The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (33 page)

By the time the Gaza Strip was recaptured by Israel in 1967, Abu Ali Shahin was commander of the Fatah Southern Command, which included the southern part of the West Bank—Bethlehem and Hebron and the towns surrounding them—and the Gaza Strip.

“After the war, Yasser Arafat and I traveled to the West Bank and Gaza together to inspect the Fatah military cells after the 1967 war. We transported arms and moved fighters from Gaza, where they were well trained, to the West Bank, where the fighters had minimal training.”

This was unbelievable. Two Palestinian underground military leaders, who were on Israel’s top 10 most wanted list, were traveling in areas that were occupied by the IDF and swarming with Israeli troops. If they went from the West Bank to Gaza they had to travel through Israel itself. This means that Yasser Arafat, who was still unknown to the world, but not unknown to the Israeli intelligence, managed to infiltrate under some disguise, probably from Jordan right under the noses of Israeli troops and the Israeli intelligence services, who had also flooded the newly conquered territories. Arafat was then able to somehow travel inside Israel, and then enter another occupied territory as he went into the Gaza strip.

Abu Ali went on faster than I could digest. I had no idea there were military cells active at the time and being trained within areas controlled by Israel. I was still trying to get my hands around the fact that I was hearing all this from a Fatah commander. It was pretty heroic stuff, and I had a million questions I wanted to ask him.

“When were you caught? And how?”

“September 1967. An informant gave me up. I was on the bus traveling from Gaza to Jerusalem. I had my head down on the seat in front of me the entire time so as to keep my face hidden. Then, about five miles from Jerusalem, the bus was
stopped. I still kept my head down, and after a few moments I felt someone hit me on the head so hard I thought my head would explode. I looked up and there were
Magav,
border police, and soldiers. I saw the guy who ratted me out standing by an army Jeep. Later on he was killed in Frankfurt. Someone was sent there for that purpose.

“During the interrogations, they nearly killed me! For five months I was kept alone in a small dark cell, where they tortured and beat me. There was no latrine, so I had to stand in my own excrement. But I would not cooperate, and I did not talk.

“After almost five months of interrogation they took me out, washed me with a fire hose, and said, ‘Clean yourself up, you filthy Arab.’ They took me to Sarafend, a military base near Tel Aviv, where they placed me in a room by myself. Army Chief of Staff General Rabin, Deputy Chief of Staff General Bar-Lev, and Head of Army Intelligence General Yariv came in.”

These were the three most powerful men in Israel at the time.

“General Yariv spoke as the others watched: ‘So, you don’t want to talk. Who do you think you are, some kind of hero? Don’t you know that we brought down Nasser and his entire army? Do you think we will not bring you down as well?’”

One of Jamal’s friends asked if it was all right to light a cigarette, which was a little unusual because in Palestine everyone smokes everywhere and all the time. Neither Jamal nor I smoke, and apparently neither does Abu Ali. Jamal asked him to refrain, but Abu Ali did not mind as long as he opened a window. I could imagine that for a smoker to sit all this time without lighting up was hard so I didn’t mind either. He opened the window a little and lit up. Jamal wanted to break the tension a bit, so he placed his big hand on me and said:

“
Ahlan Ya Miko,”
(Welcome, Miko.) “
Ahlan fik,”
I replied. This was all quite surreal, I was an Israeli sitting there among these Palestinians, former resistance fighters, and we were all perfectly fine. Abu Ali stood up, calmly poured us all more Arabic coffee into tiny cups. Then he continued: “I thought that I would be killed soon and this may be my only chance to ever speak up. So I looked at these three generals, and I said, ‘One day, when we the Palestinians liberate Tel Aviv, and you are caught and become my prisoners, and you are interrogated, will you talk? Will you give up your friends and your comrades in arms?’”

“So you didn’t talk?”

“Never! It would be a disgrace to talk. I was a commander, and if I talked during interrogations I would never be able to hold my head up among the other prisoners. Even to this day I have not talked about what I did. And I did a lot. I have written it all down, and it is being kept somewhere outside of the country. After I die they can publish what I wrote and learn about the things we did.” I would lie if I said this did not tease my curiosity, but I respected his commitment to silence.

“But,” he said, and he raised his finger and looked directly at me, “I never gave an order to hurt a civilian, and I never did so myself. Even the prosecutor at my
trial said, ‘He is the enemy of the khaki,’ khaki meaning the army. All of my operations, and there were many, were against military targets.”

As a child, I remember that “Fatah” was the word to describe the enemy. The way I understood things as a child many years ago, they were the vilest, most frightening bloodthirsty Jew killers since the Nazis. I was the son of an Israeli general, and here I was sitting with a Fatah commander from the days when I was a child and a few other Fatah fighters who were closer to me in age. Had the conflict been solved and peace reigned it would have been somewhat romantic to reminisce about the old days. But the conflict was still going on and so was the resistance. Yet, there I was, and there they were—drawn together as though we were now on the same side, hoping for better days.

“What is the point of harming civilians?” Abu Ali asked rhetorically. “If you harm the military, you harm the state. If you harm a civilian what do you achieve? I never acted in vengeance either.”

Jamal wanted to make sure I understood the point so he clarified: “Abu Ali never avenged the massacre of his family in Rafah.”

I was reminded of a line from the movie
The Interpreter
with Nicole Kidman, where she says, “Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.”

“When my interrogations began, I weighed 75 kilograms [165 lbs.] I was in great shape, like an athlete. I used to walk 120 kilometers [close to 75 miles] in a single night with military equipment on my back. At the end of the five-month interrogation, when they finally sent me to jail, I weighed 39 kilograms [about 86 lbs.].

“They sent me to
Ramie
prison, but the prison warden did not want to take me. I was so frail he was worried that I would die on his hands.

“They put me in with common criminals. I remember one in particular, Shmaya Angel.” Shmaya Angel was a renowned Israeli crime lord and serial killer. “They thought the Israeli criminals would kill an Arab like me, but that didn’t happen. In fact, I developed relationships with all the heads of the gangs inside the prison. We had an agreement on how we would manage the relations between us because we were united in our struggle against the prison authorities.

“Our communication with the other Palestinian prisoners, those who were held in other prisons around the country
³
was a vital piece of our struggle.

“I would write things for the other
Fatah
prisoners around the country. Issues of policy, lectures on history, and other subjects, and the criminals would help me get it out to the other prisons. I wrote in tiny letters on small pieces of paper and then folded them up. Then we would take a thin piece of plastic and wrap it around the paper tightly. The plastic would then be sealed with heat so it was completely waterproof and then someone would either swallow it or insert it in their anus and carry it when they were transferred to other prisons. Once the paper reached
the other prisons, Fatah prisoners would receive what I wrote, copy it onto a large piece of paper and read it to the others.”

All of this was done by cooperation between Abu Ali and criminal—not political—Israeli prisoners.

“We even had a constitution,” Jamal interjected. The world is told that Palestinians are incapable of governing themselves, but these men took the time and trouble to create a constitution while living in prison under harsh conditions that turn even the finest men into animals.

“Abu Ali, did you write the constitution?” I asked him.

“No. The prisoners’ constitution and policies were decided through democratic elections. We communicated with all the prisoners in all the prisons around the country.”

Abu Ali obviously saw the value of democratic processes, and this again, under conditions that were impossible. He mobilized and empowered people to take action and to affect change so that their voices would be heard. In the early days the “security” prisoners had to fight and negotiate for the most basic rights like beds and covers, decent food, and clean water. Nothing was given to them without a fight, and he created the order that facilitated this, and he did it while instilling democratic values in these young men who were overwhelmed, overpowered, and incarcerated with no law and no government to protect them or care for them.

Why were we demonizing these people, why do we fear them when we should embrace them?

Israelis like to say that if we were fortunate enough to have a civilized people as our neighbors, say like the Swiss, then things would be different, and we could have peace. But I was being exposed to a side of the Palestinians that was truly heroic. And I could see no reason why we can’t share this land in peace and indeed perhaps even share a state with a nation that can produce such principled heroism under the harshest conditions.

Abu Ali went on: “That is also the way lessons were distributed and then taught. I wrote books on the history of guerrilla movements and revolutions like Vietnam and Cuba and Cambodia, the history of Zionism and America, the Algerian struggle for independence and so on.”

He picked up a cigarette filter from an ashtray and showed it to me. “An entire book was no larger than this.”

“When I was in Shata Prison [a maximum-security prison in northern Israel near Kibbutz Beit HaShita] “I was in the X sections, in solitary confinement for 12 years, but still my brain seems to be OK.” He laughed.

“But there I was on one side, and a prison guard on the other. He, too, was a prisoner, sitting alone in a small yard. After all, he was human, and he wanted company too. So we would talk, and when he made coffee, I had coffee too. Life puts us in strange positions, but in the end we have to live together.

“After my prison sentence was fulfilled, they sent me to Dahaniya in Gaza for two years.” Dahaniya was a town in the Gaza Strip built by Israel for informants and collaborators who, fearing retribution, could not return to their homes. “These were the filthiest people, scum of the earth, and I had to live there for two years. No one was permitted to speak to me. This was punishment for the fact that I wouldn’t talk. This was far worse than any prison and I appealed to the supreme court asking to be sent back to prison, but they denied my request. Your father, along with Uri Avnery and others, protested and spoke against this inhumane punishment, but it did no good. I would look at the soldiers and curse them and curse the Israeli army, but I got no response. From time to time the authorities would come and say to me, ‘You can do whatever you want, no on will speak to you here’.”

He heaved a deep sigh. “I am 72 now. I will be 73 in 10 days. I am still paying for what I did back then, but I do not regret any of it. No, I am a fighter and a commander, and I devoted my life to the struggle. I did what my conscience dictated and I was prepared to die every time I went on a mission.”

Then he paused, sat up, and said quietly, “We all belong to this land and need to live together. Not one Arab state and one Jewish state. Judaism is a religion, and I am speaking of a secular state of all its citizens. That is the only way to live here. Being Jewish or Muslim or Christian or atheist, that is a personal choice, not for me to dictate and not to be dictated to me. I don’t want a priest or a rabbi or sheikh to govern my life. We belong in this land, and we need to live here as equals.”

This was not the first time I had heard someone talk of the “one secular democratic state” as the right solution. It was the part of the Fatah manifesto to create a secular democracy in all of Palestine. In the past, I could not stomach it, but the more I met impressive, intelligent people like Abu Ali, people who were driven by principle, the more I thought that there was no point, indeed no future, in dividing the people and the land. Not to mention the fact that the settlements and the facts on the ground had succeeded in erasing the West Bank as a viable area in which a Palestinian state could be established. My family were all Zionists, and so was I to begin with, but cracks were forming in my conviction that there was a need or even a justification for a state that was Jewish.

Then, Abu Ali began speaking about my father again. “I visited your father’s grave nine or 10 times, and each time I brought flowers. The last time was late in 2003. Then they took away my permit to enter Israel so I can no longer travel outside the West Bank.”

At that point one of the other guys in the room asked, “Abu Ali, why did you visit the grave so many times? Wasn’t General Peled also responsible for our suffering? After all, he too was an Israeli general.”

Abu Ali stood up. I looked at him and thought, his small physique can be misleading because when he speaks, men far larger than he listen in silence. “General Peled was no ordinary general,” he said, his tone clearly reprimanding. “He changed as a result of something that he saw, and he never looked back.

He was a great man, and he could have been a cabinet member or even prime minister if he stayed and toed the line. But no! He followed his conscience and remained true to it his entire life. I never met him, but felt and still feel a real kinship towards him.”

When I got home that evening I told my mother this story. She immediately replied, “Yes, I remember this. Your father was so upset he couldn’t sleep for weeks. He wrote to Rabin and to Haim Bar-Lev about it, but they did nothing. This changed him completely.”