A few days before my transfer, I was moved into my father’s cell. A look of relief swept over my father’s face as he held out his arms for an embrace. He held me away from him and smiled.
“I followed you,” I said, laughing. “I couldn’t live without you.”
Two others were in the cell, and we joked around and had a good time together. To be honest, I was very happy to see my dad safely behind bars. No mistakes would be made. No missiles would come from the sky.
Sometimes while he read the Qur’an to us, I just enjoyed looking at him and listening to his beautiful voice. I thought about how gentle he was when we were growing up. He never forced us to get out of bed for early morning prayers, but we all did it because we wanted to make him proud. He had given his life to Allah at a very early age and passed along that devotion to the rest of us by example.
Now I thought: My beloved father, I am so glad to be sitting here with you. I know prison is the last place you want to be right now, but if you weren’t here, your shattered remains would probably be in a little vinyl bag somewhere. Sometimes he looked up and saw me smiling at him with love and appreciation. He didn’t understand why, and I couldn’t tell him.
When the guards came to transfer me out, my father and I hugged tightly. He seemed so frail in my embrace, and yet I knew how strong he was. We had been so close over the past few days that I felt as if I was being torn apart. I even found it difficult to leave the Shin Bet officers. We had developed an incredibly close relationship over the years. I looked at their faces and hoped they knew how much I admired them. They looked back at me apologetically. They knew the next stop on my journey wouldn’t be so easy.
The faces of the soldiers who handcuffed me for transfer had a completely different look. To them, I was a terrorist who had escaped the IDF, made them look stupid, and evaded capture. This time, I was taken to Ofer Prison, part of the military base where I had met regularly with the Shin Bet.
My beard grew long and thick like everyone else’s. And I joined the other prisoners in the daily routine. When prayer times came, I bowed and knelt and prayed, but no longer to Allah. I prayed now to the Creator of the universe. I was getting closer. One day, I even found an Arabic-language Bible stashed in the world religion section of the library. It was the whole thing, not just the New Testament. No one had ever touched it. I’ll bet no one even knew it was there. What a gift from God! I read it again and again.
Every now and then, somebody would come over to me and gently try to find out what I was doing. I explained that I studied history and that since the Bible was an ancient book, it contained some of the earliest information available. Not only that, but the values it teaches are also great, I said, and I believed that every Muslim ought to read it. People were usually okay with that. The only time they got a little sore was during Ramadan, when it seemed I was studying the Bible more than the Qur’an.
The Bible study I had attended in West Jerusalem was open to everybody—Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist, whatever. Through this group, I had had opportunities to sit down with Jewish people who came with the same purpose as I did: to study Christianity and learn about Jesus. It was a unique experience for me as a Palestinian Muslim to study Jesus with an Israeli Jew.
Through this group, I had gotten to know a Jewish man named Amnon pretty well. He was married and had two beautiful children. He was very smart and spoke several languages. His wife was a Christian and had encouraged him for a long time to be baptized. Finally, Amnon decided to do it, so the group gathered one evening to witness his baptism in the pastor’s bathtub. By the time I arrived, Amnon had finished reading some Bible verses and had begun to cry very hard.
He knew that when he allowed himself to be lowered under the water, he was not only declaring his allegiance to Jesus Christ through the identification with his death and resurrection, he was also divorcing his culture. He was turning his back on the faith of his father, a professor at Hebrew University. He was abandoning Israeli society and religious traditions, destroying his reputation, and jeopardizing his future.
Not long after, Amnon received notice to begin serving his tour with the IDF. In Israel, every non-Arab citizen, male or female, over the age of eighteen is required to serve in the military—men for three years, women for two. But Amnon had seen enough checkpoint massacres to feel that, as a Christian, he could not allow himself to be placed in a position where he might be required to shoot unarmed civilians. And he refused to put on a uniform and go to the West Bank.
“Even if I could do my job by shooting a stone-throwing child in the leg instead of in the head,” he argued, “I don’t want to do it. I am called to love my enemy.”
A second notice came. Then a third.
When he still refused to serve, Amnon was arrested and imprisoned. What I didn’t realize was that Amnon was living in the Jewish section of the prison the entire time I was at Ofer. He was there because he refused to work with the Israelis; I was there because I had agreed to work with them. I was trying to protect Jews; he was trying to protect Palestinians.
I didn’t believe that everybody in Israel and the occupied territories needed to become a Christian in order to end the bloodshed. But I thought that if we just had a thousand Amnons on one side and a thousand Mosabs on the other, it could make a big difference. And if we had more … who knows?
A couple of months after arriving at Ofer, I was taken to court, where no one knew who I was—not the judge or the prosecutors, not even my own lawyer.
At my trial, the Shin Bet testified that I was dangerous and requested that I be kept longer. The judge agreed and sentenced me to six months in administrative detention. Again, I was transferred.
Five hours drive from anywhere, in the sand dunes of the Negev Desert and very near the Dimona nuclear plant, stood the tent prison of Ktzi’ot, where you melted in the summer and froze in the winter.
“What’s your organization?”
“Hamas.”
Yes, I still identified myself as part of my family, as part of my history. But I was no longer like the other prisoners.
Hamas was still the majority. But since the start of the Second Intifada, Fatah had grown significantly, and each group had about the same number of tents. I was tired of pretending, and my newfound ethical code kept me from lying. So I decided to keep mostly to myself while I was there.
Ktzi’ot was serious wilderness. The night air echoed with the sounds of wolves and hyenas and leopards. I had heard stories of prisoners who had escaped Ktzi’ot, but no stories of anyone having survived the desert. Winter was worse than summer—freezing air and drifting snow and nothing but canvas to keep out the wind. Each tent had a moisture barrier across the roof. But some of the prisoners tore down pieces of it to make privacy curtains around their cots. The moisture from our breath was supposed to be trapped in that liner. But it just floated up and stuck to the naked canvas until it got too heavy. Then all that spit rained down on us throughout the night as we slept.
The Israelis virtually papered the camp with glue boards to try to keep the mouse population under control. Early one frosty morning while everyone else was still asleep, I was reading my Bible when I heard a squeaking sound, like a rusty bedspring. I looked under my cot and saw a mouse stuck to a glue board. What surprised me, though, was that another mouse was trying to save him without getting stuck himself. Was it his mate or a friend? I don’t know. I watched for about half an hour as one animal risked its life to save another. It moved me so much that I freed them both.