Looking for Justice

Hashem Abu Maria: We can make tea for you. . . . Welcome to Al-Khalil and welcome to the International Movement of Defense for Children. I am the coordinator of the Hebron office and the coordinator of the social activism mobilization committee.

[Abu Maria then proceeded to introduce us to his colleagues, a lawyer for the Justice for Children unit, volunteers in movement coordination, and a field researcher on the violations of children in Palestine; we were later joined by another staffer, Abu-Jamal. We then introduced ourselves, including our participation in academic organizations like the Association for Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association, both of which had recently passed Academic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions resolutions.]

Hashem Abu Maria: Welcome and again, welcome to Al-Khalil, and I am happy with your visit to the city, and I am happy to be introduced to people who are working in academic boycott and especially of the Israeli occupation. What we do in this country is mostly look for justice. We look for that much more than we look for getting a punishment or erasure of the other side. This is what we focus on at DCI, especially regarding Palestinian children. Through our work, we try and find equality and opportunities for Palestinian children. We defend their rights, as according to international law. Before I speak more in depth about our work, I want to talk a little bit about the area that we are in.

Academic and Labor Delegation: What led to the contemporary conditions of DCI’s work in Hebron?

Hashem Abu Maria: We are in one of the largest cities in the West Bank, 250,000 [people]; I’m talking about the city, not the government. Al-Khalil is one of the most complicated issues in the Israeli–Palestinian negotiations. And it could be that the issues here are even more complicated than the issue in Jerusalem itself. The reason goes back to the historical artifacts and ruins. They are tied to religion, the Jewish religion and the Islamic one. More specifically, I am talking about the Ibrahimi Mosque. The Israelis believe that it belongs to the Jews, and Muslims believe that it belongs to the Muslims.

The Oslo Accords and the following subsequent accords [in 1997] split the city of Al-Khalil into two parts. H1 is the Palestinian area that we are currently in, and H2 is the Israeli. Of course, this ended in the Second Intifada. This means that Israeli [settlers] have no problems moving around in military vehicles and coming into any areas, and they have no regard to any agreements that were previously made. . . .

And today, what Israel does is they arrest, imprison; they come in the middle of the night in raids; they do anything they want, anything or any sort of activity that they judge and discover as security so that they may do whatever they want. Also, the whole city, Al-Khalil specifically, is surrounded by a band of settlements. And they control it with their own specific entrances. So, there are main arteries, streets in the city, that if they close them, the city is finished. So, if you ask anybody in Hebron, they will tell you that the only way they were able to enter and exit Hebron was through a large sewage pipe during the [Second] Intifada.

H2 is supposed to be the areas under Israeli control. And we are very close to H2. Of course, it’s a Palestinian area [too]. H2 is the old city. And the people who are living in the old city are in H2. The predicament that I mentioned before about H2 is that in H2 there are fifty to sixty thousand Palestinians living there and in the old city. This area has about 450 Israeli settlers. The 450 settlers are protected by around ten to twelve thousand Israeli soldiers who live here.

And what further complicates issues is that the settlers not only have taken over Palestinian properties, taken schools, like they took Osama School and turned it into a synagogue, but they also live in Palestinians’ old homes. And when you go to the old city, you will see that the Palestinians are living in the lower floors of their homes and the settlers are living on the higher levels. Some of the streets where there are Palestinians and settlers living in the same area like Shuhada Street [Martyrs Street, which was the main street of Hebron] were closed for six years during the [Second] Intifada.

The settlers in the old city, the 400 settlers, 450 settlers, they are known to be some of the most religious settlers who believe that Arabs do not have the right to live there.

Academic and Labor Delegation: That doesn’t mean they are religious; that means that they are racist.

Hashem Abu Maria: Yes, exactly. I don’t know if you remember the incident that happened in 1994 in the Ibrahimi Mosque.

Academic and Labor Delegation: This was in February 1994.

Hashem Abu Maria: When he entered, Baruch Goldstein, when he entered the mosque, and he killed the people inside of the mosque.4 And the Israelis at that time took that as an excuse to take safety precautions that restrict Palestinian life, of those who want to enter the mosque. The area of H2 alone has seventeen Israeli checkpoints inside. . . .

Academic and Labor Delegation: How large is Hebron totally?

Hashem Abu Maria: Forty-two square kilometers. The old city, H2, is a place of commerce; this is a major center of business. This is the lifeline of the city in H2, which is controlled by Israel. In it is the main market for Al-Khalil. The central farmers’ market for Hebron was there. It also has the central bus station for the Hebron government, which means the city, the villages, and the surrounding camps. It also contains the tourism related to Ibrahimi Mosque. All of these were things that the Israelis ended. They shut down the central bus station. They shut down the farmers’ market. They shut down the Ibrahimi Mosque and made it so that there are specific times and days for visitation. And one gate for all. And they had full control for seven months during the Second Intifada.

The old city was under curfew for seven continuous months. In this seven months, the curfew was lifted for only one hour per day to go grab necessities. So twenty-three hours under curfew per day for seven continuous months. So what this forced families to do was considered one of the biggest mass flights of people in the area, relocated (displaced) from H2 to H1, more than twenty-five to thirty thousand Palestinian citizens who had been living in the old city.

And we as an organization saw and felt this with the dwindling amount of students present in the schools of the old city. And that is why what’s left of the Palestinian population of the old city today is only between thirty and thirty-five thousand people.

Hashem Abu Maria: So, in our organization we have documented many children who have been violated, and I am talking about children who are under the age of eighteen. I am talking about children who are detained by Israeli forces today—180 children, not only in the old city but throughout the West Bank. From the old city, there are twenty children.

Some of the violations committed are related to injuring children with live ammunition, searching children in a way that destroys their dignity and humiliates them, restricting children from getting to school; there are a lot of times where the schools themselves are raided and searched. In the old city, the settler children throw stones at Palestinian children and adults, and sometimes they throw stones at foreigners who walk the street who they perceive as in solidarity with Palestine. They also throw garbage (including feces and urine). The merchants who still operate there, to protect themselves, have resorted to putting up fences or nets so nothing falls on them. . . .

Hashem Abu Maria: Defense for Children International (DCI) is an organization that defends the rights of Palestinian children. And we base our work on international human rights law and international treaties. We have worked in Palestine since 1992 and in Al-Khalil since 1995, after the massacre. We were previously in Al-Quds [Jerusalem], but we were deported. Our original offices were in Al-Quds; we are like many Palestinian organizations that had to leave Al-Quds.

We have several specific programs. One of our programs is the advocacy, international solidarity, program through which we get international organizations to support us. We give them periodic reports of what is happening in Palestine and the nature of violations that children are forced to endure. They help us by pressuring Israel to respect international law.

The second program is the documentation of violations. So what we do in the West Bank and Gaza, we document the nature of the violations, who is perpetrating them, every single detail about them.

We have a legal program. We work at both the Palestinian and Israeli levels in terms of the court systems. We have a large number of lawyers who are specifically pursuing children’s detention by Israel. So we represent them in the court system, and we also arrange for family visits to them when they are in prison.

And at the Palestinian level, we are working on the situation of children who have problems and issues within Palestinian law, like petty crime, some juvenile issues, and so on. We try to ensure that the detention, the arrest, the jailing, the trial, that all of these things are actually happening according to the law, that they are respectful of, and not in violation of, children’s rights.

We have a third program that is called Protection and Social Mobilization. And this is an advocacy and organizing/mobilizing program in the sense that they try to work within Palestinian society, so that the society will become much more conscious and aware of children’s rights and of protection and respect for children.

That’s why we work with a very large network of Palestinian institutions; we are part of the Palestinian NGO network. We have connections with the different official and unofficial parties, including the Network for the Protection of the Child.

Abu-Jamal (DCI staff member): For example, we documented that in January 2013 there were four cases of children’s detention for several hours, from the old city. They were arrested by Israeli soldiers, and they transferred them to the police station in Kiryat Arba [the largest settlement outside Hebron]. And there they were interrogated and charged with throwing stones. And while they were there, they had to endure many different forms of torture, shabih, sitting for a long time on the ground [in a certain position]. There is also torture where they had them standing in a certain position (shabih). Let me show you how [proceeds to show us a squatting position].

Hashem Abu Maria: Shabih is any torture mechanism in which they make a person hold their body, or part of their body, stationary for a very long time [this can include being bound and blindfolded while being held in an uncomfortable position].

Abu-Jamal: This continued for six hours. And they were released after the Palestinian coordination, the joint Israeli Coordination Committee, intervened.

Abu-Jamal: We also documented the beating of a child from Al-Mushariqa neighborhood, twenty meters away from the Holy Ibrahimi Mosque. His name is Nabil Nader Al-Rajabi; he was born in 2006. He was injured in his left eye by a stone that a settler’s child had thrown at him. His eye was injured, and he received treatment in a public hospital. And fortunately, the injury was external, and so they saved the eye.

Also, the Sidr Family house in the old city on Shuhada Street was exposed to an avalanche of stones from settlers from the settlement that they call the Hadassah house. There is only five meters between the family’s home and the settlement.5 A four-year-old girl was injured by the stones and also treated at the public hospital.

We noted that the injuries of children vary from settler violence like throwing stones at them or beating them; detention and detainment by Israeli soldiers of children present on the street; accusing them of throwing stones or participating in other public activities. This is in addition to attacks against schools. And the schools most subjected to this behavior include Qurtuba School on Shuhada Street; Ibrahimiya School, seventy meters away from the Ibrahimi Mosque, and by the way, this is the oldest school in the old city and in Hebron; Hajiriya School, the main school of Al-Khalil; and Tariq ibn Ziyad School. They are all located in a yard near the Ibrahimi Mosque.

Four months ago, we documented the detention of twenty-three children who went to these schools between the eighth grade and the tenth grade who are aged between fourteen and sixteen who were detained by Israeli soldiers. They were arrested and detained in the morning on their way to school, and they were transferred to the police of Kiryat Arba, the settlement police. After about two hours of being detained, they were handed over to the Palestinian Authority.

Academic and Labor Delegation: Did you all get involved or intervene?

Abu-Jamal: No, we did not intervene, but there is a security coordination agreement between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority stating that any time children are arrested for security reasons or allegations, the Israeli military needs to inform the Palestinian Authority so that the children are protected.

Hashem Abu Maria: We must note that this is a very important security issue because once these children are detained, the Israelis want the Palestinian Authority to follow up and create a file [on the children]. They are therefore giving orders to the Palestinian Authority [to take these children on as security issues].

The next step involves the Israeli–Palestinian coordination committee, where the Israelis direct the Palestinians to detain children, as they are minors. The Israelis then determine the location where these children will serve their detention, which is often in their own homes, although it can be elsewhere. As a result, the Palestinian Authority essentially acts as the warden or jailer for these children, implementing house arrest. This means the children are confined to their homes and cannot leave. This action is framed as being humane because it involves house arrest instead of prison. The Palestinian Authority oversees the enforcement of these house arrests.

We have these cases that are very, very difficult to address; [the children] are very difficult to protect.

Academic and Labor Delegation: Basically, their mission is to protect the children. And they are unable to carry out their mission because you’re talking about a child who’s under detention who needs to go to school, is unable to do anything. So there are a lot of parties involved in this process. Who else is involved, like other parties, Palestinians? Israelis?

Hashem Abu Maria: We have more than one agency, Palestinian organizations that take this on.

Academic and Labor Delegation: So, within the Palestinian Authority, you’re talking about several agencies that have to deal with this child. You have the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Social Affairs, and so on and so forth. So the Israelis are not wanting to take the responsibility of dealing with the children, like feeding them or jailing and so on, so they tell the Palestinian Authority to take on their work?

Hashem Abu Maria: Yes. So, as I was saying, they tell the Palestinian Authority, “This child needs to be imprisoned in Bethlehem. Serve the sentence in Bethlehem.” Whether the Palestinian Authority takes him or her to their home or rents a home for them or rents a hotel room, Israel is not concerned about that. But it is not optional for the Palestinian Authority to imprison them or not. It is imposed; they have to imprison the child. So the child has to serve the sentence, and they have to make sure that the sentence is served.

Abu-Jamal: The torture in prison entails subjecting the children to psychological and physical pressures during what they call the interrogation.

Academic and Labor Delegation: How long does interrogation last?

Abu-Jamal: Varies from several days to several weeks. Depends on the alleged charge.

Hashem Abu Maria: This is only the interrogation. Detention could take months or years.

Abu-Jamal: The intention of these physical and psychological pressures is to force the child to confess to a crime that will then enable the Israeli military to take him or her to court and to present a list of charges.

The different torture mechanisms come in many forms and include: forcing the child to stand or to sit in a particular position for a continuous period or for several hours without moving, accompanied by handcuffing the children with plastic handcuffs behind their backs and blindfolding them with a cloth to prevent them from seeing; also screaming, threatening children with more violence; or [threatening] to transfer the child to a prison that’s harsher or arresting one of the members of their families; or threatening to put the child in solitary confinement for days to weeks.

Abu-Jamal: For accuracy, these threats are not necessarily put into action. The purpose of them is to scare the child and get them to confess. And there are children who have been subjected to beating with punches, with kicking, or denying them food and drink for eight to ten hours. And they also place them in maximum security, in solitary confinement. And it can last for hours, one or two days. The intention of all of this, as we stated at the beginning, is to force the child to make confessions, either about themselves or their classmates at school or in the neighborhoods in which they live. There are also cases in which the children were subjected to sexual harassment, sexual violence; even sexually harassed in a verbal way or other ways.

For example, a boy was threatened that he would be raped if he did not confess. Of course, not all cases, we cannot even say a majority of cases, go through this or the threat may not always be followed through with, but I can confirm that there are some that were subjected to this.

There is also the suffering of detained children in their transfer to courts. The child may have six or seven court appearances [during the course of a trial]. Every transfer to court means an early morning wake-up for the child, 5:30 a.m. or 6:00 a.m., during which their hands and feet are bound with iron shackles.

They are transferred from prisons, and it may be a long distance away, such as from Hasharon Prison in the north, near Haifa. And then they take them to either Salem court in the north or Ofer in the south, which is near Ramallah. They take them to a small room that measures two by three meters. It is named the waiting room.

They put twelve to seventeen children in this room, and they keep them detained there from early in the morning until late evenings.

Abu-Jamal: Why does it take so long? Because they wait until all the children appear for trial court. So they present every child to the judge in the court and then they bring him back to the room, then the following one and the third one and so on and so forth. And this continues on until the evening.

What does this mean? This means extreme boredom, extreme boredom. The shackles, leaving the shackles on for several hours.

Academic and Labor Delegation: What about the hands?

Abu-Jamal: Inside the cell they are loosened, but then they put them back on again to take them to court and back. Overcrowding. That’s why the court session, actually going to trial in itself, is considered a very difficult day for the child. And we’re talking about five, six, or seven sessions with these conditions that children are subjected to.

Academic and Labor Delegation: Are there girls? Are you using the masculine pronoun as a generic pronoun or is it really all boys?

Abu-Jamal: Almost all the cases we’ve dealt with were boys.

Hashem Abu Maria: Today not a single girl is in the prison, but in the past there were. We experienced four cases.

Abu-Jamal: Hadeel Talal Abu-Turki, for example. Excuse me, we have five cases in the old city. Two of them, the detention was for over two and a half years.

Hashem Abu Maria: One girl was [sentenced to] four years and one was two and a half years, sentenced to two and a half years. She served two years and got out.

Academic and Labor Delegation: What were the charges?

Hashem Abu Maria: The charges were that she tried to stab a soldier.

Academic and Labor Delegation: How?

Hashem Abu Maria: When she was heading to school they found a knife in her bag. There are many cases that we have a hard time actually addressing and Israelis don’t want to talk about; for example, some children will try to get away from their families and hold a weapon like a knife in their bag so when they cross a checkpoint they get arrested. She gets close to the checkpoint; she raises the knife, not because she wants to stab a soldier, but she wants them to arrest her so she can escape. But then the Israelis, the Israeli military, rather than taking it for what it is, they define it as a security offense. And so they charge her, try her, and sentence her, and then she has to serve the sentence. She ends up spending her sentence in an Israeli prison. A girl who was fifteen years old spent six and a half years in prison.

The one that spent four years was sixteen years old. The one who was sentenced to two and a half years was sixteen years old.

What I want to make clear is the age situation. Israel deals with Palestinian children according to military decision. They only consider Palestinians children up to sixteen years old. If you’re over sixteen, you’re not a child, and you as a child can be arrested at twelve years old, detained, and tried at the age of fourteen. These are military decisions.

There have been children who were four years old and eight years old who were arrested, but then they released them after a few hours, but there were these cases. But we have twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-olds that have been indicted and sentenced.

If they’re younger than twelve, they get a financial fine. So there is a punishment.

What’s most dangerous, and the last thing I want to say about this, which my colleague did not have a chance to speak about, is the worst thing in Israeli jails, which is the attempt to recruit them as collaborators to work with one of the Israeli security agencies.

Academic and Labor Delegation: You know this because they told you? They did not get recruited?

Hashem Abu Maria: No, there were children who were recruited, but they told us, confessed when we took their testimony. They told us that this has happened. I was a social worker in some schools before I came to work here, and I had dealt with seven cases of children who were pressured to be recruited within a year.

And one time I actually spoke on the phone with the intelligence officer, their handler. And this is a very, very dangerous precedent that we try to work on with the Palestinian Authority, with the Palestinian Prisoners Club, with the societies that protect Palestinian prisoners with international agencies, with everybody and with the Israeli intelligence to prevent this, because this is really dangerous.

Academic and Labor Delegation: Can you talk about the history of this kind of recruitment, recruiting children? How long has it been going on and where did it start?

Hashem Abu Maria: In my experience, and I’m forty-three years old. As far as I know, they’ve been trying to do this since the First Intifada, and it hasn’t stopped.

I can talk to you about how they treat the children and what goes on with them and what techniques they use with these children. In short, they put a child in a terrifying situation. They isolate them from others; they threaten them; and they pressure them and offer them things. The child is isolated; they cannot see a lawyer, or their family, or Red Cross. So they tire them out and prepare them psychologically.

Another approach is that they try to recruit the children by telling the child that they will be doing the other children a favor by accepting. For example, there’s more than one interrogator, interrogation officer with the children, and they try to reason with them and convince them that you will be actually helping your friend if you tell us if they throw a stone. They tell that kid that if the child continues to throw stones, they might be subject to getting beat or killed, so in the end they would only be helping them out by accepting their offer. “So you’re actually doing them a favor by telling us, because we’ll be protecting them.”

Hashem Abu Maria: DCI has created a manual that is to protect children in the context of armed conflict. We talk about specific cases and stories of some of the children related to the theme of recruitment.

And one of the things in order to actually deal with this is theater, drama therapy. So we created a whole script based on the children’s testimonies, and we had them perform. We collaborated with a theater company called Harra [neighborhood]. And the name of the play is The Trap. This was in 2011. And now we are discussing with the Ministry of Education to present them in schools, to screen them in schools, especially for children who are twelve to fourteen years old, because this is the time when they’re most vulnerable (because this is the age when they can be arrested by the Israelis). Especially in areas where children are more subjected to this, like the town where I am from, Beit Ummar, which is very close to Highway 60, which is a road for settlers. I am talking also about the Arroub refugee camp, which is on the land of Beit Ummar, and the old city in H2.

There are many other areas where we are doing it, Qalandia, Ramallah. This is a process—we already finished the play, and we have already done some shows in schools. It is very realistic; it shows exactly what is happening, how Israelis try to pressure the Palestinian children.

I swear, I’m certain that 70 percent of adult collaborators, those who have worked with the Israeli military, were recruited when they were children. This subjects the child not only to isolation from society but also to death; they can be killed in Palestinian society, in any society.

What happens here is that when we’re talking about a child that’s fourteen, fifteen years old, the older the child grows, the more assignments, the more dangerous assignments they give them. So we want to also raise consciousness about this issue. When this person grows up, they will become rejected by Palestinian society and unprotected by the Israelis. . . .

Academic and Labor Delegation: What kind of problems or restrictions with funding, for example, do you have when you bring attention of Israeli violence on children’s rights to the international community? Is there a conflict?

I was wondering how do you handle the long-term psychological effects of what children go through? For example, do they have therapy? Because you mentioned that you were a social worker, therapy, because there is the phenomena of post-traumatic stress disorder. For example, being threatened with sexual violence as a child, how that can have long-term effects on their identity as an adult. We know that, in the United States, how that has reflected itself in problems. So how is it handled? I know that we glorify the prisoners and all that, but what about these concrete dimensions?

What kinds of support services are in place for the families?

Hashem Abu Maria: We are not an organization that gives social or psychological services. We provide legal services and legal consultations. We provide documentation of the violations. We analyze the information, and we issue reports. We communicate with international organizations to pressure, to stop these violations.

For social services, we have partners in Palestinian society who are more specialized in providing these kinds of services. And we refer these cases to those people who are more specialized. And we are working in the West Bank, for instance, through the Palestinian Network for Children’s Rights. For example, the YMCA has many sites in Hebron; they have a program from newly freed prisoners, a program for freed child prisoners.

Now with the families of the children, our role as DCI is to exchange information.

We provide these services indirectly, but it is not our specialty, so we like to send them to people who are trained for that.

As far as the European Union is concerned, it’s hard to be very, very accurate about it. We are accomplishing a lot of successes on the popular level with mostly human rights organizations. Not only in Europe.

We are trying to add more reports in English, not just in Arabic. We provide, every two years, a biannual report to the international Committee on the Rights of the Child about Palestinian children.

At the popular level, we experience a lot of support. But on an official level, politics comes first, unfortunately.