There was no elegance to my groans of pain. When the door opened to the 0.5m x 0.5m x 1m steel box, it took me a moment to refocus on the three people staring at me, and another moment to remember who they were.
"See?" said one. "I told you you were Falasteeni naa'naa".
I stumbled out of the box, my ears ringing and his voice distant, a large grin on his face. I couldn't muster up the indignation to respond to his comment that I was a "minty Palestinian" - a pretty boy as it were.
The man with the grin who called me a minty Palestinian had been in the box for three hours at a time when he was imprisoned here. While in it, the metal box would be pounded on with a metal bar just like he did to me. His hands would be cuffed behind his back and his head hooded to shroud out any light that made it through the rusty box. This is one form of physical torture used at the Khiam prison in south Lebanon. The prison operated under the guidance of Israel until 2000, when Israel retreated from south Lebanon. Abu Ali was in the prison from 1996 until it was freed in 2000 - a long four years of captivity, interrogation and torture. "Their creativity knew no bounds", said Abu Ali as he described the myriad methods of psychological and physical torture.
I was too ashamed to complain to Abu Ali about my 2 seconds of "torture". He had encountered so much, and his eyes were wide and teary as he described his experiences. His work was to turn this prison into a museum about one of the horrors of a brutal Israeli occupation. During the war this summer, the Israelis bombed it for almost 10 hours despite its distinct lack of military importance (Israelis also bombed the UN post 50m away, killing four UN observers including a Canadian). Erasing Khiam prison was an attempt to help realize Ben Gurion's wager from decades ago, that "the old will die and the young will forget".
tarek : )
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