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- Country of residence: Palestine
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Nazareth - “Al-Quds Al-Arabi”: When the Palestinian researcher in the social and political sciences, Dr. Amer Al-Huzail, from the lands of 1948, searched for a school in which he would finish his secondary studies, he found it inside the city of Nazareth in the Galilee during the seventies of the last century, and at that time it was for him like someone seeking knowledge in China. The distances are far and the possibilities are few, but he reached them and farther on the wings of an iron will.
In a special interview with Al-Quds Al-Arabi, he accompanies us on a journey to the desert, both sweet and bitter, between today and yesterday, and from there to the big world, back and forth. During that time, we stop at important issues, including the power of science in development and survival, the fraught designations of its daughters, and its activity in politics and society inside Palestine and elsewhere.
Al-Huzail was born in 1957 in the clan of Al-Huzail in the Negev, and today he resides in the city of Rahat. He says that his clan extended over a large area before the 1948 Nakba, but the Israeli authorities deported it to build the “Shoval” settlement and crammed it into a small area after the majority of it migrated to Gaza, Jordan, and the West Bank.
In response to a question, he continued, “We have relatives in the Egyptian Sinai. We belong to the Tiyaha tribe, which is a very large clan in Sinai, and there are connections between many Palestinian and Egyptian Bedouin clans in the Negev and Sinai.” Al-Huzail, who lives in the city of Rahat, reveals that he is haunted by nostalgia for the desert, its tranquility, and romantic features in his life, especially during childhood, despite its harshness. Likewise, the longing for people’s love for one another and for psychological comfort, and the longing for horse riding and hunting. However, there are great difficulties and a difficult aspect to Bedouin life when you live in the desert, especially when you are a shepherd as a child in the summer and in a harsh winter. We were doing what is known as “Izbat” in the desert with my brother Suleiman, and I was only in the second grade when I started participating in the care. My mother, may God have mercy on her, would give us the “supply” and we would set off in the desert, my brother and I, away from the tribe’s camp, and spend the night in the desert for several days and then return. Sometimes my father, my brother Sultan, or my sister Sultana would come to us with food and drink.”
■ Is the fear of the dark or of desert beasts still in your consciousness?
□ “Sometimes we heard wolves, hyenas, and beasts at night, and we witnessed several attacks by them on sheep, and we used trained dogs.”
■ and education? So how did you manage?
□ “Practically at that time, education was scarce. We rotated in the education room in several groups due to the scarcity of school rooms, so I was taking care of the sheep either in the morning or in the afternoon, and after that I would go to learn, and even when I returned home from high school in Nazareth, I would participate in the care. In Al-Hazil schools, we were in groups of the first, second, and third grades within one row, and the teacher moved from one group to another.”
■ You studied with your brothers when you were ten sons and daughters, and you reached the universities despite the hardship of life?
□ “My father, Salama al-Huzayel, may God have mercy on him, was educated and patriotic. He finished primary school at the Sons of Sheikhs School inside the city of Beersheba during the British colonial period. At that time, an eighth-grade graduate was equivalent to the level of today’s university graduate, and he was fluent in English. At that time, the teachers in this historic school were from Mount Hebron and Gaza, and today it is used as an Israeli museum. From the beginning, I realized that knowledge is the key to success and my mother, may God have mercy on her soul, Rifaat Abu Lubba Al-Alamat, who is an intellectual and has the greatest role in our learning. My father was diligent and devoted everything to teaching us. He owned sheep and we learned one by one and helped each other. The sons and daughters also learned: My sister Shafa was educated and she is the director of the social affairs department in the local council of Laqiya, Rita was educated and is a nanny, and my two sisters, Hakim and Sultana, were not educated, but they were cultured and very fond of literature, and Sultana was very revolutionary. She used to herd sheep while hearing the sound of the storm from a small transistor radio, and she returned every day with shipments. Rebellious. My brother Salem, may God have mercy on him, was the first to graduate in the Negev and the first to travel to America and learn psychology. He named my sister Rita after one of his foreign friends. He recalls that his brother Shukri, who is a few years younger than him, is a doctor in political science and lives in Germany. Sultan is a retired school principal, Suleiman is a retired school principal, Salim is a sheikh and a tribal judge.”
Regarding the period of childhood and youth, Dr. Amer Al-Huzayel explains that “his father is a man who loves knowledge and sent him to Terra Santa School in Nazareth in the period 1972 - 1976, and so did the rest of his brothers (Salem, Salim, Suleiman, Sultan) and Shukri. It was a unique experience because of the move from the desert to the city, but its people embraced us, which made “It was easy for us to adapt.” He added, “We studied in the country, in the United States, and in Germany, and we were followed by the eldest brother, Salem, may God have mercy on him.” We would stay in Nazareth for a month or two because of the difficulty of transportation, and the round trip would take long hours.
The Demolition of Our House: A Founding Event
On one of these visits, on 04/12/1973, we returned to the clan’s farms and did not find the stone family house that his father had built. On the way to it from a distance, I was confused and almost thought that I had gotten lost on the way. When I reached it, I found it in ruins, and my aunt was sitting worried, and she informed me that the Israeli authorities had demolished the house under the pretext of not having a permit. It became a major clash, and a number of people were injured on both sides. It was the first clash with the Israeli police in the Negev. They arrested my father, brothers and sisters.
Researcher in social and political sciences
He points out that this tragedy is still in the heart of his mind because of this injustice represented by the demolition of the house and the arrest of his father for two years in Ramla prison on charges of beating a policeman. He says that he later wrote a poem to his father, “Memories and Thoughts,” and secretly, he appreciated his parents, who were the most important role models for him. He added, “The injustice of demolition continues. Destroying a house is self-destruction and involves trauma.”
After the clashes, the Israeli authorities built the city of Rahat as part of a policy of concentrating the largest possible number of Bedouins on the smallest patch of land and granting the land to the Jews, simultaneously Judaizing the place. Hence the name Rahat, which is a Biblical name meaning a basin of water for animals. He explains that the Israeli authorities gave this name to this Palestinian city in the Negev, which is the second city after Nazareth and has a population of 70,000 people.
■ Did you adapt to city life quickly?
□ “When you bring Bedouins from small villages and force them to live in the city within the “burning stages,” it leads to social crises, and this forced modernization is one of the reasons for the spread of crime in the Negev.”
■ Weak identity is a central factor in sliding into the swamp of violence and crime, as you say in your articles. how?
□ “The relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, between the oppressor and the oppressed, causes a horizontal and vertical collapse and a collapse of the controlled society in general. This leads to a collapse of the social structure and morals, the building of identity and even control in society. At one time we used to follow the saying of the great leader, and we said, “He who has great wealth will be thrown into the grave.” . This process of collapse led to individual dealing, psychological complexity, and internal congestion in the soul. The oppressed, who cannot control the oppressor, takes out his anger on the oppressed. This is a phenomenon witnessed in Algeria, South Africa, and elsewhere. Today, we need the leadership to return to educate and organize in the face of a country that targets them daily.
■ party?
□ “The role of the party is to organize society. Unfortunately, our parties are seasonal and meet the public only on the eve of each election.”
Nursing study
Al-Huzayel studied nursing (1977-1980). During his studies, he discovered that this was not the subject he wanted to study, so he tried to persuade his mother not to do so. His mother rebuked him, but later the administration of the Israeli Kaplan Hospital in the city of “Rehovot” (Zarnuqa) removed him and stopped his education due to his position on the beach operation led by The martyr Dalal al-Mughrabi in 1977 and his clash with the Jewish students over the right of the Palestinian people to struggle. Then he moved to the Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Sarafand, and during the 1982 Lebanon War, I was seeing wounded soldiers and collaborators from Lebanon, so I left my job and traveled in the same year to Germany.
Traveling to Germany
Al-Huzayel chose to travel to Germany in 1982 because education was free and there were job opportunities. He explains that his relative, the writer from the Negev, Salim Al-Afanesh, and Salem Abu Jabr, his friend from the Negev, preceded him to Germany, “and I joined them.”
He continues, “I learned about the amazement of beginnings in the beautiful city of Heidelberg.” I stayed with my son Salem at first and learned the language there before moving to Marburg. I went from Heidelberg to Marburg by ride (Trump) to save expenses, and I had a mattress on my back so I could sleep on the road sometimes. This was the experience of many Arab and Palestinian students like me, and the treatment of the Germans was good. After I had walked a long distance, a car stopped with a German husband and wife in it. On the way, they understood my destination, so they decided to take me to the last stop, and I respected them very much.” He added, “I became politically aware and participated directly and actively in the activities of the Palestine Students Union.
When he arrived in the city of Marburg, he felt as if he were in southern Lebanon due to the large number of Palestinian students active in the Palestinian struggle in that stormy year in light of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. “They helped me adapt to the university and I adapted in five minutes, and later I participated in embracing new Palestinian and Arab students in case they needed any help. “I had become politically aware.”
In 1990, he traveled to the United States to search for the American archives as part of his doctoral studies. This was the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the decline of the organization, and then the first Gulf War. After seven months, he returned to Germany and found that everything had collapsed in Germany as well, as if there was nothing left of the student union.
National Democratic Rally
In 1994, Dr. Amer Al-Huzayel was one of the three initiators of establishing the National Democratic Rally Party in response to the Oslo Accords. He left his mark on its program by formulating the demand to change the law of nationality and return as a confrontational proposal with the essence of the Zionist project of the Jewish state and as a cornerstone for building a state for all its citizens.
Al-Huzayel recalls that Azmi Bishara joined the establishment movement four months later, and at the Abu Anis Hall conference in Umm al-Fahm, we gave him the presidency of the party by acclamation. This delay in joining was because he doubted success after the failure of his “Equality Charter” initiative in the early 1990s. At first I was influenced by the communist tide while I was in Nazareth, but I did not find any positions that satisfied me in it, and I did not like its political ceiling. My attitudes toward the “Sons of the Country” movement developed while I was learning nursing in the beginning, but my attitudes are more flexible than theirs. Due to my ideological position, I did not think at the time, nor do I think today, about running for the Knesset. Inside the St. Gabriel Hotel in the city of Nazareth, the founding of the National Democratic Rally was announced, and later in the Anis Hall in Umm al-Fahm, we held the founding conference.
Al-Huzail explains that he formulated the party's political program with a vision of opposition to Oslo and for the sake of the clash with Zionism, and the Knesset was not a goal, but rather a platform and starting point for a mass movement protesting the Jewish state and suspended citizenship. He added, “We had a conservative political stance regarding the tendencies of Ahmed Tibi and Abdel Wahab Darawsha, who were counted on Oslo. When I saw that the path had deviated, I left the National Democratic Rally and returned to the Negev and left the party’s activity after the first elections in 1996. After the elections, political and organizational discussions began to emerge. Azmi Bishara began to speak with the same “charter of equality” and from within the entity, and we wanted to work from outside Israeli citizenship to meet with The rest of the Palestinian people are in their project. There were clashes over direction and organization, and I did not have time, so I said that I had done the job and returned to the Negev and was interested in contributing to building a mass movement. Fate wanted Azmi Bishara to ally himself in 1999 with his former opponent, Ahmed Al-Tibi, after he accused him of political deviation.
Mass activity in the Negev
Following the experience of the Negev in alternative planning, he took the initiative with others to establish the Arab Center for Alternative Planning to defend the land and the Arab human being on a national level, which is active to this day from its headquarters in the town of Eilabun in the Galilee. In 1994/1995, Dr. Amer Al-Huzayel worked as a teacher in Rahat High School, but he was removed due to a political background. Between 1995-2008, he served as director of the strategic planning department in the municipality of Rahat and kept pace with all its plans, the most important of which was the Rahat 2020 plan.
Vice President and Education File Holder
In the first local elections for Rahat in the Negev in 1989, Dr. Amer Al-Huzayel took the initiative to establish the “Alliance of the Sons of Rahat” list under the slogan “Do not let the tribe rule the city, and democracy is the solution” without running for any position. In 2008, he ran for elections and became vice president in Rahat and responsible for the education file for ten years. His most important mark was developing the education system and Arabizing the city by giving its neighborhoods and streets Arab-Islamic historical and literary names. Regarding this, he says, “I worked to Arabize the city. Its name chosen by the Israeli Ministry of Interior is Biblical, and we gave Arabic names to the streets from Palestine to Jerusalem and Ashkelon.”
Family
Al-Huzayel married Khadra Al-Sanea in 1989, a woman from Laqiya who works today as a nanny and a school principal. He has six children: four girls and two boys. He gave them loaded labels: Mithaq, who studied psychology, Wiam, a doctor, Vision, a nurse, Hataf, a university student studying psychology at Beersheba University, and Diyar. He studies the language in Germany in preparation for studying computer engineering and programming, and learns law and safety. In late 2018, he retired from politics and returned to his professional life, where he established the Man and Space Center for Planning and Community Empowerment. Today he holds the position of its general director. He is also a writer, political analyst, social activist, and specialist in strategic planning and community empowerment.
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