ELECTRONIC INTIFADA – electronicintifada.net
The Electronic Intifada (EI), found at http://electronicIntifada.net, publishes news, commentary, analysis, and reference materials about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective.
PALESTINE CHRONICLE – palestinechronicle.com
FROM OCCUPIED PALESTINE – fromoccupiedpalestine.org
Independent online journal and resource archive of the conflict.
Israeli right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu, who stated that Israel did not “go far enough” in its 22-day invasion and massacre of 1400 Palestinians in Gaza earlier this year and who has never accepted even the possibility of an independent state for the Palestinians, is now the new prime minister. He was sworn in on April 1, after being asked in February by President Shimon Peres to form a coalition government.
Netanyahu’s government includes Ehud Barak, who as Defense Minister in the previous Labor Party government masterminded the war on Gaza. The Israeli Labor Party, which is supposedly a left-leaning party, is about as leftist as George Bush. To make matters worse, the new foreign minister is Avigdor Lieberman of the racist, anti-Arab Yisrael Beiteinu Party and one of Time magazine’s 100 “Most influential people in the world.” He is also a former member of the outlawed Kach Party, whose founder, Meir Kahane, advocated the forcible expulsion of all Palestinians from all of historical Palestine. Time failed to mention this aspect of his history.
This triumvirate represents what will be undoubtedly be a continuation of previous policies of ‘population transfer’ and forced exile, a government determined policy to push more and more Palestinians off their land in the 1948 territories as well as the West Bank and Gaza. There are also dozens of laws in the 1948 territories that explicitly and clearly discriminate against the Palestinians who live there, especially in the criminal justice system, but also in regards to civil restrictions on buying land, building on already owned property, and even marriage.
In his first crack at prime minister a few years back, Netanyahu expanded illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and has promised to continue to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem through continued land expropriation and settlement-building in the present and future as well. According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Netanyahu has also agreed to initiate legislation to deprive Palestinians of their citizenship and other rights in the 1948 territories, in support of Lieberman’s stance that all Palestinians who live there must sign a ‘loyalty oath’ to Israel.
Although this new government has leaders who are terrorists, war criminals and ultra-right wing racists, it is Zionism and the entire conceptualization of the state of Israel that should be indicted and condemned. A state for Jews only, a state that was formed by expelling hundreds of thousands of people, a state that makes laws to uphold the supremacy of Jews over other religious groups, a state that violates international humanitarian law every minute of every day, is a manufactured state, is a state that has no right to exist.
With the economic, military and political backing of imperial Great Britain, and against the popular sentiments of tens of millions of Arabs, Israel became a Jewish state in 1948, established on 78% of historic Palestine (even though Jews owned only 6% of the land), and forced into exile over 750,000 Palestinians. These Palestinians and their descendants make up the largest refugee population in the world, with estimates varying from 4.7 to 6.2 million people.
At the time of the founding of Israel, the most famous slogan of the Zionists was that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land,” as if the Palestinians had never existed. Zionist militias, armed and protected by the British, terrorized Palestinian cities and villages and forced the mass exile of 1947-48 that the Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe.
This political movement, Zionism, sought to bring Jews from all over the world to settle in and colonize Palestine as a state exclusively for Jews. Britain, and later the U.S., have unequivocally supported Israel, considering it their settler-colonial outpost in the Arab world and Middle East. And leaders of these Zionist terrorist groups became future Israeli government officials, like former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir, who believed in the concept of Greater Israel – that all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the territories occupied in 1967, belonged to the Jews as well.
For 61 years, the state of Israel and the Zionism it represents have repudiated the national rights of Palestinians to self determination, return and independence. The Palestinians constitute a nation, one that has been oppressed for decades and one that continues to resist Israeli Zionist racism.
Resistance to South Africa’s apartheid system was the most correct and righteous struggle of its day. At that time, you would have been on the wrong side of morality, justice and history if you challenged the South African liberation movement’s demand to absolutely destroy and shatter apartheid. Why is Zionist Israel any different? Especially this new government? It is correct to boycott Israel, to divest from it and to push for sanctions against it. And you will find yourself on the wrong side of history again if you challenge the Palestinian liberation movement’s demand to dismantle Zionism, racism and the state of Israel. This is the real road to peace and justice for all people who live in historic Palestine and the entire region.
Nov.10
Nov.8
The Guardian of Zionism: The “Liberal” Press and its Missing Contexts
Nov.5
Bush, America and the Middle East by Ali Abunimah
Nov.5
Oct.26
Ali Qased, long-time activist and organizer for Palestinian national rights, died in the early hours of Sunday, April 3rd, 2005, after spending nearly two weeks in a New Jersey Hospital. He had been battling health problems for the last three years, and finally succumbed to complications from heart failure at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Patterson, New Jersey. He was 62.
Qased was born in a village near Ramallah, Ein Yabrood, on May 27th, 1942, six years before Al-Nakba, or “the Catastrophe,” when over 750,000 Palestinians were driven off their land by European Jewish settler-colonialists and their British allies. That moment in the history of the Palestinian people stayed with Qased his whole life, and prompted him to dedicate his political work to fighting for the Right of Return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
As a teenage activist, Qased was forced into exile to Egypt, where he studied and gained a degree in economics and political science from the American University of Cairo. Egypt was also the place where he became influenced by the ideas of Jamal Abdel-Nasser and ultimately joined the ideologically-similar Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). After moving to Puerto Rico, he also gained a Master’s Degree from the American University of Puerto Rico.
A leader in the Palestinian and Arab community of New York, Qased also organized Palestinians in Ohio, New Jersey, and Algeria, where he lived for eight years. But it is his work in the United States that will be missed the most. He influenced activists all across the country, and will always be remembered for his strong will, principled stances, and mentorship of two generations of Palestinian and Palestinian-American organizers and activists. Adherents of his ideas and views can be found in many cities in the U.S., from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Youngstown, Ohio, to Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, and New York.
His ideas were militant and revolutionary, but grounded in a brilliant understanding of community organizing—meeting people at all different political levels, and helping to move them forward to advanced views of the world. He obviously saw Israel and Zionism as the enemies of his people, but also recognized the roles that U.S. imperialism and Arab reactionary regimes play in the repression of Palestinian national rights. And most importantly, he was an internationalist, supporting national liberation and workers’ struggles all across the globe, including the U.S.
One of his protégés commented on an irony associated with his death: “Ali was a man who spent his whole life fighting for Palestinian national rights, especially the Right of Return. But he’ll be buried in New Jersey, while American Jews from Brooklyn have the ‘right’ to be buried in Jerusalem, the capital of his nation, Palestine. He lived and died in exile [barred by Israel from returning to Palestine], like most Palestinians, as a proud representative of the heroism and steadfastness of an entire people.”
Qased is survived by his strong and loving wife of 29 years, Fatma; four daughters, Arwa, Khulood, Rama, and Reem; two sons, Jamil and Hakam; one granddaughter, Fatma; and three grandsons, Ali, Wajih, and Adam. He is loved by many around the world, and will be greatly missed.
Your Help is Needed!
Dear Friends,
We write to you from Palestine at this very difficult time. We the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC) are in desperate need of your help and your kindness. Our lives have been severely limited by the Israeli occupation. It seems that they do everything they can to make life impossible.
Everything is disrupted. Many places of work have been damaged by demolition and people have lost their jobs. The ever growing numbers of closure points make movement to and from work very slow. Food is not reaching our communities in sufficient quantities. Parents are unable to feed their children. Some schools are occupied by the Israeli military.
Our programs serve children and women. Things are always worst of all for the children. They suffer from malnutrition, from nightmares, and in some areas from retardation due to malnutrition of mothers during pregnancy.
The UPWC runs approximately 33 daycare centers and kindergartens serving over 1,500 children. They are now in danger of not being able to remain open because of an unusual emergency situation. Our funds are depleted.
Up till now and for the last 6 years we have been able to cover deficits by donations, but this year and especially these two months the regular donors respond to our requests saying that they are more interested in projects that deal elections process. But, no one is even sure that elections will indeed take place. We all wonder how we can empower a woman to share in elections while we take away her ability to feed her children. We wonder why the policies of the USA to stimulate democratic reform neglect children’s basic rights to security and education.
Many families have lost their breadwinners. Some are unemployed, some in jail, some handicapped by the ongoing violence, and some are underemployed. Those who work across the green line in Israel do not earn enough to feed their families. In many cases, the women have had to find work as well. In some cases they are the only bread winners.
We, the Union of Palestinian women’s Committees, a volunteer non-profit grass-roots organization, employ 50 women as teachers in our daycare centers and kindergartens. All of them are the only breadwinners in their families and have no other avenue of employment. We are unable to pay them for the coming month. This is devastating for them and for their children. Our women are very poor, but they are very much respected by their communities, and most of them, after teaching the children in the morning, spend the afternoon as volunteers helping to empower women in small, poor and neglected villages and refugee camps.
The stories of the women who work with UPWC are heart breaking. We have three teachers in Beit Foureek (Nablus area) who have 6 relatives including husbands who have been killed during the last year, and what is more disturbing, they have 22 members of their family who have been put in prison by the Israelis on flimsy pretenses.
Our women deal with a lot of pressure and are heroic.
We have a very special program for the children. We teach them some important basics. We try to give them a meal and help them find some safety and comfort. We want kindergartens to be a safe haven and a place of sunshine for them. We are suffering over the thought of having that bit of safety and peace taken away from them. We fight hard to maintain our capacity when we need to double and triple in size to serve the unimaginable needs arising from the violence of occupation.
We have been unable to supply the basic materials for our schools. We have a special curriculum embodied in a program that we created. But right now we are unable to pay for new copies of these books which see heavy use in our schools.
We try to generate funds for some of our expenses by charging fees for our daycare and kindergartens. These are symbolic and equal to 5 to 10 US dollars. But when we ask the parents, we find that on the next day many children do not come back to school. So we send the teacher who is from the same village to bring them back because our Priority is the child not the money. Khiam, for example, is the mother of three of our children. Her husband is a worker who lost his job because of the Apartheid Wall divided him from his job. They cannot afford the school fees. Khiam is too pained to say that she can’t pay the fees and thus keeps the children at home until we send someone to fetch them. When we have them back, their smiles at our schools are as bright as sunshine.
These fees, in any case, merely pay for 10% of our book costs which amount to $8,000 annually for all our daycare and kindergartens. We used to take this money from the leftovers of projects held by donors in Palestine like CRS or UNDP. It used to help us to decrease our deficits. But now, even this money has dried up.
An emergency situation exists and the Apartheid wall is strangling us every day a bit more. Mrs. Nadia T. director of our school program is unable to travel properly between towns and villages to examine the schools. Her work has been slowed immensely and made very frustrating, yet she persists.
Please, would your organization consider sending an emergency donation so that we might help the most helpless of society in a situation of war and occupation?
Our bank account is at the The international Bank of Palestine, Albireh branch, under the name of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, Account number 114001.
Maha Nassar
Chairperson of Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, UPWC
Al Bireh (Ramallah) Palestine, P.O. Box: 4112
telefax.: 00972-2-2987252
e-mail: mahanassar@yahoo.com / upwc@palnet.com
web-site: www.upalwc.org
Palestine Solidarity Group – Chicago
4/16/05
Sumoud (http://sumoud.tao.ca/), a political prisoner solidarity group in Toronto, sponsored a North American speaking tour of Palestinian ex-political prisoners and activists from Occupied Palestine in eight cities in the US and Canada, making its Chicago stop on April 9-11. The tour participants were from Addameer (www.addameer.org), a Palestinian prisoners’ support and human rights association in Ramallah. The Addameer representatives were Sahar Francis, a Palestinian lawyer who has worked for many years with Palestinian prisoners, and Akram Al Ayasa, an ex-political prisoner and former president of the Bethlehem University Student Council, who had been arrested seven times from 1976-1990 by the Israeli occupation forces for organizing student movement activities and civil demonstrations against the occupation.
The Chicago leg of the tour was sponsored by a broad spectrum of organizations that illustrates the support that the political prisoner campaign has generated in its early launch. These included the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Arab American Action Network, the National Boricua Human Rights Network, the First United Methodist Church of Downers Grove, the Coalition of African, Asian, European, and Latino Immigrants of Illinois, the International Solidarity Movement-Chicago Chapter, and Not In My Name. At each of the events—a meeting with members of the National Lawyers Guild, an Arabic-language presentation to Chicago’s southwest side Arab American community at the Arab Community Center, an appearance with church-based activists at the First United Methodist Church in Downers Grove, and finally, an inspired discussion with the Puerto Rican community at the Café Batey Urbano in Humbolt Park—Francis and Al Ayasa were able to promote the message of raising awareness and solidarity around the issue of Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli occupation jails and to connect this struggle to the struggles against the oppression of political prisoners throughout the world.
The National Lawyers Guild heard Al Ayasa speak of being arrested multiple times for non-militant, student demonstrations as the Palestinians’ rights to protest the injustice of the occupation was ignored; mass arrests and detentions that happened even before the first Intifada; an Israeli “defense force” that arrested him the first time for protesting the killing of two Palestinian girls by settlers driving by the school; the administrative detention that came with the first Intifada, as the large numbers of Palestinians who had come out to protest the occupation could only be detained by arrest without evidence and without trial; and his final arrest and detention at a military camp/prison far into the desert near Egypt, where family visits were not allowed and visits by lawyers were difficult if not impossible.
Francis discussed the difficulties of practicing law under a contradictory and vindictive system that treats Palestinians as common criminals, but under a military court. Lawyers have difficulty even visiting clients, sometimes having to wait as long as six months for a visit, or a year to get a court date. Especially during this most recent Intifada, which started in September of 2000, lawyers were increasingly targeted for harassment, some even accused of passing information about the resistance to their clients (even though they were separated by a glass wall during visits). During the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike in August of 2004, lawyers were accused of passing information, and helping to coordinate, between clients in different prisons, because the Israeli prison authorities could not comprehend how the hunger strike, a protest against prison conditions and violations of human rights and international law, had so quickly and organically spread throughout all the prisons in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and 1948 Palestine.
At the Arab Community Center and the First United Methodist Church in Downers Grove, a film produced by Defense of Children International-Palestine Section (http://www.dci-pal.org/english/info/aboutus.cfm), a Ramallah-based children’s support group, provided vivid case studies of Fida, arrested at 15 and kept in jail for two years, followed by 18 months of probation, who was beaten in jail as she resisted her jailors’ demands to change her name (it means “sacrifice for the homeland”); and Rakan, arrested at 17, joking with his parents after his release because “he smells like cigarettes,” and in the next breath, talking about the beatings and torture that prompted two suicide attempts. Francis explained that the UN and international conventions define a juvenile as being under the age of 18, while Israel defines a juvenile as anyone under 16—allowing them to detain and jail many more Palestinian youth. She made it very clear that in terms of prison conditions, treatment, and torture, the Israeli prison authorities draw no distinctions between adults and juveniles.
At Café Batey Urbano, both Francis and Al Ayasa were inspired by the stories of Carlos Alberto Torres and Oscar Lopez Rivera, Puerto Rican political prisoners who have been unjustly imprisoned in the US for 25 years. Al Ayasa spoke of the impact prison life has on the whole family, describing his own son calling him “uncle,” not being able to reconcile the photo of his father in prison with the man who had come home to him; as well as the economic difficulties that are caused by the imprisonment of the eldest son or the breadwinner in a family. And hearing about the Puerto Rican prisoners helped Al Ayasa recall some of his comrades, who are still in jail 20 years after his first arrest.
To an audience of Palestinian, Puerto Rican, Irish Republican, American Jewish, anti-war, and anti-racist activists, Francis appealed for solidarity with the movement to free Palestinian political prisoners, and all prisoners who resist occupation and colonialism. Putting this appeal into action after the presentation, the whole audience went across the street to visit the prison art exhibit of Rivera and Torres, commemorating the 25th year of their incarceration.
After leaving Chicago, the two continued to San Francisco and the Al-Awda (Right of Return) Convention in Los Angeles; and will conclude the tour this week in Toronto and Montreal. The impressive turnout at their events in Chicago demonstrated that a broad section of people from many Chicago communities oppose the occupation of Palestine, and the denial of human rights and political status to those who would resist.
The Sumoud and Addameer tour is only the beginning of an international campaign to free all Palestinian political prisoners. By the time this article is published, there will have been demonstrations around the world outside of the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), commemorating Palestinian Prisoners’ Day on April 17th—to demand that the ICRC, the only organization allowed access to Israeli prisons, take effective and public action to end the practice of Israel’s incarceration of Palestinian prisoners in areas outside of the occupied territories, to end Israel’s widespread use of torture on Palestinian detainees, to ensure that sick and injured prisoners are provided adequate and appropriate medical treatment, and to end all violations of the prisoners’ rights.
By Hatem Abudayyeh
Before the death of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat on November 11th, 2004, there had been an enormous amount of speculation raised, and analysis offered, concerning the issue of succession. And now that the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), Rawhi Fattouh, has been named the interim president, the speculation will continue for at least 60 more days.
Arafat was a revered leader in the hearts and minds of Palestinians. His iconic stature as one of the original leaders of the Palestinian government-in-exile, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Palestinian National Movement (PNM) in general, cannot be denied. And he died as so many Palestinians before him, on foreign soil. From Gaza to Kuwait to Jordan to Lebanon to Tunisia to Ramallah and then finally to Paris, Arafat embodied the essence of the Palestinian exile.
But many believe that he never should have returned to Ramallah. The Palestinian Intifada that had begun in 1987 was supported and led by the PLO, and was gaining momentum and wide international support from people and nations that supported Palestinian self-determination. A mass revolt that included all of the different sectors of Palestinian society, the Intifada was on the verge of forcing the Israeli/American hand, but that uprising ended when news came from Norway that Arafat and the PLO had brokered a deal.
The Oslo Accords, which he supported and signed, allowed him, in 1994, to make that infamous trip from Tunis back to Palestine, more specifically the West Bank. Many other senior PLO leaders refused to follow. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the entity formed at Oslo, named him its President, and he was officially elected by popular vote in 1996.
That he was legally elected is undeniable. That the PA became the representative body of the Palestinian people is another issue. The Oslo accords were negotiated in secret, rejected by the bulk of the PLO, and prompted the resignation of most of the PLO’s Executive Committee. The PA was created by forces outside of the Palestinian National Movement, and was only able to gain legitimacy and prominence because of Arafat and a small cabal of his associates. These elements negotiated Oslo in secret, ignoring the fact that the PLO had institutionalized an internal, democratic structure that did not allow any one sector of its leadership (in this case, Arafat and his Fatah organization) to negotiate, unilaterally, on its behalf.
Overnight, the PLO became extinct, rendered superfluous by Oslo and the American-Israeli support of the “peace process,” especially since most of the original PLO factions refused to join the PA or enter the West Bank and Gaza. Understanding the mistakes of Oslo will help in understanding the current Palestinian, post-Arafat situation.
A new reality was established at Oslo, a reality that did not correspond with the real political, social, and economic conditions of the majority of the Palestinian people. Dr. Adel Samara, one of the foremost economists in Palestine, called Oslo “peace for capital.” He meant that it was a peace treaty signed by the ruling class of the Palestinians, for their economic and financial benefit alone.
In the ten years since Oslo, Israel has doubled its illegal, Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land, even though the accords stated that settlements would be frozen. Land expropriations and home demolitions continued unabated, as the Israelis stole acres and acres in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Palestinian political prisoners remained in jail, treated to inhumane and state-sanctioned human rights violations, including torture. And Palestinian refugees, over 4 million in number, remained destitute and forgotten in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and within the occupied territories. Israel broke withdrawal agreements five times, according to British journalist Robert Fisk, and it succeeded in forcing the Palestinians (the PA) themselves to administer the occupation.
So the “state-building” experiment went awry, and the “statesman” Arafat went back to being a “terrorist” as another Palestinian Intifada erupted in September of 2000, after he had refused to give in to US/Israeli pressure to concede on the issues of the Right of Return and Jerusalem. Non-PLO formations such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad had already begun to gain popular support in the territories, and Oslo imploded as it was destined to, because the United States, Israel, and the PA tried to impose a solution on the Palestinian people, a solution that was, and still is, antithetical to the goals and objectives developed decades ago by the Palestinian National Movement.
The PNM has always stated, very clearly, these goals and objectives: the unequivocal Right of Return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, an independent state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, and self determination for the Palestinian people. And the PNM has always had an entity to uphold these goals and objectives, and work to achieve them—the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Formed in 1964, and led since 1969 by Arafat, the PLO was always recognized as the sole, legitimate representative of all the Palestinian people, including those living in the 1948 territories, the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, and the Diaspora. The PLO had legislative, judicial, and executive branches, and helped establish democratic, popular committees that represented women, youth, students, workers, and peasants—all the social sectors of Palestinian society. The PLO also had a military component, as all national liberation movements resisting occupation must, but the bulk of its work was organizing (general strikes, demonstrations, civil disobedience, etc.) against Israeli occupation and US support of Israel. The PLO had members all over the world, and came to embody—in the same way as the Vietnamese, the El Salvadorans, the Nicaraguans, the Cubans, and the South Africans, among many others—resistance to colonialism and US imperialism.
As the Intifada has made quite clear, the Palestinians refuse to give up their inalienable human, civil, and national rights; they refuse to continue to be occupied; they refuse the imposition of solutions by the Israelis and the Americans. And now that Arafat is gone, they will refuse a Hamid Karzai or Ayad Allawi-type leader appointed in his stead. The PLO is still the only relevant institution that would guarantee a collective, unified, and democratic leadership of the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. Besides some of the political organizations that originally formed it, the Islamic organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, will be equitably represented there as well. Because, despite ideological differences, all of the National and Islamic forces agree on the basic goals of the Palestinian National Movement.
The Israelis have tried their best to wipe out the top leadership of Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP, the second largest faction within the original PLO), respectively, knowing that the PA has done its bidding in the past, and would still be the easiest entity to deal with in the future. They fear the very concept of the PLO, which is why they and the US continuously speak of a Palestinian “partner for peace,” or “moderate element,” someone that they can control and dominate.
A united Palestinian leadership that includes all of the National and Islamic organizations cannot be controlled or dominated. It would have an authentic mandate from the Palestinian people, which would be impossible for Abu Mazen, Abu Ala’a, Nabil Sha’ath, or any other of the Western-nominated “successors” to Arafat. The Palestinians do not need “elections” in the same way that the US has elections. The PLO was a democratic institution with an internal democracy that made for collective decision-making processes, and it can be that again. Israel and the US cannot force a form of government on the Palestinians, because the Palestinians have learned from Arafat’s most pronounced mistake—that they are not in the “state-building” stage of their history, but still in the national liberation stage. They are a nation without a state, and must continue to resist occupation, and struggle to build that state, within the framework of a united front of political, military, and diplomatic leadership.
Arafat led the PLO, Fatah, and the PA with political brilliance and an incredible force of personality. He was able to use Fatah’s influence among the masses to protect him from the mistakes and corruption of the PA. Without him, there is real potential for the poor workers and peasants within Fatah, and other political organizations, to revolt against the PA and their ruling class “peace for capital.” More dangerous is the possibility that the PA’s armed security forces begin vying and fighting for control of the Authority, prompted by Israeli and American pressure on some elements of the PA to accept more and more concessions in return for their endorsement and support.
The Palestinian situation cannot be separated from the US war on Iraq and its plans for economic and political hegemony in the Arab World. The strong Iraqi resistance in Falluja and the troubled American occupation of all of Iraq makes it ever more important for the US to attempt to quiet Palestinian resistance as well. Continued revolution in Palestine will make the US’ imperialist plans even more difficult, so the Americans must use all of the power at their disposal to appoint a Palestinian that they can “trust” and control. The reintroduction of the PLO into the Palestinian national liberation movement will keep these scenarios from materializing.
Arafat’s legacy could have been secure, as the revolutionary fighter and leader of the PLO. But his legacy was tarnished by Oslo—tarnished by the unilateral move to “state-building,” and ignoring the fact that the Israelis were not interested in an independent state for the Palestinian people. In 1993, the Palestinians were still in the national liberation stage of their history. And in 2004, the national liberation struggle and the Palestine Liberation Organization is still the answer.
The US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) and the Palestine Solidarity Group (PSG) – Chicago combined to organize a national two week tour of the Addameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association that recently completed after stops beginning in Chicago and through Milwaukee, San Francisco, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Youngstown, OH, Detroit, College Park, MD, Washington, DC, Columbus and Portland.
To support Addameer’s campaign against administrative detention go to www.addameer.info for campaign materials including presentations, case studies, and videos.
On August 28th, 2004, hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners broke their hunger strike after Israel decided to discuss some of their demands, eventually agreeing to some of them. Since the end of the hunger strike the world has moved on, once again ignoring the suffering of thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Ignorance of the plight of Palestinians not only allows the number of political prisoners to increase with every Israeli incursion into the occupied territories, but also allows the conditions in which they are held to continue to deteriorate.
The massive Israeli military operation against the Palestinian Intifada, which began in September of 2000, has resulted in the killing of more than 3,000 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians, women and children. Countless tens of thousands more have been injured. But in the midst of all the bloodshed, the statistic that often gets lost or forgotten is the number of Palestinian civilians that get swooped up in raids and end up spending desolate months or years in Israeli prisons and detention centers.
While it is often said that the entire Palestinian population is being held prisoner, human rights groups report that there are currently about 7,500 being held in inhumane conditions within the physical confines of Israeli prisons. Over 750 of these are administrative detainees, held without charge or trial for indefinite periods of time. Three hundred and eighty of the political prisoners are aged 18 and under, 78 of whom are 16 years old and under. There are 106 Palestinian female political prisoners, 20 of whom are mothers and 2 of whom have given birth while in prison, with their children remaining in captivity with them. Of the total 7,500 political prisoners, 3,800 are being held in civil prisons, with the remaining in Israeli military detention centers and prison camps.
The hunger strike ended when the Israeli authorities agreed to some of the prisoners’ demands, which represented only the most basic rights any prisoner – political or not – should receive. The end to treatment such as arbitrary and indiscriminate use of torture, firing of tear gas into prisoners’ cells and prison courtyards, humiliating strip searches in full view of other prisoners and guards each time they enter or exit their cells, solitary confinement for months and even years, confining women and children with adult male prisoners, withholding or delaying medication and treatment to sick detainees, and maintaining prisoners on near starvation diets that are insufficient to sustain health, are all required by international law, and not just random demands.
Only with the continued intense spotlight of the international community, will the Israeli government follow through on granting these basic rights.
These demands are basic and needed, but should also include the call for ending administrative detention (which B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports as making “a charade out of the entire system of procedural safeguards in both domestic and international law regarding the right to liberty and due process”), the ongoing use of torture (numerous human rights organizations have documented that, despite a 1999 ruling by the Israeli High Court of Justice against the practice, the use of torture in Israel is still widespread), and the incarceration of women and children without adequate medical and humane treatment (women and children are often held in the same prisons, and even the same cells, as adult males, and receive the same poor medical and health care).
Every American concerned about human rights – regardless of their views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – should be outraged by the condition of Palestinians held in prison by Israeli authorities. By the silence of the U.S. government, it is providing tacit support for the practices of administrative detention, the use of torture against Palestinians, and the imprisonment of women and children by the Israeli Government. The U.S. is responsible for much in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially since over 4 billion dollars in U.S. tax dollars are sent to Israel annually. So it must insure that Palestinian political prisoners are treated humanely by Israel, and ultimately released.
As you read about the violence and casualties inflicted by the Israelis in Palestine, also think about the thousands of additional Palestinian men, women and children being held in Israeli jails as political prisoners and the conditions under which they suffer.
ADDAMEER – addameer.info
Palestinian non-governmental civil institution that focuses on human rights issues for political prisoners.
Sumoud – sumoud.tao.ca
A Political Prisoner Solidarity Group
