Abed’s work in the DFLP inevitably drew the attention of the Israelis. In the fall of 1989, almost two years after the start of the intifada and nine months into Abu Wisaam’s jail sentence, soldiers came to Abed’s home one night. Blindfolded and with his hands zip-tied behind him, he was thrown into the back of an army truck with half a dozen other detainees, all sitting on the cold, hard bed of the vehicle, bent forward over their crossed legs. Then the blindfolds were removed. Abed recognized the other young men: three were from the DFLP and three from Fatah. As the truck made its way to the detention center in Ramallah, two soldiers in the back beat and cursed Abed and the rest of the handcuffed detainees, then took turns hurling themselves at their heads.
Abed and his comrades were put in a large tent next to the Ramallah jail, which was an old Tegart fort, a type of building erected during the 1936–39 Arab Revolt against the British Mandatory authorities. Named after their designer, Sir Charles Tegart, a colonial police officer, they were later used by Israel as jails and police stations. Once the soldiers had left, the Fatah detainees interrogated the prisoner they suspected had turned them in. It was the same Fatah activist who had handed out five Jordanian dinars to the shabaab before they were rounded up. Israel often arrested its own informants, so that they could avoid suspicion and also continue to gather intelligence from inside the jails. After the others beat him, the Fatah activist confessed to having given their names to Israel in exchange for thirty-five shekels, roughly forty dollars.
From the Ramallah tent Abed was transferred to an unsanitary facility south of Hebron, Dhahiriya, where he was interrogated. The plainclothes captains of Israel’s intelligence service, the Shabak, tortured him in the usual method, known as shabih, a reference to the stretching of the prisoners’ arms. A filthy, putrid sack was placed over his head, and his hands were shackled to a pipe high above him so that only his toes touched the ground, pulling his limbs as if on a vertical rack. Unlike some of the detainees, who endured shabih for an entire day, Abed’s torture ended after an hour. The Israelis didn’t need him to confess: they said two members of his cell had already given him up as their leader.
Abed hired one of the most prominent Israeli Jewish lawyers representing Palestinians, Lea Tsemel. A sharp-witted forty-four-year-old who looked something like a pixie, with sparkling green eyes and short brown hair, she had spent nearly two decades waging a quixotic battle against the laws and military orders that denied Palestinians their basic civil rights. She explained to Abed that under the Tamir Amendment—named for an Israeli justice minister who had commanded the bombing of the British tax offices in Jerusalem in 1944—he could be convicted solely on the basis of a statement by a third party, without the right to cross-examine or even demand the appearance of this person in court.
After his interrogation, Abed was sent to the Ofer prison near Ramallah, then to a detention facility in the Anatot base, which, as it happened, was built on land confiscated from his family. Detainees used buckets as toilets. Abed stayed there for two months and was allowed to shower only twice. Next he went back to Ofer, where he was tried and sentenced by a military court to six months, then to Dhahiriya again, and finally out of the West Bank to Israel’s largest prison, Ketziot, in the Negev Desert. It was built to confine the thousands of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians rounded up during the intifada, at a certain point holding one in every fifty Palestinian men. Politically aware inmates named it Ansar III, after the Ansar prison camp Israel had erected when it occupied Southern Lebanon. But most referred to it by the Arabic name for the area since before Israel colonized it, the Naqab.
Abed arrived in the Naqab in the winter, when the temperature of the desert nights would drop below freezing. The facility was made up of more than one hundred crowded tents, with a couple dozen detainees in each. Every cluster of two to four tents was surrounded by a dirt mound and enclosed with barbed wire. It was easier for Israel to control the inmates by giving some autonomy to the factions, allowing each to run its own tent. In Abed’s cluster, there was one tent for the DFLP, one for Fatah, and one for the Islamists. When new prisoners were brought in, they would line up before the heads of the factions and declare their party affiliation. Not everyone had one, so this was the moment when they had to decide.
Abed saw one prisoner approach the front of the line and declare, “I’m with the PLO.” Everyone around him laughed. “We’re all PLO!” one of the party leaders said, since the PLO was not a faction but the umbrella group for all the non-Islamist parties. “Okay, I’m with Abu Ammar,” the man offered, using the kunya, or honorific, for Yasser Arafat. He was put with Fatah. Two months later, Abed saw that this man, who had not known the name of the faction he joined, was now the head of Fatah education in his cluster. That, Abed thought, is how they choose their leaders.
At the time, nearly half of the thirteen thousand Palestinians in Israeli jails were in the Naqab. The inmates included most of the more than two thousand Palestinians held under administrative detention—that is, held without having been charged or tried and with the possibility that their sentence might be extended indefinitely. Among them were journalists, attorneys, physicians, professors, students, trade unionists, civil society leaders, advocates of nonviolence, and members of Israeli-PLO dialogue groups, which were illegal. Unlike Abed, most were not told the reason for their imprisonment.
Each tent set its own daily schedule. Abed’s DFLP tent held mandatory courses in party objectives, policies, and ideology, and instruction on how to withstand interrogation by the Shabak. Some inmates read and translated newspaper articles brought in by their lawyers. Televisions and radios were forbidden, great numbers of books were banned—from Shakespeare, Tolkien, and Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn and The Constitutional Law of the State of Israel—and none of the prisoners was allowed a family visit.
The tents had no tables or chairs, and they flooded when it rained. Even during dust and sandstorms the soldiers required the tent flaps to remain open. The barrels used for trash overflowed each day, bringing a terrible stench and an influx of mosquitoes and rats. Many prisoners developed skin diseases. But the real torment came at sunset. Every night the Israelis would turn on the speakers and play a heartrending ballad by Umm Kulthum. She was Abed’s favorite singer, along with Abdel Halim Hafez; he disliked pop music and listened only to the classics. The Israelis played a different wrenching Umm Kulthum song each night. Her songs were lengthy; the most famous, “Enta Omri” (“You Are My Life”), was almost an hour long. The anguished prisoners would lie on their beds listening, homesick, some of them crying, others working on the one letter they were allowed to send each month. Abed didn’t dare try to write to Ghazl. The Israelis read all the mail, and who knew how they would use the information against him. Or her. Instead, he would stand outside the tent and look up at the moon, wondering if at that moment Ghazl was looking at it, too.