Prisons Called ‘University’ for Palestinians’ Uprising

To be in prison, to be shot, to be on a wanted list--these are the badges of honor and obstinacy in the Palestinian revolt as it begins its third year.

When Palestinians talk now about how the intifada, or uprising against Israel, has persisted and why they think it will go on, they often point to these three punishing factors as fortifying the will to continue.

In prison, thousands of Palestinians have learned the tricks of organized resistance even while under the gaze of Israeli prison guards. Palestinians call prison the “University of the Uprising.” Graduates form the hard core of activism.

And admission to this educational system is evidently bound to increase: Israel is building two jails to expand its capacity from the present 15,000 inmates to more than 20,000.

Arab casualties in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip mounted after Israeli soldiers received the green light to fire on masked or fleeing Palestinians. The dead now number about 600; the wounded, at least 45,000. (A total of 44 Israelis have been killed.) The growing list of fatalities and the legion of walking wounded are in themselves restraints on any Palestinian who talks of giving up the struggle.

“The blood of the martyrs is not cheap,” a popular Palestinian saying goes.

Finally, there are the legions of “bingos,” young men wanted by Israeli authorities. They are so named because when an Israeli soldier matches the identification card number of a captured Palestinian to a list of fugitives, he yells out, “Bingo.”

Bingos are a brooding presence in the intifada, which began Dec. 9, 1987. Because bingos are the most susceptible to being fingered by informers and hunted down by Israeli soldiers, they float from house to house or take refuge in caves that dot the limestone terrain of the West Bank, rarely daring to sleep in the same place two nights in a row.

With a mystical fatalism, some consider themselves already dead and are therefore entrusted with the most dangerous and violent activities, notably the killing of suspected collaborators.

To be touched by prison, the bullet or bingo lists is to be endowed with special authority in the uprising. The opinions of the “young heroes,” as they are called by the public leadership of the intifada, are now begining to encroach on the strands of moderation that have until recent months dominated the uprising.

More and more, disdain for diplomacy is commonplace; some voice suspicions that even the Palestine Liberation Organization might squander the gains of the uprising.

The gains in two years of tumult have been a series of half-steps: the placement of the Palestinian case at the center of peace efforts; movement in Israel toward some accommodation with Palestinians rather than outside Arab governments; a shedding by the PLO of its maximum demands for eradication of Israel, and affirmations from Washington that Israel must end its occupation.

Still, a Palestinian state is far from a sure thing. Can anything short of that be viewed by the core of the intifada as the only goal worthy of the sacrifices? Some observers are pessimistic.

“We have reached the point of no return in the intifada, “ a Palestinian activist in East Jerusalem said. “It is these young activists who set the pace of the intifada. And it is they who will sweep away moderate leadership if there is no solution in sight.”

Israeli officials, meanwhile, speak of targeting thousands of hard-core activists for suppression--and it is the jailed, the wounded and the wanted who make up this core.

In an interview this week, Israeli Defense Minster Yitzhak Rabin singled out the “hard core” as the “main object of military security activities . . . those who use terrorism and those who organize the typical activities of the intifada ,” such as stone-throwing and the commercial strikes that are daily fare.

Familiar Names

Thus, the dance in place continues. The price that the Palestinians pay is high, and they expect high dividends. And Israel plans to keep exacting a toll to make the Palestinians, in the words of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, “understand that violence will not get them nearer to their goals.”

Anata. Dahariya. Jneid. Megiddo. Ansar III. These are names of Israeli prisons that hold Palestinians. The names are as familiar to Arabs as the names of villages or their children. Hardly a town or refugee camp has not seen a youthful member carted away to one, if not for six months or a year, then at least for a few days.

In front of any one of the prisons on any day, you can see parents and relatives inquiring after missing family members and impassive guards shooing them off.

Since the uprising began, according to Rabin, at least 35,000 Palestinians have spent time in jail. That is almost 2.5% of the population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 5% of the total male population--and perhaps 10% or more of the men between the ages of 16 and 35 active in the intifada.

A number of Israeli experts consider the mass jailings to have been the incubator for the uprising. Although the intifada began spontaneously, many of the early organizers were former inmates released in a 1986 prisoner exchange with a Syrian-backed Palestinian group.

Israeli officials estimate that two-thirds of the released prisoners were rearrested in the first six months of the uprising. But being put back into jails allowed the prisoners to renew and expand the education gained during their previous terms and pass it on to supporters from elsewhere.

“These prisoners, veteran ones and new ones, are the backbone of the intifada, “ said Ehud Yari, an Israeli journalist and visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Former Palestinian inmates paint a picture of nearly constant indoctrination and political interchange during captivity.

K., a Palestinian neighborhood leader from Beit Sahur, recalls with a mixture of dread and glee his four-month stay in Ansar III, the notorious desert prison camp in southern Israel.

The midnight arrest, the blindfolding, the beatings on the way, the hours spent waiting in a hot bus before being let into the tent-prison--all bring a shudder to K. as he remembers his July arrest.

K. was a Jehovah’s Witness before the intifada began and thus had never taken part in any political activities. The uprising, K. said, released pent-up frustrations of Palestinians living under Israeli rule. In his case, it was the difficulty of obtaining permits to get medical care in Israel for his daughter, who suffers from heart disease.

So, when word reached Beit Sahur, a Christian town of 12,000 next to Bethlehem, of troubles in other West Bank and Gaza cities, K. shed his religion for political activism.

“I decided that if we could get a state, we would not have the kind of troubles we have with the Israelis,” he said.

K., 32, organized boycotts of Israeli products. He smuggled bread into the neighborhood during prolonged curfews and during general strikes that enforced the closure of businesses. Finally, he rose to a high position in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical faction of the PLO.

He was captured by soldiers after an act of civil disobedience that has become a trademark peculiar to the revolt in Beit Sahur: Townspeople began to resist paying taxes. In early July, soldiers confiscated 25 cars, and citizens responded with a sit-in and card-burning at city hall. Beit Sahur was put under an 11-day curfew. Residents were confined to their homes.

Meanwhile, arrests of local leaders were under way. K., whose name was on a list carried by soldiers who pounded at his door, was taken to Dahariya for five days and Anata for 25. Then he was bused to Ansar, with his hands tied behind his back and his head bowed.

Choose a Faction

Ansar, called Ketziot by the Israelis, is divided into four sections, with 1,250 prisoners each. Two parts are reserved for prisoners who have been charged with crimes and two are reserved for prisoners held without trial. Each section is divided into five parts, with 250 prisoners housed in 25 tents.

After a greeting of songs welcoming inmates to “the university of the revolution,” newcomers choose their faction: one of the PLO factions or an independent grouping.

“Usually, by the time you get to prison, you have already belonged to some faction,” K. explained.

There are two political meetings a day. The inmates discuss politics, the ups and downs of the intifada, their conditions under the occupation. They read from handwritten books, sometimes printed on tiny capsules that can then be popped in the mouth during searches.

K. translated the authorized Hebrew and English newspapers into Arabic. He also helped edit a clandestine magazine of articles written by prisoners.

“We don’t have time to think about being locked up. We are too busy studying,” K. said.

Subjects such as how to resist Israeli interrogation are also in the curriculum. Sometimes “students” are given the chance to deal with prison authorities on behalf of prisoners--to ask for extra blankets, more paper or other commodities.

“It’s a like a final examination, so that prisoners learn how to face the Israelis,” K. noted.

In some ways, the organization in jail mirrors the intifada as a whole. A unified leadership made up of veteran prisoners oversees section and tent leaders.

There are hunger strikes, demonstrations, song festivals--all ordered from the top. Mass political meetings also are held to consider decisions taken by the PLO and to discuss trends in the intifada.

Prison authorities do not take all this lying down. There are surprise searches, and sometimes prisoners are forced to sit outside in the searing sun or the cold desert nights.

One of the most fearsome weapons used by prison guards is pepper gas shot from a canister. “It sticks to your face and stays in your mattress for weeks,” K. said.

After four months in jail, K. was released and renewed his activities in Beit Sahur. “We feel that prison is a school,” he recalled. “No matter if I get jailed again. Sometimes we feel freer in jail. We meet people from all over. We feel we can trust everybody, talk freely. If I have to go back, I would not regret it.”

He views PLO diplomacy abroad with disdain: “Sometimes we think the PLO leadership cares more about its own prominence than us. We don’t want to deal.”

In the sandy streets of Jabaliya--the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza, with a population of 55,000--youths emerge from shadowy corners and alleyways to show visitors scars, sometimes more than one, on all parts of their bodies.

The exhibitions are part-complaint--”Look at what the Israelis have done”--and part boast. Among young Palestinians, the scars are a goad to stubborn resistance.

Nehad, 19, was once light on his feet and able to evade pursuing troops through the winding alleys of Jabaliya that he always knew better then they. Once he ducked a bullet aimed at his heart and proudly shows visitors the cinder-block wall where it hit instead.

But in March, during a stone-throwing face-off with soldiers, a bullet caught up with him. As he spun away from a rifleman, he was struck in the back. After he fell, soldiers kicked him in the legs. But he realized that what he felt there was not pain but a dull thud. His spinal cord had been severed. Now, he is paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.

Nehad was not engaged in unrest before the intifada. And even when the first demonstrations broke out, he thought they were just part of the periodic bursts of anger.

Then, the leaflets from covert leadership began to circulate. “People began using the word intifada. I decided to participate,” he recalled. He burned tires in the street, wrote graffiti, told merchants to close their stores.

On days when the leaders called general strikes, Nehad and other young men would post themselves on the main road leading to Israel and try to persuade workers to stay home from their jobs. If persuasion failed, then rougher boys and young men farther up the street would use force, sometimes beating drivers.

Since his injury, Nehad has gone to Jordan for medical treatment, but nothing has restored movement in his legs. Yet during neighborhood conflicts with soldiers, he still wheels himself out and acts as a lookout for his agile comrades.

Earlier this month, soldiers arrived at his small cinder-block home with a list of wanted youths. His name was on it.

“They came to my room and noticed the wheelchair and the bed pan. They left me alone but confiscated some political books I had,” Nehad said. “ ‘Don’t you know these things are illegal?’ they asked me.

“I said, ‘I have nothing to lose.’ They left saying they would be back when they wanted to arrest me.”

To Nehad, the various plans put forward to get peace talks under way are a waste of time because none mentions a Palestinian state.

He pauses when asked if he regrets joining the uprising. “No. No,” he responds. “It is too late to turn back. We must go on until the end.”

A Desperate Air

In Nablus, the largest city on the West Bank, there seem to be an infinite number of people who are convinced they are on lists of wanted bingos. It is part of what gives this town of 120,000 a desperate air.

Dozens of suspected Arab collaborators have been killed by Palestinians in Nablus. Sometimes they are shot in broad daylight, sometimes hacked to death in clandestine killing grounds deep in the bowels of the crowded, old inner city.

Sometimes the collaborators are accused of tipping off soldiers on the whereabouts of Palestinian activists, sometimes of being middlemen in dealing land to the Israelis. Some are accused of extorting money to gain favors from the military government, such as travel permits or export licenses.

Prostitutes and drug dealers are suspected of giving the army information in return for plying their trades, or are killed on the grounds that they are damaging the Palestinian cause by dealing in vice.

In late November, youths wielding pistols hunted for collaborators and sealed off whole sections of the old city. Wanted youths have ignored calls from the leaders of the intifada to cease executing suspected informers.

“We must protect ourselves,” explained H., a self-described bingo. “The leaders cannot expect that we can sit here and drink coffee while the Israelis come and get us.”

H., a former business student at An Najah University, began his intifada career as a member of a neighborhood popular committee responsible for enforcing strike closures and boycotts of Israeli goods. He later joined a “strike force” that warned suspected collaborators and petty criminals to stop their activities.

He was forewarned that he was wanted when soldiers visited his home one night in his absence. They told his parents that he should turn himself in or he could be shot. Since then, he has moved from house to house up and down the length of the valley that cradles Nablus.

During a reporter’s visit, any untoward noise from outside the small meeting room brought a start from H. He had already planned a window escape that would take him up to the jumbled rooftops of the old city. H. said he sleeps during the mornings when there is commercial activity in the street and it is harder for soldiers to penetrate the old city without meeting chaotic resistance.

Still, from the bags under his eyes, it looks as though he sleeps fitfully, if at all.

H. belongs to the Fatah faction of the PLO headed by Yasser Arafat and aspires to join the Black Panthers, a group of wanted men organized by Fatah to carry out investigations and executions of suspected informers. The Red Eagles were formed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist PLO faction, along the same lines.

“The members of the Blacks and the Reds know they are wanted. They know they could be killed at any moment, so they are responsible for the most sensitive actions,” H. said.

No Time to Wait

His fatalism proved prophetic; a week later, Israeli soldiers shot to death four leading members of the Black Panthers during a bloody raid on a barber shop in Nablus.

There have been complaints from public leaders of the intifada that both the Black Panthers and Red Eagles have been responsible for unbridled killings in Nablus. Recently, outside funds to the group were cut off, but it still operates. It was the Black Panthers, for example, who sealed off the old city while pursuing collaborators.

“The rules in Nablus are different from other places. We are hard hit, and we don’t have time to wait for instructions from other places,” H. said.

Although he belongs to Fatah, H. opposes most moderate positions taken by the faction. He thinks Palestinians who hold peace seminars with Israelis ought to stop. Arafat should stop talking to Washington, he believes, and Palestinians should take any chance they have to kill Israelis.

“Why do we die and not them?” he asked.

A jeep passed by; the army radio squawked. H. was through the window in an instant, not waiting to see if anyone outside was playing bingo.