Mohammed Ali Al-Kal’ilah is a man of forty-nine, tall and of noble bearing. He was born in the village of Samu’a, twenty kilometers south of Hebron. The village has a population of ten thousand, all of them Moslems who earn their livelihoods from farming and from the large stone quarries next to the village. They send the cut stones to Jordan, and someone once said that this, too, is a way of returning the territories to that country.
The security forces arrested Mohammed Ali Al-Kal’ilah in June 1985. He worked as a room attendant in a Dead Sea hotel and was taken from there to a prison in Hebron and placed in a cell. He told me his story in Hebrew.
“A few guys came to me, as if they wanted to beat me up, and said, You are a dog and a son of a dog, and I said, What for? They said, You don’t know why we brought you here? Where is your son? I said, My son was home with me about three weeks ago, and afterwards, he went back to his house in Ramallah. He has a house there where he lives with his wife and children. They said, No, no. Tell us where he is now.”
The son, Ali Mohammed Al-Shehade Al-Kal’ilah, left his father’s house in Samu’a when he was eighteen years old and rented a house in Ramallah. He lived there with his wife—who was a teacher—and with his three children—’Afaf, Mohammed, and ’Amar.
“They said, We want your son, and only you know where he is. I said, I don’t know. They said, You are a whore and a son of a whore and a dog. They came to beat me, and someone said, ‘Don’t beat him, he’ll tell everything soon. I said, I don’t know anything. They said, We’ll bring your wife here and we’ll fuck her in front of you. This went on for almost a week, only talk, without beatings at all.
“After that, they said suddenly, Now go, bring your wife, and your son’s wife, and sit here, in the office of the mukhabarat, the intelligence service, in Hebron, every day from seven in the morning to seven in the evening. So I brought them, and there was also my son’s baby, and officers pass us the whole time and spit on us and say, Tfu! you are dogs and the sons of dogs, and every day they would leave us there until nine at night, and every day we had to take a taxi, and when we came home at night, the mukhabarat would come again, at four in the morning, and enter the house, and pull everything out of the closets, wake up the children, and they would bring big dogs with them and say, We want your children to see the dogs and go crazy from fear of them.
“After that, the daily detention in Hebron ended, but the mukhabarat would still come to search the house every night. And after about three months I went again to the hotel at the Dead Sea to work, and I heard on television that the army had a battle with some people near Hebron, killed four and captured one wounded, and my wife called me on the telephone and said to come back, and I went and I saw my house bulldozed, not one stone left on another.”
Why were they searching for your son? What had he done?
“They say he killed Israelis. I don’t know. He never said anything.”
You really don’t know? Even now you don’t know?
“I don’t know! I didn’t even get along with him. He never spoke to me.”
This is the story: The son, Ali, was arrested in April 1978, accused of membership in the Fatah, and released. He claimed that he had been freed on the basis of a certain bargain, and he apparently did not live up to it. He was arrested again in 1979, accused of the original crime, and sentenced to four months in prison, with another half year suspended.
From the moment he was released, he was a marked man: on the one hand, the security forces watched his every step, and on the other hand, his former friends tormented him, accusing him of collaborating with the enemy. No one spoke to him. He was a pariah. A person who met him during that time testified that he seemed as if he had gone mad. He lived like a hunted beast, and sensed that every passing moment brought his end that much closer. It may be that for some the occupation, with its cruel demands, is a challenge which hardens their souls and pride; but there are, without a doubt, many more who, caught between the conqueror and the conquered, lose their humanity.
In order to counter the accusations of his friends, the young man went out to the mountains and made contact with a particularly deadly gang of terrorists, a gang which a year previously had murdered a Jew in Ramallah.
Ali Al-Shehade Al-Kal’ilah took part in the gang’s horrifying murders of two couples, one in a forest near the town of Beit Shemesh (within the 1967 boundaries of Israel), and another not far away, near the settlement of Mayo Beitar, in the West Bank.
When I learned, a week after my conversation with the father, what his son had actually done, I felt that I didn’t want to hear the rest of the story from the father. I remembered the innocent, naive, and optimistic faces of the murdered couples, and I could not find in myself any sympathy at all for Ali Al-Kal’ilah’s father, lamenting his son and demanding that he be allowed to rebuild his destroyed house.
I refused to even think about him for three weeks. The deed was like an open, coagulating wound. I thought: So they knocked down his house, big deal! I reserve my sympathy for the real victims, for his son’s victims. I refused to go back to see him.
But after three weeks, during which I met so many Arabs and Jews, dogmatically miserable and some unaware of how miserable they are, I sank deeper and deeper into frustration and melancholy, and the futility of the unbreakable prison of circumstance, without a solution and without an outlet, only continual pain, an ongoing and spreading terror. I then understood that I had to go back to Mohammed Ali Al-Kal’ilah; to go back to him precisely because of the repulsion and repugnance I felt, and hear his story to the end, because it is a story that repeats itself in a thousand and one variations, the hard and evil story in which there are no victors, and in which no one is in the right, only death and destruction and people who are bound to their fate with a curse.
Mohammed Ali Al-Kal’ilah is a tall, mustached man, a man with presence. Swollen, purple bags under his eyes. He had a four-room house and a large garden in Samu’a. In the garden he grew figs, grapes, olives, and vegetables. The rooms were carpeted with rugs his wife wove with her own hands. It took her four months to make each rug.
One morning, soldiers came to the house and notified her that she had fifteen minutes to get all her belongings and her daughters out of the house, after which the house would be leveled. Sometimes, when I hear about the destruction of houses in the West Bank, I wonder what I would remove from my house during that quarter hour—the basic necessities, I suppose: bed linens and cooking utensils. But what about the photograph albums? And my manuscript? And books? And old letters? How much can you get out in a frenzied fifteen minutes?
Al-Kal’ilah’s wife took mattresses and blankets, plates and a gas burner, and a suitcase full of clothes into which she had the presence of mind to shove the family photo album. She and her two daughters, Ibtasam and Noel, stood there and cried. The soldiers knocked down the house and spread its stones over the entire garden. The head of the family arrived after the destruction. A neighbor offered the family accommodations in a single room in his house. As Mohammed Al-Kal’ilah stood by the ruins of his house, security personnel approached him once more. “They told me, Come, you son-of-a-bitch, come with us now. I said, What more do you want from me? He said, We killed your son. I said, Fine, you’re strong, you can kill us all. I’m only one man and you are a government. They handcuffed me and took me for interrogation in Hebron. I said, I don’t have anything to tell you, I haven’t seen my son for a long time. They showed me my son’s identity card covered with blood, and said, Look, this is his blood. Now tell us where he was during the months when we didn’t know where he was.
“I said, I don’t know. They don’t believe me. And I was like a dead man, because my son had been killed, my house had been destroyed, and at work they told me not to come back. What do I have left, what?
“They interrogated me. Beat me with their hands all over my body and threw me hard against the wall. Afterwards, I would sit in a chair—and they would come suddenly from behind and throw me over. The interrogator would sit across from me in a high chair. He would present the sole of his army boot to me, and then press down on my balls hard and harder, and spit on me from above, from head to foot, and when he had no more spit he would go drink a cup of coffee and come back and spit some more.
“Later, they put me on trial and gave me four months in jail, because they said I helped my son hide in my house, but I didn’t help him, he didn’t hide in my house, because he had his own house in Ramallah, and even the mukhabarat knew he had not been with me for years, and even if he murdered all the Israelis, he is the only one responsible for what he did. Why did they knock down my house? Why did they destroy my body in the interrogations after he died? Who does it help that they kill me, too? Why do they have to do that?”
In the Emergency Defense Regulations of 1945 (promulgated by the King in his Privy Council), part 12, section 119, it says: “A military commander may issue an order confiscating for the government of Israel any house, building, or land, if there is reason to believe that any firearm was illegally fired from it, or from which were illegally thrown, detonated, exploded, or shot in any other way a bomb, hand grenade, or any other explosive or inflammable device, or any house, building, or land situated in any area, city, village, neighborhood, or street, in which it has been discovered that the inhabitants, or some of them, violated, or tried to violate, or assisted violators, or were accomplices after the fact to the violation of these regulations, violations involving violence or threats of violence or any violation judged in a military court; with the confiscation of the house or building or land as stated above, the commander may destroy the house or building or anything within the house…”
The wording of the regulations allows, in fact, the destruction of any structure in any village or city in which one resident has committed any security violation; the commander may order that the house be destroyed, confiscated, or sealed without having to give any notification, and without charging the owner of the house with any crime.
“Now they won’t allow me to build myself a new house. They say, Someone like you can’t get a permit. We now live in a rented house, two rooms without a kitchen and without a bathroom. Eight people together with my wife and my son’s children, and we cook everything in the bedroom. They made us into animals. Now tell me what law you have that doesn’t let a man build a house for himself? And not only that—you killed a man, why don’t you give him to his parents? Why don’t you tell them where he is buried? What more do you want? Are you afraid of his body? Let us know at least that he has a grave. Even if he is a murderer, he is still our son.”
Attorney Leah Tsemel, who has taken on Al-Kal’ilah’s case, has submitted uncountable petitions to the authorities, and asked why his house was destroyed. On January 12, 1987, the laconic answer arrived: “The petitioner’s son resided in the destroyed house.” In March of this year, Tsemel appealed to the High Court of Justice. The hearing on the petition has not yet taken place.
* * *
I have told the story as it was told to me. One’s heart does not go out to Mohammed Al-Kal’ilah, who raised such a son. But perhaps one must take a rational, principled stand here precisely because he arouses no sympathy. It is a difficult thing to do, nerve-racking to the hearer of the story. To the entire Israeli ethos. It is precisely the exceptional, repugnant cases like these which are the real forge of a moral and human code of behavior. To display wide-hearted humanism even in such cases, and reduce somewhat the hate and bitterness.
I did not, however, tell this story for any purpose. If I had a goal in mind, I could have chosen a much less ambiguous incident. There is no lack of them. I chose this story because it is a sort of bitter microcosm of the big story—of two nations’ life together. One that brings to life the simple misery in which we live.
Attorney Leah Tsemel is still trying to get the terrorist’s body. “I have a few bodies like that I haven’t gotten yet,” she says, as a sort of grotesque conclusion to the whole story. There is a cemetery near Jericho for terrorists, and for prisoners who died in hunger strikes from improper forced feedings. Mohammed Ali Al-Kal’ilah goes every day to see the ruins of his house. I cannot even begin to measure the sorrow of the families of the murdered. I know that a family which has lost a dear one in such a way has no life. I think of the young, full lives which were cut off. I do not know if the families of the victims find any comfort in fostering hatred of the murderer, his family, his nation. How can we judge them if that is how they feel? The murderer’s father said to me: “If my son murdered, kill him. Kill him immediately! But why have you destroyed my entire life? Why have you made me and my family into beasts? I still have power in my hands”—he clenched his fist for me and trembled—“I could kill a million times the man who ordered my house destroyed. Did I ever do anything like that? Did I ever think like that before? I only wanted to live. Now they have made me like that, too. They have turned me into a murderer.”
I asked him how he supports his family now, after he was fired. At first, he did not want to answer. Afterwards, he said he had become a beggar. He goes from village to village and pleads for money. Not in Samu’a. He is ashamed to go there. Sometimes he goes to a village and sits in the street, and someone he knows passes. Both of them turn their heads in shame.