Ms. Allegra Pacheco was born in the US to an Orthodox Jewish family. A number of years ago she emigrated to Israel and began a legal practice. Currently she is an Israeli human rights lawyer and was instrumental in the fight to have torture of Palestinian prisoners outlawed by the Israeli Supreme Court a number of years ago. Below is a story by Gideon Levy from the Friday Magazine of the Israeli Newspaper Ha'aretz about Allegra and her fiancée Abed al-Ahmar.

Friday Magazine, 31 May 2002 Gideon Levy

Abed al-Ahmar, a four-time administrative detainee, was released straight into the arms of his Jewish-American fiancee. A story with a happy ending - for now.

Allegra Pacheco - so American, so Israeli. She offered to give us a tour of their new home. We moved from room to room - this will be the kids' room, insh'Allah (God willing). Here is the work room, this is the balcony with a view and here is the bedroom. The cat lives here. And this is the new kitchen that was built by a young carpenter, Mohammed Daramah, who shortly after completing the job, turned himself into a human bomb in the ultra-Orthodox Beit Yisrael neighborhood in Jerusalem, killing 10 Israelis and wounding about 50.

A man and a woman are setting up house. He is the son of Palestinian refugees, she is an American Jew - a new immigrant. Exactly a year ago, she tried on a wedding gown in New York, he bought cupboards in Deheisheh - and was arrested that same afternoon. He had gone to Jerusalem, was caught without a permit, and returned home a year later. That was the fourth administrative detention (arrest without trial) slapped on Abed al-Ahmar, a human rights activist and a field-worker for the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, who has also worked for the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. According to the Israeli defense establishment, he is suspected of being an activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Sated with arrests and interrogations, his body broken from the torture he underwent at the hands of his interrogators years ago, he is now planning to marry his fiancee, Allegra Pacheco, an Israeli-American lawyer who is also involved in human rights activities - in fact, she met her husband-to-be when she defended him as a lawyer. They were engaged in Meggido Prison and will live on the edge of the Deheisheh refugee camp, itself a kind of prison. Yet despite everything, there is a sliver of light in the darkness. This is a story with a happy ending.

Ahmar returned home last weekend after spending a year in administrative detention. He is 43 and has spend almost 10 years in prison, most of the time without first being tried. Last Thursday, he was one of a group of about 15 Palestinian detainees who were released at the Qalandiyah checkpoint. The Border Policemen who were their escorts removed their blindfolds, but did not open their plastic handcuffs. After 12 consecutive hours of bound hands, without having eaten, and after a year of imprisonment without a trial, the detainees alighted from the bus in a disoriented state and looked around for someone to free their hands. An elderly Palestinian night watchman from a nearby brick factory eventually brought a screwdriver and undid the cuffs. Ahmar is keeping his handcuffs as a souvenir and runs them over his fingers like prayer beads.

Border Police spokeswoman Liat Perl says in response that the Border Police have no connection with escorts inside buses, and that its policemen do not have anything to do with the entire "procedural process" that concerns the prisoners: "The Israel Defense Forces is the one that takes care of them and handcuffs them."

The soldier at the checkpoint did not let them proceed home. It was evening, Ahmar had just been freed from a year in detention, but he had no chance of getting to his home on the edge of Deheisheh refugee camp, which is just outside Bethlehem. His request for a transit permit from the authorities at Ofer detention facility, his last place of incarceration, had been turned down. So he stood by the checkpoint, at first bound, then freed, and didn't know what to do. He walked to the nearby village of Bir Naballah, knocked on the door of a distant acquaintance, and spent his first night of freedom in his house.

Arrest after arrest

On the morning of the day of his release, Ahmar and some other detainees were made to sit on the gravel outside the prison offices, their hands bound, their eyes covered, under a blazing sun. They sat like that the whole day. He asked if he could have something to lean on, to relieve his chronic back pain, which he has suffered from since his interrogation by the Shin Bet security service in 1995, but that request was denied, too. The men were given water three times during the day. Around dusk, he was taken to a Shin Bet security services interrogator who showed him a computer image of his brothers and asked him to identify them by name, to ensure that the right prisoner was being released and not, heaven forbid, someone else. (It wouldn't have been the first time.)

Just to be on the safe side, Ahmar was also asked for the name of his maternal grandmother. The physician asked if he had any special problems - "but only ones that started here, at Ofer" - and Ahmar asked for a painkiller because of his aching back, but his request was rejected. At last the men were placed aboard a bus. Attorney Allegra Pacheco was waiting at the Bethlehem checkpoint, totally distraught. No one knew whether her fiance was being released or not. By the time she finally learned where he was, in the late evening, the Bethlehem checkpoint was closed to her and she had to get to Bir Naballah by stealth, under cover of dark, for their first night together in a year.

Pacheco, who has both an American and an Israeli passport, has been living for the past year in their future home in Bethlehem, as it has been constructed, one floor above the home of the parents and brothers of her fiance, in the stone building that faces the Deheisheh refugee camp, where he was born. The next morning, last Friday, the couple set off for home. The policemen at the surprise checkpoint next to Ma'aleh Adumim, just outside Jerusalem, stopped their taxi. Bingo. Ahmar's name still appeared on the computer lists as a wanted individual and the policemen wanted to arrest him. A copy of the court decision to release him that he carried with him finally convinced them to let him go.

Exactly a year ago to the day, Ahmar went to Jerusalem after ordering the cupboards for their new home, in order to meet a small group of communist activists - new immigrants from Russia. He says that they wanted to visit Deheisheh, but he thought that would be too dangerous for them and suggested that he come to them instead. Policemen suddenly showed up, for no apparent reason, at the apartment in the Malha neighborhood where the meeting took place. They asked for papers and Ahmar, who of course did not have a permit to enter Jerusalem, was immediately arrested.

He spent 39 days in solitary confinement in the prison facility in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, though he was questioned only on seven days - mainly, he says, about the relations between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites and the prevalent norms in the Palestinian society before and after the intifada. It was a quasi-intellectual sort of conversation. He says he told his interrogators that if they wanted to save their souls, they should undergo vocational retraining as human rights activists. They told him, he says, that the human rights activists in Israel are a marginal group, people without a profession who are unable to find any other work. He said they would one day meet in the international court at The Hague.

The transcript of the interrogation states that the subject replied with chutzpah. The interrogators' code names were Dekel and Nir. They told him, he recalls, "You are going to get administrative detention and then another administrative detention, and when you get out, on the way home, be careful not to get into a car because you will get a missile." This time he was not tortured as in the past, apart from being tied to a chair for a lengthy period.

Two 'A's' and a heart

I saw al-Ahmar in the Supreme Court last June, when he appealed his detention. He showed the court faint signs that the handcuffs left on his wrists. His face was ashen and he had to leave the courtroom in order to throw up in the midst of the hearing. During the past year, he spend time at the prison facilities in Megiddo, Ketziot (in the Gaza Strip) and Ofer. In Ofer, he hung the frozen schnitzels that the army gives its prisoners for lunch on the barbed wire to thaw them out. When he got to Ofer, four days before his release ("The four days at Ofer were harder than a year at Megiddo"), he was bound and made to sit on the floor for 16 consecutive hours, his eyes covered, before being taken to his tent. The officer Sergei asked if any of the detainees knows Hebrew. Al-Ahmar volunteered immediately, knowing this was the only way he would be able to get up for a few minutes and relieve the burning ache in his back.

Al-Ahmar recalls that Sergei said: "Welcome to our concentration camp. What the Germans did to us, we will do to you. What we went through, you will go through. Then you can find yourselves another nation to abuse, the way we are going to abuse you."

(The IDF Spokesman, in response: "The claims made with respect to the IDF officer who compared the Ofer detention facility to a concentration camp have been investigated and found to be untrue. In any case, the IDF views with great seriousness and condemns expressions of this sort, which are not proper for soldiers in the IDF to say.")

On Saturday, al-Ahmar went with Pacheco to see the devastated headquarters of Yasser Arafat in Bethlehem and the swath of destruction in the streets around the Church of the Nativity. The two had met in 1996 in the detention cells of the Russian Compound - a superb setting for meeting singles and arranging marriages - when he was an administrative detainee and she was his lawyer. Pacheco immigrated to Israel two years earlier, in 1994, believing that she would devote most of her work to joint Israeli-Palestinian projects, since peace was apparently at hand, and that she would spend only one more year representing Palestinian prisoners.

Following the abuse and vilification that was heaped on the family of the pro-Palestinian Jewish activist Adam Shapiro, Pacheco's mother asked her not to disclose her exact place of residence on the East Coast; she is afraid. Pacheco also has a large family in Israel, not all of whom know about her plans. Last January, during one of the hearings on extending al-Ahmar's detention, the two of them adjourned to a side room, with the permission of the court, where Pacheco produced two gold rings and a box of borekas, and they became engaged. They also offered borekas and Coke to the soldiers and the judge and the Shin Bet agents.

The rings that the two wear are inscribed with two "A"s, standing for their first names, Allegra and Abed, with a heart between them. A photograph of the couple is stuck on the door of their new Amcor refrigerator with a magnet. A neighbor installed a special wooden ladder for the cat to use to get from the balcony to the yard and back up. The kids in Deheisheh already know the cat. Allegra and Abed say that their children will speak Arabic and English. In the meantime, they themselves converse in Hebrew, which is the second language of both of them.

When the Israeli army occupied Bethlehem and she was unable to leave the house, Allegra joined her future mother-in-law and together they planted green beans and tomatoes between the olive trees. That was very nice, she says. On Saturday, a few hours after we said good-bye, the army entered Bethlehem again and placed the city under curfew.

By Gideon Levy, >