Preface

Ramle city. A motley mix of some 40,000 Middle Eastern br

residents, all but 5,000 of whom are Jews from Arab lands. It is br

not a pretty city, and the main street is a garish potpourri of fast- br

food shops with loud music blaring from loudspeakers. Off to- br

ward the edge of the city, where it meets its sister town of Lydda, br

stands the Ramle prison. It is the maximum security prison in br

Israel, and its grim gray walls with barbed-wire coils at the top br

are capped by sentry boxes set every fifty yards. In this prison, br

with its more than 700 murderers, rapists, robbers, and Arab br

terrorists, I wrote this book.

It was on the evening of May 13, 1980 that they came for br

me: four plainclothesmen with a piece of paper, an un- br

precedented Administrative Detention Order mandating my im- br

prisonment for six months without trial or charges. And so Ram- br

le Prison, the prison I had driven past so many times, the one br

vaguely suggesting a Hollywood movie prison out of the thirties br

and forties, became my home.

My particular “home” was a tiny cell, some six by nine feet br

in size, in Wing Nine. My immediate neighbor to my left was a br

veteran Yemeni Jewish criminal named Adani, who was serving br

the last part of a fifteen-year sentence for armed robbery. On my br

right was a Bedouin Arab, imprisoned for the rape and murder br

of a Jewish girl in the Negev area of the country. The possibility br

of his having been apprehended would have been slim if not for br

the fact that he added greed to his original sin. Having buried br

the body in a well, he applied for the reward by contacting the br

police to say that he had “discovered” it. Incredibly, his life br