After Almost 40 Years in Israeli Prison, Death Didn't Set Walid Daqqa Free - Twilight Zone - Haaretz.com
The forces swooped down shortly after we left. Dozens of Border Police and blue police personnel, led by the district commander, flailing, demolishing and making arrests. They were raiding a grief-stricken home. A home to which Walid Daqqa, the longest-serving security prisoner in Israel.
The forces burst into a home whose occupants hadn't yet digested the bitter news – which they had to receive via social media – that Daqqa had died. He passed away alone, without being allowed to part from his loved ones: his wife, Sana; his 4-year-old daughter Milad, born from his sperm, which was smuggled out; his mentally frail mother of 92; and his siblings, who were dedicated for almost 40 years to his struggle for freedom. Violently, the police officers fell on a home to which even the deceased's body hadn't yet been returned. This is how things are in the era of Itamar Ben-Gvir, this is how things are in this time of savagery and sadism.
Last Monday afternoon, friends and family were sitting in the private yard of the house on a row of plastic chairs, next to the mourners tent which was being erected there. Already in the morning the police arrived and ordered the family to remove the chairs from the yard: sitting is forbidden, mourning is forbidden, being sad is forbidden, condolences are forbidden – now within the State of Israel, too, in the city of Baka al-Garbiyeh.
On Monday, the penultimate day of Ramadan, far from everyone's eyes, a few elderly, secular men were sitting in the backyard, smoking cigarettes and drinking bitter coffee, despite the fast. They are Daqqa's old friends from prison. Seared with ordeals, after decades of incarceration for serious deeds – for which Jews would be sentenced to half the time in prison – among them a few well-known names. Karim Younis, from the village of Ara, who was released from prison a year and a half ago, was the most prominent of them.
I first met Younis and Daqqa in Shatta Prison, in the Beit She'an Valley, in 2001, in the office of the facility's commander. Even then, a photograph of the Lubavitcher Rebbe hung on the wall. The conversation with the two inmates, which was off the record by order of the Israel Prison Service, left a deep impression on me. This week I met Younis again, mourning for Daqqa, and I understood why. Younis was convicted with others of murdering Avi Bromberg, an Israeli soldier, in 1980. In the year and a half since his release, he traveled the world like a youthful adventurer and looked for a partner to continue traveling with in this new, late stage of life. He looks good.
I never met Daqqa again after that one time but from the late 1990s, he wrote me letters from prison, during the period when that was still possible; most of them dealt with the fate of other inmates. An Egyptian security prisoner, sick and forgotten, who thanks to the publication of his letter in Haaretz, was able meet with his mother and, for the first time, with his daughter; a blind lifer who begged to be allowed to touch the members of his family when they visited.
Police disperse people mourning Walid Daqqa's death.
Even before Daqqa became the country's longest-serving security prisoner, he was a leader of the inmates. Some of his letters were of a philosophical nature. The play "Parallel Time" – which of course caused a furor in Israel and cost Haifa's Al-Midan Theater its budget for staging it – was based on a long letter that Daqqa wrote to "my brother Abu Umar," namely former MK Azmi Bishara.
"I write you from the parallel time… Many things in your time have changed. The telephone has no dial, car tires have no inner tubes… I write to you from the parallel time. We are stuck in the parallel time from even from before the end of the Cold War, from even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before Madrid and Oslo, before the first and the second intifada. We date from even before the invention of mobile phones," Daqqa wrote after his first 19 years in prison.
"Today," he continued, "I'm beginning to count my 20th year in prison… In the past, time had no meaning for me. How much time had passed in the broad sense of the word wasn't important to me. All that interested me were the minutes that passed quickly during my family's short visits, the minutes that weren't enough to ask all the questions I had written on the palm of my hand, and the tasks that would obligate Sana to expend much effort, not only to carry them out, but [simply] in order to remember them all. Here it's forbidden to use pen and paper during visits. Memory is our only means.
"I forget to observe the lines that have begun to be engraved in my mother's face, forget to look at her hair, which she has started to dye with henna in order to conceal her white hair, so that I won't ask what her real age is. And what is my mother's real age? I don't know. My mother has two ages: the chronological one, which I don't know, and the arrest age, the parallel age, which is 19 years."
This week, 92-year-old Farida sat in her room in the family's home. She is completely disconnected from her surroundings. For years she was known as the "prisoners' mother," because she made the rounds of detention facilities and looked after the inmates. The previous time we met her, in 2014, Alex Levac took her picture as she caressed a photograph of Walid.
Walid Daqqa's mother, Farida, with a picture of him in their yard, in 2014. For years she was known as the "prisoners' mother," because she made the rounds of detention facilities and looked after the inmates.Credit: Alex Levac
Daqqa was convicted in 1987 of being a member of the squad that murdered Moshe Tamam, a 19-year-old soldier, even though he did not take part in the murder itself. He was 26 at the time, and died this week at the age of 62. Thirty-eight years, an almost complete course of life, maturity and aging, without a single day on the outside. Few prisoners in Israel have been imprisoned for so many years. Every few years, there was a spark of hope that he would be freed, but it was always extinguished in disappointment in the end. The seemingly brightest of these moments was in 2014, during the fourth phase of an agreement made a year earlier with the Palestinian Authority for the release of prisoners.
The last four Israeli security prisoners to have been jailed before the Oslo process were about to be freed, and everything at home was ready for the celebration of Walid's return. His brother Assad Daqqa, who devoted his life to working for Walid's release, had already bought 200 balloons, ordered mountains of baklava and paved the road leading to their house, alongside which schoolchildren had spelled out the word huriya (freedom) with stones. And then Israel suddenly decided to cancel the fourth phase unilaterally, for no apparent reason, and the dream of freedom was shattered.
After that, when Daqqa's entire official prison term – 37 years – was almost up, he became entangled in the affair of the smuggling of cell phones into the prison in 2016, an operation organized by the then-MK Basel Ghattas, and he was sentenced to an additional two years. When he fell ill with a terminal disease in recent years, prison service bureaucracy prevented his early release on various pretexts and via various committees. Even when the illness became more acute, in the past few weeks, the apparatus of evil did not grant him the basic human minimum, which in the past was granted to the worst of murderers: to be freed and spend his remaining days with family and friends.
A year ago he was hospitalized in Shamir Medical Center. The prison service's medical staff had decreed that "his days are numbered and there is genuine danger to his life." To no avail. Israeli Arab security prisoners are not released early, not even if they are deathly ill, certainly not in the Ben-Gvir era. Afterward Daqqa was transferred back to the hospital in Ramle Prison, where he died this week.
His lawyer, Nadia Daqqa, was the last person to meet with him on behalf of the family. She related to them how Walid was brought to their visit in a wheelchair, and that she couldn't hear anything he said because his voice was too feeble to carry through the glass partition. That was about three weeks ago. Not even that condition was bad enough to set him free.
He met his wife, Sana, a lawyer from the town of Tira, in 1996, when he was active in the Palestinian Prisoners Society. They were married in 1999, in a prison ceremony but never got permission for a conjugal visit. Less than five years ago, Sana became pregnant from sperm of his that was smuggled out. Walid was punished for that with a spell in solitary confinement; initially the state refused to recognize his paternity, when Milad was born.
A former housepainter who worked in Tel Aviv and Eilat, and who had whitewashed the walls of the Avia Sonesta Hotel in Taba, Daqqa was captivated in his youth by the ideas of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was shocked, he said, by what the Israel Defense Forces had wrought in the 1982 Lebanon War, including its responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacre (carried out by Christian militiamen under Israel's watch), and he joined the ranks of the violent struggle, thereby sealing the fate not only of the soldier who was killed but also the course of his own life.
One of the last photos taken of Walid Daqqa in prison.
Last Sunday, Sana was driving in her car with their daughter Milad when she began receiving reports on social media that Walid had died. It wasn't the first time rumors of this sort had circulated on social media, but Sana's heart told her that this time the report was correct. She told her daughter, who began to cry out.
When I met Sana the next day, it was clear that her world had collapsed, with decades of hope and anticipation snuffed out irrevocably. Despite his illness, the two hoped that they would still be able to spend a period of time together. Walid was due to be released on March 4, 2025. In another year, one last year in incarceration. Assad, his brother, says that when he was still allowed to speak on the phone from prison (another privilege that has been eliminated), Walid talked of his dream of dying at home as a free man. That was not to be.
Assad saw his brother for the last time by stealth, several months ago. One evening he arrived at one of the internal medicine wards at the Shamir Medical Center, approached his brother's guards and asked them where "Dr. Khaled" was. In doing so he managed to see Walid for a split second, and Walid saw him. They never met again.
No one phoned the family this week to inform them officially of Walid's death. The family turned to the mayor of Baka al-Garbiyeh and to Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights for help in arranging for the transfer of his body, but again, to no avail. The family's lawyer told us this week that there's a policy of not responding to families in such situations. Let them wait, let them choke.
And then the police showed up late Monday afternoon. Armed, brutish, insensitive. A large force proceeded slowly toward the banned tent in the family's backyard. They attacked everyone in their path. A three-minute video clip captures the action. Officers beat and shoved people, women cried out. The mourners tent was captured and cleared out, white smoke was emitted, an elderly woman fell to the ground, five mourners were arrested. "What kinds of fascists are these!" someone is heard shouting in the background.
Thus Walid Daqqa went to his death – but not yet to his grave.