I can just beat up and throw in prison.”

One of the soldiers turned to me. “It seems that the law is on your side,” he said.

The hours passed, and I somehow knew the major wouldn’t come. Finally it was over. One of the soldiers said they were releasing me and he asked where I wanted to be dropped off.

“Back to Beit Ummar where you picked me up.”

“It is a hostile place and you will not be safe there,” he said. “Why don’t I release you in here in the settlement in Kiryat Arba and someone can come and pick you up from here?”

“Thank you,” I said. “But my friends in Beit Ummar will be expecting me.”

I did not expect them to agree but there we were off again in the Jeep, leaving this ghetto of fanatics behind and returning to Beit Ummar. I called Khaled, and he said he’d wait for me at the entrance to Beit Ummar by the checkpoint. I then called Mazen just for fun. I enjoyed dialing my Palestinian friends from this fortress on wheels, which is exactly what the army Jeep felt like. It ensures that the soldiers see nothing but wires and a hole big enough to fit a gun barrel and shoot. The beautiful Hebron hills and olive trees do not enter through their windows, and neither do people’s faces.

When we reached Beit Ummar, the soldiers warned me again, “This is hostile territory, and no one can guarantee your safety here.” I thanked them again and walked peacefully into Beit Ummar. The look of surprise on the soldier’s face was equal to the look of surprise on the faces of the Palestinians standing around at the entrance to the town as I emerged from the belly of the armored beast. The storm had subsided by then and it felt good to walk in the cool air.

In the summer of 2011 I went to back Beit Ummar to protest again, and again I was arrested. This time we marched towards the settlement of Karmei Tsur that has been eating up Beit Ummar land for years, and now was in the process of expanding and taking yet more land. We marched among cultivated terraces of fruit trees and dirt roads. The soldiers were more brutal this time and there was a new deputy brigade commander, an army major, in command. We were ordered to turn back and within minutes the pushing began. As I was walking away I got shoved really hard by a young soldier, and as the terrain was hard enough to balance, I turned and told him to back off. Within seconds, the deputy brigade commander was in my face. He placed me in a choke, grabbed and twisted my
arm, severely spraining my thumb, releasing just as I thought he was going to fracture it. He then asked for my ID and charged me with attacking an army officer and placed me under arrest. “I want four men watching him, he assaulted an officer,” he yelled. Another one of the commanders, an army captain, came with four soldiers and stood around me. “Your CO is a liar, you really should report him and quit your posts,” I told the captain and soldiers as they stood around me. I showed them my swollen thumb: “Look at this, who do you think assaulted whom? Do you really believe I assaulted a fully armed combat soldier, not to say a major in uniform?”

“Shut up, we saw you assault him,” the captain replied. “And him!” he added as he pointed to a young red-headed soldier. “Hey, he assaulted you too, didn’t he?”

They soldier just looked down and walked away.

“Your major and your captain are liars! You should report them both and quit this despicable work!” I yelled at the young red-headed soldier. “Is this what you signed up to do when you joined a combat unit?”

I was held at the same spot for some time while the protesters, all 20 of them, dispersed. “I can’t believe it takes so many fully armed IDF combat soldiers to subdue 20 unarmed protesters. When did the Israeli army become so weak and cowardly?” I asked as loud as I could. I then suggested to the soldiers that one day they will all return to apologize to the people of Beit Ummar at which point one of the soldiers begged his officer to let him “show me not to talk like that.”

I was taken to the Jeep where the commanders stood around all sweaty and dusty. “By the looks of the dust and sweat one might think you were all real soldiers in combat. But you know what you did today was not combat,” I told them. “It was sad and pathetic and all you got was me. This was no heroic battle, and you are certainly no heroes.” The deputy commander then had me searched, took my iPhone and erased the video and photos I took, looked through my bag and generally tried to show he was in command. “You are a sorry sight for officers,” I said.

Once again, I was taken to the Kiryat Arba police station—and this time an officer did show up to place the charges. It was not the deputy commander, who by then had my passport, but the captain. He told a tall tale about how I attacked him, resisted the arrest and forced him to wrestle me and forcibly take my ID out of my shirt pocket. “What pocket?” I asked the investigator as I showed him my pocketless shirt. The captain also said I called him a Nazi. “Too bad he is not here to say this to my face,” I told the investigator who then told me that they always charge protesters that they arrest with calling them Nazis.

All of the ridiculous charges were easy to dispute, although by the time I was questioned the officer left and I could not confront him. Some of my exchanges with the soldiers were caught on video and put on YouTube. In the end, I had to sign a document promising I would not return to the region for a period of 14 days. I was returning home to California a few days later, so it mattered little
and I signed the document. I was released, but this time the soldiers flatly refused to take me back to Beit Ummar. I was dropped off on the main road to Hebron, outside of Kiryat Arba, and waited until friends from Beit Ummar came by to pick me up.

Somehow, through all this madness, I stayed relatively calm—something I find hard to explain. Perhaps it had to do with the soothing Palestinian landscape.