Preface

PrefaceRamie city. A motley mix of some 40,0000 Middle Eastern residents, all but 5,000 of whom are Jews from Arab lands. It is not a pretty city, and the main street is a garish potpourri of fast-food shops with loud music blaring from loudspeakers. Off toward the edge of the city, where it meets its sister town of Lydda, stands the Ramie prison. It is the maximum security prison in Israel, and its grim gray walls with barbed-wire coils at the top are capped by sentry boxes set every fifty yards. In this prison, with its more than 700 murderers, rapist, robbers, and Arab terrorists, I wrote this book. It was on the evening of May 13, 1980 that they came for me: four plainclothesmen with a piece of paper, an unprecedented Administrative Detention Order mandating my imprisonment for six months without trial or charges. And so Ramie Prison, the prison I had driven past so many times, the one vaguely suggesting a Hollywood movie prison out of the thirties and forties, became my home. My particular "home" was a tiny cell, some six by nine feet in size, in Wing Nine. My immediate neighbor to my left was a veteran Yemeni Jewish criminal named Adani, who was serving the last part of a fifteenyear sentence for armed robbery. On my right was a Bedouin Arab, imprisoned for the rape and murder of a Jewish girl in the Negev area of the country. The possibility of his having been apprehended would have been slim if not for the fact that he added greed to his original sin. Having buried the body in a well, he applied for the reward by contacting the police to say he had "discovered" it. Incredibly, his life sentence had been reduced, and he was preparing to go home after having served a mere eighteen years. There were some seventy prisoners in the wing, fifty-eight of them Jewish. Of those, the overwhelming majority were Jews from Eastern or Arab lands, Sephardim. Perhaps more than anything else, this is the accusing finger that points at the Israeli Establishment, for what the Muslims could not do during more than 1,000 years of domination of the Jews in their lands, the Jewish Establishment of Israel accomplished in less than 25: the spiritual destruction of hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews who came to the Holy Land with their religion, Zionism, and basic Jewish values. Less than three decades later, they were deep into crime, violence, drugs, prostitution, and pell-mell emigration from the country. In my wing alone there were four Yemeni Jewish murderers. I doubt that there had been a total of four Jewish murders in the 2,000 years of exile in Yemen ...
The greatest enemy of modern man is boredom. In prison, it can drive men mad. And so I instituted a stiff, disciplined daily regimen of study and writing that would keep me busy from early morning (4:30 A.M.) until lights out (midnight). This schedule included regular study not only of Bible, Talmud, and Law, but also of other writings of various kinds. I have, for example, been creating a biblical commentary for the past ten years, and, ironically, never did I have so much time - and peace and quiet - to work on it as in prisons. It is a labor of love, and I spent many hours on it, daily, while in Ramie. That in itself gives more than a passing clue to the attitude of the prison guards and officials toward me. It goes without saying that the Jewish prisoners treated me with respect and admiration. Not only did I represent, in the eyes of these Jews from Arab lands, opposition to the Establishment they so hated, but they had a genuine gut feeling that the Arab poses a terrible threat to Jews within Israel. No Ashkenazic Jew from Europe can really appreciate this, for he has not lived with an Arab majority. He has not tasted the bitter dregs of Jewish minority status under Muslim rule. Even more significant, the average guard was overwhelmingly sympathetic to me. It was clear to all that was not an ordinary criminal and that I had been imprisoned for my ideas - ideas that so many of those guards, as well as Jews throughout the country, privately espoused. Therefore, I was allowed as many books as I wished, things that I could not have done without while writing my commentaries. And that is the key to the writing of this book. It would have been impossible to write the manuscript, with all its facts, dates, incidents, quotes, and names, had the prison officials not allowed me to bring in all my private papers and newspaper clippings. It is thanks to them that this book was written, a fact they knew about and to which they conveniently closed their official eyes. Cell 23 in Wing Nine of Ramie Prison was, thus, the scene of many hours each day, many days a week, more than two continuous months of writing. I had no typewriter, and so each page had to be handwritten Moreover, never knowing when the authorities might change their attitude and confiscate the work, I smuggled out each chapter as it was finished and thus never had the opportunity to look back at what I had written. Nevertheless, I gained strength through the encouragement of the other prisoners. On the door of my cell I had placed a large Hebrew sign that read: "How good it is to be a good Jew." Every time a prisoner
passed, he would shout the message out to me and smile. Indeed. "How good it is to be a good Jew.” Meir Kahane