Sulaiman Khatib

I grew up in a village called Hizma, in northeast Jerusalem. I come from an indigenous community that is deeply rooted in and connected to the land. Our family had lived on this land for generations; we were even registered in the Ottoman archive as far back as the fifteenth century. Jerusalem was the center of our lives: this is where I went to secondary school and where my father worked. As a child I even played soccer with Jewish kids from Neve Yaakov.

At 13 years old, I became more interested in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. I started to secretly listen to revolutionary music and hide revolutionary magazines under my bed. In my school, discussing politics was banned. The Palestinian flag was illegal, and even saying the word “Palestine” could get us thrown in jail. I connected with Palestinian prisoners and activists, and it opened my eyes about our situation under occupation.

In 1986, when I was 14 years old, I informally joined the Fatah Youth Movement. I threw stones at soldiers, wrote graffiti on public buildings, hung Palestinian flags and prepared molotov cocktails. I wanted to steal guns from Israeli soldiers with a friend whose home had been demolished. We stabbed two Israeli soldiers in the back. They were slightly wounded and we managed to escape.

We got arrested three days later. I was put in temporary detention and received my sentence 一 fifteen years of prison. The Israeli army also invaded my mother’s home and barricaded off my room with concrete. During my time in jail, two of my brothers were also arrested and imprisoned. It broke my mother’s heart.

During the first two and a half years of my imprisonment, I was placed in the juvenile section of the Hebron detention center. Torture was routine: beating prisoners, spraying tear gas into prison cells, and violently stripping prisoners happened on a daily basis. There was also rarely enough water for drinking and showering. To improve our conditions, I joined hunger strikes, eating nothing and drinking only salted water for as long as 17 consecutive days. It was through these hunger strikes that I first learned about nonviolent struggles and the virtue of patience.

Later on, I was transferred to the Janad jail next to Nablus. There, I worked in the library and had the opportunity to read a lot. I never had a chance to get a formal education, but I educated myself in jail. We used to call prison the “Revolutionary University.” I became exposed to new thoughts about the conflict and the means to solve it. In an attempt to learn about the “enemy,” I studied the history of the Jewish people and taught myself both Hebrew and English. It was then that I realized that there were multiple narratives to the conflict. Watching Schindler’s List deeply moved me and changed my life forever. I realized that these “enemies” were actually human beings who had also suffered. The journey of my transformation was painful, but it was also deeply spiritual. Slowly, I reconstructed my worldview.

I had thought my enemy was the Jewish people, but I was wrong. We have common enemies: hatred, fear and collective trauma. I knew that if we could somehow unite against these common foes, we could end the conflict together. Our land does not belong to the Jews or the Palestinians only. We both belong to the land. Reading the writings of Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. made me realize that there was no military solution to our conflict. The only possible solution is a joint, nonviolent struggle for peace, freedom, security and human rights for all.

In 1997, after ten years and five months in jail, I was freed. With a group of friends, we established the Abu Sukar Centre for Peace (later Al-Quds Association for Democracy and Dialogue). We hosted Palestinian-Israeli youth programs, where we would use soccer to bring children together.

In 2005, a few friends and I started engaging in secret meetings with former Israeli soldiers. These meetings eventually led to the establishment of Combatants for Peace in 2006. It has not been easy: we still face checkpoints, ever expanding settlements and the separation wall keeping us apart. But together we hold firm to our resolutions of community building and nonviolent struggle.