Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation

  In the fall of 2015, tensions escalated in Hebron and in the rest of the West Bank. A wave of stabbings, shootings, and car rammings overtook Israel and the West Bank. Thirty-six Israelis were killed in attacks by Palestinians, and three citizens of other countries, including two Americans, were killed. One hundred and forty Palestinians were killed carrying out attacks against Israelis, and a further eighty-two Palestinians were shot by Israeli forces during clashes. Issa was finding it ever more challenging to convince the children with whom he worked of the merits of nonviolence. One day, alerted by a neighbor, he rushed to a doorway where an eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl huddled, a knife in her hand, ready to stab the next Israeli she saw. Issa convinced her that there were ways to resist the occupation without taking a life and in the process throwing away her own. Shaking, she dropped the knife and accompanied him to Palestinian security officials, who took her into custody.

  Inspired by this incident and others, in November Issa called the young people together for an urgent refresher on the principles of nonviolence, and how to behave if detained. “Don’t give the army an excuse to shoot you,” he said. Be polite and calm. Don’t resist. He gave them the contact information for an attorney, one of the group of human rights lawyers, some of them Israeli, who have rallied to his cause. The speech as he recounted it to me reminded me of one I used to give to my clients years ago when I was a public defender. Be polite, calmly ask for your attorney and your parents. Answer no questions, make and sign no statements.

  According to military authorities, 861 Palestinian children were arrested by the Israeli Defense Forces in 2014. This figure understates the true figure, as it does not include children detained by the IDF and released after a few hours, without being registered into military detention facilities. Most of those children were between the ages of twelve and seventeen, though the youngest child ever to be detained by the IDF, a boy from Hebron, was a mere five years old. According to Military Court Watch, an NGO that monitors the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli jails, prisons, and courts, which receives its data from the Israeli Prison Service, “at the end of April 2016, 414 children (12–17 years) were held in military detention. This represents a 93 per cent increase compared with the monthly average for 2015. The latest data includes 12 girls; three children under 14 years; and 13 children held without charge or trial in administrative detention.” At sixteen, Karim was among the younger teenagers gathered in Issa’s garden. And yet he had already been arrested three times, though each time detained only briefly.

  The first time Karim was arrested, he was thirteen years old. He and his sister were walking near a checkpoint when a car came within a hair’s breadth of running them down. Karim, frightened, lifted his hand to ward off the vehicle. It screeched to a halt and a settler leapt out of the driver’s seat and began punching the boy. The police arrived and arrested not the man beating the child, but the child being beaten. The settler went on his way. Karim spent four hours in police custody.

  Three years and one more arrest later, Issa’s lecture felt not merely relevant, but urgent. Normally, Karim had a hard time sitting still. He’d pop up from his seat, get distracted. But that November night, he sat, rapt, unmoving, for nearly an hour, almost as if he knew what was about to happen.

  There was the sound of footsteps, a rustling, and then the pop of flares. In the sudden, brilliant light Issa and the young people found themselves surrounded by Israeli soldiers. The commander peered at the youths one after another, and then pointed at Karim. He was the one they wanted.

  The soldiers took Karim aside and searched him. At this point Karim told me he felt relatively unconcerned. He assumed that he was merely the first of the group to be searched, and that the others would soon follow. However, once he’d been thoroughly frisked, the commander said, “Yalla,” Arabic for “Let’s go,” and motioned for Karim to start walking.

  “Where are you taking me?” Karim asked in Arabic.

  “Quiet,” the commander told him in Hebrew. Issa offers Hebrew lessons at the community center, to arm the children with language, but Karim’s is rudimentary at best.

  The soldiers led Karim down the hill and out onto Shuhada Street, a strange experience for a boy who’d never been allowed to walk there before. They stopped in front of the imposing, gorgeously renovated Beit Hadassah, a Jewish settlement and museum built on the site of a medical clinic that nearly a century earlier had served the small Jewish community of Hebron. In 1929, Palestine, then under British rule, was engulfed in riots, and sixty-seven Jewish residents of Hebron were massacred by their Palestinian neighbors. The British subsequently moved the rest of the Jewish community out of the city. For the next fifty years, Hebron was exclusively occupied by Palestinians, though after the Six-Day War the Israelis built a large settlement on its outskirts. In 1979, a group of religious Jewish settlers, mostly women and children, stole into the heart of Hebron in the middle of the night and illegally occupied Beit Hadassah. The Israeli government went on to sanction their settlement.

  The commander exhibited Karim to two soldiers who were standing in the middle of the street out in front of the elaborate building. The first soldier shrugged. “Maybe it’s him. Maybe it’s not him,” he said. The second soldier, an Arabic-speaking Druze, insisted that yes, Karim was the one they were looking for. He then poked the other soldier, who hesitated a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and agreed. Yes. They had the right boy.

  A few moments later, a border police officer arrived. This officer was also Druze, and he spoke to Karim in Arabic. He showed Karim a long knife with a black handle. “Karim,” the officer said, “admit that this is your knife.”

  It was when he saw the knife that Karim panicked. They could imprison you for a knife. They could shoot you. Terrified, he violated the rule Issa had laid down. He spoke. “No! No!” he insisted. He’d never seen that knife before. He had no idea whose it was or how it came to be on the ground in front of Beit Hadassah.

  In 2010, the Office of the Israeli Military Advocate General instructed army commanders that when dealing with minors, they should always tie hands from the front, unless security considerations require tying their hands behind their back. Karim was compliant. Nonetheless, the soldiers zip-tied him with his hands behind his back. The rules also require the use of three plastic ties—one around each wrist and one connecting the two—to avoid pain. On Karim, the soldiers used a single tie. Evidence collected by Military Court Watch suggests that Karim’s treatment is typical. Commanders in the field routinely violate both international standards and the IDF’s own rules regarding the restraint of children.

  As the police officer loaded Karim into a jeep, settlers began pouring out of Beit Hadassah. Their faces contorted with rage, they began shrieking, “Terrorist, terrorist!” Be quiet, Karim told himself. Be calm, so you won’t get hurt.

  In 2013, after UNICEF recommended that the blindfolding or hooding of children be prohibited, the IDF legal adviser for the West Bank reminded all commanders that blindfolding is only permitted when there is an explicit security need. Nonetheless, when Karim arrived at the police station, he was blindfolded. This is a consistent pattern: the IDF responds to international pressure by establishing appropriate rules and procedures, which are routinely violated without consequences.

  Issa, meanwhile, had followed Karim and the soldiers down to Shuhada Street, though of course, because he is Palestinian, he was not permitted to go as far as Beit Hadassah. He stood, watching from a distance, until Karim was taken away. Then the soldiers came up to him. Issa asked them why Karim was arrested, but the commander raised a hand, silencing him.

  “Was the boy found in your house?” the commander asked.

  “You know he was,” Issa told them. The soldiers had been in the garden when Karim was arrested, and they knew Issa well. They knew the house belonged to him.

  “You are arrested for harboring a terrorist in your house,” the commander said.

  “Wh
at terrorist?” Issa asked. “Who is the terrorist?”

  Karim, the commander said, had walked up to the soldiers in front of Beit Hadassah, a knife in his hand. Frightened, the boy had dropped the knife and run up to Issa’s house.

  “When?” Issa asked. “When did this happen?”

  “Five minutes before we arrested him.”

  Issa tried to explain that the boy had been with him for the previous hour, that it could not be Karim who had dropped the knife. But the exercise was futile. More than futile, it was a farce.

  The soldiers arrested Issa, handcuffing and blindfolding him. They brought him to the police station where they were holding Karim and shoved him into a bathroom, seating him on the toilet. Issa sat there for the next four or five hours. Periodically a soldier would open the door, cock his weapon so that Issa could hear it, and then leave.

  While this was happening, Karim was being held in the same base, sitting outside on the ground, blindfolded and zip-tied. He was neither given water nor allowed to use a bathroom. Eventually, after what Karim estimates is about four hours, the police officer returned and led him to an interrogation room.

  The interrogator removed Karim’s blindfold and the zip-tie that was cutting painfully into his wrists. He began asking Karim questions, none of which had to do with the knife. What the interrogator wanted to talk about was Issa Amro.

  Tell us about Issa, the interrogator asked. What does he do? Whom does he talk to? What does he tell the young people at the community center?

  Karim refused to answer the questions. Instead, he asked the interrogator to call his parents. He also asked to speak to the lawyer, whose name he fortunately remembered. UNICEF recommends that interrogations of minors always take place in the presence of a lawyer and a family member. This is not a standard the IDF accepts. As the US State Department report noted, 96 percent of Palestinian children report being denied access to an attorney during or before interrogation. Unusually, however, in the face of Karim’s valuable insistence on his rights, instilled in him by Issa, the interrogator did indeed put Karim on the phone with a lawyer, who reaffirmed the boy’s right to remain silent.

  After this, Karim was taken out of the interrogation room. His blindfold was put back on, more tightly this time. He was zip-tied, also more tightly. The soldiers placed him in a chair, and then pushed him from the chair onto the ground. Then they started beating him.

  Up until the late 1990s, Israeli Shabak interrogators routinely used physical violence, even torture, against Palestinians. In September 1999, the Israeli high court banned the use of physical means of coercion in interrogations, though it made an exception to the prohibition for cases involving a “ticking time bomb,” which interrogators have continued to use to justify abusive interrogation methods. B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) and HaMoked (the Center for the Defense of the Individual) have documented a myriad of continued violations of human rights and international law. According to their reviews, prisoners are held in miserable conditions, fed so poorly they lose weight during detention, subject to solitary confinement, and denied hygienic items like toilet paper. They are forced into stress positions and bound, sometimes for days at a time. And they continue to be beaten. UNICEF, official IDF policy, and the Geneva Convention all prohibit the beating of detained children. And yet, as has been noted in the US State Department report, 61 percent of detained Palestinian minors suffer physical violence during arrest, interrogation, and detention. Children like Karim report being punched, kicked, forced into painful positions, and more.

  When the beating stopped, a soldier pressed a cup of water into Karim’s hand, but though he was parched, he refused to drink. With his eyes blindfolded, he couldn’t tell what was in the cup, and he’d heard stories of boys being forced to drink the soldiers’ piss.

  For the rest of the night, Karim was left outside in the cold. At some point, an Arabic-speaking soldier put a jacket over him, but it was quickly taken away. Later on, a kindly female soldier brought him inside to a warm room, but almost immediately a male soldier took him back out. Finally, in the morning, Karim was loaded into a jeep and taken to the army base at Kiryat Arba, the settlement outside Hebron. There a physician checked his body for bruising and took a medical history. Karim spent the next night in the detention facility at Gush Etzion. This facility is for adults, not minors. The next day, Karim was transferred to Ofer Prison. The day after that, he went before a military judge.

  Extrajudicial administrative detention, where prisoners are held for up to six months, with the possibility of indefinite renewals, is routinely used against Palestinian adults. In December 2011, in response to international pressure, the IDF stopped issuing administrative detention orders against children, though that fall, as the violence in the West Bank escalated, they once again began detaining some children without trial. Karim, however, avoided the purgatory of administrative detention. In the six days he was held, he went to the military court three times.

  The military court at Ofer Prison is a dusty complex of portable structures. The courtyard in which families wait is walled in by Perspex panels bolted together, separating the waiting area from the trailers that house the miniature courtrooms. In one corner is a makeshift snack bar with a Hebrew sign, its menu and prices written in Arabic. On the morning I visited, no one lined up to buy the Hello Kitty ice cream or sesame seed bourekas, and the vendor entertained himself by playing Kanye West’s “Power.” There is about the place an air of helpless patience and boredom, women and elderly men trying to pass the time by doing nothing as they wait to witness their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, be tried and sentenced.

  The Ofer court seems like a temporary facility, tossed up to accommodate an urgent need. This is appropriate, given that international law is premised on the concept that military occupation is temporary, and that the military legal system is meant to exist only briefly, during occupation. And yet the failure to construct permanent facilities is curious, given that this temporary occupation has now lasted fifty years, with no end in sight. In contrast, most Israeli settlements, even those constructed hurriedly, often in the dark of night, quickly assume the prospect of permanent structures.

  Karim had a hard time understanding what went on during his court hearings. Even now, months later, he wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. The proceedings were held in Hebrew, with an Arabic translator. He described the translator to me as a young uniformed soldier who sat playing with his smartphone. Karim told me, “He speak the lawyer ten words; the translator tells me one word.”

  Gaby Lasky, a civil rights attorney and a progressive member of the Tel Aviv City Council, who along with colleagues represented Karim in this case, told me that she once won a case at the Salem court in the northern West Bank. At the announcement of the not guilty verdict, the translator, an Arabic-speaking Druze, looked puzzled, and then stopped the proceedings. He couldn’t remember or did not know how to translate the word acquittal to Arabic and had to ask one of the lawyers in the courtroom.

  The conviction rate in the IDF military courts is above 99 percent (as of 2011), with the vast majority of young offenders taking plea bargains. They plead guilty not because they necessarily committed the crimes of which they are accused, but because children are routinely denied bail. In the occupied territories, if a child is charged, for example, with throwing stones, and insists on his innocence, he is likely to spend four to six months in jail awaiting a hearing. But if he pleads guilty, he will serve on average a three-month sentence and then go home.

  Many things made Karim’s case different from that of the typical Palestinian child accused of a crime. Karim was well trained. He knew not to answer questions and had been drilled to expect and demand his rights. Because of his relationship with Issa, who was the 2010 winner of the UN’s Human Rights Defender of the Year in Palestine award and is well known in human rights circles, Karim had an Israeli lawyer. Most important, h
is case attracted the attention of the Israeli media. For all these reasons, though he was held without bail for a number of days, eventually Karim’s case was dismissed without indictment.

  Issa believes that the boy was arrested as part of a campaign of harassment and intimidation directed at him. He is convinced that the arrest was primarily for the benefit of Baruch Marzel, who appeared at the community center at the same time as the soldiers. At Marzel’s side was an American settlement supporter. Marzel and the visitors from America set up an encampment around the community center, complete with tables and chairs. When Issa returned from detention and notified the army that the settlers were trespassing on his land, he was told that they had obtained a permit for a protest. This was not true. Even in the West Bank one cannot get a permit to stage a protest on another’s private land. The extremists surrounded Issa’s property for twenty-four hours, at all times accompanied by Israeli soldiers. Though Gaby did not feel comfortable speculating about the arrest, about whether there had ever been a boy with a knife, she did tell me that it would not have been the first time in her experience that the IDF had arrested a nonviolent activist without justification. Nor would it have been the first time that the IDF engaged in the theatrics of oppression for benefit of the settlers.

  As frightened as Karim had been, as miserable was the experience of being arrested, he was conscious that things could have been a lot worse. Unlike most young arrestees, he didn’t go through the terrifying experience of being roused from his bed in the middle of the night. Another teenager, whom I’ll call Mahmoud, described to me this more typical experience. Mahmoud’s family woke one night to the sound of loud banging and shouts. Knowing that their door would be blown off its hinges or kicked in if he didn’t move quickly to open it, Mahmoud’s father leapt out of bed, stumbling over his children sleeping on mattresses on the floor. This was not the first time the family had been woken in this way. When I asked Mahmoud’s mother how many times the IDF had shown up at their home in the middle of the night, the doe-eyed thirty-nine-year-old mother of nine shrugged.