Sa'ed is not alone

Ha'aretz By Ilana Hammerman
I met Sa'ed's family, the Hamamreh family, four years ago. The workers who built my house in Jerusalem were from their village, Hussan, near Bethlehem. I asked them to introduce me to a woman from the village who could teach me spoken Arabic. That's how I got to Um Sa'ed, mother of six (Sa'ed is the eldest). She rejected the idea of payment, saying she was not a teacher but a nurse by profession. And she suggested that we get to know one another and, if a friendship developed, that would be her reward and mine, aside from the Arabic.

A friendship did develop, not just between us but also between me and her children and her husband and the grandparents and aunts and uncles......

I go to their home almost every week, relax on the sofa and soak up all the warmth and attention they give me in ways I'm not always used to; I talk and listen, argue, laugh a lot, and sometimes also cry, over my troubles and theirs. If I hadn't seen with my own eyes how my country and my people are making the lives of these people miserable, stealing their land and their freedom, humiliating them and harassing them in countless ways, if I didn't know all of this, I would return from all my visits there feeling relaxed and strengthened.

Not only do I see all this but, because of Sa'ed's sister Saja's illness, I have also come to know about the terrible hardships faced by residents of the occupied territories who have had the misfortune to become seriously ill. I've come to know the faulty health system, the awful state of some of the hospitals, the dreadful consequences of an absence of health insurance worthy of the name, and the difficulty of getting to and from treatment in Israel. While we were busy exploring the treatment possibilities for Saja, who is seriously ill, her brother was arrested and imprisoned in military court. The family was completely shocked, for this kind of arrest was no routine matter for them: No one in their family had ever been arrested! What could they, a religious Muslim family, have to do with the Popular Front, a secular leftist organization?

Sa'ed is one of tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been tried in Israeli military courts since they were established in 1967. The millions of Palestinians who are subject to this system, which was supposed to be temporary, can have no expectation of a fair trial. A fair system would not send so many thousands to "remand until the conclusion of proceedings" to sit in prison for many months, sometimes for a year or two, before their case is decided. A fair legal system would not convict close to 100 percent of those judged by it. A fair legal system would not issue so many indictments that read like form letters automatically filled out by a harried clerk; indictments that contain no specific dates or locations or charges, so that there is no way innocence can be proved.

How can Sa'ed, for instance, prove he did not participate in a gathering whose date is spread over a time period of two or three years, that began sometime in 2006? How can he prove he was not a member of this or that organization, which almost certainly does not keep official membership lists? And when will he even be given an opportunity to speak; he who categorically denied the charges in the vague indictment read out before him and also refused to verify with his signature the brief and desultory interrogation conducted with him, according to the record?

In the meantime, he is brought into hearings in handcuffs and leg shackles and listens quietly to the contradiction-laden words of other dejected young men like him, who say they don't even know him; not even the one who mentioned his name in a long list of names he somehow came up with in some interrogation under who knows what conditions. A fair legal system would not operate this way, so far from the public eye, for even though a military order stipulates that "the military court shall hold its hearings with open doors," the public is not permitted to enter these open doors except by special permit.

But the vast majority of the Israeli public does not know and does not want to know about the existence of the hearings held before the military courts, or who these people are whose freedom is taken away from them for such long periods of time, or where those bleak and deserted courtrooms are located. In one of them, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, in these months, very slowly, Sa'ed's fate is also being decided.