Twilight Zone / Out of prison

Osama wakes up early every morning these days and goes to work in his well-kept garden. Afterward he goes for a walk. It's hard for him to sit at home. "It's hard for me to stare at walls," he says. He is 45 years old, and 19 of those years were spent behind walls, bolts and locks. Ten years ago, when we were first introduced through the letters he wrote me from prison, using green ink and in excellent Hebrew, he wrote that he dreamed of taking his other pen pal, a young man named Hagai Matar, horseback riding around his village.

Since then, Matar has grown up - he was a conscientious objector and is now a journalist at the weekly paper Ha'Ir - and Osama Barham has left jail and returned to jail. He was released this past summer, and we met again this week. "You look good," I told him as we embraced. "I dye my hair," he told me.

The house in the village is better kept than it used to be, and Osama is more muscular. In the time that has passed, so has another intifada, along with the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. When he was released from prison the first time, I was invited to join him at a large celebration his family held. The entire village came. I found it strange that the person to whom Israel attributes militant involvement with Islamic Jihad should make a point of seating an Israeli alongside him. "For five years, you've been telling me that I'm part of Jihad; for five years, I've been telling you that I'm not," he once wrote me from prison. I later was invited with my children to his home for lunch.

Together, we traveled to cover Nakba Day at the Balata refugee camp near Nablus in May 2000. Together, we saw the "Black Panther," Ahmed Tabuk, who shot 43 Palestinian collaborators in the knees, standing on a stage and firing gunshots all over the place. Tabuk has since been assassinated, the intifada abated and Osama disappeared from my life.

In December 2000 we visited a clothing store in the heart of Nablus owned by a close friend of his, Sa'ad al-Kharouf, who sold Oslo T-shirts. I spoke with Al-Kharouf in German. Soon after that, Al-Kharouf stayed the night in Osama's home. A late-night phone call sent them out of bed to help a friend who said he was "stuck" on a West Bank road with Osama's brother-in-law. When they arrived, it became clear that they had fallen prey to an Israel Defense Forces ambush. The clothing salesman was killed and Osama's brother-in-law was seriously wounded. They suspect the ambush was orchestrated to assassinate Osama, but they killed his friend and wounded his brother-in-law instead. Osama went into hiding and disappeared.

The wanted man hid for three years, and I didn't hear a word from him. In October 2003, he was caught in a shop in Ramallah. Three IDF soldiers in disguise dragged him outside with a gun pressed to his head. He tried to claim he wasn't Osama Barham, but to no avail. His picture, which had been distributed to Ramallah's collaborators, gave him away. About a year later, in December 2004, my phone rang. "I have a trial tomorrow. Please come. I would like to see you," he told me from a smuggled cell phone in a Ramle prison.

The trial at Ofer Prison was just another routine farce in Israel's military courts. The judge spoke in a French accent, the prosecutor in a Russian accent, confusing the accused with a witness, and the prison guard was Ethiopian. Only Osama was native to this land. We exchanged wordless glances through the bars. The prosecution offered Osama nine years in jail as part of a plea bargain, but he refused. "Fifty life sentences won't make me strike a plea." He claimed he was innocent. "I was a communist and now you claim I'm a big Islamic Jihad commander?"

Among other charges was a particularly grave one, accusing Osama of having been in possession of explosives. He denied the charge and was sentenced to only five years, due to dubious information supplied by a prisoner named Hassan Fatfata. This was Osama's umpteenth arrest, after having once been the most senior of all administrative detainees, with dozens of extensions and six years without a trial in an Israeli jail.

His first arrest came at the age of 15, during the first intifada. After he was beaten by a soldier because he didn't have an identification card, and his father, a respected school principal, withstood curses and humiliations from the soldier, the young Osama decided to take action. He hung a Palestinian flag on an electricity pole and was arrested. Since then, he has been in and out of jail. The question of his involvement with Islamic Jihad remains a mystery. But he never cut off ties with his Israeli friends, including Dr. Anat Matar (Hagai's mother) of Tel Aviv University - "my friend Anat," he called her in his letters - and attorney Tamar Peleg-Shrick, who was like a mother to him.

He has expressed opposition to violence on more than one occasion. In 1999, while in administrative detention, he wrote me from jail: "I want to ask Israeli society a basic human question that echoes in my mind: Why are we in jail? How many years will we stay in jail on the basis of mysterious and arbitrary charges?"

Osama is from one of the beautiful old villages in Samaria. Again we sat, like we had done in the past, in the garden, in the shade of the fig tree. I hadn't been here in eight years. The children, Layat, 8, and Hanin, 7, who were born when he was a wanted man and grew up without a father, return from school. In the first weeks following his release, Hanin would not let her father touch her. During his last five-year sentence, his wife was permitted to visit him just three times. Five years without a phone call home and almost without visits.

During those few visits, he wasn't told which of his family members had passed away. Only after he was released did he learn that his uncle had died. Osama's father had been killed in a car accident while on his way to visit him in Ketziot Prison in 1996. His sickly mother had felt ill once while visiting him. The prison guards withheld her medications, and Osama thought he was about to lose her as well.

The mother, Najiya, has traveled for the last 18 years between different prisons in Israel. In the 1990s, five of her sons were arrested at the same time, each of them charged with involvement in different militant groups. Now, for the first time since 1980, everyone is home. Osama says he doesn't know the young people in the village. Sometimes he'll stop a youth to ask who his father is.

The autumn sun floods the yard with bright light. "Respect my experience," Osama told his interrogator during his last interrogation, after 14 days without sleep. "You're 24 years old? I've been in interrogations since before you were born." When the interrogator offered coffee and cake, he politely refused. He knows that the Shin Bet security service is likely to show a photograph of him sipping coffee in the company of his interrogator to other detainees in order to smear his name. "From eight in the evening to six in the morning, I didn't say a word to him, except that my name is Osama Barham, and I won."

Osama is now a successful real estate agent. He has become a vegetarian and he works out every day. In jail, they once received one bell pepper for eight detainees to share for breakfast. Osama threw the pepper at the prison guard and was transferred to solitary confinement. His last sentence was his first as a family man, with a wife and two children. He says it is much harder to be in jail when a wife and small children are waiting outside. He says there are Palestinian detainees who haven't received a phone call or a visit in seven years. He recalls one detainee who was imprisoned for 26 years, and hadn't seen his son in 12 years. When the two of them met in jail, after the son was also arrested, the father would talk to him as though he were speaking to an infant, Osama says.

Every two or three months, Osama would be transferred to a different prison. After three years, he was allowed to hug Hanin for the first time. Layat burst into tears when the prison guards didn't let him hug his father, too. "You don't have children?" Osama asked the guard. On the phone on either side of the glass wall, through which detainees speak to their visitors, Osama tried to soothe his son. "Why didn't they let me in?" the boy asked, and his father responded, "You're already a man, and the Israelis are scared of you." Layat was five years old.

In June, as his sentence drew to a close, Osama warned his wife not to tell the children that he was about to be released. It isn't unusual for a legal sentence to be completed and for the Shin Bet to extend it through an administrative detention. Until the very last moment, you're never sure whether you'll be released. It's hard to even keep a countdown going. Friends were told he would be released in October, just to be on the safe side. When he was finally freed in June, hundreds of village residents waited next to the checkpoint.

Throughout his sentence, Osama got to know no less than 72 members of the Palestinian parliament who were jailed with him. To this day, 45 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council are in Israeli jails, most of them without a trial. But Barham is reluctant to become involved in politics. "There isn't one honest Palestinian organization," he says. "They're all corrupt and nobody is happy. Fatah people aren't happy with what's going on in Fatah, and Hamas people aren't happy with what's going on in Hamas, and nobody is happy with what happened in Gaza. But people are scared to speak up. I'm not scared to speak up."

What has changed? 

"Everyone became beggars. Because the Palestinian Authority begs for alms, it became normal. That is what disturbs me most. Once, people would be dying of hunger and they still wouldn't ask for charity. Now, they see the PA begging, so they think that everyone can. Fifteen years ago, a thief was a thief. Now he's a hero. Everyone is talking about money, money, money. Everyone is scared that the PA will collapse and there won't be money. Just money. Exchange 20 words with someone, and 15 of them will be about money.

"Once, people were willing to fight for ideas. Now, everything is money. We deteriorated fast, and now we're at rock bottom. If only we had half an organization like Hezbollah. Hezbollah has institutions and truth and concern for bereaved families. Here nothing is holy to anyone anymore. Nobody dares criticize, nobody reflects, nobody is willing to admit mistakes. Not Fatah, not Hamas, and not any other organization. You people aren't far from there. It's all about money for you, too. You're ashamed of it. And the person I hate the most on your side is [Likud Chair Benjamin] Netanyahu, who constantly thinks he's on stage. Avraham Burg is the only one who understands that you're heading to a bad place, and that's why he got a foreign passport. Ami Ayalon also understands the situation.

"If Israelis knew what was going on in the territories, their thinking would be turned upside down. Look what happened to [peace activist] Tali Fahima, a rightist who once came to visit [who was convicted of aiding Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades militants]. We, unfortunately, don't appeal to the Israeli street. Instead of appealing to America and Europe, we should have appealed to the Israeli street, because that's who will ultimately decide. Lots of cameras would have turned the Israeli street around. It would be enough for Israelis to see the major detour we had to take today, because of the checkpoints, just to get to the village."

Dec 9, 2008 -- 1:10AM, Memphis wrote:

I think Apartheid has taken on a new meaning since the world became aware of it from S.A. The original Afrikance word simply means separation from what I have read, mind you, haven't read that much on the actual meaning and origins of the word. Now the word carries with it a legal definition and is punishable by law. So with that, not too many people are going to push the apartheid comparison. Jimmy I think only mentions that actual word 3 times in his book.

 

The reason I posted that article is because it shows how Blacks, from South Africa, who lived through Apartheid see palestine. And I think that is very important, Before anyone dismisses the idea as anti-semitic (dershowitz) or is used as inflammatory language to highlight the crisis (carter) that they take the account of actual survivors of apartheid south africa. Who is better to know the system of apartheid than those who lived through it? I would take the world of a survivor of apartheid before a lawyer who grew up in the U.S and who theorizes about the system of Apartheid, which essentially means separation, which no one with a rational mind can actual dismiss

true, it's dutch for separation.....

look up some things about David Ben Gurion and his pals------------they actually used the Afrikaners model as an example how to run the state, they argued that unlike the Afrikaners they should also do some /toughdirty/low educated work themselves instead of letting the natives do everything. ---------in order to control the society the best etc. the history of early Israeli leaders is loaded with facism, shit is disgusting/

Apartheid is a word(that like many) has been taken out of context outside the dutch world..........but if we cannot label Israel's actions apartheid policies etc than Apartheid doesn't mean what it means...when Dutch people talk about America a little over 40 years ago we also label american society 'apartheid' society.