In all the following dialogues, ‘AQ :’ stands for Ahmad Qatamesh, while ‘INT:’ stands for an Israeli military interrogator.

INT: We are a civilized occupation, compared to your Arab brethren, who kill you en masse.

AQ: You are an occupation, with all its evils. You have driven thousands into collaboration, prostitution and drugs; your Government confiscates the land, you arrest, injure, demolish homes, exile and ultimately kill. In your invasion of Lebanon alone, you killed more than thirty thousand of us, and in the Intifada, you killed more than a thousand, mostly children, youth and women. But, are we to limit our choices between two types of killers? Isn’t freedom a better choice for us?

INT: The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) do not shoot women and children.

AQ: Haven’t you read the reports of the highly respected human rights organization B’tselem, or the reputed researcher, Meron Benvenesti, not to mention Amnesty International, the various United Nations organs, among others? This indiscriminate, unfettered brutality, that you are practicing against us, is gradually leading your society towards fascism.

INT: You cannot be serious about this fascism thing, we are a democracy, mind you.

AQ: Maybe for your own, your political system is democratic, but for Palestinians, even living among you, your entire system is based on racism, and for us in the West Bank and Gaza, you display lucid fascist tendencies as well. You can refer to the visionary writings of your renowned philosopher, Leibovich, who proclaimed that the occupation is laying the foundations for fascism, and “corrupting the Jewish soul”. A quick look at your leaders, since 1948 confirms this fear. The upper echelons of power in your society has always been dominated by a disproportionate number of army generals, far more than intellectuals. The likes of Aba Eban, Shimon Peres and Haim Ramon are merely a rarity.

INT: Are you sincerely worried about us from the evils of fascism?

AQ: The rise of fascism destroys you as humans, and in the process ignites your iron-fist policies and your terror against our people and the peoples of the region, bringing the whole area to the dark abyss of a war, that may not spare anyone. I worry about that, and I care to prevent this scenario from happening.

INT: I gather that you read a lot.

AQ: Well yes, I am a writer; my job is to read, think and write.

INT: You hate us.

AQ: Absolutely.

INT: Because we are Jews.

AQ: Nonsense, I have nothing against you as Jews, and I have never carried any hate in my heart against anyone because of his/her religion or conviction. I judge people according to their behaviour and deeds.

INT: So how does our behaviour make you hate us?

AQ: You are a professional team of tormentors and killers, ridden with an intricate mesh of psychological complexes, paramount among which is your sadistic appetite for torture and humiliation of others. You are an organ of occupation, you earn high salaries and very lucrative benefits for your dirty jobs, and this is precisely why you oppose peace, as it will throw you out of business. Is it clear now, why I hate you?

INT: But, you do not just want to end the occupation, you dream of Haifa and Jaffa. What then is the future of the Jews here?

AQ: From my perspective, just and lasting peace cannot exist without the assimilation of all the citizens, including the Jewish citizens, into one secular democratic society, free of discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, or gender. Here, I fully subscribe to Karl Marx’ theory on the Jewish Question.

INT: But, this is a dream that may take 60-70 years to be realized.

AQ: No power in the universe can deny me the right to dream of a society without war, hatred, or racism, a real human brotherhood/sisterhood.

In an exchange with a fellow prisoner that I had just met, he said: ‘there is no solution for the Israelis except exterminating them,’ to which I annoyedly replied: ‘this is their logic; even though we have suffered gravely under their occupation, we should never ever adopt their logic. We are, after all, their anti-thesis. We ought to have a just but humane solution to our conflict with them, and keep the higher moral grounds, the gibberish that Ahmad Said [a well-known Arab radio announcer from the Sixties] used to utter: ‘fish of the Mediterranean, get hungry’, is unacceptable, both morally and politically.

One interrogator once said that I was swimming against the tide of history, so to speak, to which I responded:

AQ: I stand up for my freedom of opinion and self-expression, and often in history, visionaries were lonely at first: Abraham had virtually no followers, even his own father disbelieved him; Christianity only became an established state religion 3 centuries after its inception; Muhammad had merely one hundred followers in the beginning; Vladimir I. Lenin was in a pitiful minority up until World War I; Einstein, Darwin, Galileo and Charlie Chaplin were very much on the margins, when they first revealed their non-conforming views and theories.

The question is one of principle and morality, to be consistent and at peace with your own conscience; [...] and like Jesus prophetically said, what good is it to win the entire world, and lose yourself?

INT: Are you against peace?

AQ: No, but I am opposed to the current so called “peace process”. Peace is a great moral value, no less essential than freedom, justice and advancement.

INT: So, you resist the peace process with violence.

AQ: With words, actually.

INT: Are you ready to participate in the negotiations?

AQ: Of course not, I am not an elected representative to negotiate on behalf of my people, and I am against the very political platform of the current “negotiations”.

Later on, this particular thought was formulated into a clearer offer to participate in the negotiations, in return for my freedom. Needless to say, I categorically turned down the offer.

After many long but failed attempts to make me “confess” to their absurd allegations, I burst out saying,: You are but hostages to your own grossly exaggerated lies, which you disseminated throughout your media. In short, you have tailored a Tarboush (fez) for me, but I shall never wear it, regardless what price I may have to pay at the end.

I sincerely pity those young men, who start out the budding stage of their lives in such a barbaric job, that corrupts their souls and obliterates their humanity. There is nothing more despicable or abhorrent than deriving pleasure from the miseries, agony and anguish of others, regardless who those others might be; it annuls one’s intrinsic humanity, and plants the seeds of sadism which keep growing inside for the rest of one’s life.