JERUSALEM (June 8) - An Israeli Arab journalist who went missing two months ago during a visit to Bethlehem escaped from his Palestinian captors and managed to reach an IDF checkpoint at the entrance to Jerusalem just before midnight on Wednesday.

Exhausted and broken, Youssef Samir, 63, said that when he approached the soldiers, after making his way through the darkened alleyways of Bethlehem, he knelt down and kissed the earth.

"It was as if I was born all over again, and was given my life anew after 64 days when I never saw the light of day," he said tearfully in an interview with The Jerusalem Post yesterday afternoon from his bedside at Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Hospital where, 12 hours after his dramatic escape, he is being treated for exhaustion and bruises.

An Egyptian who defected to Israel three decades ago and a veteran staffer of Israel Radio's Arabic Service, Samir's harrowing trial began in April when he made a routine visit to Bethlehem with his wife to buy some meats.

While in Bethlehem, Samir, who lives on the edge of nearby Beit Jala [that is the Arabic town from which they have been shooting and launching mortar shells at residential areas of Jerusalem], was stopped by a Palestinian policeman and ordered out of the city.

Infuriated, Samir went home to bring the officer some of the 18 books he had written about the Palestinians living abroad to prove his loyalty.

When he arrived back in the city, he was sent to Palestinian Police headquarters, and was since feared dead. Appeals to the PA on Samir's behalf from Israelis and various foreign channels went unheeded.

Israeli intelligence reports indicated that Samir was being held by the PA's General Intelligence Service headed by Tawfik Tirawi and Amin al-Hindi, a claim the Palestinians vehemently denied through the two-month ordeal.

Yesterday, though, a feeble Samir confirmed the reports and told the Post that he had indeed been held by Tirawi's men in Bethlehem for the past two months.

"I was given a mattress in one room of an office in the civil administration headquarters, where I was repeatedly beaten, humiliated, and terrorized," he said.

Every day an interrogator would demand that Samir own up to being an Israeli agent, or to working for the General Security Service, and was told to write a curriculum vitae.

"Write, write," he was repeatedly instructed, and when the journalist, author, poet, and grandfather asked what more he should write, he was repeatedly beaten with a belt and by hand.

"You all know that I'm a poet. You all know that I'm an author. I was never a detective and I was never a spy, never," he said he told his captors.

"Look, look at these bruises," Samir said yesterday, pointing to his black-and-blue elbow, back, and knee caps, as his eldest daughter Haya, and other family members looked on in horror.

Weeks went by. Sometimes Samir was told by his captors that he would be released soon. Other times they told him he would rot in the building until he died.

"I knew that unless I escaped from there I would die," he said yesterday.

So, when his guard was dozing off Wednesday evening, Samir said he took flight.

He rejected reports on Israel Radio yesterday quoting political sources that Samir's escape may have been connected to an appeal from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to PA Chairman Yasser Arafat on his behalf made through German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer earlier this week.

Indeed, the report stated that Sharon never received a response, and a German Embassy spokes-man could neither confirm nor deny the report that Fischer had discussed the issue with Arafat.

"I was not released, I escaped," Samir said, noting that he heard sirens wailing and saw flashlights searching for him for the next three hours that he made his way out of Bethlehem and into the surrounding villages.

Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said there were no signs indicating that Samir was released by his captors, though there has been some media speculation that the PA turned a blind eye to his escape, based on reports that the door of the building where he was being held was suddenly unbolted.

Barefoot, his hands tied behind his back, and wearing a tattered shirt, Samir said that after roaming the streets on Wednesday night, he made his way to the home of a family in an Arab village near Rachel's Tomb that had yellow (Israeli) license plates on its car.

"I didn't know if I would find good people or bad people [who are the good, and who the bad? Are the Israel haters and murderers of defenseless civilians the good? CNN would have us believe that the haters of Israel are in the right, and Israel’s army defending our citizens being in the wrong] in the house, but I knew I was a dead man if I would be turned in," he said [how did he know that? What made him believe that?].

Luck was on Samir's side [I think much rather that it was the Lord]. The owner of the home knew him, and burst out crying when he identified himself.

"We were sure you were dead," the man said. [How come this family was sure of that? What made them think that?]

The man gave him a shirt and shoes and something to cover his face before driving him to the Israeli checkpost, using back roads to avoid disclosure, Samir said.

"When I saw the Israeli soldiers, I nearly fainted from happiness. I fell on the floor and kissed the earth before their feet,"⁴ --- [“The sons of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you; and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet.” – “Kings shall be your foster fathers and their queens your nursing mothers. With their faces to the ground they shall bow down to you, and lick the dust of your feet.”] he recalled, as the young soldiers called for their senior commanders to rush to the scene.

Jeep after jeep rushed to the checkpost, and medics and soldiers rushed up to the ailing captive.

"It was a surrealistic scene, one that I will never forget all my life," Samir recalled, as soldiers and officers rushed to assist him and give him first aid.

"I saw a country that cared about its citizens," he said, "something that would not happen to such an extent even in Western cultures like the US."

"They offered me platters upon platters of food," he said, "enough for 40 people, and I did not even have appetite to eat a thing."

Has the experience changed him, a reporter asked.

"A lot has changed in my outlook," he said.

"He has been crying his eyes out half the morning. It is a mixture of anger mixed in a flood of bitterness and pain," Samir's daughter Haya concluded. [Bitterness and pain about what? Anger about what?]

My question is:  has any of the foreign leading news stations and magazines reported what this man endured and said? Do people see what his tears make plain? Do they hear the words and see the tears of the man who drove him to the Israeli roadblock? Have any of these journalists gone down to Eilat and interviewed some of the thousands of Palestinians there to inquire, why they are so far away from their families? Has anyone asked why the death toll among the Palestinians is so much higher than that of the Israelis? 

Terrorism is not Israel’s way of dealing with our neighbors. Murdering, blowing to pieces and lynching defenseless civilians, fathers and mothers of children, teenagers and little ones and calling that "struggle" is not our way. Many Palestinians would rather live in peace with Israel, under Israeli rule, than under Arafat's. But they cannot say this aloud out of fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones. When the PLO calls for a general strike all shops must be closed. If any shop owner does not agree with the strike and keeps his shop open, he knows it either will be smashed to pieces, or burned down, or his family will pay for it.

I remember the Palestinian woman from Gaza crying out loud to a journalist that cursed was the day when the Palestinian people got rid of Israeli rule. For it had been better for them under Israeli "occupation" than under Arafat’s “democratic” rule. The woman was never heard of or seen again. She had cried that way because her husband had not wanted to give up his house to one of Arafat's man. So they came in the middle of the night, arrested him, beat him and threw him out in the street. He still would not sell or give up the house. They came again at night, this time they took the son, arrested and judged him under trumped up charges and the son disappeared. To make a long story short, Arafat's man got the house, the Palestinian man and his family vanished.

Those among the Palestinians who can afford for the whole family to leave go abroad. Those who can't buy tickets for the whole family stay, for they know if some of them leave, the remainder of the family will pay for it most probably with their lives. It wasn't Israel who drove them away but the terrorism of Arafat's men. Even Arafat's wife prefers a life of luxury in Paris than to share in the "struggle" of her people. 

From my own observations and from my Palestinian aquaintances I know that neither Arafat nor his men of lawlessness have any concern for the welfare of their people, for lawfulness and civility. They are totally corrupt, only crave for power and getting what they want in whatever way. While the people barely have the necessities for life Arafat's men live in luxury villas at Gaza's seaside, drive luxury cars and go from Gaza's airport vacationing abroad. The average Palestinian living in the "occupied territories" only dreams of these things; the Israeli Palestinian has the chance to make this dream come true.

Bethlehem was once a prosperous, happy and peaceful town, Christians and Moslems living peacefully side by side, making a fine living with tourism. The same was true of East Jerusalem, East and West profiting from each other, sharing in the benefits of booming tourism. At that time Bethlehem and East Jerusalem were still under Israeli rule. 

Then came head-Mason “new ager” George Bush Sr. to power, and with one single term in office he shifted the balances in the Middle East, by calling Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Judea and Samaria "occupied territory" to be "returned" to the Palestinians. The gulf-war gave Israel  - until then known and feared by her neighbors as strong - a new image: that of a "weakling" and a "coward" who could not fight for himself, a perception still intensified by the withdrawal from Lebanon under PM Ehud Barak. 

Then came another "brother Mason" to power, this time in Israel --- Yitzhak Rabin, and the balances tilted even more in favor of the Palestinians, or better, in favor of a "new world order" of a "united Middle East" in which Israel's sovereignty would be a matter of the past in preference of a "comprehensive" peace.

Fellow "brother Mason" king Hussein was part of the plotting club. But how many realized that by not looking beyond their own fleshpot one day they would loose that very fleshpot? Balances got shifted, the Lord's prophets warned, but how many who had the power to do something about it really paid attention?

Scores of Christian Palestinians left, the others either actively joined or they go along, as they did in Hitler's days. Terror instills fear. When Palestinians are found dead somewhere in a back alley or in a gutter, obviously horribly tortured for no other reason than having been friendly with Israelis, or unwilling to give up something Arafat's men of lawlessness wanted, the regular average family man, the regular average people begin to fear. Most people don't want to play the hero, they just want to make a living, provide for their family, raise their children, and enjoy a halfway decent life.

Today Bethlehem is almost completely empty of Christians and has become another battlefield of  "Hamas" as has Hebron, East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Shechem [Nablus], Tulkarm, Jericho, Gaza, and towns in Samaria and the Galilee. All of these have become "dark places" in the land of Israel.

Did you know that it says in Psalm 74:20: "Have regard for the Covenant; for the dark places of the land are FULL OF THE HABITATIONS OF HAMAS (violence)?" The word for "the violence which shall no more be heard in our land, wasting nor destruction within our borders..."⁵ (suicide bombings, mortar shells, shootings, ambushes, car bombs, etc. etc.); and the violence which filled the earth in Noah's days also is⁶ --- HAMAS. The word "Hamas" means "violence; cruelty, injustice, oppressor; take away violently, wrong, imagine wrongully, violent wrongful dealing, damage."

One Arab, sobbing loudly, has spoken the truth for all the others who do not dare say so. But believe me, no Israeli Palestinian wants to live under Arafat's rule, unless he wants to have a license to kill and be called a hero for it. Another noticeable thing is that all foreign journalists take their quarters in Israel. None of them stay within the Palestinian territories. They only go there to film what an action craving public wants to see; and filming Palestinian violence and "bad" Israeli soldiers shooting at the “oppressed” Palestinians makes for good ratings. They got to keep up with the competition! But funny --- they feel much safer within Israel, and prefer Israeli freedom and lifestyle, hotels, food and public service. But wagging their finger against "bad bad Israel" and maligning, lying about and slandering that people does not seem to bother their conscience one wee bit. Perhaps their conscience is already seared...?

Well, Youssef Samir, welcome back home to Israel. G-d has given you the opportunity to speak up for the truth, as you thought you had done for the Palestinians abroad. What you had believed to be true proved a delusion, a mortally deceptive nightmare. Youssef Samir, you are a poet and author known in the Arab world. This is your opportunity to stand up for justice and for the truth, as a representative of and mouthpiece for the "good people" among the Palestinians and all the Arab people. Confound the lying Media and put them to shame by one Arab poet having the courage to come forward with the truth!