781 days in Iranian captivity

Haaretz

Josh Fattal spent 26 months in an Iranian prison. The 29-year-old American allegedly crossed into Iran, together with his friends Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd, while hiking in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan in July 2009. Suspected of being spies, the three Americans were interrogated, barred from almost all communication with their families and refused proper access to their lawyers.

Fattal and Bauer were sentenced to eight years in jail but, following an international campaign that had everyone from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to actor Ashton Kutcher calling for their release, they were freed after serving two years, soon after Bauer’s girlfriend Shourd was let go. All three were released on “humanitarian grounds.”

Last week, Fattal, who had been to Israel a half a dozen times growing up and spent two months here at age 16 on his Reform Jewish youth movement’s NFTY summer program, landed at Ben-Gurion Airport.

During the long months when Fattal’s fate remained up in the air, his aunts, uncles and cousins in Israel had been praying for him. But they were also trying to keep a low profile, so as not to draw attention to the fact that not only was Fattal Jewish, but his father Jacob is an Israeli. It was information the family feared could affect the way the Iranians treated him.

Now, Fattal was flying in for a visit with his new girlfriend – to thank his family here for their prayers and support, and celebrate his freedom with them. It was the first time the former prisoner has traveled beyond the borders of the U.S. since he was released from Iran on September 21, 2011.

And the first thing the Israeli airport security did was – detain him for three hours of questioning. “It was not a great welcome but, of course, it was better than in Iran. I wasn’t blindfolded, for starters,” he says, wryly, over coffee on a sunny afternoon in Jaffa a week later. “But it was still an interrogation.”

The Syrian stamp in his passport, which he got when he arrived in Damascus to visit Bauer and Shourd before they all set off for that fateful weekend hike, probably did not work to his advantage, he says. Nor, most likely, did the Omani one, which he got when he was released from Iranian jail to the Gulf state that reportedly helped broker his freedom and paid the million dollar bail demanded.

Fattal’s father, an Iraqi-born immigrant to Israel who met his American wife Laura when he went to the U.S. to study years ago and has since made Philadelphia his home, had arrived in Israel a few days earlier. He was outside in the arrivals hall waiting for his son, together with a handful of family members. They waited four hours and when they tried to find out what was going on, they were told it was not clear that Fattal had even been on the flight. Worried, they left the airport and went home.

Fattal’s girlfriend, meanwhile, who had not been detained, somehow managed to miss connecting with his waiting family outside and spent her first hours in this country sitting on her own in the arrivals lounge.

Fattal calmly sat it out. As someone now accustomed to long periods of waiting, he seems to have learned a thing or two about patience. Delays don’t faze him much. No great anger bubbles up about it either.

The rest of Fattal’s nine-day visit to Israel, as it happens, was no less eventful than his first few hours in the country; it fell right in the middle of Operation Pillar of Defense, with rockets being lobbed from Gaza into Israel and Israeli warplanes bombarding the coastal Palestinian city. As such, the trip ended up offering him even more food for thought on all those questions of security, aggression, two sides to every story, and peace.

“Just because I don’t like fundamentalist parties like Hamas doesn’t mean I support Israel bombing them,” he says. “Attacking is wrong,” he continues, “especially as so many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”

Regarding Iran, Fattal feels strongly that Israel needs to “stop pushing America toward war.” He blames Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for keeping the question of whether Israel will or will not bomb Iran perpetually in the forefront of the news – as a way, he believes, of distracting the public from the country’s more immediate political and economic problems. The threat of a strike against Iran is “bluster,” says Fattal.

If there is anything he believed on the day he was led into captivity that only strengthened during his 781 days there, it is that there’s no black and white in these stories of conflict.

“So frequently people think of life in binary terms. But no. I hate Iran. Iran imprisoned me. But I also don’t support American policy in the Middle East at all,” says Fattal, who, as a student at Berkeley and later, living in a small town in Oregon where he was an environmental activist, marched against U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fattal, who is writing a book together with Bauer and Shourd about their experiences in captivity (to be published in 2013 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), would not reveal any details of the time in prison in this interview. But he would say that he was not treated any worse by his captors on account of his being Jewish, or part Israeli.

Fattal’s Israeli family had been terrified that this would be the case, he admits, and had kept his father out of the spotlight during the ordeal, leaving it to Fattal’s mother and older brother to face the media. But as it turned out, his captors were “curious” about his background but not punitive, he says.

“I told them I was Israeli in interrogation,” he says. “They knew anyway. I wasn’t sure how it would play out, but I told them almost immediately anyway, within the first week.”

His being an American was the real problem, he says, describing how, when the three captives would complain about the conditions they were being held in, their captors would talk about Guantanamo Bay, and the sort of treatment the Americans met out to prisoners there.

Regarding the rest of Fattal’s biography, they would say: “We respect Moses and Jesus, because we are all people of the book… Jew, no problem.” And then they would say ”Israel – problem.” But they would leave it at that, recounts Fattal.

But his experiences in Iran, he says, in conclusion, only strengthened his belief that peaceful – rather than aggressive – behavior is the answer. “It was clear to me that my captivity was part of a bigger mess. It’s a worldwide mess, and I know there is a real human cost to this sort of tit-for-tat.”