Desperation, survival and escape from the human condition called oppression – tyranny names the terrorist

How I became a ‘terrorist’
At 16, entering the steel gates of the Israeli military prisons, I could never go back to my former life. Levinger’s outpost, his settler violence, permanently changed my life.
By Abdelrahman Al Ahmar

The first time I was attacked by an Israeli settler, I was 14 years old. I was walking to school when an armed man wearing a skullcap, standing near some Israeli soldiers, pulled my pack off my back and threw it in the mud. That wasn’t last month, nor was it near a new outpost in Nablus. Rather, this happened 30 years ago, on the main road running through Bethlehem, near Deheisheh refugee camp, where I lived. The settler was not just any alienated, disaffected man. He was, I learned later, the father of the national religious settlement project – Rabbi Moshe Levinger.

In those days, the settlers and the Egged buses on their way to and from the nascent settlements in the area would drive right by the camp. Their vehicles were often the targets of many rocks: Who among us wanted armed Israelis using our roads? Levinger wanted to show us who was boss. At first he would stop his car, and chase and try to attack us. He would scream at the soldiers stationed on the road to arrest and beat the kids. Soldiers would then fire tear gas and play cat-and-mouse with us in the camp’s alleys.

Emboldened by army support, Levinger and his fellow “pioneers” would enter the camp and open fire randomly. Clashes would ensue. The soldiers would then run after us and make arrests while Levinger and his friends would return to their cars and drive home to their settlements. The violence became a daily event.

This is what life was like for me and my friends during these years. For Levinger and his nationalist movement, it constituted a disruption of their commute to and from Jerusalem. To placate these champions of Zion, the Israel Defense Forces finally erected a nine-meter-high fence, topped with barbed-wire, around Deheisheh. The camp’s thousands of residents now had a single way in and out, and it was guarded by soldiers, making it like living in a prison. A 7 P.M. curfew was in place for years. …more