By Badawiya Samri
NABLUS, March 25, 2018 (WAFA) – Through her contact with Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails – through her work in Addameer organization, Somoud Sa’adat knew Asem, a political prisoner in Israeli jails. Through letters, she loved him although she did not see him even once. She loved his steadfastness, struggle, ideas, and his optimism, she said.
Somoud is a Palestinian activist who currently works as a researcher in Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. The daughter of imprisoned Ahmad Saadat, the Secretary-General of Palestinian Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who is serving a 30-year sentence in the Israeli prisons, Somoud has grown up in a revolutionary and nationalist home.
Her fiancé, Asem Alkabi, from Balata refugee camp, is also serving an 18-year sentence and will be released in three years.
The engagement ceremony and procedures were initially held on March 23 and will continue during April.
Somoud says Asem and she “decided to get engaged after they felt harmonious and carried the same human feelings, to prove that distance and absence could not stand in the way of any two people who liked each other.”
“There is always a message to our people that it is our right to live, love and rejoice, despite everything we experience and endure. The forced exclusion (detention) does not stand in front of human life. We have to achieve our right to love and challenge the circumstances.”
Somoud has been denied visitation to her father by Israeli prison authorities ever since he was arrested. The only time she was allowed to visit him was in 2015, nine years after he had been in jail.
But because the father‘s opinion was important to her engagement decision, Samoud had to consult him before she took the decision to engage to Asem, especially since her father and Asem spent one year together in 2011 in Hadarim prison.
Although Asem is now in Rimon prison and Sa‘adat is in the Negev prison, they were able to communicate to get father’s approval and consent to the engagement of her daughter, Somoud.
The meeting between the families of Somoud and Asem took place in Ramallah after the father was consulted. The two got engaged last Friday.
Somoud wishes that she would be allowed to meet her father and her fiancé.
“I never felt the prison lives inside of Asem. He’s an open-minded person, a person of a strong opinion,” she said. “He confronts everything. He’s optimist and wants to go back to his normal life, to have a home and a raise a family like everyone else.”
“That’s why I loved him. Still, I would very much like to personally meet him. Face to face communication is beautiful after getting to know each other from a distance,” she added.
The story of Somoud and Asem isn’t the first. There are many cases of Palestinian women who got engaged to political prisoners inside Israeli prisoners.
Asem’s cellmate, Ra’fat al-Bourini, also got engaged to a girl after he got to know her when she was visiting her prisoner brother.
C.K/K.T/M.N
