A Testimonial to Steadfastness

On December 10, 2009 Al Haq, the pioneering Palestinian human rights organization, celebrated its 30th anniversary. On this occasion the announcement was made of the winner of Al Haq’s first Annual Human Rights Award, Sabri Gharib. Raja Shehadeh, one of the founding members of the Organization, wrote the following tribute to Gharib.

Sabri Gharib, the recipient of the First Annual Al-Haq Human Rights Award, was too ill to come himself to receive the award. The struggle over the past thirty years with the Jewish settlers to save his land has had its toll on his health. He sent one of his sons on his behalf. There is no doubt that Sabri never sought recognition, reward, publicity, or financial reward. In the course of his thirty-year-struggle, he simply wanted to preserve his land. By choosing him as the first recipient of its annual award, Al-Haq was not only rewarding him, but also the Palestinian people. In a sense, this presentation of an award to a hero like Sabri is a selfish act on Al-Haq’s part. By his resilience, tenacity, and bravery, and his success at staying in his home, surrounded as it is on all sides by the settlement, fenced in and imprisoned, Sabri puts the rest of us to shame. He also provides us with the best example of the struggling Palestinian after whom we should all aspire. This was why it was thought that he is the best candidate to receive this human rights award.

I will never forget that first meeting with Sabri Gharib in 1982, when I sat on the porch of his house up the hill in the village of Beit Ijza surrounded by attractive, mainly empty hills on all sides except for the small menacing presence of the fledgling settlement, which Sabri referred to as Hadasha [Hebrew for “new”], whose full name was Givon Hadasha. With his strong voice, high cheekbones, piercing, unflinching gaze, Sabri narrated under oath the attempt of the Jewish settlers at taking hold of his 120 dunums of land, which he said was the main source of income for himself and his large family of ten children. I had no clue then that this was going to be the beginning of a long, painful, and inspiring relationship with this formidable fighter who would become the symbol of Sumoud [steadfastness]. . . .

Throughout my years at Al-Haq and after I left the organization, Sabri continued to appear at my office to update me about his struggles:. He and his children were shot at by the settlers. He was so often dragged from his house by the military and imprisoned to allow the settlers to claim more of his land and get on with building their homes on it. After the bulk of his land, which he used to cultivate and depend on as the source of livelihood for his family, was stolen from him, he had to seek other manual work. . . .

Whenever we at Al-Haq would feel satisfied that the work we were doing was satisfactory, Sabri would appear and put us in our place. He would explain how the settlers had taken more land to build their water tank, or encroached further by building another fence faurther on his land, or that they had come at night to his house and shot around to scare him and his family. When he described how he would be working in the field and they came to him and held their gun at him, he would say: “Shoot me. I don’t care to [if I] die.” When we heard this from him we knew, just as the settlers did, that he meant it and that this was why the settlers left him alone. Any other man would have taken to the wind and ruan. Not Sabri. “This is my land,” he would say, “I inherited it from my father and I will leave it to my children. Nothing matters but God and the land.”

Whenever I found myself struggling for our much sought after Palestinian state, I would remind myself that to someone like Sabri, his struggle was not nationalist or in any way abstract but a concrete, specific fight to save the land which was he felt had been entrusted in to him by those who preceded him and which he was under a solemn obligation to pass on to his descendants. . . .

As the years passed, the single settlement near his house grew to become many settlements, and more and more of his land was being taken, yet Sabri would not relent.

The last time I went to visit Sabri, I was depressed by what I saw. To get to his house I had to go through a narrow passage surrounded on both sides by wire fences. Most of the rest of his land was taken over by the settlement. As I stood on the few meters allowed him around his house, I watched as an older Israeli man was taking a walk with his dog. I tried to catch the Israeli’s eyes to see how he might be feeling about imposing this state of imprisonment on the owner of the land which was illegally acquired to build the community in which he has chosen to live. But he continued to avert his eyes.

In contrast Sabri’s gaze remained no less sharp. He turned to the settlement and said:

“Look at what they have done. Look at the resources available to them. Here I am a single man, in a single house, surrounded by all these walls and yet to them I am like a Ghoul.”

Sabri’s ability to remain in his house is a small victory, and yet it is a kernel of a hopeful future. Just like that first affidavit Al-Haq took from Sabri grew into massive documentation of many more human rights violations over the past thirty years, in the end the example of Sabri’s struggle and life it will make all the difference. It will empower and inspire many future generations. As to those who now feel immune, they will not always be successful at escaping prosecution for the criminal acts they have done to others.

It is perhaps appropriate to wonder where we would be today had there been many other Sabris, many other ghouls like him who would fight as tenaciously to keep their land as he did. While we might think of Sabri as a hero, he himself has no patience for posturing or role models. Yet despite what he might think, he is a unique and outstanding phenomena and an inspiration for all of us. This is why he deserves to be honored as the first recipient of this annual Al Haq award.