Battle for Peace Confessions of a Former Palestinian Freedom Fighter August 2006

by Saed Awwad
Photos by Russell Byrne

Saed’s story is of an internal and international pilgrimage – from a land of warfare where citizens would rejoice over the bloody deaths they would bring down upon each other to the peacefulness of East County, and from hatred to love for formerly bitter enemies.

I gazed into the face of death several times while still in my early teens. I was born and raised in Palestine on the West Bank. My home is a place called Taybeh. It is an ancient town that the Old Testament called Ophrah and was famous as the hometown of a freedom fighter named Gideon. The New Testament called our town Ephraim and it was a place where Jesus “stayed with his disciples.” My family and my people occupied the land for millennia. We believe that our distant ancestors were living in Ephraim when Jesus Christ visited the town.

The year 1967 was momentous as being both the year of my birth and the year that the occupation of our lands began. Throughout my childhood Israeli settlements were springing up on land that Israel took as its own by wresting it away from my family and my people.

My earliest memories include uniformed people of a different color, race, and language from me who were carrying guns and driving tanks. I learned from my parents that those people hated us and had taken our land from us. They were our enemy. I came to regard each of them as my personal enemy.

Teenage Freedom Fighter
At a very early age I became involved with the activities of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) insurrection. It was considered an honor to join with our brothers to fight for our freedom against the invaders.

The news services make the PLO seem like a formidable force, but it was a ragtag operation when I was young. There was no training; we kids were simply encouraged to devise creative ways to harass the enemy. We did a lot of experimenting and taught ourselves to make homemade weapons using sharp objects. I made a gun out of wood that used a thick rubber sling to shoot nails, but I was never a good enough shot to actually hit anyone with it.

I taught myself to build bombs and fill them with wooden nails and splinters. I intended the nails to tear up flesh and the splinters to become flaming projectiles that would pierce an enemy’s body setting him aflame. I built bombs for three years but never did any damage with one of them. We would attempt to lob them into passing military vehicles but we never were any good with the fuses. The car or truck always got past before the bomb exploded.

One day, while being chased by Israeli soldiers, I had to leap over a 20-foot wall to keep from being shot. I continued running even though I broke my ankle when I landed on the other side. I ran in a huge circle and entered a small town adjourning ours where I was able to take refuge in a house belonging to a shepherd whom I knew. I was afraid to go to a hospital for fear that the authorities would be able to track me. I knew that the shepherd fixed the broken bones of his animals so I asked him to fix my ankle in the same way. He treated me just like one of his sheep. He grabbed my foot, snapped the bones back into the right alignment, used two sticks to set a splint, and wrapped it up. I thought at several points during the procedure that I would rather have died than to endure that pain.

One day I was actually caught by an Israeli patrol. It was about seven o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t been able to sleep at my house for a while because I knew the soldiers had identified me as the person who was writing anti-occupation graffiti messages on the sides of public buildings. On this particular occasion I had spent the night at my aunt’s house. I thought I was leaving early enough to avoid trouble, but when I opened the door my heart sank because Israeli soldiers were standing there waiting for me. They forced me to erase the graffiti from the wall of a school.

My dad happened to be the principal of the school. When he saw me working on the wall he came out of the school to ask me what I was doing. The soldiers who were watching from a distance thought that I was trying to incite trouble at the school. They called me over, cornered me between two of them, and began viciously beating me with their guns and night sticks.

My dad tried to intervene, explaining that I was his son and that he had simply been speaking with me. My aunt, a niece, and several women also tried to get me away from the soldiers. Everything was confusing with the soldiers struggling and beating me and my family trying to shout explanations. Suddenly one soldier put the muzzle of his M-16 against my head and everything immediately got deathly quiet. I was standing there watching the soldier’s finger, waiting to see if he would pull the trigger. I was terrified and realized that I was not ready to die.

The soldier obviously never pulled that trigger. They finally left me lying on the ground beaten and bruised. I went to the doctor and was treated for multiple fractures, internal bleeding, and had a broken back that required an operation.

Death Comes for a Friend
An even more serious situation occurred a year later in a confrontation between young men from our town and a band of Israeli soldiers. I was fighting by the side of my best friend, Abraham. It was a fierce fight and I heard bullets whistling past my ear. Suddenly three bullets made a different splattering sound. I turned and saw Abraham lying on the ground making random motions amidst the blood that had suddenly bathed his entire body and the ground that he was lying on.

The death of my friend completely devastated me. Bitterness and hatred took possession of my spirit. I no longer cared whether I lived or died. All I could do was think dark hateful thoughts of retaliation.

Abraham was buried the same day he died. During the funeral a young lady approached me with a bag in her hand. She handed it to me and said, “Abraham would want you to have this.” I saw that the bag contained the garments he had died in. His jeans, shirt, and scarf were still dripping with his blood. The sight of the blood-stained clothing seemed to push my mind into some kind of dream state. I was enveloped by a sense of unreality. All I could think was, “This can’t be happening!” I was struggling to somehow accept as true the grim reality that Abraham was really gone.

Life began to fall apart for me. I was called many times for interrogation and was often beaten, but the occupation authorities never had enough proof to put me into prison. However, I was playing a dangerous game that I was bound eventually to lose.

I finally realized that I was faced with three choices: To be destroyed as my friend Abraham had been, to go to prison for the rest of my life, or to seek freedom somewhere else. Only one of the choices really made any sense so I emigrated to the U.S. in 1990 and embarked upon a search for personal freedom.

I was 21 years old and was coming from a land that had been devastated by decades of warfare into a land of peace and prosperity. The USA was the first place to recognize my rights as a human being. The United States has given me citizenship, identity, and dignity.

I became owner of a liquor store in the San Francisco Mission District and used the income to leap into the American culture of unrestrained excess. I tried everything that I thought might give my spirit a sense of freedom to match the liberation of the society that I was now living in. I began drinking, smoking, and partying. I was free to try anything that my mind could imagine, but my heart remained empty. My spirit was bound by passions that would not let me loose.

I always acted friendly towards people. I had good friends and would never hurt anybody. I kept my anger and hostility bound up in me, but it kept bursting out in the gambling, partying, and womanizing that were symptoms of the bondage that I continued to labor under.

Turning Towards the Light
One day my confusion overwhelmed me. My parents were visiting and at 2 a.m. I stumbled into my living room unable to sleep. I turned on the TV and saw an elderly man sitting behind a desk flanked by a US flag and an American Eagle. I have always loved these two symbols of American freedom and liberty, so I began to listen to what he said.

The man seemed to answer every question that had been crowding my mind; he began pulling dark and secret things out of my heart. He pointed his finger at me and told me exactly what I needed to do. I finally surrendered my life into the Lord’s keeping, went back to bed, and experienced the best night’s sleep that I’d had in my whole life.

Three days later I shared my extraordinary experience with my dad. My words frightened him because he thought that I was turning my back on our culture. He became ashamed of me and thought it would have been better if I had died. He could not accept what was happening to me and made the decision to return to Palestine. I wrote him a letter and as he left I gave him a Bible with the letter folded into its pages. “Don’t read this until you are on the airplane,” I said. Once the plane took off he opened the Bible, found the letter, and read it through.

“I am no longer your son only,” I wrote. “I am a son of a heavenly father.” then I quoted the scripture that had the words, “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”

“I am being given a mission,” I told him. My father discovered that the letter marked the page I was quoting from. He began reading and saw that everything I said to him was true. A few years later he returned to the States and asked me to baptize him. What a wonderful day that was!

For years I prayed that if my father were to die he could do so with our arms linked together. In 1995 he was in a Stanford Medical Center hospital bed facing death. As we were gathered together around him, singing his favorite Arabic hymn that has the words “We give thanks at all times.” He took my arm and as I held him he went home.

Hatred and grace cannot for long occupy the same space. One must eventually win over the other. Six months after my experience the Lord unmistakably asked me to forgive from my heart the Jewish people who had been my enemies. My hatred came rushing back to the surface and I shouted at Him, “If You ask me that a second time, I’ll never speak to you again.”

I battled with God over the issue and He eventually won. Divine love came flooding in to replace the hatred that I been carrying in my heart during my entire life up to that point. Forgiveness is not a gift, it is a character of God. To forgive is an honor. Only God can really forgive and that day He put His forgiveness in my heart.

Sharing the Gift with Others
In the year 2000 I joined a team on a mission trip to both Israel and Palestine. This was my first trip to the Middle East in ten years. I became fast friends with a Messianic Jewish rabbi named, Jeff Schindleman.

We retuned to the States in October and the two of us started the Echo Of Christ ministry together. Jeff, the Jewish rabbi, and I, a former Palestinian freedom fighter, have joined together in a ministry of reconciliation reaching out to Jews and Arabs.

We go on mission trips and continue to minister to the Jews in Israel and to Arabs in Palestine. We’re making a difference in people’s lives. We planted a church in my hometown and started a No Child Left Behind project, which is an after-school program for disadvantaged children. We also began offering tutoring and counseling services for people and families in crises. We have set up a scholarship program to sponsor children with good grades who cannot afford to go to the university. We are building churches in a number of locations, including Cana and Nazareth. We provide financial support for pastors who are in start-up churches.

I moved to Brentwood in 2003 and I’m completing a masters in Counseling and last month (July) I took a trip to the Middle East to help with a summer camp for 200 children in my hometown of Taybeh. The camp is partnering with an Israeli church that supplies counselors and teachers to work with the children. I will also travel into Israel in order to encourage pastors that we support. I will conclude with a three day crusade in the West Bank.

I’m also planning to travel into Iraq and to work with a chaplain in supporting, counseling, and encouraging US military. I will thank them as an Arab from a sincere heart for the work they are trying to do for Arab people. I will offer them counseling to assist them in overcoming the psychological and emotional problems of combat. I have experienced those things myself.

I’ll direct the troops towards the source of the internal freedom that everyone is longing for. They will give me their ears because I’m speaking from experience and not merely from books. People will come to me afterwards and meet with me one-on-one to learn more about how I discovered this freedom.

We’re bringing a message of reconciliation to the people of the Middle East, throughout America, as well as here in the Bay Area. We’re creating a brotherhood of liberated people and joining the ranks of those who, the Bible says, “overcome the enemy by the word of their testimony.” I tell the story to my Arab brothers and sisters as well as to my Jewish brothers and sisters. Our Lord provides a common ground from which all of us can come together in reconciliation and peace.

I’ve come a long way since staring at death down the muzzle of an automatic weapon held by a man I hated and would have killed if I could have figured out how to do so. It’s been a great journey!°

If you want to learn more about Saed’s peacemaking work and about the Echoes of Christ ministry, go to the website, www.echoofchrist.org. The website also contains directions for making a donation to this important work of international reconciliation.