By: Ada Ushpiz.  (transl. by Prof. Israel Shahak)

Ha’aretz, 12 June 1992

Mikhail Musalah, a teacher from Beit Sahour, graduate of Bir Zeit. was among the latest detainees in the town’s tax revolt three years ago, but only this week, after a series of trials lasting over two years, the series of harassment and damage he has been exposed to since will possibly cease. This is a story with a happy ending, and in that regard it is an unusual story concerning occupied Palestinians, but it reveals a part of the everyday’s repressing reality in the Territories, which is often cruel especially towards the "upright citizens" of the occupation who try to confront the army and to obey the law without denying their loyalty to the Palestinian struggle, becoming trapped in impossible situations.

On a Sunday morning, in mid-October 1989. when the Christian residents of the town were in church, the Israeli tax collectors under army guard appeared at Musalah’s home and confiscated everything they could get their hands on. ‘It was expected", says Huda, his wife, with a smile of resignation. "They had already been at our neighbors’ and we awaited our turn. They burst through the door as if we were dangerous criminals. Mikhail was at church and only my children and their friends were at home, all under the age of five. They burst out crying just at the sight of them. They emptied the living room of sitting arrangements and tables. They only refused to take the black and white elevision. "Give that to your child as a toy", one of the soldiers told her, and confiscated instead the color television from the home of Mikhail’s brother in law, in the next door apartment. "This is on Mikhail’s account", the tax official explained. Huda, a graduate of Bethlehem University in English literature, tried to contain the situation, "Why should you act inhumanely?" she asked the soldiers, and tried to calm the children. "But I was still in shock. I knew what to expect. I was not afraid, we were part of a general non-violent struggle and we believed in our cause, but still, the soldiers, the guns, the rudeness, the shoving, the violence, shocked me. I had never experienced such a thing, Here we are ali educated people. I felt a kind of helplessness, which even today I find it difficult to describe’, One week later customs officials appeared in the family’s olive grove, looking for Mikhail. "I heard the shouts "Mikhail, Mikhail"! and went to them". he says. "One of them told me: ‘Now, my friend, submit a report, pay, and we will pretend that we are arresting you, we will take a few things, and in a day or two we will release you and return every thing’. I said: “No’. They said: ‘You are a fool’. I got angry, and I told them that I might be a fool. but they should speak politely".

The customs officials took him to the family’s furniture shop registered in his name although he does not work there, and emptied it of merchandise worth about 70.000 Shekel. Mikhail was placed in one of the last waves of confiscations and arrests, directed at breaking the Beit Sahour tax revolt. A closure was imposed on the town at the time. Large trucks with cranes went through the town’s alleys, amassing furniture, refrigerators, washing machines and everything else, ultimately estimated at millions of Shekels worth. A relatively small representation of 30 tax refusers were arrested and sentenced to various periods of imprisonment and to fines. Mikhail did not know at the time, or did not want to know, that his family had paid all its debts to the Civil Administration, apparently secretly, and that his name appeared together with others on a piece of paper distributed by the income tax commissioner to check posts in June 1989: "These fellows have paid their dues to income tax".

Beit Sahour. a town of 13.000 residents, most of them middle class Christians, well-educated, many of them of free professions, became during the Intifada one of the spearheads of the Palestinian struggle in the West Bank and the power center of the Popular Committees. Along with that, like many of the West Bank residents, many of its residents also adhere to an intricate dialectic of walking among the drops in their relationship with the authorities. The magic words. "Israeli democracy", are constantly on their lips. "Why is a people who suffered so much in the Holocaust unaware of the suffering of others", they voice well known sentiments.

The relative comfort of the Beit Sahour residents increases, as may be expected, the feeling of discrimination, the ideological awareness of the occupation’s effects and the sensitivity to the lack of infrastructures, the backwardness of the health and education systems, and the much higher taxes than in Israel. The high taxes, called "enslavement taxes" in the town. are an especially painful point for Beit Sahour’s small merchants, who eke out a living. Already in 1988 the town residents embarked upon a united non-violent protest and gave their identity cards back to the Civil Administration, after the latter had confiscated the identity cards of dozens of residents in order to force them to pay tax debts. Since then the town has participated in the Intifada: demonstrations, stonings, detentions, wounded, dead, curfews. During the past few years Hamas’ strength in the town has grown, but the town continues still to serve as a well liked site for the Israeli peace movement demonstrations and rallies.

That is how Seit Sahour was even then, in 1989, when it was the only town to respond in its entirety to the call of the PLO’s Supreme Command for a tax revolt. The immense media resonance, the feeling of internal solidarity which accompanied the struggle, the organization for self sufficient food supply and the filling the warehouses in case the closure lasted for a long time – all of these left no room for anyone who had grown tired. The social pressure was sweeping. Even residents who had previously preferred to keep quietly good relations with the Civil Administration, were now recruited to the revolt. The tax collectors and army who searched for cracks in the revolt at any price, had no pity for those who appeared to them to be a weak link, since he or his family previollsly had good relations with the authontles, and pushed him into what was for him an impossible corner.

Mikhail Musalah, aged 44, father of five, does not consider himself a political person. Had he been an Israeli, he would certainly have been considered a model citizen, but he is "a proud Palestinian", in his words, and is not prepared to denounce his people’s national struggle. Prior to his arrest during the tax revolt and after it, he never had any trouble with the Israeli law. He avoided confrontations with the authorities, and even today he is afraid of trouble: When Civil Administration decided to transfer him from heading the "AI-Hajaj junior high school" in Tuqu’a to heading a high school In Belt Sahour, he was showered with compliments. You are the ideal candidate, they told him, you are clean, you are not politically involvedi you are the man we are looking for. In April 1986 there was a demonstration at his school. Soldiers arrived and demanded that he will give the names of the "inciters". Mikhail refused. “I am an educator", he told them, "not a policeman". He was immediately suspended, transferred to an e!ementary school as a plain teacher, "and in order to humiliate me, I was also sent to attend a teachlng course in Ramallah, for beginning. teachers". When the tax revolt broke out, he was not prepared to benefit from the good reputatJon of his family which had always paid its taxes on time, refused to be a strike breaker, and preferred to be arrested and stand trial. "From that moment I turned from a teacher into an offender, from a normal person Into a crimlnal. I was taken from one prison to another and from one court to another. Many days we were starved. There were places, like Dahariya, where we were allowed to shower once every ten days, twenty. minutes time for 15 people, and whoever did not have enough time had to do without a shower. In Anata jail, a place open to the winds, we shivered from the cold for 20 days, 75 people in an asbestos covered shed wlthout walls. Entire days without any activity, without newspapers, without a single book, except for children’s books for studying English and Arabic, which we found in a closet there. Already in the beginnlng, at Bethlehem prison, they handcuffed us and made us stand facing a wall for long hours. We asked them to handcuff us with our hands in front, so that it would be less painful, but the soldiers refused. Those are the orders, they said: They put us on a bus and forced us to lay on the floor like animals. There were doctors among us, pharmaclsts, merchants, whose only crime was not paying taxes. Why was it necessary to humilitate us: I kept seeing before my eyes my crying daughter, whom a soldier pushed away and did not allow me to embrace in parting".

Mikhail Musalah was sentenced to six months imprisonment and a fine of 2.000 Shekel or 60 days imprisonment. He preferred to be imprisoned rather than pay the fine. His lawyer, attorney Shlomo Leker, the attorney of many other such detainees, appealed. He argued that he worked in education, his taxes had been duly paid, automatically deducted from his salary, and that he did not profit from family property registered in his name. The tax examination showed that the Musalah family’s debts were marginal. The offense was recognized as being merely technical. In mid-December 1990. the court accepted the appeal changing the imprisonment for a suspended sentence and a fine. As happened to all Beit Sahour residents the confiscated merchandise was sold at an auction for a tenth of its worth, without there having been an evaluation as required by law. But contrary to other residents, in Mikhail Musalah’s case that was not the end of the story, but its beginning.

On January 22 he received notification of his dismissal from his teaching post from the education commissioner in Judea and Samaria (sic). The pretext: Regulations 132(a) and 144(f) of the Jordanian Civil Service Regulations of 1966, which have long been invalidated in Jordan itself, which permit the firing of a public employee who was sentenced to a prison term for an offense of harming state security or of disturbing the public order. No effort was made to check whether Mikhail had appealed against his sentence and what were the results of that appeal. "I felt that my world had collapsed", says Mikhail. "I had been a teacher for my entire life. I lost everything, my work, my property, my dignity. Being in prison was a harsh enough experience, but now I was left without a job. Even today, I often wake up at night and ask myself: What did I do to deserve that? All I did was participate in a non-violent demonstration".

Exhausted from the lengthy struggle, Mikhail was willing to suffice with a pension, but the Israeli pension committee rejected even that request, arguing that the law permitted it to deny pensions to criminals. The Jordanian pension law, after being futher amended by an Israeli administrative order, grants the right to pension only to public employee who has completed 20 years work, while Mikhail had completed only 19.5 years before being fired. In the letter of reply, Yaron Herman, deputy legal advisor of the Civil Administration, meticulously listed the articles of the Israeli amended pension regulations (Judea and Samaria) which granted htm the right to deny Mikhail his pension. Attorney Leker tried to settle the matter in a telephone conversation with Herman. In spite of the dismissal having taken place illegally, he explained, Musalah would accept it if he got the pension he was entitled to. To his surprise. Herman accepted it and in late April a letter arrived from the Civil Administration announcing to Mikhail that "The pension commitee has decided to authorize a full pension to which he is entitled". But the implementation of the decision took time, and ultimately Herman went back on his letter claiming that there had been a misunderstanding, announcing that the committee had only authorized for Mikhail a one-time compensation amounting to 16.501 Shekel, instead of a pension which could amount to 130.000 Shekel. considering a life expectancy of 30 years.

"At that point I gave my attorney full authority to do whatever he considered right", says Mikhail. "I had despaired. I did not want to suffice with compensation, but my family put pressure on me. I needed cash and I did not believe that I stood a chance of defeating the Civil Administration". Leker agreed to a compromise on Mikhail’s behalf, after he was given an unequivocal promise that the money would actually reach his client. The Civil Administration hurried to have Mikhail sign a form forfeiting his rights, but one day after the form arrived at Herman’s office a letter reached Mikhail from Nissim Vaknin, deputy tax staff officer, announcing that they intended to confiscate the compensatlon money toward debt of about 13.000 Shekel to income tax. "That was bad, although I didn’t raise the posslbility of violation of an agreement", says Leker. I had negotiated with certified lawyers, everything was signed and sealed, but when speaking about the legal system in the Territories we should know that It apparently adopted the Civil Administration’s policy of intentional harassment, of making life miserable for the Arabs. All the legal and moral norms are completely changed there".

Leker appealed to the appeals committee at the military court in Ramallah, usually staffed with reservists and not by officials, once agaln, gambling for the entire stakes, and won. The committee decided that the dismissal was illegal, not because it relied on an archaic Jordanian law, which allows severe penalties for any disturbance of the order in the broadest meaning, which does not exist in a democratic state. but because it relied on an unsuitable pretext. The appeals committee also stated unequivocally, contrary to the Civil Administration’s claim that “suspended imprisonment? could not serve, as a pretext in order to dismiss an employee. Mikhail Musalah ‘could either return to his job or receive a pesnslon. These days the Civil Administration should implement the appeal decision. If It denies it, Leker will appeal to the High Court of Justice. The Civil Administration refused to comment on the affair.