My 20th year
By Gideon Levy Now they have added a Perspex board with holes, in addition to the two separate iron lattices. One can’t even touch a finger. The head of the Prisons Services, Major General Yaakov Ganot, is well known as a hero who lords it over the weak. First over foreign workers, as the chief of the Immigration Police, and now he is throwing his weight at the security prisoners. In the present government and public atmosphere that helps one’s career. The noise in the visiting room is terrible, and one can’t hear a word. Prison guards on both sides of the barrier, in spite of the opaque separation fence, are keeping a close eye on things. Here, Israeli Sana Salameh-Dakah, a resident of Tirah, met last Thursday with her husband, Walid Dakah. Once every two weeks, 45 minutes, behind the lattice. They married in prison in August 1999, with 40 guests and refreshments, at the time when Shlomo Ben Ami was minister of public security, and it was still permitted to consider security prisoners human beings, and since then they haven’t met without the lattice divider. Without a single day of leave, not even to part with his dying father, without a single phone call home, without setting a term for his punishment, without one minute of privacy with his wife, prisoner Walid Dakah is in his 20th year in prison. In 1986, Dakah, who comes from Baka al-Garbiyeh, was convicted of participating in a unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) that murdered soldier Moshe Tamam, whose body was found in an orchard near the settlement of Ma’aleh Dotan. Dakah was convicted in a military court, on the basis of the testimony of one of the members of the unit, and on the basis of his confession during the interrogation. Since then, he has vehemently denied that he participated in the murder. Had he been a Jew who murdered a Palestinian, he would have been released years ago; had he been a Jew who murdered a Jew, he would have been released about two years ago, with one-third knocked off; had he been a Palestinian from the territories, he would have been released in one of the prisoner exchanges. But Dakah is an Israeli Arab, and nobody cares about him. There are 22 Israeli security prisoners who have been incarcerated since before the Oslo Accords, and most of them haven’t even had a term set for their imprisonment. Let them rot. I met him in early 2001 in the Shata Prison, for a conversation that I was not permitted to publish. Before that he used to write me letters in which he never mentioned his own case, but only the distress of his friends: the blind prisoner Ala al-Bazian, who is not allowed to touch members of his family, the sick Egyptian prisoner, Mohammed al-Surkeh, who has been forgotten and left on his own, and the child prisoners in the transit division of Ramle Prison. Now he is in Nitzan Prison. A former house painter, who worked in Tel Aviv and in Eilat, and painted the walls of the Sonesta Taba Hotel, among other places, he was imprisoned at the age of 24, and is now 44 years old. A few weeks ago, he wrote the following letter to his friend MK Azmi Bishara, whom he calls “Abu Omar.” It is printed here with his permission. “My dear brother Abu Omar, “Today I am beginning to count my 20th year in prison, and it is also the 20th birthday of one of the young men here. Today, the day of my imprisonment and the birthday of my friend, reminds me of Lina: How hold is she today? I heard that she is already a mother of two. And Najla, the mother of three, how old is she? And Hanin, the mother of the baby? And how old are my nephews and nieces, those who were babies on the day of my arrest, and those that were born a few years later? How old are my little brothers, who have already married and become parents? “In the past I didn’t ask. Time had no meaning for me. It was not important to me how much time had passed, in the broad sense of the word. I was interested only in the minutes that passed quickly during the short visits from my family, the minutes that did not suffice for asking all the questions I had listed on the palm of my hand and the chores that would demand great efforts of Sana, not only to carry them out, but to remember them all. Here we are not allowed to use a paper and pen during the visits. Memory is our only means. “I forget to look at the lines that began years ago to be etched in the face of my mother, forget to look at her hair, which she started to dye with henna in order to conceal the white, so I won’t ask her real age. And what is her real age? I don’t know how old my mother is. My mother has two ages: her chronological age, which I know, and the age of my imprisonment – the parallel age, which is 19 years. “I am writing to you from the parallel time. We don’t use your ordinary units of time, like minutes or hours, except during the moments when our time meets your time next to the visitors’ window. Then we are forced to pay attention to those same units of time. After all, that is the only aspect of your time that hasn’t changed, and we still remember how to use it. “One of the young participants in the intifada who came to us, told us that many things in your time have changed. Telephones no longer have dials, and they work with cards rather than tokens, car tires don’t have inner tubes, and there is a tubeless tire. I like this system of tires, which contain material that plugs up punctures by itself, and prevents the escape of air. “I like it because it is like a prisoner who battles with the nails of the jailer. I have no other means except for that same system that repairs itself. Our drivers don’t miss a nail; they drive over all of them, there hasn’t been a single obstacle on the way that they haven’t driven over. Apparently they thought that by doing so they were shortening the route and saving effort. Our drivers are not rash; they simply use the same tires, as though we were not flesh and blood tires, and they have no destination or goal, to the point that we have become an expendable commodity. The market is the political processes: Take a tire and give us a small vehicle. What good are the tires without the vehicle? “I long for the Palestinian and Arab leadership to become more sophisticated. I long for our nations and the political leadership to adopt a system of self-repair, and not to be in need of the Americans and the others who pretend to be repairers of tires and at the same time are fanning the conflicts in Lebanon today. “We, the prisoners, are living in parallel time: We see and are not seen, hear and are not heard, as though an insulating wall made of opaque glass on one side, your side, were separating us from each other, as in the cars of VIPs. We have been stuck in parallel time since before the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. We have been here since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the first Gulf War, and the second and the third. Before Madrid and before Oslo and before the outbreak of the first and second intifadas. “Our age in this parallel time is the age of the revolution, before the birth of some of its factions. Before the Arab satellite stations and the spread of the hamburger culture in our capital cities. We are even from before the invention of mobile phones, modern communications systems and the Internet. We are part of history, and history is a situation and the root of a past that is no longer. But we are the roots of a past that continues and has not ended. We speak to you in the present tense, in order not to turn into your future. “Our time, which is standing still, has caused the usual concepts of time and place to disappear from our language; it has confused them. Here, for example, we don’t ask when and where we will meet. We have met and continue to meet in the same place. We walk back and forth here flexibly, on the axis of the past and the present. For us, every moment after the present is an unknown future to which we are unable to relate. Like the Arab nations, we have no control over our future, but with one essential difference: Our occupation is foreign, their jailer is Arab. Here we were arrested because we sought the future, and there the future has been buried while it is still alive. “In our parallel time, most of us have not even answered the question asked of children: What do you want to be when you grow up? I, although I’m already 44 years old, still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. “We are the time that battles with the place, with an internal contradiction. We have become units of time. We are defined as points on the axis of time every time so-and-so is arrested, and so-and-so arrives in prison, and so-and-so is released. “These are the important coordinates in our life in parallel time. We know how to determine the hour, the day and the date according to your time units, but these are units that are not in use. Here, something or other happened when so-and-so arrived or before so-and-so was released. Since we don’t know when so-and-so will be arrested or when he will be transferred from one prison to another, when we speak about the future we have no way of determining a new coordinate on the axis of time, and then we use borrow your units of time. “In parallel time, we have learned to develop strange relationships with objects and things that only a person who has been imprisoned will understand. Otherwise, how is it possible to understand the emotional ties between a prisoner and an undershirt, just because it was the last thing he was wearing at the moment of arrest? How can one explain our profound ties with objects whose loss will cause us to be sad, sometimes even to weep? A lighter or a certain pack of cigarettes assume a special emotional importance. They are the proof that once we were outside of this parallel time, that we belonged to your time. They are the last straw of the person drowning in parallel time. “In 1996, for the first time in 10 years, I heard the honking of a Subaru, and I wept. In our time, the sound has a use other than to warn pedestrians. In our time, that sound can arouse profound emotions. “Our relationship with the place can be no stranger than our relationship with objects. Here one can develop a special relationship with a stain caused by a water leakage or dampness on the wall of the solitary confinement cell. One can develop a relationship with a hole in the wall or a crack in the door. Who can understand this emotional dialogue, the feelings, the detachment and the descriptions, as though we were talking about paradise and the gate to it, rather than about the solitary confinement cell and the holes in its walls. “Prisoner 1: “There’s nothing like Ward 4 … Where are those days in Ward 4?” “Prisoner 2: “True, but the best thing in Ward 4 is Solitary 7.” “Prisoner 1, releasing the air from his lungs, in an expression of regret for those days: “I know. I know what you mean. In that solitary cell, you hear, right at dawn, the sound of the cars on the expressway.” “Prisoner 2, interrupting his friend: “Not only that. You know the door of solitary? The door! Between the door and the wall, right next to the door hinge, there’s a large crack two centimeters wide through which you can see. When you sit on your bed you can see to the e-n-d of the corridor,” he says, dragging out the word “end” the length of the corridor. “Prisoner 1: “There’s no two ways about it, Ward 4 is the best.” “How simple are the dreams, how great is man. How small the place, how great the idea. “The truth is that I didn’t plan to write on such a day about time and place, nor about politics or philosophy. I had a profound desire to write about what bothers us. About what I love and what I hate. But my unplanned writing is like my unplanned life. I admit that I didn’t plan a thing, I didn’t plan to be a freedom fighter, and I didn’t plan to be a member of a faction or a party, or even to be involved in politics. Not because these things aren’t right, and not because politics is forbidden and disgusting, as some people claim, but because for me these are great and complex things. I’m not intentionally a freedom fighter or a politician. “I could have continued my life as a painter or a gas station attendant, as I was doing until my arrest. I could have married a relative at an early age, as many do, and she would have borne me seven or 10 children. I could have bought a truck and become familiar with car dealing and currency rates. All this was possible. But I saw the horrors of the Lebanon War and the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, and they shocked me. “To stop feeling the shock and the trauma. To stop feeling the sadness of human beings, any human beings. Insensitivity in the face of horrors, any horrors, is like a nightmare for me. It’s the measure of my will and of my refusal to surrender. To sense people, to sense the pain of humanity – that is the essence of civilization. The will is the essence of the rational person. Action is his physical essence, emotion is his spiritual essence, whereas feeling – sensing people and feeling their pain – is the essence of all of human civilization. “And it is just this essence that is they are trying to fight against in prison during the hours, the days and the years. Not against you as a subversive political person, not against you as a religious person or as a consumer from whom they deny the material pleasures of life. You can adopt any political view that you wish, practice your religious rites, obtain a large variety of goods. The goal of the prison system is to undermine the person within you, any relationship that you can have with human beings and with nature, even your relationship with the jailer as a human being. They will do everything to make you hate them. What they are fighting against is love, aesthetics and humaneness. “Now, in my 20th year as a prisoner, I admit that I’m still as happy as a child because of very simple things, am filled with joy at every word of encouragement or protest or any good word I hear. I admit that my heart pounds in my chest at the sight of a flower that I see on television, or a landscape, or the sea. I am happy in spite of everything, and I have no longing for the pleasures of life, with two exceptions – the children and the day laborers: the sight of children, when they are coming from every direction on their way to school, and the sight of the workers, coming from the alleys and the neighborhoods in the early morning hours of a foggy and cold winter day, walking to the center of the village, ready to travel to their places of work. I admit now that all these emotions, all this love, would not have remained in me had it not been for my love for my mother Farida, my wife Sana, my brother Hosni, without the support of my family, without my friends’ support for me and for them. “I’m a person who holds his love like someone holding hot coals in his hand, but I will continue to hold it. I will continue to love you, because love is my only modest victory over my jailer.” The source: Haaretz (Israel).