Every Palestinian act is ‘terrorism’


April 23, 2017
Sarah Benton


Demonstrators take part in a rally in support of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails, in Ramallah, April 17, 2017. Photo by Mohamad Torokman/ Reuters

Palestinian Prisoners Hunger Strike Continues

By James Zogby, Huffington Post
April 22, 2017

One thousand five hundred Palestinian prisoners have been on a hunger strike for almost a week now. They are refusing sustenance in an effort to improve the deplorable conditions faced by the nearly 6,500 Palestinians who are currently imprisoned in Israel.

On the day before the strike began, the action’s leader, Marwan Barghouti, published an op-ed in the “International New York Times.” It was an elegantly-written piece in which Barghouti laid out the conditions in Israel’s prisons and the demands of the strikers. These demands include: more regular family visits, better health care, an end to solitary confinement, and end to administrative detention (a practice in which Israel jails Palestinians for prolonged periods without charges or trial—there are currently 500 such detainees), and installing public telephones enabling prisoners to have monitored calls with their families.

Barghouti began his article noting that he has been in prison for 15 years during which time “I have been both a witness to and a victim of Israel’s illegal system of mass arrests and the ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners”. He concluded his opening paragraph saying “After exhausting all other options, I decided there was no other choice but to resist these abuses by going on a hunger strike”.

As one of the co-founders of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, I have long been acquainted with Israel’s “justice system”. Since most Palestinians have been convicted based on confessions obtained under duress, international human rights organizations have condemned Israel’s violations of international law and the lack of due process afforded to prisoners. Over 80% of all arrested Palestinians have been refused the right to legal counsel until after they have been subjected to prolonged and often abusive interrogation. In his article, Barghouti describes these abuses that he and other prisoners have been forced to endure, noting that the equivalent of 40% of Palestine’s male population have been jailed by Israel.


Israeli right-wingers goad the hunger-strikers in Ofer prison by setting up a barbecue outside on April 20, 2017. Photo by AFP

The Israeli government’s response to the article and to the strike, itself, have been revealingly characteristic of their modus operandi.

Because the Times initially described Barghouti as a Member of the Palestinian Parliament and a leader, Israel launched a campaign forcing the editors to change their description to note that Barghouti had been convicted of murder and membership in a terrorist organization.

What Israel did not mention was the fact that Barghouti’s arrest, trial, and conviction were denounced by the Swiss-based Inter-Parliamentary Union as being “a violation of international law” and having “failed to meet fair-trial standards”. The IPU concluded that “Barghouti’s guilt has not been established”.

But when Israel is on the war-path in an effort to discredit criticism, facts don’t matter. Instead they make do with bullying threats to force their target into submission. They called the op-ed “journalist terrorism”; accused the Times of “media terrorism”; called Barghouti’s piece “fake news” that was “full of lies”. Former Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, called for an investigation to see who at the Times was responsible for getting and publishing the article. One Knesset Member went so far as to suggest that Israel might close the Times’ Israel bureau.

Israel also ratcheted up the rhetoric against Barghouti and the other strikers. Despite the fact that most of Palestinians are being held on political charges (and many are detainees who haven’t been charged with any crimes)—all were hysterically denounced as “loathsome murderers” and “dangerous terrorists”.

In the end, the Times relented and changed their description of Barghouti to meet Israel’s demands.

Reflecting on this Israeli bullying campaign, Haaretz’s insightful columnist, Chemi Shalev* termed the entire effort a “ritual of diversion and denial”. By focusing on the description of Barghouti and not the content of his piece, Israel was able to “accentuate the insignificant at the expense of the essence”. “First”, he wrote, “you manufacture righteous indignation over a minor fault…then you assault the newspaper…and cast doubt on its motives…In this way the Israeli public is absolved of the need to actually contend with the gist of the article…In this way, anyone who wants to address Barghouti’s claims…is seen as collaborating with a terrorist and enabling terror”.

What Israel will not acknowledge and is attempting to obfuscate is that their treatment of Palestinians is deplorable

As for the strikers, Israel promised a harsh response and no negotiations. Barghouti and other “ring leaders” have been placed under solitary confinement. One Israeli minister said that Barghouti should have been “executed”, while another said that Israel should treat their prisoners the way Hamas treats its captives. And while a law is being advanced to allow the government to force-feed prisoners, Foreign Minister Lieberman said that the government should be firm even if it means letting prisoners die. At the same time, a not so subtle media campaign has been launched to discredit Barghouti as a political opportunist who is only doing this to advance his political career and to sabotage the “peace process” (as if one actually exists).

What Israel will not acknowledge and is attempting to obfuscate is that their treatment of Palestinians is deplorable. Their 50 year long illegal occupation has driven a captive people to resist their systematic oppressive violence. In the process, Israel terms every Palestinian response “terrorism”. Whether throwing rocks at checkpoints, boycotting Israeli products or writing op-eds and going on a hunger strike—all become “terrorist” acts.

There are, to be sure, horrific acts of real terror that have been committed by Palestinians and these must be condemned and punished. But even here Israel is not blameless. Doesn’t bombing civilian targets and killing scores of civilians or systematically starving Gaza into submission qualify as terror? And doesn’t confiscating land, demolishing homes, and centuries-old olive orchards also fit the definition of terrorism?

At the root of all the violence is the persistence of an inhumane occupation and the evil that results from it.

What should be noted, however, is that like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a mass prisoners’ strike is an inherently non-violent protest. This, Israel refuses to accept. Because it can admit no wrong-doing and because of its obsessive need to control all aspects of Palestinian life, any resistance becomes a threat and, therefore, an “act of terror” that must be punished and snuffed out. It is this behaviour that breeds resistance. And this deadly and tragic cycle will continue until Israel recognizes that its victims are real people who will not submit but will continue to assert their rights.

Follow @jjz1600 for more.

James  Zogby is the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, Washington, D.C.

All drawn in by hunger strike



Palestinian protesters hurl stones towards Israeli security forces during clashes following a demonstration in solidarity with hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners, in front of Ofer prison in the West Bank, on April 20, 2017. Photo AFP

The Palestinian Hunger Strike Aims Beyond the Jailhouses

The hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners is a means of liberation from the destructive effect of the multiple prison cells on the outside

By Amira Hass, Haaretz premium
April 19, 2017

The Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike, initiated and being led by Marwan Barghouti, has refreshing subversive potential, and not necessarily against the Israel Prison Service. As a number of prisoners’ representatives outside the prisons say, it’s not an adversarial or ideological strike. It’s about basic human rights that even prisoners, even prisoners who are members of the other nation, deserve.

Give them a public phone, and be done with the prison guards who get big money for smuggling in cellphones. Let them meet with their families without the continuous agony-strewn path to a once-per-year permit. Lengthen the visits and see what a positive impact that will have on the atmosphere. What the prisoners are trying to say to the Israel Prison Service and the Israeli public is that both sides have an interest in the prisons maintaining a level of decency.

The real subversiveness is internal. One can see in the strike an attempt to get the Palestinians to shake off their fatalism and inaction in light of Israel’s ever more powerful malevolence and rouse their quarreling leaders out of their complacency with the status quo and their delusion of sovereignty.

This is no simple thing in the age of privatization. What are the individual hunger strikes if not privatization of the struggle? What are the stabbings, the knife-brandishing and the car ramming attacks if not the privatization of a revolt (or using it to flee personal and family problems and frustrations, and even to die)?

The individual hunger strikes of administrative detainees were a burden on the prisoners’ support organizations, but those groups were swept up in natural concern for the detainees’ health, and they invested in the strikes a great deal of time and talk that went nowhere. The too-frequent use of individual hunger strikes eroded them completely as a tool for recruitment, impact or change.

The imprisoning of Palestinians is Israel’s default policy. But beyond the regular prisons, Israel has created and continues to create all kinds of other means of imprisoning Palestinians. That, in the end, is the summary description of the real Oslo process, not the one reflected in high-flown promises. Clusters and clusters of jailhouses in our midst, and all of us – Jewish Israelis – are the wardens. Thus the experience of imprisonment, whether in a formal prison or another kind, is shared by all Palestinians.

But with the shattering of Palestinians’ space – using tried-and-true colonialist tricks that Israel upgraded and polished, and to which it has added tons of gall – it has created dozens of different mechanisms of imprisonment, dozens of geo-social units with varying levels of absence of freedom and suffocation.

The pinnacle is of course in Gaza, where two million people are serving life sentences. But in the other parts of the country as well (including sovereign Israel), the walls in which Palestinians are imprisoned vary: bureaucratic rules that are constantly changing, rampant discrimination, Area C, arrogance, violent settlers, a ban on travel through the Allenby Bridge, humiliation at Ben-Gurion Airport, etc.

The hunger strike is a means of collective liberation from the destructive effect of the multiple prison cells on the outside

This shattering into dozens of units of incarceration has created a different consciousness among those imprisoned in each of them, depending on the level of suffocation and detention. Those whose level of detention is lower (freedom to travel abroad but not to Jerusalem, only half the land of their village was stolen, the barbed wire and army base are a kilometre from their house instead of half a kilometre) experience the Israeli warden differently than a woman who lives in the Hebron neighbourhood of Tel Rumeida, who is cut off from the world 300 metres from her house. The official leadership, as it happens, experiences the mildest degree of detention. The level of urgency to change the situation differs from one jail to another.

The hunger strike is a means of liberation from the destructive effect of the multiple prison cells on the outside. Its challenge is to build a collective of prisoners as a body that sets the Palestinian agenda, a body viewing the Palestinians on the outside as a dismembered, shattered collective that must be reunited.

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