Nablus -

"Stand on the corner of the dream and fight.. the dream does not die and is not defeated by the constants."

Perhaps the sentence of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, from his poem “It Was What Will Be,” approaches the brown young man and the stubborn resistance Zakaria Al-Zubaidi.

It is as if the poetic text incites Al-Zubaidi and his companions to do anything, as long as the goal is legitimate, and as long as the means are available, even if this was embodied by a research attempt initiated by Zakaria Al-Zubaidi before his arrest and dropped in reality by escaping from the prison of his occupier.

Under the title "The Hunter and the Dragon... The Hunt for the Palestinian Experience from 1968-2018" Al-Zubaidi started a master's thesis, which he was unable to complete and discuss, according to the supervisor, Abdel Rahim Al-Sheikh, Professor of Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, due to his arrest in late February 2019.

In the thesis project truncated by arrest, Zakaria (46 years old) assumed the character of "the dragon", derived from an ancient legend in which the dragon prevails over the hunter after a long and difficult hunt.

In fact, it embodies his condition and makes his personal experience a reality, according to his friend Jamal Huwail, and his comrade in the resistance during the battle of Jenin camp (2002).

The dragon is victorious

Hawail told Al Jazeera Net that he and Zakaria walked together, as he entrusted them with resistance and struggle to document the sacrifices of Jenin camp through two master's thesis;

The first was for him personally, and he called it “The Battle of Jenin Camp… Formation and Legend,” and the second by Zubeidi, entitled “The Hunter and the Dragon… The Hunt in the Palestinian Experience.”

They agreed that the two would write a joint book, "The Chaser No. 1".

Al-Zubaidi's thesis, according to Huwail, would mainly focus on documenting the experience of Palestinian persecution over a period of nearly 50 years, as its theoretical framework touched on the historical pursuit of Palestinians, and dropped and documented his personal experience so that every resistance could guide it in facing the occupation and escaping from it.

It also deals with the development of the occupation and its intelligence services, security and technology, and with the material assistance of "spies", in return, the fighter was able, through several factors, to hide.

Huwail says that "the best heroes and fighters are those who continue to chase more, and inflict more losses by occupation, and not chase for the sake of pursuit," inspired by Al-Zubaidi's ideas.

Huwail confirms that Zakaria’s message was actually prepared without being able to discuss it, while he discussed his message in 2011, which documented the sacrifices of Jenin camp before the 2002 invasion, while Zakaria dealt with the camp’s resilience after that date.

Jamal Huwail, the leader of Fatah and a companion of Zakaria al-Zubaidi (Al-Jazeera)

Leave two lines.

And he added, "We were joking with Zakaria and telling him we were afraid that you would be arrested before discussing the letter, so he would say leave two lines for the dragon to write soon," meaning to the stalker.

And Zakaria is "great as the greatness of his people," says Huwail, who is one of the rare youths with sacrifice and redemption. His father, mother and brother are martyrs. His five brothers were arrested and distinguished by the diversity of their political affiliations.

And he continues, "A high-ranking Palestinian leader asked me why Zakaria had shot before his recent arrest at the occupation near Ramallah?", I replied briefly, "because he is Zakaria."

And when a foreign solidarity activist, who was visiting the Freedom Theater in Jenin camp, wanted to write his story, Zakaria replied to her, saying, "You will not appreciate it because you will not believe it." .

In late 2007, Zakaria al-Zubaidi, as a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Book (the military wing of Fatah movement), handed over his weapons, hoping to pardon him and other resistance fighters according to an agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.

He was detained inside the Muqata headquarters (the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority) in the city of Jenin before receiving a partial and then a full exemption. He moved to the city of Ramallah, and was elected as a member of the Revolutionary Council of the Fatah movement. Despite that, he did not drop resistance to the occupation from his agenda.


continuous resistor

The leader Hawail describes him as a "continuous resistance" who only thinks about the occupation and confronting it, and says that his family lived an unstable life, as they had not met once since 1991 at one table together, and he knew about his father "making the first local weapon (pistol) using pipes, while his mother She used to monitor and clean the weapons of the resistance fighters.

As for his grandfather (Abu Samir), he escaped from the Israeli Shata prison in 1959, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, and there is no place in the body of Zakaria or all of his brothers without a bullet wound or the explosion of an Israeli mine, as a result of many assassination attempts.

To the Jenin camp, where the Zakaria family lives, we moved with a question about the man's secret and stubbornness in the resistance to his former captive brother Yahya Al-Zubaidi. He responded with bold questions and said, "Has the Palestinian people gained their freedom? Did they obtain an independent and sovereign state? And how do you explain that we are still in the last occupied country in the world?" 21st century?

Yahya told Al Jazeera Net, Zakaria is a stubborn fighter because he is a demander for freedom and does not want death for himself or his people.

“Whoever demands freedom becomes the strongest and stubborn man in the world because he demands a legitimate right guaranteed by all heavenly books and all international laws, and for this people will continue until they attain their freedom.”


The good student and the hard chaser

His classmate Bader Othman says on his Facebook page, "I and Zakaria al-Zubaidi were in several courses together. We were finishing a master's degree majoring in Contemporary Arab Studies from Birzeit University... Zakaria did not finish the "Arabs and Modernity" course, as he was arrested in Ramallah about the middle of that semester. While he finished, the previous semester, the course "The Political Geography of the Arab World", with distinction, and in that particular course we used to hear the stories of the Jenin camp in the second intifada, the experience of the Freedom Theater, and much more.

And his colleague adds, "In about the same chapter, we started preparing the message proposal, and we needed two different duets, the duality of the hunter and the dragon for him... He was writing about the experience of the chase."