To mark Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, 17th April, Adalah’s Media Coordinator Amal Ziadah interviews former political prisoner Areej Shahbari, a Palestinian woman from Nazareth

On April 18, 2002, at two o’clock in the morning, just as the Independence Day celebrations in Israel were ending, a large force of police appeared at the home of Areej Shahbari in Nazareth. Areej, then a 22-year-old student of computers, was the last to be awoken by the noise and the voice of someone who appeared to be the commander of dozens of policemen who filled the entryway. The commander asked her father and brothers to show him their identity cards. However, as soon as he noticed Areej, he left them and approached her, asking her to present her identity card. The young woman, who did not understand what was happening in her home, did not think to ask questions and immediately reappeared with her identity card in hand. He asked her to accompany him to the adjacent room and there informed her, “You’re under arrest.” The reason for the arrest, he told her, would be explained to her when got to the police station. She asked to change clothes – because of the late hour, she was still in her bedclothes – and he agreed. While she got dressed, she was accompanied – by order of the commander – by two policewomen, one in uniform and one in plainclothes. Areej was attached to the latter by handcuffs. “They did not agree to take off the handcuffs, even when I asked to go to the bathroom. Both of them were attached to me until the moment they took me to the police station.” Until then, the police had time to conduct a search of the apartment, in accordance with the search warrant they had obtained. The search consisted, she says, of the pointless scattering of the contents of her home.

Areej precisely remembers the details of the night of her arrest. She can describe in detail the faces of the policemen and the things that were said. “It’s something that is impossible to forget. This is such an extraordinary and unique experience that it’s impossible to forget.” Areej was brought to the police station in Nazareth, where she was forced to wait for hours until they informed her that they were going to take her to the detention facility in Jalameh and that she would meet there with a Shin Bet [General Security Services] agent named Elias. “Elias will explain everything to you,” they said.

She defines the interrogations at the detention facility, which lasted about a month, as conversations. They included discussions of political and general subjects. “These conversations with Shin Bet interrogators lasted for hours, and sometimes entire days passed between one interrogation and another. They wanted to know everything. They didn’t force me to say things, but each time asked me to remember more details that I hadn’t mentioned. When I asked them which details, they didn’t answer me. They sent me back to the cell so that I’d remember.” She was not tortured or humiliated. In retrospect, she notes, one can regard her as lucky in light of the degrading treatment that was inflicted on others she met in prison.

On the night of Shahbari’s arrest, a childhood friend and the son of neighbors, was also arrested. He met Shahbari on the same night, when she was led to her jail cell. From afar she noticed him and the policemen who were leading him to the interrogation room. Until then, she could not imagine the reason for the arrest. When she saw him, she began to make assumptions about the reason for the arrest.

“Until then, I didn’t know at all what the reason was for my arrest. I couldn’t think of any reason, apparently due to the initial shock from the arrest. But when I saw my friend from, a distance, I began to put several things together that we shared, including the fact that both of us had made the acquaintance of a young guy from Jenin. I didn’t imagine that an indictment would be filed against me with so many charges, including such hallucinatory ones.”

The indictment filed against Shahbari contained eleven charges, ranging from contact with a foreign agent, to an attempt to support a terror organization, weapons violations and conspiracy to commit a crime. As part of a plea bargain, some of the charges were dismissed from the indictment, or replaced by lesser included offenses. Shahbari denies all of the charges, but claims that she agreed to the plea bargain for lack of any other choice. From her perspective, the charge defined as “contact with a foreign agent” is unfounded. “The fact that I met a young man from Jenin, someone who is part of my people, does not make him a foreign agent. He is foreign from the perspective of the state, which has disconnected us from one another. But the contact I had with him is not morally considered a crime.” She does not regret her contacts with the young man from Jenin and even says that she is proud of them.

At the trial, which lasted about six months, Shahbari discovered that the things she said during interrogation, some of them as side comments or in specific contexts, were distorted, made to appear incriminating and used against her. At one of the hearings, for example, she told the judge that she felt discriminated against within the state as an Arab. The state prosecutor immediately confronted her with some of the things that she had ostensibly told her interrogators, suggesting that Arab citizens receive all of their rights and should serve in the army. “I was in shock,” she says, “to hear that I was capable of making such a statement. It is simply impossible. But the government’s representative insisted that that is what I had said. Immediately after the court session, when I had returned to my jail cell, I recalled that in one of the interrogations when I was asked for my opinion – and, indeed, most of the interrogations were a sort of discussion of opinions – the topic of military service was also raised. I said, cynically and exhausted from the pointless conversation, that, ‘Of course, Arab citizens enjoy all rights and it is only natural that they should serve in the army.’ I was angry that the prosecution used my words inappropriately, which were clearly said in a cynical manner. I immediately spoke with my attorney and we sent a clarification to the judge.” In Shahbari’s view, this clarification did not change the judge’s attitude toward her: “Throughout the entire trial, the judge made me feel that I had committed an act of ingratitude and that I was actually a person who did not know how to appreciate what the state had done for me. He was not sympathetic toward me at all.”

Shahbari was sentenced to five years in prison. Even today, she is sure that when the judge read the sentence she heard that she had been sentenced to only 15 months. At the time she smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. “Another few months and I’m out,” she thought to herself. And it was not clear to her why all of her relatives present in the courtroom looked unhappy. The policeman who accompanied her after she left the courtroom apparently realized that she had not really understood: “You were sentenced to five years in prison. Do you understand?” She was stunned.

By the time the court handed down its ruling, Areej had spent about six months in the Neveh Tirzeh women’s prison. She was incarcerated with other political prisoners defined as ‘security prisoners’ by Israel, and separated from criminal prisoners. At first there were around twelve women in the wing, but by the time she had finished serving her sentence the number had grown to over 100. She spent her first night at Neveh Tirzeh with another woman in an isolated cell, a sort of nighttime transition station before the two were brought together with the rest of the prisoners. In the adjacent cell, there was a criminal prisoner who lit the mattress in her cell on fire in the middle of the night. It immediately burst into flames and the prison guards quickly evacuated her. However, they left Shahbari and her cellmate until an officer arrived, because the procedures allowed for their removal from the cell only in the presence of a prison guard of officer rank. “We could have asphyxiated from the smoke,” she says. “A similar incident occurred several years later, when a fire broke out in one of the cells while I was in isolation. Then also they evacuated all of the prisoners, except for the political prisoners. The fire was really right next to us, but they only evacuated us after some time had passed, when an officer appeared on the scene.”

The attitude of the prison authorities to the political prisoners was indeed different from their attitude to criminal prisoners. The differences were most salient during times of significant political events. As she explains, “When a terror attack occurred, for example, one could sense the tension and anger in the faces of the [female] prison guards. Indeed, we watched the news broadcasts and followed current events very closely and were aware of what was happening outside. The prison guards would interpret any action as a provocation and they would respond crudely, shoving and shouting. When Abu Ammar [Yasser Arafat] died, there was an atmosphere of mourning, and we remained glued to the television. Anyone who raised her voice was punished. The punishment could be isolation, an electricity cut or the closure of the canteen, from which we frequently purchased food and other items.”

However, Shahbari says, the political prisoners were organized and powerful, so that even if their rights were restricted it was difficult to impose things upon them without their fighting for their rights. In some instances in which they were punished, they appealed to the Supreme Court via organizations that deal with prisoners’ rights. According to Shahbari, however, these petitions did not lead to significant changes and the reality effectively remained as it was.

If there was a difference in attitude among the prison guards toward criminal prisoners and political prisoners, the fact that she was a political prisoner and also a citizen of the State of Israel differentiated her from the other political prisoners. The distinctions were mainly to her detriment. “Because we were involved in activity that was not for the good of the State of Israel, we were regarded by it as prisoners who had committed an act that was worse than the prisoners who came from the Occupied Territories. We were seen as traitors, as those who had received everything and responded with ingratitude. This could be felt especially when we complained about the violation of our rights. Once, for example, I asked that they allow me to continue my university studies. The prisoners’ ombudsman answered me with an offhand response: “Indeed, before you committed your activity, they allowed you to study, so why did you engage in this activity?” At some stage, she gave up fighting for her right to study, but while inside the walls of prison she led many other battles for the rights of prisoners.

Shahbari says that life in prison is conducted in exemplary order, which is determined to a great extent by the prisoners themselves. The prisoners wake up early in the morning, clean their wing, have discussions on current affairs, organize study sessions on subjects in a range of fields (“some of the prisoners arrived at prison without knowing how to read or write, and between the prison walls they acquired quite an impressive education,” Shahbari says), decide on measures such as protest strikes, lists of demands for the prison authorities, etc. The prisoners are organized into groups that are identified by political affiliation. Each group has a leader. The leader is elected by a majority vote in the group and only she is allowed to be in contact with the prison authorities and to decide on principle matters. Immediately upon arriving in prison Shahbari introduced herself to a leader of a group, who was arrested for her involvement in murdering a young Jewish person whom she met over the Internet. Soon, Shahbari had established her status and gathered round her a considerable number of women who wanted her to act as their leader.

The role of leader, from Shahbari’s perspective, was not an easy one. Although she had relatively little life experience, the women suddenly expected her to lead them and to know how to present their demands to the prison authorities. Shahbari says that she tried to instill an atmosphere of mutual respect among the women, was careful not to impose decisions and views upon them, and even developed close relations of friendship with some of them.

Friendship in prison, is that possible? “Yes. I personally had a very close friend, with whom I am still in contact. Friendships strengthen the prisoners, most of whom are serving decades in prison.”

Do you miss prison? “Prison is a period that I would prefer to erase, but there are people I miss. There were some human things in prison that you only experience there – for example, the birth of Nur, the son of one woman, who was released from prison just after I was released, about two months ago. We gave him his name; we took a vote. To raise an infant in prison is not easy, but he brought a family atmosphere to our wing. We raised him, all of us. He learned to say all of our names and that was thrilling. Nur grew up in a cell with us for nearly two years. When the authorities removed him, there was an atmosphere of mourning which lasted for a long time.

“But there were also difficult moments. The most difficult was when I had to tell one of the women that her husband, who was a wanted man, had been killed by the army. She was a recent bride who was arrested as part of an effort to apply pressure on her husband to turn himself in. She loved him very much and did not stop talking about him. All of us got to know him from her stories, and we learned to love him as she did. The news was very difficult and I didn’t know how to tell her or how to prevent her from hearing about it on the news, which we followed closely.”

Shahbari has been out of prison for four months. Today, she receives absolute support from her family and the circle of friends around her, most of whom kept in contact with her despite the fact that she was a political prisoner. Nonetheless, the fact that she was arrested on a security basis has made some of her friends and acquaintances wary of her and they refrain from discussing political issues with her. She is not bothered by this. It is clear that the issue of political prisoners should be the top priority for the Arab public. Since her release, she has been summoned several times for questioning by the Shin Bet. However, she continues to raise awareness about the issue of political prisoners on many levels. Today she has become a sought-after spokesperson on panels and in discussions dealing with the rights of political prisoners, and hopes for a better future for herself.