by Rula Jebreal
At three o’clock the following morning, someone began knocking violently on her front door. Miral understood at once what was going on; she had heard some comrades in the Popular Front talk about such visits. Jamal, surprised and half-asleep, went to the door.
“Police! Open up!” The speaker was a man dressed in civilian clothes. He held out a shiny badge to the incredulous Jamal. “Where is your daughter Miral?” the man asked. “She has to come with us. Here’s the warrant,” he added, handing Jamal a sheet of paper.
“Why do you want to talk to her? What has she done? There must be some mistake,” Jamal said, his voice husky with anxiety.
“There’s no mistake. We have a precise warrant. Your daughter must come with us for questioning. Now go and call her—we’re in a hurry,” the man said, stepping into the living room. Two uniformed policemen stood at the front door, awaiting orders.
Miral, already dressed, came out of her room. “Here I am,” she said, feigning a self-assurance that in fact was nowhere to be found inside her.
“Well, I see that you’re ready. Let’s go, then,” the man said, seizing Miral by the arm. She was repulsed by the touch of his cold hand. When they passed in front of her father, Miral said, “It’s all right, Papa. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ll be back soon, you’ll see,” and she left him, an old, devastated man in pajamas.
When he saw his daughter being roughly shoved into a police van, together with some other young people from the neighborhood, Jamal ran into the bedroom for his shoes, thinking that he would follow on foot. Meanwhile, a small crowd of furious, worried parents had gathered in the street; someone said the police had rounded up a great many people that night. Jamal saw many of his neighbors embracing one another and weeping. Soldiers were coming out of houses, carrying books, documents, and computers, as Jamal started running desperately after the van.
It rolled through the streets of the Old City, heading for the Mascubia police station, inside the New Gate, where the interrogation center was. So many young Palestinians had been brutally tortured inside the walls of that macabre facade that every Arab who passed in front of it felt uneasy. The deserted streets gave Jerusalem a sullen aspect. The new city, with its towering buildings, seemed to be laying siege to the ancient and tormented Old City.
The van came to a stop in the courtyard of the station, and the prisoners were escorted to their various cells. With the exception of a trembling and weeping girl from her neighborhood, Miral knew none of the others. She was brought into a large room. It was dark except for the light shed by a bulb hanging from the ceiling over a rusty desk with an old black telephone. The rest of the furniture consisted of three wooden chairs and a metal locker. The walls bore stains of every color and dimension, some of them recognizable as dried blood. It was very cold, but Miral’s anxiety prevented her from feeling the external temperature. Her hands were sweating, her heart was beating uncontrollably, and she kept thinking, “I must stay calm. They’re trying to frighten me, to upset me. I must stay calm.” Despite her efforts to bolster her spirits, her legs were getting weaker and weaker. She heard far-off sounds, the thudding of slammed doors, footsteps in the corridors. That waiting period, which in reality lasted no longer than half an hour, seemed immeasurably vast to Miral. Every minute increased her distress. Finally, the metal door behind her opened, startling her.
“Come here. Sit in front of me,” a police officer ordered her, pointing to a chair that faced the desk. Except for a lock of hair that hung down over his forehead, he was almost completely bald. He sat down and arrogantly lit a cigarette. Then he took a file out of a drawer. Miral caught a glimpse of her name and some documents in Hebrew. The man began to turn pages with his chubby fingers, all the while holding the cigarette clamped between his lips. “We’ve had our eye on you for some time now, Miral,” he said, chuckling in a reproachful tone. “You’ve disappointed your father, and you’ve disappointed all of us.” There was a singsong quality to his voice.
“I beg your pardon?” Miral replied, feigning ignorance. She had decided to limit herself—if she could—to giving only vague and evasive answers.
As the policeman slowly put out his cigarette, his lips curled in a sneer. “Very well,” he said. “If you answer properly, I’ll let you go back home before nightfall. Otherwise, you’ll force me to keep you here longer. Who gives these orders?” As he asked this question, he showed her a leaflet. Miral shrugged her shoulders. The leaflet came from the PFLP; it was one she herself had delivered two days before, carrying them from place to place in a straw purse under a few bunches of wild mint. The leaflets bore the central orders to the Bethlehem section. Jasmine was supposed to deliver them but had asked Miral to do so in her stead, and Miral had complied unbeknownst to Hani, who, when he found out, became quite angry and accused her of being reckless and impulsive. Miral had resented this, but he explained that the whole area was full of collaborators. She should have told him first, he said.
“Look at it closely,” the officer said. It sounded like an ultimatum, and it snapped her out of her thoughts. “And don’t make me waste time with little games.”
After an initial moment of confusion, Miral replied, “Do you want me to say what you want to hear, or do you want me to tell you the truth? I don’t know what that leaflet is.”
“Don’t give me that shit! If you want to play the naive innocent, do it with your daddy, not with me. Now take a good look at this photograph and tell me which of these is the one who gives the orders.”
The photograph showed almost all the members of the PFLP, including Hani, at the last demonstration. Miral found the strength for another denial: “I don’t have the slightest idea who these people are.” She spoke in the firmest voice she could summon up.
The policeman leaned back in his chair and lit another cigarette. “It would be a shame for a pretty girl like you to spend the best years of her life in prison. A real shame.” His voice resumed its singsong lilt. “Give me the names, and I’ll let you go home immediately.” He handed her a pen. “If you don’t like saying them, write them down. Or take the pen and make a circle around the faces of the persons who print these flyers. Who are they? Who brings them their orders? Who’s their contact with the outside?”
The man’s fake courtesy rekindled Miral’s anger. “It’s no good putting on the paternal act. I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know who printed the leaflets. I don’t know anything at all.” And she added defiantly, “Beat me if you have to. I don’t know anything.”
He laughed and pushed a button. “So you want to play with the grown-ups. Keep provoking me and you’ll see what happens to that pretty face of yours. You won’t recognize yourself when you walk out of here!”
Miral gave him a defiant look. “If beating up a girl makes you feel more like a man, do it.”
“You’re mistaken. I personally will not lay a finger on you. But I’ve got a friend who can’t wait for the chance.”
“I’m an Israeli citizen,” Miral asserted. “If this is really a democracy, I have the same rights you do.”
The man smiled as he spoke: “Not when it’s a matter of national security. Now, will you make up your mind to cooperate, or shall I call my friend?”
Miral looked at him. “I have nothing to say.”
He fell silent and continued to smoke, without saying another word and without looking at her, as if he were alone in the room. Suddenly, Miral heard the heavy door behind her screech on its hinges. She turned around and saw a woman a little older than thirty, blonde and powerfully built. She was wearing a black T-shirt, sand-colored camouflage pants, and a pair of heavy combat boots.
Without a word, she rushed at Miral, seized her by the hair, and dragged her out of the room. Miral screamed as she was yanked along a corridor made dazzlingly bright by innumerable fluorescent lights. Her cries mingled with those of other young people who were being beaten. Those howls of pain seemed to shake the whole building. The woman flung Mi
ral through an open door, into a room that was practically dark. It looked like a bathroom, completely covered with white tiles and divided by transparent curtains. The woman tied Miral’s hands with plastic handcuffs and shoved the girl’s face against the wall. Miral felt the plastic cord cutting into her wrists and her heart beat wildly, as she waited for the torture to begin.
She did not have long to wait. Blows from a riding crop began raining down on her back, on her legs, on her neck. The pain quickly became unbearable, and Miral could not keep from crying out every time the whip struck her. She could feel her T-shirt ripping, and shortly after that she felt blood running down her back. After a few minutes, she fainted, and when she regained consciousness, her T-shirt and trousers were gone. She felt ashamed and tried to cover herself, but her hands were still tied behind her back. Stunned as she was, she had no idea how much time had passed. Two female soldiers ordered her to kneel on the cold, dirty floor. “You mustn’t sit down. If you do, the blonde will come back. She’s not finished with you yet,” they told her, laughing. After an hour, Miral could take no more and fainted again. This time she woke up lying in an extremely small room. Behind a grate, the same policeman as before repeated the same questions, over and over, but without success.
“I want to go home. I want to wake up from this nightmare,” she kept telling herself. “I just have to hold out a few hours longer.”
But it wasn’t long before a new torturess entered the cell. As the hours passed, the torments became more and more refined. At one point, a hood was put over her head and removed after half an hour. Miral found herself surrounded with blinding light and deafening music interspersed with other detainees’ cries of pain. The sound and light prevented Miral from sleeping. To escape mentally from her situation, Miral began envisioning some of her life’s happiest moments. She thought about the warm room she’d had as a child, about its bright blue walls, about photographs of her friends, about her sister on the beach where they played games in the water. She couldn’t remember when she had hidden Hani’s gifts, especially that book, My Home, My Land. As she kept searching her mind for a way out, for an escape from that place, she imagined the colors red and yellow, the colors of the big carpet that hung on the wall of her family’s living room. “That carpet’s much older than you, Miral. It’s at least eighty years old,” her father would remind her proudly.
As she was traveling in a dream to escape the physical pain that throbbed in her wounds, a different police officer came by every half hour, shook her, and asked her the same questions. Her answer was always the same, too: she knew nothing. Her collapse began several hours later, when she asked for permission to go to the bathroom and was denied. She could go, they said, if she gave them something, and at that point Miral started crying hysterically, overwhelmed by shame and humiliation at the sight of her wet legs and the puddle of urine under her.
She was unable to calm her anxiety. Weariness hung over her, but she wasn’t through yet. She was brought back to the first room. “How disgusting! What a smell!” the officer said. “Do you want to wash up? Do you want your clothes?” When she said yes, he asked, “So will you cooperate, or shall we continue?”
“But I don’t know anything!” Miral replied. “You’ve got the wrong person.” At those words, he struck her violently with the back of his hand, knocking her to the ground. As Miral was trying to get up from the floor, using one hand to wipe away the blood that was flowing from her nose, two female soldiers entered, raised her up, and handed her a wet towel so she could clean her face. Then they roughly helped her into a sweatshirt and a pair of pants.
It was time to go before the judge, as the law regarding minors required.
10
During those same hours, Jamal was sitting in the waiting room of the police station, asking every ten minutes for news of his daughter, but no one knew anything about her. Miral was in another building, the interrogation center, which stood across the way. The entrance to the station was a long corridor, spartan but fairly accommodating. Jewish music filled the air, perhaps to prevent the most piercing screams from reaching the ears of the detainees’ relatives. Jamal waited together with other parents, some of them still in their pajamas, sitting in chairs and trying to console one another. Someone announced that an important person had been arrested carrying compromising documents and trying to get into Jordan. Jamal realized that it was useless to remain where he was and that he had to do something more than wait. When he saw the first light of dawn spreading over the Galilean hills, he decided in desperation that the best course of action would be to leave the station and find a lawyer. He realized that to stay in that waiting room, where he was helpless, was nothing but an exercise in futility.
He found a lawyer. Although still young, this man had acquired a great deal of legal experience since the outbreak of the intifada, and he was quite familiar with cases involving Palestinian militants who were under arrest. “Don’t worry, Jamal,” the lawyer told him over the telephone. “If your daughter’s a minor, she’ll go on trial today, and if she doesn’t have anything on her record, they’ll let her go with a warning.”
And as the lawyer had predicted, Miral, escorted by two police officers, was brought into court on the afternoon of the following day. The courtroom was empty except for a small number of people, one of whom was the judge. He never looked at her but kept his eyes on the documents he was perusing. She caught a glimpse of her father in the corner, sitting next to two other persons, and as soon as the judge raised his head, looked at the prosecuting attorney, and asked, “What do we have here?” the man next to her father approached and declared himself Jamal’s lawyer. Instinctively, Miral saw that this was her chance and resolved to act innocent and submissive, casting aside all defiance. And when the prosecutor began to state his case to the judge, Miral took off the sweatshirt that covered her bruises. The officers glared at her threateningly, recognizing her attempt to display for the judge’s benefit the marks of her mistreatment, which were clearly visible, including those under her white, bloodstained T-shirt. Jamal had seemed dejected, but when he saw Miral’s condition, he had to make a great effort to keep from crying out. The lawyer gripped his arm and told him to remain calm. He could see that Miral had been beaten and probably tortured, but the lawyer whispered that this was practically routine procedure for extracting information, and that nobody was spared, not even the youngest.
Miral was trying to avoid her father’s eyes, but out of the corner of her own she saw him trembling in his chair.
The judge very brusquely asked the prosecuting attorney if Miral had made a statement of confession or if there was any evidence of her involvement in the disorders of the intifada, and the prosecutor replied that he needed another twenty-four hours before he could produce such evidence and offered the judge a photograph that showed Miral, in profile, at a demonstration. The judge gazed at Miral for a moment before turning his attention to the dialogue between the two attorneys. Miral’s lawyer asked the prosecutor if there was any other evidence or if there were any witnesses against his client. The prosecutor contemptuously avoided answering him and continued talking only to the judge, but the judge told the prosecutor to reply to the lawyer’s questions. That same morning, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz had published a long denun ciation of the abuses committed by Israeli officers in charge of interro gations, some of whose victims were minors, all in the name of national security. The title of the article was “How Far Are We Willing to Go?” and a copy of the paper lay on the judge’s desk. After listening to the arguments on both sides, he said that since the accused was a minor who had not confessed and had committed no prior offense, he would grant her the benefit of general mitigating circumstances. Jamal’s lawyer gave him a satisfied smile.
“You’re free to go,” the judge said, specifying that she pay a fine amounting to three thousand shekels, or about seven hundred dollars. Then, with a stern look in Miral’s direction, he added, “I don’t want t
o see you in my courtroom again. The next time, the sentence won’t be so light. Therefore you had best make sure that you stay far away from trouble from now on.”
A weight lifted from his chest, Jamal gladly paid the fine and waited for Miral to be set free. When the gate opened and he saw her appear, his heart leaped into his throat, and tears rolled down his cheeks as he embraced her with all the strength he had. The tension of those interminable hours was finally dissolved. Miral could not suppress a cry of pain because of the burning wounds on her back. She was brought at once to an outpatient clinic, where a doctor dressed her wounds, and then she was finally able to go home.
Jamal understood that danger still hung in the air. He couldn’t take a repetition of such events. Miral washed and went to bed, and as soon as she fell asleep, Jamal asked Rania to stay with her sister and went to Dar El-Tifel. He wanted to discuss with Hind his decision to remove Miral from Jerusalem for a time in order to keep her safe for the immediate future. Hind received him in her office, and after an exchange of cordial greetings, she asked him for news of Miral.
While Jamal told her the story, recounting what had happened and describing Miral’s physical state, tears filled his eyes. With every detail he added, Hind’s face showed greater distress and worry. She agreed about the necessity of sending Miral to her aunt in Haifa for a time. Until exams began, Hind said. Jamal asked if a few weeks would be long enough. When Hind said yes, he wanted to know if it would compromise Miral’s grades. Hind told him not to worry. Miral knew what the syllabus required and would be fine if she studied on her own while she was at her aunt’s. Jamal left with a knapsack full of books and notebooks to take home to his daughter.
