Talking to a Palestinian Dissident
This interview was originally published as a podcast episode, but Sam later told me that people in the West Bank heard the interview and recognized his voice. “The podcast we did is making me trouble,” he told me. Fearing for his safety, he asked me to take it down, which I did. Thankfully, he bravely agreed to an excerpted transcript version. There are not enough Palestinian voices like his, so please share this to ensure that the people trying to silence his voice do not succeed. You can also find his book here.
Things are tense. I hope the West Bank doesn’t turn into another Gaza soon. It’s escalating. People recently started to say that October didn’t happen, it was faked by Israelis for some reason, and they started to distrust the Palestinian authority, the Fatah movement, and even some of their members have denounced the authority of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization). So things are not stable. I’m not sure if the West Bank will survive all of this.
There’s a calculation that’s often made with regard to the war. Are you defeating Hamas or are you creating more terrorists in the process of defeating Hamas? Elon Musk famously made a comment to that effect. Do you think that Israel is creating more terrorists than they’re eliminating right now?
That is what is happening. And that was calculated by Hamas from the start. Hamas did what they did because they never cared about the Palestinian people. As long as they have more popularity, more money, they can always recruit new people. And considering what happened to Gaza and what is happening in the West Bank, they can recruit as much as they want. If even one top Hamas leader survives all of this, they will start building this whole thing all over again.
So what is your viewpoint on October 7th?
Well, most Palestinians do not consider what happened on October 7th to be something bad. They’re saying that it was mostly faked. When it first started, they were not saying it’s totally bad. They were saying, you should not be killing children and all of that. But they were not very upset about it, and they’re not saying that it sucked or anything.
But that was fine, as they considered Israel the enemy. I’m not expecting them to feel compassion to Israel or something. But starting in November, everybody around here started saying that it never happened and this is a new level of denial. They’re circulating this video of an Israeli Apache helicopter shooting a few rockets around the Gaza border, and they’re saying, “No, Israel did that.” And no matter how I try to talk to them about it, nobody is responding to this.
Why do you think it is that you have a different perspective on this?
Well, it’s not just me. Maybe there's 5% of the Palestinian population who have a different perspective than this. And they’re usually people who actually experienced what it’s like to be, uh, they have a few Israeli friends and maybe they experienced what it’s like in Israel for real.
Most of the people here in the West Bank who work in Israel — there’s around 150,000 people — a lot of them who I talk to, they feel more sympathy towards Israelis and some of the places that Hamas had, those people were there at some point. Like the people from the West Bank were working around these areas at some point.
So for them, they can see how Hamas could have caught them at one point, thinking they were Israelis or something. But most people in the West Bank, me personally before I was 20 years old, I never met an Israeli in my life. So for me, I used to picture them as being a different type of people. Like, they would not be kind to me. They would not treat me with anything but, but in a bad way. I remember the first time I met an Israeli guy, who was in the IDF, and I thought he was definitely going to shoot me. But he was just a normal guy.
How old were you?
I’m around 30. But at the time, I was around 24 or 25.
How did you meet this person?
I was working for a Palestinian company, which was at the border between the West Bank and Israel. And for security purposes, we had to have a few Israeli guys.
He was friendly?
Oh yeah, actually a funny story happened with this guy. So we usually hang together after work in his car around the office, and at one point there’s this Palestinian guy who walked beside us, next to the car. And the Israeli guy was terrified. I never saw anybody as terrified as he was. He just like hid under the seat of the car. And he was absolutely afraid and I was like, what are you afraid of? And he said, did you see who walked past us? I was like, yeah so what?
And he was like, this guy is scary as fuck. And I was saying no, this guy would never hurt you. He’s not even Muslim. He’s always drinking and he’s always partying around. Like he’s the least, like if anybody in Palestine would hurt you, it would not be that guy. And then this guy said no, but when I was little this is the image of the terrorist guy that used to be broadcast to us when we were growing up, and this guy was bald and had a beard. Not the Hamas beard, but the cool guy beard.
What is a Hamas beard?
It’s not trimmed usually. So this guy had a trimmed beard, but because he’s bald and he like, he looked very much like the stereotypical terrorist you would see around, although his personality was nothing like that. Actually, most people would not even talk to him because he was drinking all the time.
And so your Israeli friend saw this guy and he saw the way that he looked with the bald head and the long beard and he was terrified of him. And that was the moment when you saw the fear on the Israeli side?
Yes.
When you were a child growing up, before you had this experience and before you had this realization of how Israelis feel, what were you learning in school? Were you being taught to hate the Israelis? Was the school system very much against Jewish people?
Definitely. Everything in the Palestinian curriculum in general, everything in the Palestinian culture in general, is teaching people that Israel is the enemy. Even without the curriculum, even without the books, what you have in your mind about Israelis is this image of an IDF soldier with a big machine gun. And that image took a long time for me to change. And I remember once I had a friend from Gaza who was working with me and we were walking in Jerusalem and every second we were walking, he was about to jump one of the guards that were near the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
What do you mean, with a knife or something?
Not with a knife, but he was always intense and every moment we came across any of these guards, he was about to either attack or defend. So he was very intense and he was about to make a scene. And I was talking to him, “These guys are not here to hurt you. These guys are just here to keep security. They’re not even IDF. They’re Arabs, most likely.”
Doesn’t this guy understand that if he attacks these guards, he could be killed?
He definitely understands that, but he couldn’t keep his cool. He couldn’t keep calm. No matter how many times I told him. And I was telling him like, these people are not IDF members, David. These people were just guards of the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. And he couldn’t keep calm. I had to leave him behind. I had to walk away so he would not like get me in trouble.
So I spent some time in the West Bank years ago when I used to live in Israel and I have to tell you something. I want to hear what you think about this. I was living in Haifa and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and for a period I went into the West Bank. I had friends who were Palestinian, but they were Israeli citizens and they were living in Israel and they were actually quite happy living in Israel. They would rather be living in Israel than in the West Bank. Anyway, I went to the West Bank and got to talking to people, random people on the street, whatever, just asking questions.
My experience was that among Israelis, what I found was that a lot of Israelis, overwhelmingly, and until this day, if you look at polls, you see that recently in the wake of October 7th, when you look at the response by Israel, you find that, I forget the number, but something like 70 to 80% of Israelis were blaming Netanyahu for everything. They were very critical of their own government.
Yeah, yeah, 76%.
Okay, 76, thank you. And then you look at the Palestinians. They did a poll in Gaza and like 72% of Gazans said they support October 7th. And so what I found in my own experience was that a lot of my friends supported the Kadima Party, which is Hebrew for ‘forward,’ which is the progressive party of Israel. And I had a lot of Kadima friends and they were very critical of their own government, sort of in the way that a lot of leftists in the U.S. are critical of American government.
Then I went into the West Bank and I realized that this phenomenon didn’t exist. There weren’t really a lot of Palestinians who were strongly critical of their own side. Personally what I found was that a lot of, and this is the part that I want to ask you about, I found a lot of Palestinians were speaking about the Israelis in ways that reminded me of Nazi rhetoric. They were talking about the need to eliminate them, eradicate them. They were talking in genocidal terms. I was horrified to hear, because at the time, when I first went to Israel, I was actually more to the Palestinian side. I, you know, I see an underdog and I’m thinking, I automatically want to side with the underdog.
I mean, I see this powerful military presence. I think a lot of Americans and Westerners these days, they see the same thing and they think the same way. They’re like, well, here’s this powerful military force. And here are these people who are kind of oppressed and they don’t have a strong military. And you know, I want to side with the underdog in this. And I was of that thinking.
It wasn’t until I actually got to Israel and sort of experienced Israel as a liberal democracy where you had rights for queer Israelis, rights for Palestinians, rights for all different religions. And then I went to the West Bank and I see not only the oppression of the Islamo-fascist state, but also the way in which the culture was just so horrifically racist and genocidal across the board again and again and again. I had conversations where people were like, yeah, yeah, let's just fucking kill all these Jews and I just my jaw was just on the floor.
I’d never in my life experienced that kind of hatred, even growing up in the South, and there’s racism against black people in America. But nothing that I’d ever experienced reached this level. Does this connect with your experience or did I have an unusual experience?
This is, for me, the biggest problem that we face with the Arabian culture, the Palestinian culture in general. I am always speaking about this because if we are not able to criticize ourselves, if we don’t have a left anywhere here, we will not be moving forward as a country, as a civilization, as a nation. The concept of political correctness has not migrated yet to our culture. Like, for us, there’s nothing wrong with being racist. We have a candy around here, a piece of candy that’s called a nigger’s head. Or a black head. Because it’s black and it’s round. It’s made of cream and a thin layer of chocolate on a biscuit.
How do you say this in Arabic?
Ras al-Abed.
What is the most literal translation of this term?
Slave head.
Jesus. If you’re out with your friends and you say, let’s get some slave heads, is there ever going to be somebody in the group who would say, what the fuck are you saying? Is somebody going to call you out? You know, like in the United States, you would imagine if you dropped a phrase like that…
I will not survive for 24 hours.
But in Palestinian culture?
I tried to bring this up multiple times. Like, why do we call this type of candy this fucking racist name? And around here, people just laugh it off or say, what? What are you talking about?
Well I mean, how often do you see a black person in the streets?
In the West Bank? No, there’s very few black people in the West Bank.
I never saw one when I was there. I never saw one ever.
Yeah, me too. Like, I spent 30 years here and I only saw like maybe one or two people. A lot of it is ignorance but it’s also that, like for me, this is the way I think about it. I think that this culture has not yet reached the 21st century. I know that’s a different way of saying it, but a lot of the reforms that happened in the West in the last 200 years have not happened here. That’s why we don’t even have the concept of political correctness. We have no word for that type of behavior.
And yeah, the PLO is kind of the left-leaning political authority here. But it’s left-leaning politically. It’s not left-leaning socially.
So we did not work on this type of behavior. The young generations in general, we are working with a lot of them and I talk a lot about feminism around them and I talk about all of this stuff. They’re starting to pay attention to the racist stuff. The LGBT community, they’re not able to handle that.
They don’t care about that?
Maybe the LGB but not the T.
What would happen if I’m trans and I’m living in the West Bank?
You as a Jewish person living in the West Bank, your life would be very much in danger.
Forget about Jewish. Just trans.
Definitely trans, you will not survive 24 hours.
What’s gonna happen?
If you walk in public, even if you are not trans but just in somewhat feminine clothes, you will be jailed. At the very least.
Okay, like a night in jail?
Oh, what happens in jail with this kinda stuff is just awful. In some cases, they were abused by the police officers.
Going back to the subject of war. Is this a subject that you’ve been following very closely? Is it easy to get information about this as you’re living where you are? Do you have access to different sources and news and internet and everything?
Oh yeah, definitely. We have access to everything here.
Do you think that most Palestinians are using that access and are pretty well informed and staying up to date?
Definitely. Palestinians in general are very interested in politics and it’s rare for me to meet somebody around here who is not reading a lot or who does not follow what is happening very well. The thing that the different type of ignorance about this that happens is because of the perspective of the culture itself. So the culture is just, first of all, if you look at anything around this area in Arabic, you would see some news that are very different than if you look it up in Hebrew or in English. And for us in this area, English seems to be more objective.
So, tell me what you think about the current situation in Gaza. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.
Well, definitely I’m not with what is happening right now. A lot of people are dying unnecessarily. Definitely what happened on October 7th was very bad and the Hamas members, they did this. They did worse to us, Palestinians. Not worse, but they did as much bad to us as they did on October 7th. They threw a lot of us from buildings, PLO members. They did so many things. And they’re going to do more.
At one point, I dated the nephew of one of the Hamas leaders in Gaza. She told me that when she was little, maybe 14 years old, her uncle took her with her dad to a barbecue on a nearby hill in Gaza. And they went there and he was signaling a few of the young people, young kids in Gaza, to go attack the wall that surrounds Gaza. And he stood there on that hill barbecuing with her and the family. So like those young people were going to get killed and he was just laughing and eating meat on that hill, like nothing was happening.
So what is happening in Gaza, definitely Hamas was the reason for it, but also Israel can do better, much better than this.
Do you prefer a ceasefire?
There’s already 20,000 people that were killed.
How reliable do you find those figures to be?
There was that incident during this war with al-Ahli hospital and it ended up being that a Hamas rocket actually like fell in the parking lot and actually it wasn’t from Israel.
Maybe it’s not 20,000. Maybe it’s 10,000. But it will never be 1,000.
Tell me about your book.
I wanted to show a different side. It’s doing fine right now. It’s like around 20,000 on the Amazon bookstore and it has been there for five days so it’s going well. I wanted it to be entertaining for people to actually read it. But deep within the book, I put some stories here and there, just like the story I told you about the guy who used to walk with me who was very afraid of the Palestinian guy who thought he was a terrorist. These type of stories. I am somewhat woke because a lot of people here are telling me like, you're always saying this is racist and stuff. But it’s woke for my country. It’s not woke for America. Most likely, if I was in the States, they would call me conservative. Palestinian woke is like, women can go to the grocery store by themselves.
In the final chapter, I say that America is right. I know everything feels like it’s going to break apart any day now. But what is happening right now is just the unraveling of this century. It’s just us trying to get to a new civic system where maybe the left is just not as edgy as it is right now. Maybe the right and the left can figure something out.
Everything that’s happening now between Palestine and Israel is not really about Palestine and Israel. It’s just about the United States going through another period, such as the period they went through after World War II and after the revolution. I’m just trying to talk to the reader and tell them, like, it’s fine. But it’s going to be a very hard few years, definitely.
What do you see as the solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict? A two-state solution?
I used to support a two-state solution. I worked for it, actually. I put a lot of my effort and soul into the two-state solution thing for 10 years. But recently, I’m starting to say no. The two-state solution is very hard to work. And after diving deep into all of this with the war and everything. No, actually, Palestinians do not want a two-state solution. Israelis do not want a two-state solution. Nobody wants it. I’m not sure how this will solve, if ever. I’m just hoping that Palestinians at some point recognize that they cannot keep dying for this dream or the other. They died a lot for the Arabian dream of Arabian unity and all that. And then it was about Islamic pride and stuff. And now it’s about the left of the United States, about minorities and we keep dying for stuff that has nothing to do with us, for a state that we don’t even know how it will look like at all. I’m just trying to make it about the people, not the land.
They’re thinking about winning but they don’t know what that looks like. They want to take the land and do what to the Jews? Throw them into the sea? You killed 1,400 people and then what?
Well, I suppose winning looks like taking the land and-
And giving it to Hamas? And giving it to Hamas to rule it? Hamas is incapable of running a company with 10 people. They’re not going to be able to rule a country.
They’ll just run it like a mafia state. Obviously.
This happened, like this just happened this year, like a lot of people from Gaza were coming out of Gaza and we work with a lot of people from Gaza, and a lot of them were saying, Hamas is literally abusing us. And they were talking about how they’re stealing their money when they’re going outside from the Gaza to the West Bank. If you have 200 shekels in your bucket, they will take it, going in or out.
It doesn’t get any lower than this. Everybody knows it. And they will return to understand it.
They will return to understand it. I like that.
Actually, what I’m worried about more than anything is that for them, this is a major win. Like, a year ago, Hamas was nothing. If anybody said Hamas, like nobody knows what Hamas is. Right now, everybody knows what Hamas is and for them, they can raise a lot of money with that popularity. They will always find young radical Muslims to recruit.
Tell me about the leadership in the West Bank.
From what I saw in the West Bank, the model with the PLO is working actually. I’m not talking about the big cities. I’m seeing it in small communities here and there. There’s local leaders in every community. They are members of the PLO and they’re teaching the young generation that Hamas is bad or stuff like that. And even if, let’s say, there’s a group of Hamas members. Or Hamas sympathizers, you can call them. Those people do not last very long. If they’re doing something bad, actually bad, they would be reported to the police or something. I’m not saying that… the Palestinian situation is very hard, and it will not be solved… You cannot look at it as you look into any other country. You have to be rough a bit with the young people who are trying to just use their fists instead of their words to solve this whole thing. Or who are doing more than that. But overall, like every, almost every person I know who is over 40, they will never say Hamas is good. They remember, like I remember, I’m 30 and I remember how it was in 2006 when Hamas took over. They were just very loud, obnoxious. They were saying that we should kill Fatah members and they were the type of people who you could never speak to. They’re always right. They always have the moral authority. They have both like political authority and moral authority out of their religious nature, whatever.
What happens if you disagree with them?
Then when the stuff happened with Gaza, and they took over in Gaza, they start killing PLO members in Gaza.
No, no, but before that, before that, when they were first coming up in power, and they always think that they’re right about everything. If you disagree with them, what do they think about that?
No, no disagreeing with them. That’s not even a question. Around here in the West Bank, they did not have absolute power because they never took power. But you can see it in their eyes. If you disagree with them and they had power, you would not last five seconds. They would definitely kill you. And I’m not talking about disagreeing with them about Palestine or about resistance. No, no. If you disagree with them on the smallest of stuff. It’s like, is it halal to go pray after after five o’clock or six o’clock? They will just, for you, they will just make you into a kafir (disbeliever), make you into someone who’s not worthy of being alive at the very least.
I remember how the community around me changed when the PLO took them out out of the community in 2006. The whole community was just different. Like these young people started to speak whatever they want. The leadership changed. And there was no more of that fighting and all that bullshit anymore. In two months, the whole community changed to a new thing. But in Gaza they paid the price.
In Gaza, they brainwashed the whole population most likely. And remember every one of those Hamas members has a class in the local mosque that happens every day and they teach 20 kids out of it. You understand me? They are capable of brainwashing the whole population, especially if they’re young. And anybody who just says you’re wrong, they will get killed.
Okay, well before Hamas came to power, what was life like for you where you live? Was it better? Was it more liberal? Was it an easier, more open lifestyle?
Definitely it was more liberal. The culture itself changed to be more with how Hamas thinks. Remember, in Palestine, the situation is hard. We are looking subconsciously for something to work. So when Hamas comes, it’s an easy sell for them. Yes, everything that happens bad in life is because of a Jew. And if we just kill them, everything will be okay.
Like I remember a lot of them just cancelling art classes, cancelling music classes. I didn’t have any art classes until I was like 8th grade when one of the Hamas teachers like left the school and then we introduced a new type of school culture where the art is celebrated. And to this day I remember like my first art teacher.
But the PLO here is key. We never had any organization as left-leaning as the PLO in Palestine. I’m not sure how that would happen again if it went away. So I think the international community should support the PLO more. They need a lot of support because if they fall off, Hamas will have a much easier route to take over the West Bank. Because the only thing that is stopping it right now at this moment is the PLO.
You know, you see these arguments about how Israeli mothers protect their children with their own lives. But then on the other side, you see mothers talking about how the Israelis have metal bombs but Palestinians have ‘child bombs.’ It’s the opposite mentality of sacrificing yourself for your children. It’s child sacrifice for the sake of your own beliefs.
This ideology really needs to die. For them, this is their superpower. Everybody in the leadership understands this. If you have an army where nobody cares about their own life, and they do not have to, like if they kill, if they do whatever they do, they do not care about all of it because they are 100% beyond doubt sure that they are on the right side, then you have an army that will never lose. And they’re so sure of that, the think this superpower will allow them to take over all the Middle East. And maybe America one day. That’s how they think.
But they do not understand that winning is not about fighting. It worked for a while, back when we used swords, but now winning is about what you do in peacetime. It’s about how Western culture asks, how moral are we? Is it right to kill people? All that stuff. And I think that asking this question itself is just a miracle of human civilization.
Great article. I have a heightened religious orientation, but your interviewee reflects what I think is the majority case - most people are much less concerned about ideas and theology, instead outsourcing this to their “tribe”. Yet - yet - I do think the religious ideas are the key to undoing this interminable hatred.
Has Sam's book come out yet? Amazon shows it as unavailable.