Reading material such as this
gives one hope that the Umma will reconcile with the West. Most present day commentary listens far too
much to the minority radical Islamic wing that is feared even more by Muslims
than the West. That fear was exploited
by autocrats to avoid democracy everywhere.
That such groups can be banned
for been undemocratic in their philosophy is rarely considered as if a liberal
democrat should be equal to either a communist or a Nazi. All such groups need to be sorted out for
democracy to prosper.
Conversations with the various
peoples soon uncover the reality that an educated man or women is sharing a
continuity of aspiration and culture everywhere and that commonality is vastly
greater than apparent differences. It is
only among the ignorant that narrowness of lifeways makes it difficult to find
common ground.
The second lesson is that this system
should be established for all prisoners of all types. It is an inspired sociological experiment
that clearly worked. Try it on the usual
run of prison inmates and they will reform themselves. The drain on prison resources is the cost of
maintaining a library.
From An Israeli Prison to Tahrir
Square
One Palestinian’s Odyssey in a Middle East Ablaze
As pro-democracy demonstrations sweep across the Middle East, ousting
dictators in Tunisia and Egypt
I have not been surprised. Sophisticated organizing for democratic
reform and justice has a rich legacy in the region. In fact, watching
anti-Mubarak demonstrators taking to the streets en masse to demand true
democracy, freedom from repression, and the right to be stakeholders in their
own political and civil systems caused me to reflect on my friend Sami Al
Jundi, a Palestinian from the Old City of Jerusalem who has spent the last two
decades working for peace and a nonviolent end to Israeli occupation. He is, in
many ways, a product of that legacy.
Sami’s political awakening came in 1980,
when he was inducted into a highly organized, democratic community and, at the
age of 18, began a program of serious study, reading hundreds of books
including:
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract
Makarenko’s Pedagogical Poem
The writings of Ho Chi Minh, Basil Liddell Hart, and Angela Davis
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Incoherence of the Philosophers by Imam Ghazali
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Arab Nationalism Between the Reality of Separation and the Aspiration
for Unity by
Munir Shafiq
The complete works of Dostoevsky. Twice.
These were not parts of syllabi for courses in political science and
literature. Sami was not in a university. He was a Palestinian political prisoner
in an Israeli jail, incarcerated for building a bomb with two friends intended
to be used against Israeli security forces.
The bomb exploded prematurely, killing one of Sami’s friends. He and
his other friend were arrested by the Israeli secret service, tortured,
interrogated, and finally sentenced to 10 and 15 years in prison, respectively.
It was in prison that Sami received his higher education. The veteran
prisoners in his jail had established a complex, intricate, community-based
society with self-governance. This included a program of study for the new
prisoners via a curriculum created and overseen by an education committee.
Previously, political prisoners had been forced to work in Israeli
military factories, making netting for tanks and building crates to hold
missiles. The prisoners revolted, burning down one of the factories, and then
made a collective decision: their efforts and energy would go only towards
their own people. They won access to books, paper, and pens through hunger
strikes and other acts of resistance.
A Palestinian Odyssey
For the first three years of his confinement, Sami sat with five other
new prisoners in a circle on the concrete floor of their cell for six hours a
day, six days a week, being instructed in great detail by two older
cellmates/teachers. One of them covered the background of Fatah (the secular
Palestinian national liberation movement that Sami was a member of) and the
other taught the history of rebellion and revolution in the modern world, from
the Bolsheviks in Russia Ireland and South Africa
After the six hours of group meetings, Sami and his fellow
prisoners would sit on their mats, each with a book, reading in silence for the
rest of the day. The books were assigned, but the education committee mixed the
fare. A dense political volume like Mahdi Abd Al-Hadi’s The Palestinian
Issue and the Political Projects for Resolution would be followed with a
volume of poetry or a novel like Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was
Tempered.
When Sami graduated from the mandatory courses, he was free to
determine his own reading and composed a list of 70 titles. Taking advice from
the older prisoners, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels topped his list.
Given the mainstream media’s emphasis on the role of inflammatory
Islamic rhetoric in the Palestinian resistance movement, one might assume the
prisoners’ reading list would have been replete with books focusing on
anti-Israel indoctrination. In reality, Sami underwent the intensive
equivalent of a liberal arts education.
He emerged from his decade in prison well-versed in Greek and Roman
classics, Russian literature, world history, philosophy, psychology, economics,
and much more. He read The Odyssey and The Iliad three
times each. He read the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. He read the
letters that future Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote from prison to
his daughter, Indira Gandhi, a future prime minister herself. Sami describes
the prison library as “an ocean.” The texts mentioned above only skim the
surface of his deep plunge into world literature.
This education system was just one element of the remarkable society
that Palestinian prisoners built inside Israeli prisons. They held elections every
six months for a prison-wide council and steering committee. They divided
themselves into committees chaired by the members of that steering committee,
responsible for education, communication with the Israeli guards, security, and
intra-prisoner affairs.
Sami served several times on the elections committee and the magazine
committee. When his cell got hold of a contraband radio, he and his
cellmates became the news committee, surreptitiously listening to radio reports
at night and stealthily disseminating the news in headline form to the other
cells each morning.
There were daily book discussions in the cell, weekly political
meetings between cells, and monthly gatherings of the entire 120-person section
or corridor of cells to take up thorny topics of disagreement among members of
the different Palestinian resistance movements jailed together. When the
prisoners engaged in any joint action, such as a hunger strike, the decision
would be made collectively after lengthy deliberation.
Israeli guards sometimes revoked the privileges of the prisoners as a
form of punishment. The harshest punishment of all was the confiscation of
pens, paper, and books. Books, according to Sami, were the prisoners’ souls.
The Impact of Prison
Prison did not further radicalize Sami in the ways one might expect,
nor did it stoke a desire for revenge or for the further use of violence.
Instead, locked away, he began to develop a worldview grounded in principles of
nonviolence, democracy, and equal rights. Undoubtedly, he was influenced by a
collection of speeches he came across by Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the
teachings of Gandhi that he read. But much of the human being that Sami grew
into emerged from the society the prisoners had painstakenly created, with its
emphasis on reading, discussion, reflection, democracy, solidarity, and
equality.
Sami speaks with nostalgia of the weekly “criticism” meetings that the
older prisoners in his cell facilitated. He approached the first such meeting
with trepidation. No one, after all, likes to be scolded for doing
something wrong.
He was taken off-guard when the prisoner-facilitators started the
meeting by criticizing themselves. Then, turning to the younger prisoners, they
began with positive feedback, noting, for example, who had participated
actively in group discussions. The prisoners were also given the opportunity to
critique each other, but only after each had criticized himself first.
Sitting in those meetings, Sami came to realize that much of the goal
of this prison society was, as he puts it, to build the humanity of the young
prisoners. Political books and discussion provided intellectual stimulation,
literature engendered empathy and compassion, and carefully facilitated
discussions fostered connection and solidarity.
Prison as a place of study is hardly unique to Palestinians. Though in
the United States Northern Ireland , where
many Irish Republican Army volunteers were jailed, was regularly referred to as
“the university
of Long Kesh Robben Island for 27 years, Nelson Mandela received a
Bachelor of Laws degree from the University
of London
What was suprising to me, however, was the intricate community built by
the Palestinian prisoners, with enormous care taken to nurture and educate the
young. The path that Sami set out on, while in prison for constructing a bomb,
led him to an unshakeable belief that Israelis and Palestinians can and must
work together to build a common future of peace with justice. I had never
considered the possibility that a decade in prison might not harden a prisoner
against his jailers but provide him with the intellectual and emotional tools
to become a passionate advocate for reconciliation.
Prison was instrumental in shaping Sami’s worldview and his growth as a
courageous and critical thinker, thanks not just to his determination to study,
but to the fact that older political prisoners viewed the development and
education of a younger generation as their primary human and political task.
Sami’s own proudest moment, he would later tell me, was when it was his turn to
become a teacher.
From Israeli Prison to Tahrir
Square
As I watched the events in Tahrir Square unfold, leading to President
Mubarak's ouster, I experienced the same excitement and inspiration I first
felt when Sami began describing his prison experience to me. There are
striking parallels between the two in terms of solidarity, human connection,
and incredible organization.
For example, neighborhoods in Cairo organized their own volunteer
guards to make sure their streets and homes remained safe; people set up ad-hoc
clinics in Tahrir Square; demonstrators banded together to protect the Egyptian
Museum and its priceless treasures from regime-friendly thugs and
looters. And according to a Democracy Now report by Sharif
Abdel Kouddous, when a group of demonstrators associated with the Muslim
Brotherhood began to chant “Allah Akbar!” the crowd drowned them out with the
chant, “Muslim, Christian, we are all Egyptian!”
But I watched with dismay the way the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority
(PA) responded to the protests. It seems reasonable to expect that those who
struggled for their own people’s freedom would be quick to support an Egyptian
nonviolent struggle for democracy. Yet the PA banned and suppressed solidarity demonstrations
in the West Bank -- and such repression of
political expression was no isolated incident. The once revolutionary Fatah
movement has become the corrupt, authoritarian, and self-serving Palestinian
leadership we see today.
There are complex reasons for this transformation, including the fact
that, though some of Sami’s former cellmates now hold high positions within the
PA, much of the current Palestinian leadership is drawn not from the
revolutionary prison generation, but from PLO members who returned from exile
in 1996 after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. In addition, those
accords created the Palestinian Authority as a quasi-government without a
state. The political goals of a national liberation movement and the
political project of nation building were absorbed by an entity (the PA) that
had functionally become a sub-contractor for the Israeli occupation.
Beyond the specifics, there is the issue of the nature of power
itself. Once a regime -- any regime -- is in power, its tendency is to do
whatever it takes to cling onto, consolidate, and expand that power, even at
the expense of the very ideals it came to power to uphold.
Whatever the mixture of reasons, if there is a parallel to be drawn
between the incredible Palestinian political prisoner community of the 1980s
and the inspirational people’s revolution emerging like a tidal wave in the
Arab world today, there is also a warning to be offered. Today’s
Palestinian Authority provides a lesson for the people of Egypt
May Palestinians and Egyptians gain strength and solidarity from one
another as they demand freedom as well as a meaningful political voice. May
they learn from each other as they build enduring institutions of democracy and
pluralism. May they continue to nurture hundreds of thousands of courageous,
critical thinkers.
The people’s revolution is still unfolding in Egypt
Jen Marlowe is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, author,
playwright, human rights advocate, and founder of donkeysaddle projects.
Her new book, The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner
to Peacemaker, co-written with and about Palestinian peace activist Sami Al
Jundi, has just been published by Nation Books. Her previous book wasDarfur
Diaries: Stories of Survival. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio
interview in which Marlowe discusses how prison became university for one
Palestinian prisoner, click here, or download it to your iPod here.)
Copyright 2011 Jen Marlowe
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