JONATHAN KUTTAB. The Truth Shall Set You Free: The Story of a Palestinian Human Rights Lawyer Working for Peace and Justice in Palestine/Israel. London, UK: Hawakati Publishing, 2023. $US 29.95.
Early in The Truth Shall Set You Free, the autobiography of the Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist, Jonathan Kuttab, he recalls a period of questioning his Christian faith as an undergraduate at Messiah College. He writes, “I felt it was important to question everything. . . . What was the truth about God, and was he just a figment of human imagination? For me, that question lay at the root of everything” (42, 44). That period of doubt is resolved as he works his way through Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. He concludes:
If we deny the existence of God, they said, there was no logically consistent basis for justifying morality and ethics. . . . Without God as the basis for morality, I realized, no one can explain why anyone should act “morally,” especially where such morality would not be in his own selfish, tribal or national interest. Without morality, the world would be a “dog eat dog” place (46).
At first glance, this reads as a conventional college crisis of faith, resolved through conventional 1970s texts. Read in the context of the book as a whole and the very unconventional life it recounts, it sounds different, like a philosophical gauntlet thrown down before the reader. Kuttab’s argument is as old as Socrates. The counter-argument—”might makes right,” or truth is just a function of power—is as old as Socrates’s most infamous antagonists. The counter-argument in this book is much more formidable. It is the Israeli state. Two hundred fifty pages later, at the end of Kuttab’s memoir, when the painstakingly deliberate bureaucratic brutality of Israeli apartheid has been recounted and the truths painstakingly uncovered by Kuttab have set very few people free, one recalls these pages.
Kuttab was fifteen when, in 1967, the Israeli army routed the Arab coalition and began the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Born the son of a Pentecostal minister in Bethlehem, he was raised to be apolitical, but the daily humiliations of life under occupation began to radicalize him. “I am sure I would have ended up killed or in prison had I remained there in those youthful years” (37). Instead, he had the opportunity to go to the US for university. At Messiah College in the early 1970s, evangelical students, raised to be apolitical like he was, were also sorting out their relationship to politics in the form of the anti-Vietnam war movement and civil rights.
Upon graduation, Kuttab attended law school at the University of Virginia, where, among his many Jewish friends, one became his roommate. After law school, he worked for a venerable Wall Street firm just long enough to pay off his student loans and then, in 1979, went home to the West Bank as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer. Upon his return, he discovered that in his absence Israel had been perfecting its “elaborate scheme for population control” (78). More and more Palestinian land was being stolen for settlements and an intricate legal matrix of permits and licenses was being established to justify it. His Messiah education had turned him into a committed pacifist, so violent resistance was no longer an option for him. While he had also left behind his apoliticism, Palestinian factions like the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other lesser-known organizations, were also not options for him. But he had a law degree, so along with two friends, Raja Shehadah and Charles Shammas, he started Al Haq (which can be translated both as “truth” and “right”’), the first Palestinian human rights organization and one of the first in the Arab world. He had found his life’s work: on one hand, documenting Israeli human rights abuses and violations of international law, and on the other, advocacy for the victims of the occupation in the Kafka-esque legal system.
The structure of what follows, as I read it, is roughly, the work of Al Haq and its reporting on human rights under the occupation (the truth); Kuttab’s law practice (where much of that truth is both confirmed and exposed as helpless); and the resistance movement known as the First Intifada (freedom). It ends with the failures of the peace treaty known as the Oslo Accords.
When Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, it had said both that “existing Jordanian laws would remain in effect unless changed by the Commander of the Area” and that the Commander would “exercise all legislative, judicial, and administrative functions” (89). When Al Haq began, it was faced with the challenge of sorting out, on one hand, the old Jordanian law and, on the other, the onslaught of more than one thousand military orders changing that law. With the encouragement of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), they published The West Bank and the Rule of Law, a detailed analysis of how those military orders, justified under international law as “necessary for security purposes,” instead made possible the theft of Palestinian land for the purpose of Israeli settlements. To this day, according to Israeli law professor, David Kretchmer, “Israel has never had a case where the Israeli High Court struck down a military order” (176).
Al Haq continued to publish reports, including two reports documenting the systematic Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners. Further investigation by Israeli journalists forces the government to acknowledge the use of torture—a significant victory, but one that is immediately followed by the Israeli High Court responding by legalizing torture (121-125).
Alongside such reports and armed with the knowledge in them, Kuttab also works as an attorney for Palestinian victims of the occupation. Because Kuttab has immersed himself in the labyrinth world of occupation law, because he remained independent of the various Palestinian political factions and because he learned Hebrew, he is a singularly well-suited person to take up this work. He is a talented and persistent attorney. Much of The Truth Shall Set You Free documents his dogged pursuit of justice in the Israeli High Court and, primarily, in the military courts. Especially in the latter, where the bulk of the work of many West Bank attorneys happens, “there is little or nothing you can do on a professional level” (181) because Palestinians can be “detained without charges for up to six months, renewable indefinitely at the discretion of the military governor” (191).
Many of these stories are gut-wrenching: the shepherd shot and left to bleed to death by settlers, the family flocks stolen (7-13), the father imprisoned because he can’t afford the $2000 fine levied upon him because his 11-year-old daughter allegedly threw stones at settler vehicles (176). Repeatedly, Kuttab shows how collective punishment is a key strategy of the occupation. (Right now, in the midst of Israeli bombardment of the Gaza strip, that serves as an important reminder that collective punishment is not just something they are resorting to in response to the October 7 Hamas attacks. It has been their modus operandi since the beginning of the occupation.)
Kuttab’s account of Palestinian nonviolent resistance, especially as it takes shape during the First Intifada is the one section of the book that is more encouraging. The First Intifada began in 1987 and lasted until the signing of the Oslo Accords six years later. It was a nonviolent movement of civil disobedience, protests, strikes, and boycotts that deserves much of the credit for forcing the Israelis to the negotiating table at Oslo. Nonviolent resistance in Palestine didn’t begin with the First Intifada. In some ways, the First Intifada is the flowering of work that Kuttab, and friends like Mubarak Awad and Naim Ateek, had been cultivating for years through the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence and the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Kuttab calls it “a vindication” of the work on nonviolence and human rights that folks like Awad, Ateek, himself, and others had been working on (231).
Then comes Oslo, where Kuttab had a front row seat because he was part of the team negotiating the legal aspects of the Interim Agreement. Those were heady, euphoric days, at least at first. The negotiations in the wake of Oslo were beset, in Kuttab’s telling, by two issues. The first was that they quickly became negotiations between the Israelis and the PLO. But the PLO was in exile, had relatively little involvement with the Intifada, and was sorely out of touch with the realities of life in the West Bank and Gaza. Second, while Palestinians generally accepted that the Interim Agreement they were negotiating was in fact interim, “we never knew if Israelis shared this vision or if they were simply trying to get the PLO to act as their long-term servant and sub-agent” (295). After the five-year interim period passed, their suspicions were confirmed: “Israel started to firm up its control over the West Bank and Gaza, and the hopes and euphoria of the peace process began to fade” (307). The Second Intifada, much more violent than the first, ensued. In many tellings, the Second Intifada derailed a final agreement. Kuttab makes clear that it comes after the Palestinian realization that they had been hoodwinked into a permanent “interim.”
“The truth shall set you free.” On one level, this can mean that all of Kuttab’s work was united under one goal, which he restates in various ways throughout the book: showing to the world, the Israelis, and the American Christians he got to know as a student the truth about the occupation obscured by mountains of propaganda. Once the right people know the truth, a free Palestine will ensue. In that sense, the truth hasn’t set anyone free.
On the other hand, it has taken the concentrated power of a totalitarian occupation, backed by the most powerful country in the world, to pummel the truth into submission. That may be its own kind of good news, a testimony to the power of truth to set free, if not yet. Meanwhile, the truth set Kuttab, and thousands of Palestinians, not just during the First Intifada, free to resist. Which may be exactly what Jesus meant by it in John 8.