Attempt at Picture Taking Leads to Four Hour Detention
for U.S. Activist and Father
by Sam Husseini
Feb. 14 -- Today, shortly after my dad and I left our
hotel in Tiberias by the Sea of Galilee, where my
father was born, we were driving around the city [for
recollections on a previous trip, see below]. My dad
was pointing out the houses and naming the Palestinian
families who lived there before Israeli forces pushed
or cohersed them out.
We came across one house my dad was telling me
belonged to a Palestinian family which he knew. I
noticed it had barbed wire around it. I thought this
was ironic, it seemed to have been turned into some
sort of army or police base. As we passed it, I took a
picture and I asked my dad to stop the car, so I could
take a better one. As I tried to take a picture, the
soldier in the front said something to me -- at first
I innocently thought it just hello, but then he was
waving and it was obvious that he didn't want me to
take a picture. I backed off, and headed back to the
car.
By the time I got back, lots of Israeli soldiers were
heading towards us. This was probably in part because
we were driving my dad's car, which had Jordanian
license plate. The base also had signs around it
telling people not to take pictures -- in Hebrew,
which I don't read. Before too long, about eight
soldiers were around us, questioning us, searching our
belongings. An old Jewish lady passed by, she and my
dad argued about which Palestinian family had lived in
which house.
My dad and I were separated and taken to the police
station, he was questioned extensively, I stayed with
the car where they searched through everything,
forcing me to even open presents we had brought for
relatives (I have relatives in the occupied West Bank
as well as citizens of Israel in the Galilee). They
kept asking me why I was taking a picture of an Army
base -- I told them that's what tourists do, take
pictures -- and noted the significance of that house.
A beefy guy from the bomb squad unit went through my
father's papers which had documentation of Israeli
agencies confiscating my father's father's property. I
thought, in a way, he found a bomb. Israelis are
clearly aware that they are on stolen land and the
people they stole it from are still around. They told
me to put our suit cases on the ground where they when
through them -- you call this "normalization" I asked.
It was only after they finished searching through our
car that I was questioned more extensively -- I think
they focused on questioning my dad since he speaks
Arabic and few of them spoke English, which is my only
language. Only then did I learn about the Israeli
deaths at the hands of the Gazan bus driver in Tel
Aviv that happened earlier in the day. I'd predicted
such killings last time I was in Israel -- Israeli
soldiers stand by the side of the road, basically
hitch hiking -- it was only a matter of time before an
enraged Palestinian killed a few souls that way, I
remember thinking.
Several of the police officers, including the top
investigator, were "Arab Israelis" -- non-Jewish
citizens of Israel. All told, we were detained for
four hours. I told them I took one picture, but I
didn't know how to delete it from the digital camera
I'd just bought. They never did delete it -- though
they claimed to be so concerned about the picture at
the beginning of the day. They were shocked that I
could down load it onto my laptop and put it on the
internet. I later learned, they questioned my dad
extensively about my work and political activity.
They attempted to make me sign a statement in Hebrew
that my camera and laptop were ok. We ended up
insisting it be in English. When we finally got out, a
journalist and a photographer were waiting. The
journalist, Lhyim Chtszv, had tried to question my dad
earlier in the day, but the police wouldn't let him.
He was from the weekly (Tiberias doesn't have a daily)
"North Star" and was very interested in our story --
particularly since my grandfather was vice mayor of
Tiberias and we had documentation of his owning
property. He thought this was just the beginning of
Palestinians coming and seeing the places they were
born, the property that belong/ed/s to them. I hope
that it's the start of an honest relationship, were
past wrongs are confessed in a straight forward manner
and serious attempt at redress is made.
The Baltimore Sun Company
The Sun (Baltimore)
May 31, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: Sowing seeds of anger; Palestinians: Peace
is impossible in the Middle East, the author writes,
until Israel acknowledges its history of heaping
injustices on the Palestinian people.
BYLINE: SAM HUSSEINI
IT WAS the most loving fax I've ever received. I had
just come back to the office from asking Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few questions at a news
conference during his visit to Washington in January.
I was astonished to learn that my dad, in Amman,
Jordan, saw it on CNN International. "You were
fantastic," he wrote me.
I was thinking of dad - and the fact that he and
700,000 other Palestinians were forced from their
homes in 1948 - as I asked the Israeli leader if it
was time that Israel acknowledged this wrong. The most
he conceded was that the Palestinian people have
indeed suffered - because of their own bad leadership.
When Netanyahu returned to the United States this
month, the Israeli prime minister rejected the paltry
pullback from 13 percent of the West Bank that the
Clinton administration favors. Netanyahu's position
denies the Palestinian leadership even the slightest
face-saving deal. In fact, if Israel gets its way, the
Palestinians will be subjugated to "Bantustans,"
living in dense population areas and having limited
control of the areas surrounding them. Israel wants to
continue to control the population flow from various
cities as well as most of the land and the water
resources in the West Bank. As Netanyahu stalls for
time, he confiscates more Palestinian land, heaps more
injustice on an injured people and sows the seeds of
more Palestinian resentment.
The inability of the Clinton administration to make
any sort of progress prompted the French and the
Egyptians to call for an international peace
conference. That could put the issue of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict where it was 50 years
ago: in the hands of the United Nations.
When I talked to dad on his birthday - April 9 - it
was a low-key conversation. Neither of us mentioned
that it was 50 years to the day after the massacre of
Dir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem, by pro-Israeli
forces. My father witnessed another massacre in
Eilaboun, a village in the Galilee. The last time I
was in the Middle East, I visited the towns and
villages where my father was in 1948, and he put some
flesh on events that he had hinted at for years.
One evening, we walked around Terra Sancta College,
where my father was a boarder at the end of the
British mandate, in a largely Jewish part of
Jerusalem. On a similar evening in 1947, he was
puzzled when he heard jubilation and dancing in the
streets. Another student said that the United Nations
apparently made a decision that the Jews liked. The
United Nations had voted to partition Palestine. They
had good reason to celebrate. The Jewish state was
allocated 56 percent of Palestine, even though Jews
owned only 6 percent of the land and made up one-third
of the population - and most of them were mandate-era
immigrants.
We visited Tiberias, where my dad was born. We saw the
lovely stone house he was raised in, now empty,
overlooking the Sea of Galilee. I had visions of its
becoming a museum for what happened in 1948 - before
it is demolished to make room for another hotel.
Despite my prodding, my dad, hardly a shy man, did not
want to try entering the house.
My dad told me of his earliest memories of his father,
who was vice mayor of Tiberias, gerrymandering
election maps. But a Christian, no matter how adept at
dividing districts, could not secure re-election
without substantial Jewish and Muslim support. There
certainly were prejudices, but the intermingling of
the faiths contradicts the "ancient hatreds" mantra we
hear so often. Two of my uncles were nursed by
neighbors because my grandmother had trouble
lactating. One had a Muslim wet nurse, another was
breast-fed by a Jewish neighbor.
We went to a lawyer's office, and he showed us the
land records with my grandfather's name, "Yousef Habib
Husseini" in English, crossed out as the owner, and
the "Israeli Authority of Construction" written in
Hebrew. My father's claim to ownership, though
completely documented, has been denied by Israeli
authorities because they regard him as "absentee" and
thus not a legitimate inheritor. Never mind that he
was driven out at gunpoint. Meanwhile, the World
Jewish Restitution Organization is recovering Jewish
property confiscated by the Nazis.
Tiberias fell to Israeli forces 50 years ago. It was
then that my dad and his younger brother went to the
small village of Eilaboun, where they had relatives.
Today, my extended family members there are educated,
but they retain a simplicity I haven't experienced
elsewhere. They are technically Israeli citizens, but
since they are not Jewish, they're third-class
citizens. They and other Christians and Muslims cannot
buy or lease land that the Israelis confiscated from
my family - controlled by quasi-governmental
organizations such as the Jewish National Fund.
The "who is a Jew" debate matters only because Jews in
Israel are granted rights that others, like my
relatives, are denied because of their religion -
Christianity. Yet we are constantly told that Israel
is a democracy. They do not dare go to picnics on
Independence Holiday for fear of attacks from Jewish
extremists - this after my relatives have been
Israelis for 50 years.
Dad showed me the square where the massacre at
Eilaboun took place. On Oct. 30, 1948, most everyone
from the village was in the church as the Arab
irregulars were withdrawing. The bombing from the
Israeli forces came closer and closer until, finally,
a loud voice in the village yard adjacent to the
church said in broken Arabic, "He who wants to live,
let him come out." They rushed outside with hands held
high. The Israeli soldiers occasionally shot those
coming out of the church, killing some, wounding
others. The priest, with a white flag in hand, watched
in horror.
Fourteen civilians from the village were put on a
truck and led the convoy going north - to Lebanon.
They were told that they were at the front in case of
land mines. The Israelis proceeded to force the rest
of the people, young and old, to walk. When they
wanted people to stop, the Israeli soldiers would
fire, sometimes into the crowd. A 3-year-old girl was
shot in the arm as her mother was carrying her. My
dad, then 16, jumped on top of his 10-year-old
brother, who was very frail because of rheumatic fever
- figuring that only one body would be exposed. When
his father later found out about this, it was the only
time my dad saw Grandpa cry.
People walked all day with no food. When a truck with
some bread came by and people rushed toward it,
soldiers shot at them, killing a 50-year-old man,
Samaan Shufani, who was standing next to my dad
moments earlier. Later, the Israeli soldiers took all
the money from the men, strip-searched them and
threatened to kill 10 men if the women didn't hand
over 100 Palestinian pounds. My Aunt Julia came
through - as she would years later, having saved
several of my grandfather's letters. The village later
repaid her.
The 14 men on the truck included some distant (by my
standards) relatives, and they were taken back to
Eilaboun - and shot in the town square. The other
villagers were thrown on the Lebanese border. These
were all relatively fortunate. My father was lucky
because an uncle who was an officer in the Jordanian
army took him in so he could continue his studies in
Terra Sancta College, which had moved to Amman. Other
Eilabounites made their way back to their village. The
Israelis turned a blind eye to this, apparently in
part because the church had protested the massacre of
the 14 villagers.
Hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians are to
this day in refugee camps in southern Lebanon -
periodically getting bombed by Israel. As we drove
around Galilee, we stopped at the village of Lubya. Or
rather, all that remains of it. It is one of 418
villages razed by the Israelis after they drove out
the 2,000 inhabitants. All you can see are hints of
rows of stones tracing the foundations of homes.
As Elie Wiesel and others condemn ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, they refuse to acknowledge that
Israel has done something similar. ABC's Ted Koppel
has falsely claimed that the Palestinians left
voluntarily in 1948. Michael Lerner of the liberal
Jewish magazine Tikkun has disavowed Jewish
culpability in driving Palestinians from their homes.
Early in the movie "Schindler's List," a Jew is shown
pleading with the Nazis, saying that their seizure of
his property violates the Geneva Convention. But
Israel violates the same laws as it continues to
confiscate Palestinian land.
The year 1948 resonates for Palestinians not just
because it was a catastrophic time but also because
the removal of Palestinians from their land has never
stopped.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Arab-Israeli citizens
lived under suffocating military mandates. Similarly,
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have contended
for decades with Israeli military occupation,
government schemes (permits, checkpoints, closures)
that, by design or accident, pressure them into
leaving. Another mass exodus took place in the 1967
war, and Israel continued expelling political leaders
and others into the 1990s. Continued closures and
checkpoints by Israeli authorities economically
strangle the Palestinians, pressuring them into
leaving.
The Israelis use the threat of another mass expulsion
to coerce the Palestinians into accepting the starkly
unequal terms of the Oslo Accords. Better to be
subservient but keep a stake in your home, goes the
reasoning of some Palestinians.
What is needed is to get rid of the myths. What is
needed is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission
similar to the one in South Africa. Real peace can
come only through facing the past.
Sam Husseini is the former media director for the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
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