Rafat Othman Najar: A Palestinian Awaiting Deportation

By Stephen J. Sosebee

The U.N. Security Council's condemnation early this year of Israel's planned deportation of 12 more Palestinians was a severe blow that helped bring down the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The shock was not in the condemnation of such deportations, which clearly are in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention's provision that "deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive."

What stunned Israel was that the U.S. neither vetoed nor abstained, but instead joined in the vote to condemn Israel. Since then, deportation of one of the Palestinians has been dropped and the orders against the other 11 have not yet been carried out. The deportations would have brought the total number of Palestinians expelled during the intifada to 77. They signal that Palestine without Palestinians has been the barely concealed objective of the Likud government.

A Personal Note

For this writer, the deportation order against one of the 12 struck a personal note. I first met Rafat Othman Najar at his home in the Gaza town of Khan Younis a year an a half ago. His younger brother, Mohammed, was helping me arrange medical care in the United States for a young boy from the Khan Younis refugee camp who had lost both his legs and an arm to an Israeli bomb.

As a group of visiting Western journalists sat in the Najar home discussing the shock of seeing Gaza and the occupation for the first time, Rafat quietly cleared the remains of the lunch his family had served the journalists from the table. That is my first of many memories of a man who now sits in Gaza Central Prison waiting for what is, for him, a form of punishment almost as incomprehensible as death.

Rafat Najar's life has been totally devoted to the struggle for Palestine and its people. He was born in Khan Younis in 1945, three years before a flood of Palestinian refugees from the southern and coastal regions inundated Gaza during and after the 1948 fighting. Although he grew up among the refugees and shared their nationalistic sentiments, for Rafat the real hardships did not begin until Israeli forces seized Gaza in the June war of 1967.

Like many young Palestinians, Rafat joined Dr. George Habash's Marxist-oriented Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), then the second largest and most radical organization in the PLO. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested on suspicion of leading a cell in an "illegal organization." He was charged with having interrogated a suspected collaborator and having prepared to carry out military operations against Israeli forces occupying Gaza. Although he denied the charges, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

"Rafat was very active in prison during his first detention," says his cousin Khalil, who has spent 15 years in prison himself. "The authorities observed this and knew that when he left the prison he was not going to give up the struggle of his people and homeland. Prison did not break him."

Freed from prison in 1969, Rafat continued to resist the occupation. "As a man devoted to Palestine and its liberation, Rafat saw the armed struggle then as the only way to achieve our legitimate rights," explains Sa'ed Jibril, who was arrested with Rafat in 1967. "There was no indication then that peace and freedom could come any other way. Remember, resisting military occupation with force is not only our legal right, but, for many of us, a duty."

Rafat was arrested again in 1970. This time a person arrested with weapons in Khan Younis said the weapons were under Rafat's control. Although Rafat denied the accusation, he received a life prison sentence.

"The Zionist intelligence came to the court and told the judge that this group and Rafat were very dangerous and that he had the chance to change before but did not," explains Khalil. "Rafat had not changed, true, but neither had the situation facing the Palestinian people. Was he expected to stop resisting while the occupation continued?"

In addition to sentencing Rafat to life in prison, the Israeli court ordered the destruction of the Khan Younis home in which his family had lived since long before the state of Israel was created. The punishment left Rafat's parents, his five brothers and his five sisters without shelter.

"One of my earliest memories was when the army came to blow up our home and the soldiers took all our possessions and threw them in the street," says Mahmoud, Rafat's brother, who was six years old at the time. "My mother tried to stop them, but they threw her in the street and blew up the home with TNT.

"We lived in tents supplied by the Red Cross, all 11 of us, and then split up and lived with relatives." Three years later the Najars had saved enough money to build another home near where the old one had stood.

Two months after Israeli soldiers destroyed the Najar home, another of Rafat's brothers, Deeb, was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. He too was accused of participation in PFLP military operations against occupation soldiers. During the 1970s, Rafat and Deeb spent several years together in Majdal prison.

"These years were very difficult ones," says Deeb. "As political prisoners, we organized projects in prison to improve ourselves for our future and for the struggle.

"Rafat, because he was intelligent and mature, was very popular among the other inmates. When prisoners had personal problems or problems with families, they would come to Rafat for wisdom and guidance."

Because of his natural leadership qualities, the Israeli prison administration regarded Rafat as a particularly dangerous man. To prevent him from gaining too much influence, he was moved among various prisons.

In 1985, in exchange for Israeli military prisoners held by Ahmed Jibril's Syrian-based PFLP-GC, more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including Rafat and Deeb, were released.

"Of course, we did not expect ever to be released, and this gave us a new feeling about life," says Deeb. "We wanted to start families, get jobs, and to become normal humans. Our entire lives until then had been as political prisoners."

In 1986, Rafat and Deeb had a joint wedding in Khan Younis to which over 5,000 people came from all over Palestine. A year later, Rafat's wife Sheham gave birth to a girl, Rula, the first of three children. Ironically, all of Rafat's children were born while he was in detention.

Within two years the intifada erupted. Rafat's life, like everyone's in Palestine, was caught up in the cycle of popular revolt and heavy-handed repression.

"Seven times Rafat was arrested by the intelligence during the uprising," says his brother Mohammed. "Two times for investigation, which were 18 days each, and four other shorter periods. They never had any evidence to bring charges against him. Even now, as they are ready to force him from his homeland, they don't have anything to convict him with."

Nevertheless, in late July 1991, Rafat was arrested and started serving one year of administrative detention. He was in the Ansar 3 prison camp this winter when his deportation orders were issued.

The story of Rafat Najar is also the story of a wife and three small children waiting to hear that their husband and father has been taken from prison one day without warning, put into a helicopter and flown into Lebanon, to be left where so many other Palestinians have been left before him. When I interviewed them in April, Rafat's four-year-old son Osman walked around asking where his daddy was.

" I know we have to accept it sooner or later," says Rafat's wife Sheham. "But it is very hard to do. The children don't understand. They are too young. They cannot sleep, and when we visit Rafat in the prison, they ask him why he is there and why he can't come home with us."

Israeli lawyer Tamar Pelleg characterizes Rafat as a balanced, wise and respected leader. "I first met him as part of a group of prisoners in Ansar 3 in 1988, and he stood out above the others has having the respect of all the prisoners and the prison authorities," she explains. "Conditions were very harsh then, and Rafat would give his food to others who were sick or weak. This, I think, is a good example of his nature. He is very warm, considerate and sure of himself.

"I remember going to Ansar 4 prison in Khan Younis in 1990 and hearing someone yell to me in Hebrew from a group of people in mock anger, 'Tamar, you come to Khan Younis and you don't come to see me.' Then he came and embraced me, a Jewish Israeli woman, there on the street."

She pauses and sighs. "He wanted very much to start living, to start a life and he did start a life, but they wouldn't let him. He had a family, a job, and now all that is lost. I don't see any chance to reverse the order."

The shock of being slotted for deportation has had a tremendous effect on Rafat in prison. His wife reports that he has lost weight and is often in tears when seeing his family.

"I couldn't believe he was crying, as he is a very strong person," she explains. "For him, this is the worst thing they can do to him. In 1970, when he faced life in prison, they gave him a chance to leave the country instead. But he refused. How can he leave his homeland and family and friends?"

Before his final imprisonment last summer, Rafat had started working as the head of public relations for the new College of Science and Technology in Khan Younis. "We were beginning to live as a family," says Sheham.

For now, Rafat remains in Palestine, even if it is in a cramped cell in Gaza. If his case follows the usual deportation procedures, he will not be formally charged with violating Israeli military law, and the alleged evidence against him will be kept secret throughout the appeals process.

"All we want is to have Rafat here with his family and children," says Sheham. "All we can hope for is that the world community and people in other lands will help to prevent Rafat from being forced from the land of his birth. We are waiting for justice and to be treated as human beings."

Stephen J. Sosebee is a free-lance writer and president of the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.