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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.