Mystery Witness Proves Rachel Corrie Committed Suicide in a’ Pool of Dirt’

Hussain Abu-Hussain, the Corries’ lawyer, thought his was a depressing profession. I sought to cheer him up by pointing out the dismal case of the oncology specialty in medicine. It didn’t seem to work; he had spent the whole day trying in vain to trick witnesses of the murder of the late ISM volunteer into telling the truth. But the relevant portions of those witnesses’ memory were hermitically sealed behind an impermeable wall of forgetfulness. Limited in my scope of knowledge and understanding to the field of medicine, I am intrigued by the mystery of what effective mind-altering drugs the Israeli Defense Forces have at their disposal to wipe out selective segments of their soldiers’ recall and to effect such precise lacuna of brain damage.

Hussain and his fellow international human rights legal expert, Jamil Dakwar, spent the morning interrogating the young and aggressive head of the Military Police unit that had investigated and dismissed as incidental and irrelevant the fact of Rachel’s death in close proximity to two IDF D9R Caterpillars operating in the Gaza Strep. Despite his striking alertness and wide-eyed combative demeanor on the witness stand, he still lapsed into a state of amnesia when a question crept to within touching distance of the prohibited black hole of truth. On more than one occasion he would throw up his hands in a dismissive private gesture of exasperation to the judge as if in intimate private conversation with him. He seemed to do that every time he felt that he had succeeded in debunking a clever ploy by Abu-Hussain or in adequately deflecting another of the latter’s attempts at reminding him of details he had consciously forgotten. He confirmed, albeit indirectly, the statement previously made in court by one of his colleagues to the effect that “in war there are no civilians.” But he did so in such a circumspect and disconnected manner that the judge seemed to miss the point, for He (and the capital here is intentional, for that is how He seems to consider His position in the domain of His court of judgment) did not display any sign of distress or aggravation in line with what I have come to expect neurologically. Abu-Hussain grilled this witness on the specific point of what rules and regulations there existed on the subject of operating a D9 in the presence of civilians in the area. The witness, whose name, Shalom, said it all, wavered between the written prohibition of operating the Caterpillar as a battle implement in close vicinity of civilians and the definition of what constituted a war arena and who were civilians and who were not and under what circumstances, etc. etc. ad infinitum. All that Abu-Hussain could prove was that it is very difficult to trick a man who is intent on forgetting to remember.

Two thoughts crossed my mind as I pondered the implicit oxymoron when one speaks of willful forgetfulness, thoughts that separated me momentarily from the court’s surroundings and carried me to my own private dream world causing my wife to poke me in the side every time my snoring disturbed her: inexplicably I found myself as a child in pre-1948 Palestine in the midst of my father’s apricot orchard. It was Ramadan and I was fasting. I had learned that morning in our religion class that if a fasting person forgets and mistakenly eats or drinks something, it does not annul his or her fast and he or she gets full credit for the day despite eating or imbibing his or her fill. I had figured that if I spent enough time in the orchard I would be likely to forget and consume few delectable apricots from my father’s trees. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t forget the fact that I was trying to forget; the harder I tried to forget my fasting state the more I was aware of it. I spent the whole afternoon focusing on selecting the fruits that I wanted to eat accidentally. My wife poked me in the ribs and admonished me to stop snoring. I came to and glared at the state’s defense lawyer who had a habit of moving her delicate hands in animated circles in front of her face as she raised an objection. Her motherly fine features and the hypnotic motion of her tiny hands put me back to sleep. I was back in my physiology class at medical school: My favorite lecturer was asking us to try to tickle ourselves. It was impossible, he explained, because the tickling experience depended on the surprise element in it. Since our mind is incapable of surprising its own self, one cannot tickle one self. But apparently I succeeded in breaking this rule of basic physiology. My wife poked me in the ribs again: “You shouldn’t giggle in court either!” Now, fully alert in the wee hours of the morning, I still fail to make full sense of these dreams though they seem not to be totally irrelevant to the subject of tricks our minds play on us. Can a clever lawyer make a witness forget his premeditated forgetfulness?

As I came to, the same witness was still on the stand. (I wonder if I shouldn’t capitalize Him as well. He did display certain godly pretensions in his upright combative posture and physical display of readiness to appropriate the space fronting him.) How comical it must have seemed to him: A civilian barrister putting words in his mouth in a futile attempt to force him, a military colonel, to remember facts long expunged from his memory, active and inactive, long and short, and filed away under ‘forgotten.’ And the barrister looks distinctly Arab and must have, it is safe for loyal Zionist citizens of Israel to presume, dislodged from his own memory any residue of the implicit oath of loyalty to them he must have taken. We all know Abu-Hussain received his law degree from the Hebrew University and should never be allowed to forget the civilizing influence of associating with ‘real citizens of the Jewish state.’ He should have been made to swear such an oath before getting his license to practice. I recall swearing loyalty to Israel and its laws when I became a state employee. Nothing was new in that. But then I swore loyalty to Israel as my country and not the country of someone else. I assumed at the time that my Jewish colleagues may hold different interpretation of what Israel was. And I never knowingly broke Israeli laws, objectionable as many of them were. But, at the time, I could convince myself that I could work to change such laws and to adapt the nature of the state to accommodate me. The question for my Zionist fellow citizens remains whether when I swore allegiance to Israel I meant it and whether it was specific enough as to whose state Israel was. No wonder so many legislators are now working hard to clarify the point: making citizenship contingent on declaring loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state. That will be followed in due course by mechanisms for the verification of real intent. Now that I have retired I am out of the loop, no longer professionally active in the public arena. That is why I can only speculate on how others will react to the new laws of verifiable intent: Imagine a legal mind like Abu-Hussain’s grappling with the Kafkaesque quandary of swearing loyalty to an entity that excludes him out of its definition. To fall back on my field of expertise, how can a doctor who presumably had dedicated his life to preventing pain and saving lives swear allegiance to promoting illness? By swearing such an oath he would cease to be a physician though the law requires him to do so in order to be one. Let me give another simile for my differently-inclined fellow citizens: How can a member of the Yakuza swear an oath of allegiance to the Japanese police. There is a deeper psychological point here to which I will return later. It is enough to drive one to distraction.

The afternoon session was dedicated to a witness that the defense lawyers had asked that he be allowed to testify incognito for reasons of personal safety. He was the commander of the army unit operating the D9s in the vicinity of Rachel’s death incident. The court was adapted specifically for this occasion: a screen was set up between the audience and the witness stand. The plaintiff team moved their seats closer to the judge’s stand to be able to see the witness. Abu- Hussain requested that the judge allow members of the Corrie family to move to that side of the court as well so they can see the witness but the request was denied. I could understand that: If all the Corries and their entourage of translators and reporters were to be exempted, my wife and I would be the only ones left. My wife is not a threat. She is not the violent type. And I would probably be asleep half of the time anyhow. Or else they could have blindfolded the two of us and did away with the screen altogether. No such luck: the judge asked to have an armed guard at the door of the courtroom and warned us all not to take pictures at pain of arrest on the spot. This castigation induced in me a sudden urge to empty my bladder. I resisted till I could resist no more. As I tried to exit, the guard tried to prevent me and I insisted. He went in and asked permission from someone, perhaps the judge, for me. Fortunately, the request was granted. To hear people in the Arab world criticize Israel’s judicial system as unjust towards its Arab citizens, you would think such gesture was impossible. Here was my proof to the contrary. Believe me, given the circumstances and with the pressure mounting inside me, being allowed to relieve myself was the greatest act of justice I had ever experienced in this country.

The mystery witness was the commander of the unit operating the D9s on the day and in the arena of Rachel’s death. Judging by the witness’s voice I figured he was a male in his forties of medium build and a smallish balding head that allowed for the evaporation of much of the previously stored bits of information in it in Israel’s hot sun. All he could remember from that day’s incidents was seeing the late peace activist sitting in a “pool of dirt.” Nothing more and nothing less. He also had little to enlighten the court about the rules of engagement with civilians for operators of D9s. There were civilians, a dozen or so of them, in the battlefield, the battle that raged between D9s and Palestinian homes with the civilian foreign combatants in bright red and orange clothing running as decoys for the anti-Israeli structures which must have caused one D9 to mistake one of them for a menacing Palestinian home. That, at least is my best interpretation of the events of the day. But the commander had a different story to tell: All he saw is the dead body of the late Corrie woman in a “pool of dirt.” Taking his testimony as ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” one is left with the question of what was he talking about when he spoke on the wireless from inside his D9 to the driver of the other D9 under attack by, and closer to, the civilian foreign combatants in the battlefield. He is heard to ask in Arabic “Did you kill him?” The answer comes loud and clear: “Allah Yirhamu -- May Allah have mercy on his soul.” Did he think the dead person in the “pool of dirt” was a man? He, of course, couldn’t remember any of that. What is more amazing is that this brief vocal exchange, recorded on video, was left out from the written transcription of the video’s soundtrack. None of the investigators, whether in the internal operational run of the army or in that of the military police, ever took notice of that last conversation. It was the Plaintiff’s lawyers who picked out the small gem. What remains is to figure out who exactly said what and what did he mean?

‘Allah Yerhamu’ is part of the well entrenched military jargon in Israel. Since whoever says it usually lacks full understanding of the meaning of each of its constituent words, the phrase is a less painful way of indicating the act of killing. Additionally, the phrase is a distinct high point in the collective memory of our community, the Palestinian citizens of Israel. On October 29, 1956 it cost us 49 innocent lives: children and elderly, woman and men. Britain, France and Israel had declared war on Egypt earlier that day to retrieve the Suez Canal, which Jamal Abdul Nasser had nationalized, to its lawful colonial owners. Military instructions were issued from on-high to impose total curfew on Arab villages in the center of Israel including the village of Kufr Qassim. The unit commander asked the specific question of how to deal with farmers who might be out in their fields and would not have learned of the curfew. The answer came in clear and simple military jargon: “Allah Yerhamu!” With that farmers returning home from the field were stopped at the entrance to their village, lined up and mowed down; 49 of them including 23 children.

“Allah Yerhamu” is not the only connecting thread between Kufur Qassim and Rachel Corrie. The war came and went and Kufr Qassim didn’t even register on the Israeli military or government radar screen. Till communist agitators started doing what they knew how to do best: agitate. An investigation was launched and brigadier commander Issachar Shadmi was found guilty of a minor administrative offence and fined one Israeli cent. Emile Habibi, the master of tongue-in-cheek Palestinian writing, made ‘Shadmi’s cent’ a household term in our community.

This is where my blood starts to boil in anger against the inflated claims of the Corries: If the price of 49 Palestinian lives was set at one cent, how dare they ask for a whole dollar for the life of their daughter? Consider for a moment, please, the relative ratio of one Corrie life to one Palestinian life: One Israeli cent was one hundredth of a lira; the lira was scrapped and replaced with the shekel which was equal to ten liras; then that was scrapped and replaced in turn by the New Israel Shekel (NIS), a thousand shekels to one NIS. At the current rate of NIS 3.6 to the dollar

1 Corrie = $1 = 3.6 NIS = 3.6 x 1000 x 10 x 100 / 49 = 73468.8 Palestiniens.

And the world dared to question Israel when its fatality ratio during the recent Gaza ‘preventive military action’ stood at one to hundred.

Just to give the Israeli judicial system its due and just credit, I should add that some half dozen low-ranking soldiers were found guilty and received sentences of several years in jail each. In verifying the details of the Kufur Qassim account I called on my communist age-mate cousin, Toufiq, who served time with the same imprisoned Israeli soldiers. At the time he had been sentenced to a dozen years in jail for playing a leading role in a youth demonstration in Nazareth in which he was accused of shouting pro-Nasser slogans. To this day he claims that I was the one who shouted “Long live Jamal Abdul Nasser!” not him. But I was not caught. Besides I was not a communist. Very early in the game I decided to wipe that incident off of my hard disc and to this day I have no memory of the event whatsoever. Another thing that riles Toufiq to this day is that shortly after their imprisonment the soldiers were pardoned by Israel’s president while he served his full term. “If you do the right calculation, taking into account the nature of the crime and the number of days served in jail,” my cousin insists, “the value of an Israeli soldier is worth over a million Palestinian communists like me. I didn’t even shout the slogan about Nasser, for God’s sake!”

Be that as it may, in the current court proceedings, our mystery witness refused to be drawn into the memory lane that the plaintiff team labored so much to animate for him with the set of toy caterpillars that they had purchased for the purpose. And he refused to be drawn into creating a matching human form with the putty that the lawyers had brought for him. For the rest of the afternoon Abu-Hussain used the soft fistful of putty as a tool of physiotherapy for his arthritic left hand. I had already noticed that the man had a habit of pressing his extended fingers against his neck to crack the aching joints. (I told you already that once I was a good diagnostician.) Still, all that the witness could recall was that he saw a dead person in a ‘pool of dirt.’ I wondered if Abu-Hussain was going to pull out a sack of soft dirt from his bag. As to the proximity of those D9s from the pool of dirt and similar specifics of the death incident, the lawyers’ efforts were unrewarded. Personally, I reached the conclusion that Rachel, Allah Yerhamu, had committed suicide by drowning in a ‘pool of dirt.’ After all, those were members of the most ethical army in the world and would not lie under oath.

This interpretation is not as farfetched as all that: Imagine a young idealist woman who dreamt of a just world including a just Israel. She arrives in Gaza to act on her commitment to let justice reign in the world. She discovers that Israel is unjust beyond redemption. She realizes that back in her own country campaigning against Israel’s injustices committed against the Palestinians will gain her the label of anti-Semitic. To wipe your slate clean of such a foul label you have to work for Israel’s benefit as per its own definition of itself. That, of course, includes throwing the Palestinian usurpers out of ‘our’ sacred holy land. To try to change the accepted American consensus regarding the just claims of Israel is another mission impossible. So, to fight against the threat of the smear of anti-Semitism, the prime label of bigotry, Rachel must have realized that she would need to become a bigot. Now that is another Kafkaesque quandary enough to send one into despair. For an idealistic young woman trapped in such an insane vicious circle, suicide must have seemed to be about the only remaining logical choice. And what means are there in Gaza for committing suicide. Dirt is abundant. One looks for an appropriate ‘pool of dirt’ and, while everyone around is not looking, one jumps in and holds his or her breath under the soft cover of dirt. Or should it end with a soldier instructing Rachel to ‘take a deep breath’ as some other people were once instructed in the process of their execution?

Rachel Corrie’s Revenge: Israeli Young Adults Struck by Early Onset of Alzheimer’s

"Human kind cannot bear too much reality."
T. S. Eliot.

I arrived at the Haifa District Court with a deep sense of foreboding. On my way there, as I drove through Arrabeh’s sleepy streets (It is Ramadan and most fellow Moslem villagers go back to sleep after their dawn meal and prayer.) I saw clear signs of trouble: Two police cars with their lights flashing entered the village just I was on my way out. Stopped in my tracks by the daily traffic jam on the outskirts of Haifa, I turned the radio dial from my usual BBC morning news to the local Arabic FM station and heard the name of my village on the news: A seven-month pregnant young woman whose name I recognized had been slain by her mentally-ill husband in full view of her four children. She bled to death in the bathroom from her seven stab wounds before the husband escaped.

“The man is mentally ill,” I imagined the mayor explaining away our collective shame.

“We all are to blame; it is a symptom of an ailing society in the throes of disintegration,” I could hear Toufiq, my village friend since childhood, arguing back.

At the entrance to the new and imposing courthouse complex, built over the cleared area of an entire neighborhood of old Haifa, I greeted the few members I recognized among the group of mostly Jewish ‘peace junkies’ holding signs of solidarity with Rachel Corrie’s family and cause. Rachel’s rather spry-looking parents seemed duly impressed, thanking people for their good sentiments and expressing their hope to a couple of journalists that finally here was their chance to show the formal investigation of the IDF of their daughter’s death for the hasty slipshod cover-up that it actually was. The small crowd of demonstrators and media people were cordoned off against the wall to the side of the spacious entryway to the courts complex so as not to affect the security processing of arrivals. Except that the parking area elevators emptied out on the cordoned-off side of the yard. My wife recorded visually and communicated to me a ratio of ten to one who crawled under the red plastic tape rather than bothering to take the extra dozen steps required to get into the queue at the entrance. Two women dressed in lawyery black and white clothes belonging to the latter variety, the minority of upright and obedient citizens, shouted insults at the demonstrators.

My wife and I introduced ourselves to the Corries and exchanged visiting cards with them. Rachel’s mother wore an appropriate brooch on the lapel of her light summer coat, a mother-of-pearl peace dove. I used to give the same dove, handmade in Bethlehem, to foreign visitors at the Galilee Society when I headed it. We thought it only proper to extend an open invitation to the Corries to honor us with a visit to our home should they get bored with Haifa, another port city, and wish to spend a day in a rural setting and pick their fill of figs, passion fruit, pomegranate, and carob right from the tree. We felt this was the least a Palestinian family could offer to reciprocate Rachel’s own gesture of solidarity and ultimate sacrifice.

As we lined up to go through security, the young officer asked the usual “Do you carry any weapons?” and I shot back a comical “Nooo!” She explained in a rather plaintive tone of voice: “A knife is a weapon, you know!” She caught me off guard. Was she referring to the murder in my village, I wondered? How did she know I was from Arrabeh?

We cleared security, stopped at the cafeteria for a quick cup of coffee, chatted with a couple of other Palestinians of similar convictions and made it to the sun-drenched courtroom on the sixth floor.

In the court I sat next to the American consul who used the waiting time to study Hebrew from a phrasebook he must have downloaded to his I-phone. He looked so Semitic I had to resist the urge to give him a hug: We Semites have to stick together in the face of the alien hordes. The Corries sat in the front raw and a translator leaned forward from the second row to whisper the translated proceedings to them. They were so obviously Nordic-looking that a touch of hostility almost snuck into my heart. Awaiting the judge, another fellow Israelite, to commence the proceedings, I busied my head with assessing the relative inequality of the resultant triangular configuration of relationships: the consul, the judge and the Corries. I fantasized a world of peace and stability in which a level of international solidarity and cooperation is attained in which the diplomatic corps representing one state, say France, to another, say Saudi Arabia, would be drawn almost entirely from citizens of the host country. That is the level of trust and understanding that has been reached between the USA and Israel. But how well would such chummy relationship serve the interests of the Corries, I wondered? Quickly, I reached the conclusion that it all depended on the individual diplomat and his allegiance to his country of origin vis a vis his country of assigned diplomatic mission. The double jeopardy of belonging to both is a bind that only the most committed of nationalists in one or the other can maneuver through.

Soon the start of the Corries vs, the State of Israel case was announced and I prepared for the full engagement of my senses and intellect in absorbing the details of all that was going on around me. I was aware of the tremendous potential the Corrie’s case had in blowing Israel’s cover in its well-rehearsed claim to the high moral standards of its armed forces. Admittedly, I am a physician. But I am not a neurologist and I had no intention of focusing on medical issues. I had missed the chance for that back in March when Dr. Hiss, Israel’s organ-snatching chief forensic pathologist who had done the postmortem on Rachel’s body had taken the stand in this same courtroom. Still, unexpectedly, my attention was drawn to all sort of neurological phenomena. Suddenly and against my conscious attempt to follow the details of the question and answer exchange between the lawyers and the witnesses, the whole court instead became the scene for my innovative observation of certain behavioral peculiarities of the human species: I had noted that the judge had a mild form of tic where he would seem to prepare to rise up by leaning forward slightly and stretching out his neck with a slight turn of the head to the left, as if he were straining to butt an oncoming football in midair, but would then stop in mid motion, stick the index finger of his right hand under his shirt collar as if to loosen it and then, with a shake of his head, would return to his master-of-the-court upright posture. My attention was now fully engaged in the scrutiny of this seemingly insignificant involuntary motion. It shifted my attention from the proceedings I had fought the morning traffic for an hour and a half to follow. I started making mental notes of the shape and frequency of the odd motion: I studied its different permutations to such a degree that I thought I could observe its initial onset even when my patient, (for in my own mind this was how I had started to relate to the man,) could suppress it to a mere blink of his right eye. I knew this was a sign of psychological stress, though a certain suspicion started to surface from my subconscious about my own need to escape from the stress of the reality that was unfolding around me: Here was a most capable pair of Palestinian lawyers bearing down with full force on a series of witnesses representing the best Israel could produce in its defense, formerly in the face of the intruding ISM and now to counter the petty claims of a sad family set on discrediting ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and its valiant soldiers, members of the ‘most moral army in the world.’ I had seen and heard of innumerable cases where again and again the Israeli judicial system squeezes Palestinian defendants literally lifeless. But here I was witnessing the reverse process: Palestinians pressing proud Israelis, former and current members of Israel’s proud and mighty field units, into a state of denial, meekness, confusion and regression. The novelty of the unusual situation I was observing for the first time made me distinctly uncomfortable. I knew something was grossly amiss when I suddenly realized that I was concentrating so intensely on the body language of all the actors around me that I lost tract of what they were saying. I made a quick mental note of the fact that my interest was so piqued by the psychodrama unfolding around me that I had totally lost the ever disturbing chronic tinnitus in my ears.

I shifted back to observing the judge. I had been warned in advance that his record is most lean on rulings in favor of human rights defenders. Is that why he gave such clear signs of so much mental anguish? I returned to my observations of his neuromuscular oddity. Readers may think this a crude comment on a judge of justice. Yet we all do this all the time. All drivers rely on observing the lights in the back of the car in front of them to pick up the indications of its driver’s intentions. That is how a physician relates to the physical signs of those ‘cruising around’ in his vicinity. So, please, excuse this casual attitude to what you may consider to be a sensitive issue. Overall, the tic was quite frequent, perhaps once every one and a half minutes on average. But it was not regular. First I noticed that it did not occur during the rare occasions when the defense team of lawyers from the State Prosecutor Office spoke. It also occurred very rarely when the witnesses spoke. One witness made a clearly outrageous statement he should never have made: “In war there are no civilians,” he declared. The good judge strained his neck so vigorously and stuck his head out so far he nearly swept the computer screen in front of him off the table. At another juncture, the judge had a cascade of successive neck-stretching exercises as he admonished the Corrie’s lawyer, Hussein Abu-Hussein, to abandon the line of questioning he was pursuing with the witness. It was irrelevant, the judge decided. I felt the lawyer was treading very close to the red line sequestering the truth behind it. Obviously, the witness was being bamboozled.

Suddenly, the judge cut my intense inner hilarity short: He had to leave the court early for a physician’s appointment. Was he seeing a neurologist? I could certainly assist the physician with my professional observations, I thought. Or perhaps he had something more serious, a terribly bad heart or a nasty brain aneurism? Don’t rush to conclusions about possible wishful thinking on my part, please! At Harvard Medical School they taught us always to start by ruling out the worst case scenario. That is also the reason I figured that at least two out of the three witnesses who appeared before us were probably examples of a rare form of Alzheimer’s Disease. Not only that they had forgotten nearly all the relevant facts, detailed or general, of incidents in which they had taken active part some six years earlier, but also that, by the time they left the witness stand, they appeared to have been pitifully reduced physically to mere shadows of the imposing macho figures that had strode into court earlier in the day. I am not a bad shot when it comes to diagnosing medical entities, believe me. I assure you that in my active clinical career I was an astute diagnostician able on occasion to figure out what brought a patient to see me from the way he or she walked into my office. I swear to you that on occasion I would start writing my hospital referral letter while a case of Appendicitis or Maltese Fever was still changing into the examining gown behind the examining curtain, not to mention the occasional term pregnancy of a teenager brought by her anxious parents because of excruciating abdominal colic. So it was no major challenge for me to pick up the clear signs of Alzheimer’s, though, going by the rapid physical deterioration they evidenced, these probably were some of the fastest developing such cases ever reported in the medical literature.

In a ten-minute break in the court proceedings, I strode to the back of the spacious hallway to feast my eyes on what I could see of Haifa’s wonderful views. Lo and behold, the view was one of extensive ruination and well-guarded abandonment of the whole base of the Carmel Mountain as it slopes down toward the port area. The entire neighborhood, once the thriving residential area for the well-off and nouveau-riche Haifan Arab families, seems to have been cordoned off from the outside world, with its majestic multi-arched façades’ dignity still preserved thanks to its stone structure. One could imagine the pleasure and the pride of the former residents of such homes on a breezy late afternoon, sitting in their luxurious living rooms or northern balconies with Haifa’s port and the many ships taking refuge in it in full view as the sun tipped behind the soaring Carmel Mount. Now the Custodian of Absentee Property and his colluding housing agency, Amidar, seem to have decided to deny such imagined pleasures by continuing to deny the area the option of residential use. One can only hope that the former residents of such majestic homes, still awaiting return in their shacks in Lebanese refugee camps, will never see the intolerable neglect to which their palaces have been subjected.

I looked at Rachel’s parents and they seemed tired, worn out, no doubt, by the rigors of the intense delving into details of their late daughter’s death. I felt like offering them my sympathy and physical support as they ambulated out of the court. Till I went to the bathroom and took a good look at myself in the mirror: I should have asked the Corries to help me to my car, I decided.

Heading home I was elated by the prospect of my impending rise to fame in medical circles by virtue of my forthcoming first-ever report of two consecutive cases of the instantaneous onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. To rest my mind and gain some emotional respite from the excitement of it all, I turned my car radio on: The dial had been left on the local FM station. Arrabeh’s stabbing murder case was still dominating the free-for-all call-in program. Callers were speculating about what could have irked the presumably insane husband to act in the murderous way he did. For a moment I entertained the thought of calling in and alerting the program’s host, whom I knew personally, and his audience to the Corries versus the State of Israel case. I wanted to let everyone know that here was another case of murder by way of insanity. Except that here, a whole nation had gone insane.

Ameer Makhoul's Day in Court

I have known Ameer Makhoul since the day he came to my office at the Galilee Society to be interviewed for the position of director of our then new and ambitious project called ITTIJAH, the Arabic acronym for Union of Community-Based Arab Associations. I knew of him before as another troubled Arab student at Haifa University who couldn’t square away Israel’s bogus claims to democracy, as in ‘the only democratic state in the Middle East,’ with his experience as a member of a minority gagged and shackled by draconian security-based regulations. This had led at the time to his dismissal from his studies and banning from entering the university campus as another ‘trouble maker.’ Ameer went on to obtain his Bachelor’s degree through the accumulation of credits in after-hours and off-campus courses. Two decades later the administration of Haifa University was still formally advising its foreign students and other international guests against visiting Arab communities for their own safety. In1964-6, during my own university studies, I had rented a room in Vermillion, South Dakota from an old lady that warned me daily against the ‘wild Indians’ in the Prairies. I could relate to the deep-seated apprehensions of the aggressor.

The decision to hire Ameer over several other candidates, including an accomplished lawyer, was unanimous for the simple reason that he inspired greater trust and had his own independent vision of what ITTIJAH could become. At the time, my own concept of the future of the project was rather hazy, clouded among other things by the promise of generous funding from the Ford Foundation on a track to parallel the Shatil Project it had started funding for the nascent New Israel Fund in support of its grantee organizations. One Zionist Israeli citizen after another came to represent the Ford Foundation here and a day came when all of its grantees in the Middle East were asked to sign a declaration distancing them from and denouncing terror organizations. Ameer argued with his constituency on one side and with the funders on the other as to the definition of terms such as ‘terror.’ He rightly sensed an admission of guilt in the text of the form he was required to sign. He refused to do so at peril of the loss of funds. He veered further to the left in his search of funding resources internationally. With this came further alignment of ITTIJAH with Human Rights issues and structures in the various world forums including the gaining of special consultative status with the UN ECOSOC Council.

This process and Ameer’s unbending leadership style gradually led to ITTIJAH having its own stand on significant national level and international policy issues and Human Rights campaigns. This has meant that Ameer was charged with representing his constituency of over eighty local and national Arab NGOs in Israel and had at the same time to reflect back to them the sense of the international community’s rising struggle against neocolonialism, globalization, degradation of the environment and the infringement on the rights of the poor and the indigenous communities. Inevitably, Ameer gained prominence in the international struggle for freedom and equality, the very same issues he had long struggled for on the home front. At Durban, South Africa in 2001, he stood out as another front-line freedom and human rights advocate. Israel’s security services could no longer ignore him. Seeing him and Abu-Asa’ad, the head of the Sons of the Village Movement, in the frontline of protesters whose images, with clenched and raised fists, were splashed on TV screens across the globe I couldn’t help imagining the handcuffs on those raised arms. Abu-Asa’ad’s turn came first. He is more confrontational and rash. It took the responsible parties this much longer to spread the right bait and drum up the right charges against Ameer. In the meantime he has added insult to injury in the authorities’ eyes by establishing and heading the national level forum of the Committee for the Defense of Freedom which aimed to raise public awareness, locally and internationally, to the recurrent infringements of the Israeli Government on the freedom of its Arab citizens both individual and collective.

This morning, Ameer had the same confident, iron-will look, the same victorious self-confident smile, and the same massive heavy-knuckled clenched and raised fists thrust up in the air, this time with real handcuffs. I sat in the same front row in court with members of the Makhoul family including, among others, his wife, Janan, his two daughters, and four siblings. It dawned on me that Ameer’s prominent politician brother, Isam, the former member of the Israeli parliament and head of the Communist-led Jabha coalition and the current Director of the Emil Touma Institute of Palestinian and Israeli Studies was on trial as well. Second to Vanunu, Isam has done more to alert the world to Israel’s nuclear weapons than anyone I know. Except that he has done it openly and within the limits of the law. Still, to have dared to raise such taboo topic in the open and at international forums is a step beyond courageous. Cameel, my former associate at the Galilee Society and a brilliant genetics researcher, was there too. Very likely, he was on trial by proxy as well. Except that I couldn’t pin any specific violation on him. He did research at all the right places: the Weizmann Institute and Haifa University. It had often occurred to me that this branch of the Makhoul clan would make a nice group for a social science investigation regarding the factors contributing to the production of such a fantastic array of prominent individuals in one generation. Could it be that Ameer is paying the price for their collective prominence? Palestinian villagers in Galilee are supposed to survive modestly on the meager remnants of their land. This bunch is too proud and worldly successful for its own good. Somehow, everyone in the audience (all but two were Arabs) was on trial as far as I could tell from the expressions on their faces and the opinions they expressed later outside the court.

In front of the glass barrier, (not the full-height one Jonathan Cook featured symbolically in his book “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State” but a more symbolic low one,) sat the lawyers: The defense team consisted of four well-known attorneys including Avigdor Feldman and Hussain Abu-Hussain who heads ITTIJAH’s board. At one point I had a chance to greet my two friends and to ask about the absent Adalah lawyers. They had other involvements today. The prosecution team consisted of one lady attorney and her student assistant. She busied herself with the frequent smoothing down of her constantly straying locks of waist-length scraggly hair spread across her back from the tip of one shoulder to the other. I, in contrast, busied myself with imagining a less messy haircut for the petit woman: a shoulder-length cut should do, I thought. Perhaps an aggressive masculine haircut would be more in tune with her assignment. Then I came up with the perfect style for her: a straight shave. Perhaps she will discover a form of cancer that would force her to take chemotherapy and loose all of her hair. I shuddered: Why such vengeful thoughts? She is only doing her job as part of the system, no more. She is not there because she hates Ameer Makhoul personally. The system! That is exactly the problem. Her representative role is what makes her a monster to me and makes Ameer and possibly all Palestinian Citizens of Israel enemies in her eyes. But that is also what gives her power: Here she is, standing up single-handedly to a team of dedicated world-class lawyers knowing from the start that she will win. She and the three judges that have now entered the court to the subdued hiss of the audience’s motion as we rose from our seats and sat back again, were two different arms of the same system, there to tame the same beast they all know all of us to be. At one point I could see the woman in profile. She was a spitting image of Marcie, the cartoon persona in Peanuts.

This may well be a worldwide phenomenon: a system of control designed to disadvantage the disadvantaged. The three judges, the court secretary and stenographer, and the half-dozen jailors and guards are all part of the same system, a whole institution created and functioning in a way to control the likes of Ameer. Conceptually, they all owe their living to the continued perceived need to prosecute and punish the elements of society that object to the hegemony of which they are part. Not only that, but also they are fed by the same zeal and perceived duty to find, apprehend, convict and punish those who dare to disapprove of the essence of their system. Ameer and everyone in his audience today surely do disapprove of the imposed Zionist system of the State of Israel. Everyone in the court system as well as those in the security apparatus internalize their duty as being that of stemming this perceived threat to their very existence and livelihood. And this coalition of interested parties, this collection of invested partners, proceeds to assign different roles to its various members and to put on a well-orchestrated show to give the impression of impartiality in performing the very function for which they exist in the first place: to put Ameer in jail.

I need to pause for a breath here. I am sure this is not news to juridical experts and scholars of the philosophy of jurisprudence. Yet, relying entirely on my own logic, I am reaching the end of my wits. (Please, Raif Zraiq, bear with me for the next thought. I know you are laughing by now. But I lack your scholarly training.) When two contestants, say over the exact border between two adjacent pieces of land, go to court to settle their dispute, the judge and the entire court system are presumed to be neutral, unless if one party had managed to bribe them. But in our case one of the contestants is the very system of whom the entire court structure is part. All those sitting in judgment of Ameer have been bribed a’priori by holding the positions which they hold and fulfilling the duty for which they are being paid a monthly salary. And they are full partners by definition: the police who arrested him, the Shin Bet that torture him, the jailors who incarcerate him, Ms. Marcie who is prosecuting him, and the judges who will judge him together with all of us, his undeclared collaborators. We all seem to resist swearing allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”. We seem to have our doubts about subscribing to a scheme whereby the state defines itself exclusive of us. I wonder how many Americans would swear allegiance to an America that is defined as white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant?

Here finally come the formal charges against our man: meeting an agent of an enemy state abroad. What evidence does the state has against Ameer? There is a lot of it but it is all of a secret security-related nature and hence cannot be shared with the defense team. All except for one piece of evidence: the fact that Ameer saw his physician after his return from a trip abroad with the complaint of dizzy spells which the prosecutor takes as proof of the mounting internal psychological pressure of the accused over his guilt feeling about meeting the Hizbollah agent. In contradistinction to the secrecy enveloping the entire affair, the prosecutor here repeated half a dozen times the name of Hizbollah, apparently for no reason other than wishing to incriminate the accused through the mere mention of this feared bogeyman. The rest of the two-hour-long session was wasted on technicalities related to the claims of the secret and sensitive nature of the information that can be shared only between the different arms of the establishment Mafia: the prosecutor, the judges, and the secret police.

In the absence of an alternative system of justice we all will meet here again in two months. The courts’ collective holidays are upon us. The judges, the guards, the police, and the prosecutor need to spend their summer vacations with their families that had missed them all year. Ameer’s family will be visiting their next of kin in Makhoul Village in Upper Galilee. Ameer’s prison cell is reported to be comfortable: it has a proper bed.