Chapter 13:

Defiance

It was Friday, December 10, 2010—my 49th birthday—and I had been staying with Khaled’s family in Beit Ummar for a few days. I was there because I wanted to experience the occupation from the inside, and Khaled and his family were gracious enough to host me for the week. Ali said he wanted me to come with him to Nabi Saleh, another Palestinian village where weekly protests were taking place following Friday prayer. I had been to protests in Bil’in as well as other places, and so I was glad to go. Ali and I drove from Beit Ummar to Nabi Saleh, which is northwest of Ramallah.

Nearly half of Nabi Saleh’s valuable agricultural land had been seized for an Israeli settlement called Halamish. Near the village there is a natural spring named Ein Al Kus (Bow Spring). In 2009, settlers from Halamish had taken control of the spring and its surroundings and prevented Palestinian access to it. Since then, the people of Nabi Saleh and the nearby village of Dir Nizam had been protesting the theft of the spring, the theft of their lands, and the occupation in general, every Friday afternoon.

The shortest route from Beit Ummar, which is near Hebron in the southern part of the West Bank, to Nabi Saleh, which is close to Ramallah in the central part of the West Bank, goes through Jerusalem. But most West Bank Palestinians are not allowed to enter the city or even drive through it, so if you are a Palestinian or driving with a Palestinian, it takes forever to commute between these two places. We had to take a detour road, a huge eastward loop through the desert. It is a steep winding road that goes through Wadi Nar in the Judean Desert and then winds back up north toward Ramallah once you bypass Jerusalem. It took us almost two hours to take a trip that would otherwise have taken no more than thirty or forty minutes. In June 2010, AP reporter Ben Hubbard wrote this about the trip: “Wadi Nar means ‘the Valley of Fire,’ a place where brakes fail, clutches burn up, engines stall and people die. The ride up and down the canyon walls is among the worst routes Palestinian motorists must use to circumnavigate the towns, army posts and well-maintained highways built for Israelis.”1

But it was well worth the drive. Nabi Saleh lies in a spot surrounded by rolling hills and olive groves, the epitome of everything that is beautiful about the Palestinian landscape. As you approach the village, you go past the pre-military Jewish preparatory school and then the settlement of Halamish, both of which are eyesores, constructed with no regard for the landscape.

Ali is chronically late, even by Palestinian standards, so although he drove like a madman, by the time we reached Nabi Saleh the protest had begun and the Israeli army had blocked the main road to the village. We were bummed. Ali is very serious and passionate about the development of a non-violent resistance throughout the West Bank, but often he is his worst enemy and he was very upset with himself for being late. “Ali, in Hebrew we say, ‘Kol Akava Letova’,” I said.

“We have the same saying in Arabic,” he replied, quoting: “Kul Ta’akhir fiha khir,”—every delay happens for a good reason. Then Ali remembered that there was a back entrance to the village, which was another 15-minute drive.

When we reached the other side of the village, there was an army roadblock there as well. Three soldiers gestured for us to stop. I could tell they were reservists because they were older and pretty unkempt.

“Closed military zone,” they said. “You have to turn back.” Indeed!

Ali and I stepped out of the car to talk to them. They were clearly reservists, and their commanding officer, a captain in the reserves, who was a short, pleasant-looking chap with a beard, told us we couldn’t enter.

Ali tried a few lines on him. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “We just want to visit friends, and we always visit here, and we were never stopped before.”

The officer smiled and said, “You wouldn’t want to go there anyway, it’s a war zone.”

“War?” I asked. “You call this a war? A war means two armies engaged in battle. Is there another army present? Do they have tanks and warplanes? Are they well armed? Surely you aren’t referring to the boys throwing rocks as an army.” I didn’t wait for him to reply, before adding: “Besides, if you weren’t here, there would be no rocks. They would march with their flags and then go home.”

Other soldiers began crowding around, all of them reservists and far less patient than their commanding officer. “This is a closed military zone, and you are in violation of the commanding officer ordering you to leave,” one said. “Are you refusing to follow the order?”

“I thought he was in charge,” I said, pointing to the young officer, who was too young and friendly for his own good. “Besides,” I continued, “neither you nor your officer has the authority to declare this area closed. This is Palestinian land so why don’t you all go home and let us and the people of Nabi Saleh exercise our right to protest in peace?”

“But why are you even here, what are you protesting?” the officer asked in a very friendly tone.

“We are here to protest the occupation and theft of these people’s land,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“This place is no different from Tel Aviv or any other place in Israel. Jews are allowed to live here if they want, and we are charged with keeping them safe,” the officer said.

This exchange went on for some time until finally the conversation looked like it was reaching a boiling point. Ali began talking to the other soldiers too, and he mentioned that Israeli soldiers had killed his brother at a checkpoint similar to this one.

“Well, if we killed him then he must have deserved to die. Israeli soldiers do not kill without good reason,” one of the soldiers replied.

I was chomping at the bit to bring up Jenin or Gaza or a thousand other examples where Israeli soldiers had killed countless innocent people for no good reason. But this was not the time or the place. Our objective was to get into Nabi Saleh and I didn’t trust myself to keep my temper under control. I suggested to Ali that we leave. I didn’t want any problems with these soldiers because we still had another option for getting to the village. As we were turned away to get into the car, I stopped and looked at the soldiers, now a group of seven or eight. I pointed at Ali and said, “You have no idea who this man is, but believe me when I tell you that one day you will all go on your knees before this man and beg for his forgiveness.”

We got into the car and turned around.

We drove back about 300 yards, so we were out of the soldiers’ sight, parked the car among the olive trees, and walked through the olive grove under the soldiers’ noses to the village. We walked in silence for about ten minutes, until we saw Bassem Tamimi waiting for us. Bassem is about 5’8”, with slightly graying light brown hair, a mustache, and light blue eyes. He is a good-looking man and he was wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. He was very friendly, and I was struck by how calm he seemed. Ali introduced us and we all walked back up to the road and toward the village.

As we entered the village itself we saw a group of Magav2 soldiers firing tear gas grenades from massive launchers. They paid us no heed as we walked right by them, made a right turn, and walked up a hill to Bassem’s house.

Ali told me that he and Bassem knew one another from prison, and Bassem was a highly respected man in the village and in Palestine in general. Calm and collected, he had the look of a guy who wouldn’t be easily unnerved. We sat on his porch and had tea while his two young children played outside.

The house sits on a hill so we had a good view of the small village whose 500 inhabitants had decided it was time speak their mind. On the dirt road right by the house were four Israeli army reservists, one of whom was an officer; they had just erected a small makeshift barrier from large rocks they had gathered. A few minutes after they were done an army Jeep approached, wanting to drive through, so they had to dismantle the barrier to let the Jeep pass. As they bent over to move the heavy rocks, their guns slung forward and hit their heads. They were a miserable sight to see, not at all the daring and fearless soldiers one might expect from an army that claims to be one the world’s finest. It took great deal of restraint on my part to keep still and not tell the soldiers how stupid they looked. But, since I was a guest, I didn’t want to cause any trouble.

Bassem soon invited us into the house to eat. His mother cooked and he served us eggs, fresh baked bread with freshly picked herbs, and an assortment of salads. As we sat down to eat, his cell phone rang. Ali smiled as he listened to Bassem talk. I asked Ali what was so funny. He said the regional Magav commander was on the line. “He is asking Bassem in Arabic to tell the shebab (the youth who were protesting) to stop because it was Friday, and he wanted to go home for the weekend.”

An Israeli military commander calling a Palestinian resistance leader, begging him to stop protesting so he could go home to Friday dinner? What kind of House of Crazy was this?

The commander called several more times, but every time Bassem said calmly, “When the soldiers leave the village, the protest will stop. Not the other way around.”

After we were done eating we walked down toward the main road. There were quite a lot of people there, watching the protest, including young children who were stuffing their little pockets with rocks. The older kids were throwing rocks and the soldiers were shooting. They fired mostly tear gas and from time to time you could hear that they turned to rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. At one point, one of the young Palestinians picked up a tear gas grenade that had been shot at him and threw it back at the reservists while it was still spewing gas. The Israeli soldiers were terrified. They began running wildly in all directions, tripping over the rocks, their guns dangling from their shoulders and helmets bopping on their heads. I thought, thank God for them that they don’t have to face a real army.

I could clearly hear shots being fired from somewhere above us. I looked around and I noticed that the commanding officer, a lieutenant colonel, was standing a few hundred feet away. I shouted to him in Hebrew “There are children everywhere! Stop shooting!” He looked at me for a long minute, then looked away and started walking back toward his Jeep.

Just then a woman wearing a black hijab, pants, and a black shirt ran past me. She had an intent, almost mesmerized look, and she was holding a very large rock in her hand. She ran toward the lieutenant colonel and hurled it at him as he was walking away.

As the rock sailed toward the back of his head, my heart stopped. If the rock hit the officer, the repercussions would have been horrendous. The soldiers would have had a field day shooting everyone in sight. Luckily, it missed him by a few inches. I was relieved and furious at the same time.

“At least get the children out of here!” I shouted.

With all the commotion, the officer was oblivious and had no clue that he had been in danger. He went to his Jeep, sat in it for a while, and every so often would come out shooting in the air and then return to the Jeep. I kept calling him and the others to stop shooting. Then the Jeeps would speed by, screeching up and down the road, and the rocks would fall on them like a hailstorm.

I looked at Ali as all this was going on. “Don’t you feel like throwing rocks at the soldiers?” I asked him. Ali, like many other Palestinians I’ve met, strongly disapproved of the rock throwing. “It only serves the occupation,” he said. But unlike several towns where rock throwing was frowned upon, the shebab there had not yet bought into the non-violent aspect of the protests. They reacted to the army’s presence in their village by throwing rocks and, frankly, I couldn’t blame them.

It was getting late and we still had a long drive to get back to Beit Ummar. It didn’t look like this would end any time soon, so we ventured back, rocks and tear gas canisters flying above us in every direction, until we reached the car, still parked in the olive grove. I was never so relieved in my life as when we entered that car and drove off.

I couldn’t get the day’s images out of my head: Jeeps screeching through the tiny village and rocks coming down on them like a hailstorm. Right or wrong, brave or foolish, I had to admit to myself that on a simply visceral level, seeing the Jeeps get blasted with stones felt good. I felt no sympathy for the soldiers, none whatsoever.

As we drove away I really felt I could use a beer. I asked Ali if we could stop somewhere for a beer because there is no alcohol in Beit Ummar, and drinking is frowned upon in many places throughout the West Bank. So we stopped at a gas station on the way and sat for a bit while I had a beer. Back in Beit Ummar that evening we went to Yusef’s apartment. Yusef was Khaled and Ali’s older brother who was killed by soldiers at the checkpoint in Beit Ummar. His widow and her children, along with Seham, Ali’s older sister, were all there. We had dinner, then we had tea, watched music videos on television, and relaxed for the rest of the evening. I was worn out by the long trip and the day’s events. But there was more to come.

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.

1 Ben Hubbard, “Separate roads push West Bank Arabs to the byways”, The Guardian, June 13, 2010. Archived at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9215464.

2 Magav is the acronym for Mishmar HaGvul, which means “border patrol” in Hebrew.