The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  Eventually, a lawyer came to visit me. Her name was Lea Tsemel. She was an Israeli lawyer.* She came to meet me in the visiting room one day and she gave me cigarettes. She told me she was taking on my case. I was so confused. I just asked her if what was happening to me was real, or was I just trapped in my imagination. So many times I was convinced that the prison was full of snakes. I asked her about that, and she told me I was just hallucinating. She told me about my charges and let me know we’d be in court soon.

  There was one police officer who was nice. One morning, I asked to go to the bathroom, and the interrogators wouldn’t let me go until midnight. When this one police officer saw me in pain because I had to go so badly, he said, “Godammit! What happened to these people? Why do they torture people? Godammit!” He was angry, and he let me go to the bathroom. Then he brought me tea and cigarettes and said, “Rest, rest.” This was very risky for him, and I really appreciated it.

  The whole interrogation was two months. I was afraid that they were going to kill me and my friends, because we had heard all these terrible stories of torture. I had an uncle who had been arrested a while before, and I knew that he’d died in prison. He participated in a hunger strike, and when the prison guards force-fed him, he choked to death.

  The main thing that consumed my thinking was that these people were crazy, and they wanted to torture me and mentally destroy me. And they would actually say it right to our faces. They would tell us, “We want to ruin you psychologically.” In fact, many prisoners do become mentally ill. Some of them die. I didn’t go crazy. I focused on all the other people suffering besides me. And also, I think people who are really religious have a hard time with this kind of abuse sometimes. They pray to God for help, and when none comes, it breaks them mentally. But that wasn’t me, and I was able to focus on the future and what I needed to do to get myself out of that situation.

  After two months of interrogation, my friends and I were taken to trial and charged with terrorist activities. The judge sentenced us to four to six years each. My mother was in the courtroom, and she fainted when she heard the sentence.

  We Were All Still Dreaming of Growing a Moustache

  After my sentence, I was sent to Damun Prison.* I learned more in prison than I would have at a university. I met some leaders of the resistance. I was so proud of myself. They were the big fighters. And the other boys I was arrested with, they were all so happy. We thought we were so grown up, even though we were all still dreaming of growing a mustache. We’d actually shave four times a day to try to get our beards to grow in stronger so we could look older. I acted angry about my sentence—not because I thought it was too long, but because I thought it was too short! They gave me four years, I wanted twelve years. I thought it was sort of an honor.

  In Damun, I was in with a bunch of Israeli mafia guys, drug dealers—all sorts of criminals. I think the soldiers wanted to put young guys in the resistance in with real degenerates, sort of to corrupt us. But we all got along, and before long I was one of the leaders in prison. I became the representative of a group of young prisoners in dealing with the guards. I’d voice our demands and objections to the ways we were being treated.

  In 1986, I led a hunger strike. We were actually protesting about not getting enough food. Besides that, it was winter, and there was no heat, and we only had one thin blanket each. And we weren’t getting enough exercise time outside. So there were dozens of us not eating as a protest. I remember we used to dream of food at night. The Israeli soldiers, they would tease us. They’d have barbecues outside the walls of our cells, and the smell would come into our cells through the windows.

  We stuck at it for eighteen days, and on the eighteenth day I announced we were going on a water strike as well. The guards quickly brought in doctors from the Red Cross, and they told us that we’d be dead in two days if we tried that. So I said, “Okay, we won’t do that.” But it was enough to make the guards think we were crazy enough to try. The next day, the prison administrators came and agreed to our demands—more food, two more blankets at night, and fifteen more minutes of exercise time a day. It felt like a big victory. For two weeks afterward, we had to relearn to eat, like we were babies all over again. All our stomachs could handle was milk, a little soft potato, that sort of thing.

  So I had a reputation as a dangerous prisoner. Not because I was violent, but because I could lead the prisoners to rebel against our conditions. The authorities decided to transfer me to Ashkelon, which was where they put the prisoners they considered the most dangerous.* Inside Ashkelon, there were a lot of leaders of Palestine’s resistance movement. To Israel, this was where the worst of the worst went. But as a Palestinian, I felt much safer in Ashkelon than I had at Damun.

  Those of us who were young and in prison for the first time started to study. We wanted to know everything. We would sit with the older men in Ashkelon, and they told us about their experience. The older prisoners would even organize more formal education—lectures and lessons every day. These were guys who had been in prison forever. Some of them had been in since 1967. I think a few of those guys had been around to hear Jesus lecture! So they had a lot of wisdom to pass on.

  We learned about history, economics, philosophy. We had to wake up at six in the morning and start reading and studying. At ten there was a lecture until noon, and then there was a ninety-minute break. After the break, we had to write an article—it could be political, educational, whatever. But we had to write something. Every day one of the inmates had to lecture the others about what he had written and read earlier. And then we would go back to reading. They served us dinner at seven, and then between seven and ten we could read, and then we would go back to sleep. If we didn’t finish our writing, we could stay up late and write. We didn’t have enough time for all our activities. It became an addiction, and I was consumed with What am I going to read next? What am I going to write?

  Every inmate had his own specialty. Some of them were political, some of them philosophical. One specialized in economics, another in Marx. Some people taught chemistry and explosives inside the prison. We also learned languages. Some of the prisoners knew Greek, Russian, Turkish, so they would pass on their languages. Getting into Ashkelon for me was like getting accepted to Harvard or Oxford, or even better!

  But the treatment in the prison was still very harsh. Solitary confinement at Ashkelon was the worst in all the prisons in Israel. Prisoners could be isolated from others for years.* One inmate I knew lost his mind because of all the pressure from solitary. He needed psychiatric help.

  To protest this, we set all the cells on fire. Every prisoner was part of it. We all piled up clothes in the middle of our cells and lit them with smuggled matches. The smoke was terrible, and many of us suffocated. Forty-eight prisoners had to be hospitalized, but our protest got attention. They still used solitary confinement to torture people afterward, though.

  The relationships you form inside the prison are very strong. There are a lot of people from different cities—Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, so many places. So there’s a lot to learn, and you become more knowledgeable about the situations in other cities. When you get out of prison, you’re going to stay friends with them. And they’re really influential in their own societies. So many of the leaders of the First Intifada met in prison.

  I got out of prison in 1989, during the First Intifada. I was still only twenty, but I was more influential in our society because people respect someone who’s been in jail—we weren’t seen as criminals, but leaders.

  I Was Just Like the Pope

  I didn’t stay out long after my release in 1989. I was only out for six months. I hadn’t done anything this time, but because of my record and people I knew, and because it was the Intifada, I was rounded up.*

  This time after my trial I was sent to Ktzi’ot Prison.† In Ktzi’ot, I improved my Hebrew. Ktzi’ot was like a big open-air prison with lots of tents, and one of the tents was the “Hebrew tent,” where only Hebr
ew was spoken. I taught Hebrew lessons there and translated Hebrew-language newspapers for the other inmates.

  I had a lot of experience and I knew a lot, so the new inmates would ask me how to do things. I was just like the Pope. They would respect me and ask me for things. In prison culture, if you’re an alumnus of prison, you get special treatment from both the inmates and the wardens and guards. I would get the best bed in the tent, you know, the one in the corner. The guards also gave me special treatment because I was an asset to the prison. They knew that I could influence everyone else, and if I said something, everyone was going to listen to me. It was a give and take.

  I was out of prison in 1994, but of course, the Israeli authorities kept an eye on me. The authorities have this obsession, that once someone like me has been to prison, then we’re a terrorist for life. I got picked up a few times, and sometimes I’d be held for a day, sometimes for two weeks. Then, in 1995, I was arrested, and this time they took me to Al-Muskubiya. They didn’t have charges, they just wanted to interrogate me about people I knew. During the interrogation, I was tortured.

  After twelve days of not being allowed to sleep, not getting enough to eat, that’s when the interrogators started shaking me. There are two kinds of shaking they’d do—one of the head and neck only, and one for the whole body. Of course when they start after nearly two weeks of no food or no sleep, you can’t really physically resist at all. You’re too weak, and your neck starts to flop around, you don’t get oxygen, and you pass out. They’d bring us prisoners close to death.

  I remember waking up in the hospital. I’d been taken to Hadassah.* After I was better, I was taken back to Al-Muskubiya and interrogated some more. They’d use other methods, too. One thing the interrogators liked to do was to make the handcuffs really tight and bind me to a chair that slanted downward. They would leave me like that for twelve days at a time, with the handcuffs slowly cutting into my wrists. They would also put a dirty bag over my head that was soaked in vomit or that had been dunked in the toilet. After twelve days, they’d give me four hours of rest. This went on for months. Sometimes they’d only ask me a few questions, for just fifteen minutes a day. And then I’d be bound up in the chair for the rest of the day. Sometimes they’d say they were going to give me “stomach exercises,” and then two interrogators would twist my body in opposite directions while my hands were cuffed. They would put me in these stress positions until I threw up or fainted.

  They didn’t have anything to accuse me of in Al-Muskubiya, but they didn’t want me out on the streets. Also, they wouldn’t let my lawyer see me for many weeks. Finally, a lawyer came. She was a new lawyer I’d never heard of named Allegra Pacheco. I think as a prisoner, I had developed a keen sense of who was dangerous, who was safe, and who I could trust. I knew I could trust Allegra right away.

  After six months, they sent me to Megiddo Prison in northern Israel. They never charged me with anything. They just gave me a one-year sentence of administrative detention that they renewed for a second year. By this time, I was a real expert at life in prison. I was able to convince some of the guards that I was a Jew because of my good Hebrew. They used to ask me, “You’re among Arabs. How can we help you?” I asked them for a mobile phone, because we couldn’t have one inside prison. They gave me the phone.

  I got away with other tricks because of my good Hebrew. We had newspapers inside, and there were ads in the back. One ad was for a pizza place. I used one of our smuggled phones and called the pizza place, and I pretended as if I was the prison director. I ordered seventy-five slices, enough for all the inmates. And the pizza guy told me they’d deliver in two hours. In three hours, the prison director came to my tent and gave me a long look. He asked, “Do you still want pizza?” So I answered him, “If you’re going to give it to us, why not?” He was pretty mad. He said, “I know that you’re the one who asked for the pizza, because you have really good Hebrew. Now you’re going to solitary.” So I had to spend two weeks in solitary. There was another ad in the newspaper for belly dancers. I wanted to call and ask for dancers as well, but because I got busted for the pizzas I didn’t have the nerve to do it.

  The Judges Had No Mercy

  During the time I was in prison, I kept seeing my lawyer, Allegra. She helped me appeal every six months during my administrative detention hearings, and she kept me thinking about the future. I must have proposed to her twenty times while I was at Megiddo. She told me I was crazy.

  Finally, I got out of administrative detention in 1998, and I started working for human rights groups, like the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group and B’Tselem.* We’d investigate cases of human rights abuses against Palestinians. And I stayed in touch with Lea and Allegra and other lawyers who were fighting in courts to end the torture of prisoners. In 1999, they took some cases to the high court in Israel, and they won a huge victory that made certain kinds of torture illegal.

  It was also around this time that I got Allegra to agree to marry me. I think I just had to ask her enough times. As a prisoner, I’d learned to be persistent in speaking out for what I wanted, and I used the same tactics to win over Allegra. We just sort of agreed we might get married someday soon, and then she went to the U.S. on a fellowship. She was working on a book about how a Second Intifada might be right around the corner. But she didn’t finish it, because the Second Intifada started in 2000 while she was still writing and that spoiled the concept of her whole book!

  During the Second Intifada, I was still working for B’Tselem, and sometimes I’d sneak into Jerusalem to talk to Palestinians for reports on human rights abuses. I also worked with Gideon Levy, a reporter for Ha’aretz, which is Israel’s major newspaper. I’d show him around the refugee camps and help with stories. When I went to Jerusalem, I’d always bring a really nice leather briefcase, so I’d look like a businessman. But in May 2001, I was stopped by a police officer in Jerusalem and arrested for not having a proper permit to travel into the city. So once again I was headed to prison.

  I was taken back to Al-Muskubiya. Already, interrogation had changed, but not much. They still put me on a chair that was angled downward with tight cuffs. But now, instead of hitting, shaking, that sort of thing, they tried to mess with my mind more. They would do things like show me a photo of my house in ruins and tell me it had been demolished. But it was all Photoshop work.

  At the time, Allegra was in the United States. She was supposed to be done with her fellowship and come back to Israel in June. She was in Boston trying on a wedding dress when she heard I’d been picked up. She got back just in time to represent me during my administrative detention hearing. She showed up along with Lea, her mentor and my first lawyer. They had a photographer from Ha’aretz with them who was going to testify on my behalf, and they brought a lot of snacks—burek, cola, and cigarettes.* Allegra also brought wedding bands with her. We got to have a reunion in the lawyer’s meeting room, and that’s where we announced that we were engaged. We had a little party with the burek and cola, and then Lea took some pastry to the judges to tell them we were getting engaged, and she asked if we could have a little more time in the meeting room. Meanwhile, the Ha’aretz photographer took pictures of us exchanging rings. It was beautiful!

  But the judges had no mercy. The prosecutors kept bringing up how I was mean to my interrogators, cursed at them, called them sons of bitches, and how I wouldn’t cooperate. That was their big case for me being a security risk to Israel, just that I wasn’t nice enough in the interrogation room. Allegra was wonderful—she demanded that the judges look at the deep grooves in my wrists from my recent interrogation. But they refused. And so I ended up spending another year in administrative detention.

  When I got out in May 2002, Allegra and I were married, and she was five months pregnant when I was arrested again in November. This was right in the middle of the Second Intifada still, and a lot of former prisoners were being arrested. The night they picked me up, they were looking for my brother. But because
I had a record, they decided they’d pick me up as well. I was sentenced to six months administrative detention and sent to Ofer Prison.† I was in prison when our son Quds was born in April 2003. Allegra was all by herself during the birth. When June 2003 came around, I was up for another renewal of detention. This would have been the seventeenth six-month detention I’d been given during my lifetime. My lawyer Lea tried to bring photos of Quds into court near Ofer to show me. It would have been the first time I’d seen my son, but the judge refused to let me see the photos. He gave me another sentence of six months. During the hearing, I was able to slip the photos of my son into my prison uniform when nobody was looking, so I at least had the photos of my son in prison with me. My detention was renewed twice more for a year and a half total, so I didn’t get to go home and meet Quds until he was almost two. By that time I had spent almost seventeen years in prison altogether, with at least thirteen of those years being in administrative detention without charges.

  This Is Life for Thousands of People

  I’ve been out of prison since 2004. When I got out the last time, I started studying law, and now I’m a lawyer, like Allegra. Last January, I was in military court to help my friend. I argued his case in front of a judge who has sentenced me to administrative detention many times before. I was going to rub it into his face that I was a lawyer now. But they didn’t let me enter the courtroom.

  I also defend prisoners who have been arrested by the Palestinian Authority.* The conflict with the Palestinian Authority is even more complicated than the occupation. I make visits to the prisoners in the PA prisons, and in some cases they get tortured and humiliated there even more than with the Israelis. I visit my clients in prison every day. And I sit down and talk to them and listen to them. The conditions are extremely harsh. In the important cases, the information from the interrogation is shared among the intelligence agencies of the Americans, Israelis, and the Palestinians, together.