My life on the inside

Twenty-seven years ago a young Palestinian called Sa'id Ghazali was jailed
for 18 months in Israel. He was reminded of the experience last week as the Israelis freed hundreds of Palestinians as part of the roadmap to peace.

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Those who have spent time in prison usually do not like to speak about their experiences inside, because it's a story of agony you do not forget.

Watching jubilant Palestinians welcoming their relatives released from Israeli prisons over the past week or so, I recollected the joy of my loved ones 27 years ago.

My parents, my four brothers, three sisters and a crowd of uncles and cousins waited for long hours outside the walled prison of Ramla for me to be released.

I shook hands with Dabhi, the Israeli guard who escorted me out through the prison gate. As I stepped out, my family rushed towards me with welcoming arms. I was soaring with happiness.

The prison governor advised me not to come back. I advised him to convince his Government to end the occupation. If there were no occupation, the Palestinians would not resist, I said.

Prison made me see things from a wider perspective. I decided to resist the occupation by telling the truth. I pursued my university education and became a journalist.

I am strongly against violence and have never practised violence of any sort. How I got to be in prison is not even linked with politics.

I had just finished school with good exam results. I wanted to study at Damascus University, and was told by the local Palestinian municipality that I had won a scholarship to go there.

But when I got to Damascus I found nothing. No scholarship; no enrolment.

I had just 50 Jordanian dinars ($120) in my pocket. Then my bag was stolen. I didn't know what to do. I was in despair.

There was a university in nearby Beirut, but it was funded by Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation. Fatah was, and still is, a Palestinian national movement that includes people from the right and left, moderates and radicals. It also included people who believed in violence. The only way I could get a place to study there was to join the organisation.

I had a relative in the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut, later the site of a notorious massacre of Palestinians. His name was Abu Sultan. I went to see him. When he asked me why I had come, I told him enthusiastically: "I want to join the revolution."

He laughed at me. "We are a people without conscience," he said. "You want to join us?" I said yes, although I was troubled by his words. That night we ate at an expensive restaurant.

The next day, he drove me to the Ein Hilwa refugee camp in southern Lebanon. "Don't tell anybody that you are from Jerusalem," he said.

Sultan took me to a Fatah military camp. He gave me his Kalashnikov and asked me to shoot at a wooden target. I missed with every shot. "You are not suitable for this kind of activity," he told me. "I don't want you to study in Beirut, because if you do you will never get home."

So I returned to Jerusalem. To this day I have never touched a gun again.

Yet six months after my return, I ended up in an Israeli prison. My "crime" was being a member of Fatah.

Today membership of Fatah is not even considered an offence. The situation was very different then.

At that time, Arafat was abroad. There was no Palestinian prime minister. Today, the PLO's representatives discuss peace with Israeli officials. Back then, the PLO was considered a terrorist organisation.

As I look back on the past two and a half years of violence and all the human tragedies associated with it, I remember my own pain in prison. My optimism vanished like a false hope, a mirage of unrealistic expectation. The images of the past are burning in my memory.

I was taken by police van from the military court to Ramla prison, south-east of Tel Aviv. The sentence was heavy: 18 months.

I was unable to stop my horrible pain. A prison guard told me: "You are hablan" - Hebrew for saboteur or terrorist - "you are worse than a criminal." I was 19 years old. I am now 48, but his words still echo.

I was provided with a brown shirt and trousers, a plastic mug, one blanket and heavy black boots. I was taken to a room. The guard slammed the door behind me.

There were five tattooed Israeli prisoners lying on their beds. They looked tough. I realised immediately that I was going to have a bad time. I tried to claim I was a thief, but they did not believe me.

"You are a terrorist," one said. The guard came with his rattling keys and opened the door again.

He called my name. I hated my name every time they said it - it meant another long session of interrogation. I was interrogated for 39 days. They put dirty sacks over my head and tied me to the chair for hours at a time.

They wanted me to give them names of partners that I didn't have, and admit that I had done something. I had done nothing. I never really became a member of Fatah.

The guard took me to a courtyard. A photographer came and hung an iron plate with a number around my neck. He photographed me. I felt like a criminal. The guard then took me to a confined cell. I was alone, thank God - no more tattooed thugs.

There was no toilet in the cell. If I had to go, I was told to bang the door and call for the sohair, the Hebrew for guard. It could take him five minutes or hours to come. It all depended on his mood.

The next day, the guard took me to the section for inmates with short sentences. Within a few days, my feelings changed.

Most of the prisoners were Palestinians from East Jerusalem and Arab Israelis who had made contacts with the PLO.

They had smuggled weapons from Lebanon, and planted explosives in Haifa and Tel Aviv.

"You are not criminal," they told me. "You are a political prisoner. You have a cause. You struggle for your homeland, Palestine."

Many of them belonged to Fatah and other PLO factions. The activists smuggled in booklets written by the PLO leaders. They gave me materials to read. There was a lot of argument between right-wing and left-wing groups.

A prisoner who had a good command of Hebrew was assigned to listen to the news and write a daily bulletin in Arabic. Another was given the task of translating interesting articles from leading Israeli newspapers.

The leadership hierarchy was respected. The senior leaders of the organisations were all in another section, for those with longer prison sentences, and smuggled their hand-written instructions to our section in the garbage buckets.

There was a movie once a week, usually a pornographic film screened in the restaurant every Friday.

Most prisoners liked it, shouting with pleasure, but the political prisoners boycotted it. Any political prisoner caught watching it was disciplined by the others: a light sentence such as not being allowed to smoke cigarettes for a number of days, or drink coffee or eat chocolate.

In prison, the most feared word is malshan - collaborator. The Israeli inmates punished police informers from their number mafia-style, slashing their cheeks with a knife. The scar, sometimes a 10cm slit, told everybody the man was an informer.

The Palestinian activists killed collaborators. They passed a "revolutionary sentence" after getting a confession from him. Some collaborators died from fear. An activist serving a life sentence acted as executioner.

He strangled the collaborator with his hands, or used a piece of cloth or a pillow, or slit his throat with a sharp knife stolen from the kitchen, or used a heavy tub to crush his head. The other prisoners in the room made a noise to divert the attention of the guards from the execution.

After the killing, the guards would storm the room, and the executioner would admit he did it. They took him to a solitary confinement cell. After a few months, he would come back with another life sentence.

In the first few days of my incarceration, I learnt the key words of Hebrew. The guards' voices resonated with the call "sfra", the cue for a headcount of the prisoners that took place twice a day.

Nearly one hour after the sfra, a guard shouted "okhel", and the prisoners would repeat the word in every room as they rushed to the restaurant.

There were two "foras" a day - exercise in the courtyard. The prisoners spent the fora walking backwards and forwards, and talking. The immortal voice of Umm Kalthoum, a famous Egyptian singer, crooned in the background.

I served my entire 18-month sentence. I counted every hour, even the minutes.


- INDEPENDENT