At a certain stage, one of his interrogators told him that he too had been in Beirut, during the Lebanon War of 1982. A few minutes later, without batting an eyelash, the same interrogator lashed out at him, “You know it was not legal for you to go to Lebanon.” At which point only he, the person suspected of being in contact with a “foreign agent” and of “going illegally” to Lebanon – and possibly also the god of history – laughed silently to himself.
That was only one of the irony-laced moments in the hallucinatory and fraught saga of the visit last month by Israeli journalist Majd Kayyal to the Lebanese capital, to attend a conference sponsored by the newspaper there for which he writes. When he returned, he was arrested and held incognito for five days and subjected to interrogation by the Shin Bet security service without even being allowed to meet with a lawyer, until his release. This Tuesday, after Kayyal had been freed from house arrest as well, we met in the Haifa offices of Adalah: the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, where he works as editor of the NGO’s website.
The 23-year-old Haifa resident is a riveting young man. His greatest fear after he was apprehended, he explains, was that he would be incarcerated for months, during which the vibrant intensity of the experience of his Beirut visit would fade before he could share it with friends and readers. “I wanted so much to tell the story, it was such an incredible experience,” he says.
That is something which maybe only a journalist can fully understand. In any case, his concern about not being able to tell the story dissipated along with the suspicion that he had been in contact with a foreign agent.
Kayyal grew up in a politically oriented home. His mother, who works with at-risk girls, is from the Lower Galilee village of Arabeh; his father, a social activist, is descended from refugees from the uprooted village of Al-Birwa in Western Galilee. They live in Halissa, a poor neighborhood in Haifa. Kayyal studied philosophy and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For the past two years, he has worked for Adalah and as a columnist for the important Lebanese newspaper As-Safir (The Ambassador). The last article he filed before his trip was about the Black Goat Law, forgotten Israeli legislation from the 1950s that forbids expansion of grazing areas mainly in the hands of Bedouin shepherds.
Like many other Palestinian Israelis, Kayyal always dreamed of visiting Lebanon.
“Beirut is the city that interests me most. I was raised on its history, and it’s the place that influenced me most. My childhood heroes were from Beirut,” he says. “The departure of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut changed Palestinian politics. Those are the events that shaped my personality. And there is also Beirut’s rich cultural scene, of course. Then I get an invitation to an event marking the 40th anniversary of As-Safir.”
