Bassam Aramin
My son Arab is 14, just past the age that his Jewish Israeli peers are celebrating their Bar Mitzvahs. This ceremony in Jewish culture is a rite of passage that marks a boy's entrance into the realities and responsibilities of adulthood. And last week, my son experienced something akin to the Palestinian Bar Mitzvah.
It was a beautiful day on Friday the 12 July when Arab went with his friends to the beach in Tiberias. He spent all of his time in the days leading up to the trip trying to convince me that I should let him go. At first I refused -- he's young to be traveling so far in a group without his parents. But then I remembered the regret I still feel about the death of my daughter Abir.
Abir was ten when she was killed by Israeli occupation forces on 16 January 2007 in front of her school in Anata. That morning, when she asked her mother and me for permission to play with her friends after school, I'd refused. I told her, "Don't even think of coming home late, come back right away so you can prepare for your next exam." And she answered me with the last words I ever heard from her, petulant and innocent. "Well, I'm going to be late." She was angry with me. She was late that day, but not because she met her friends. A bullet from an Israeli border patrolman found her instead, and she never came back. I regret having refused her request, not knowing that it would be her last -- that she would be late despite me and despite herself.
When I saw how much Arab wanted to go, I thought of Abir and gave my permission with the condition that he look after himself and be in constant phone contact with me.
Arab and his friends Rafet, Saleh and Mohammed got themselves ready for a day at the beach, and the bus set out at 7:00am. There were about 45 passengers: Arab and nine of his peers, who range in age from 14 to 17; the rest were families and children and a group of girls Arab's age, all legal residents of Israel with East Jerusalem IDs. I was pleased with how happy Arab was during the time he called to check in.
Arab loved Abir fiercely, and her death was an awful blow especially to him, the oldest of her siblings. I was so glad to hear joy in his voice again.
At 11:00pm Arab called me and said they had almost made it back and he'd be home in half an hour. But 11:30 came and went. At exactly 12:00am I called him, angry that he was late. He answered in a hushed voice with words that chilled me.
"There are a lot of soldiers here. The police stopped the bus, we don't know why, and we're in Jerusalem -- the soldier is asking us not to talk on the phone, I'll call back later." And he hung up the phone. I didn't know why they went all the way into Jerusalem proper and where exactly they were in the city, and I was in this terrible state of not knowing what was happening to my son, trying to call him and getting no answer until an hour and a half later when he answered the phone and said quickly, "we are now in the Israeli police station, they've detained everyone from the bus, they are checking us all and I am not allowed to talk to you now and they'll let us go soon," and again he hung up.
There are no words for the state I was in during those hours, waiting for his next call and dreading it would not come. Then at 2:30am he called again to say that they were at the Moscobiyye detention center in Jerusalem. I asked him why they were being detained, and he said he did not know. I told him, "Go up to the solider and tell him, you have to talk to my father, he does not know where I am."
He replied that he was scared to do so; they'd already beaten many of the kids there because they had talked and talking was not allowed. "But I trust you, Dad."
I told him he was brave, and that he shouldn't be scared of the soldier. "Talk to him in Hebrew," I said. I made sure to teach all my children Hebrew from a young age. I could hear Arab go up to the soldier and tell him, "Please, can you talk to my father?" But the solider told him to shut his mouth and hang up the phone.
"If your father wants to see you tell him to come here," he said.
I was beside myself. I yelled in my loudest voice, "You murderers! Where is my son? Do you want to kill him as you killed his sister a year ago?" I told Arab to turn on the speakerphone so the soldier could hear what I was saying, but he had a better eye on the situation and said to me, "Dad, don't be afraid. I am okay. They are going to let us go in a bit like they said; I'll talk with you soon." And he hung up.
At exactly 3:00am the Israeli occupying forces let the group go, and I waited on pins and needles until 3:40am for Arab to come home. He was exhausted, so I told him to please go to sleep and we could talk in the morning. The most important thing was that he was okay.
The next day I returned from work in the evening to find Arab and Rafet in the house, and I heard what had happened.
In the industrial neighborhood of Wad al-Joz in Jerusalem, a group of Israeli special forces troops on motorcycles along with police and army reinforcements were stationed on the path the bus from Tiberias was taking to get its passengers, all legal residents of Israel, home. They demanded that the driver stop immediately. One of the soldiers got on the bus and said, "Anyone who moves his head, I'll put a bullet in it." Arab said to me, "At that moment all I could think of was Abir, who really was shot in the head by a bullet."
The soldier continued, "We are from national security." He then told the young men, about ten of them, to begin taking off their clothes in the bus, in front of the women and girls. Then he took them out one by one and had them lie down on the filthy street, littered with stones and pieces of glass. They began with Ahmed, who was 16 years old. Then all the young men had to strip and get out of the bus and lie on the ground. One of them was injured in the stomach by a piece of glass. Arab asked me, "How can they ask the men to undress in front of the women? They don't have morals!"
I asked him, "Do you think they perhaps have at least some basic morals?"
His answer was definitive: "None at all." I explained to him that humiliation by forced nakedness didn't just happen to his friends: it is a longstanding problem in the Israeli military. When we were in their prisons without any way to defend ourselves, our guards would take sadistic pleasure in seeing us naked, in humiliating us.
lots more...
http://imeu.net/news/article0013679.shtml
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