[Reader-list] Fwd: Reading Palestinian Prison Diaries

Asit Das asit1917 at gmail.com
Mon Apr 1 05:19:06 CDT 2013


To:


<http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/author/richardfalk/>  Reading Palestinian
Prison Diaries<http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/reading-palestinian-prison-diaries/>
by
Richard Falk <http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/author/richardfalk/>

*The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the
Israeli<http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=31.7833333333,35.2166666667&spn=10.0,10.0&q=31.7833333333,35.2166666667%20%28Israel%29&t=h>Gulag
*, edited by Norma Hashim, in close collaboration with the Centre for
Political & Development Studies, Gaza, 2013



There are many moving passages that can be found in these excerpts from
prison diaries and recollections of 22 Palestinians. What is most
compelling is how much the material expresses the shared concerns of these
prisoners despite great variations in writing style and background. A few
keywords dominate the texts: pain, God or Allah, love, dream, homeland,
steadfastness, tears, freedom, dream, prayer. My reading of these diaries
exposed me to the distinct personal struggles of each prisoner to survive
with as much dignity as possible in a dank and poorly lit circumstances of
isolation, humiliation, acute hostility on the part of the prison staff,
including abusive neglect by the medical personnel. The diaries also
confirmed that even prolonged captivity had not diluted the spirit of
Palestinian
resistance<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict>to
Israeli
occupation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories>, but
on the contrary had intensified it.  A strong impression of the overall
illegitimacy of Israel’s encroachment on the most fundamental rights
of the Palestinian
people <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_people> is also present on
virtually every page.



Although not professional writers, the sentiments expressed have a special
kind of eloquence arising from their authenticity and passion.  A female
prisoner, Sana’a<http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=15.3483333333,44.2063888889&spn=0.1,0.1&q=15.3483333333,44.2063888889%20%28Sana%27a%29&t=h>Shihada,
on learning that her family had been spared the demolition of
their family home, describes the ordeal of her interrogation in a poetic
idiom: “..the anger of the interrogators was like snow and peace to me [an
Arabic saying that conveys a sense of being ‘soothing’]. I felt the pride
of the Palestinians, the glory of Muslims, and the brightness of honesty. I
knelt to Allah, thankfully. My tears fell on the floor of the cell, and I
am sure they dug a path which those later imprisoned will be able to see.”
Or the words of Eyad Obayyat, a prisoner facing three lifetime sentences
for his role in killing several Israeli soldiers, “Among us prisoners, the
unity of love for our homeland was precious above all other things.”
Another, Avina Sarahna, asks poignantly, “Is resisting occupation a
crime?...Let me be a witness to the truth, and let me stay here.” Speaking
of the pain of being separated from her four children, Kahera Als’adi
writes, whom she discovered were living in an orphanage: “I couldn’t keep
myself from bursting into tears. Was my loving family scattered like this?
Was fate against us because of our love for our homeland?..After that
visit, I felt like a slaughtered sheep.” These randomly selected quotations
could be multiplied many times over, but hopefully the overall tone and
coherent message are conveyed by these few examples.



What I found most valuable about this publication was its success in
turning the abstraction of Palestinian
prisoners<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_prisoners_in_Israel>into
a series of human stories most of which exhibit agonized feelings of
regret resulting from prolonged estrangement from those they most love in
the world. Particularly moving were the sorrows expressed by men missing
their mothers and daughters. These are the written words of prisoners who
have been convicted of various major crimes by Israeli military courts,
some of whom face cruel confinement for the remainder of their life on
earth, and who have been further punished by being deprived of ever seeing
those they love not at all, or on rare occasions, for brief tantalizing
visits under dehumanizing conditions, through fogged up separation walls.



It is hard not to treat a prison population as an abstraction that if
noticed at all by the outside world is usually reduced to statistics that
appear in reports of human rights
NGOs<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-governmental_organization>.
These autobiographical texts, in contrast, force us to commune with these
prisoners as fellow human beings, persons like ourselves with loves,
lovers, needs, aspirations, hopes, pious dreams, and unrelenting hardships
and suffering. There is also reference to the other side of the prison
walls. These prisoners show concern for the suffering that imprisonment
causes their families, especially young children and elderly parents.
Given the closeness of Palestinian  families it is certain that those who
are being held in prison would be terribly missed, especially as their
confinement arises because of their engagement in a struggle sacred to
virtually every Palestinian. Such humanization of Palestinian prisoners is
undoubtedly superfluous for Palestinians living under occupation or in
refugee camps where arrests, which resemble state-sanctioned kidnappings
are being made daily by Israeli security forces. It is a tragic aspect of
the occupation that after 45 years of occupation there is not a Palestinian
family that is left untouched by the Israeli criminalization of all forms
of resistance, including those that are nonviolent and symbolic.



We need a wider ethical, legal, and political perspective to grasp properly
this phenomenon of Palestinian prisoners. The *unlawful* occupation
policies of Israel are unpunished even when lethal and flagrantly in
violation of international humanitarian law, and are rarely even officially
criticized in international arenas. In contrast *lawful* forms of
resistance by the Palestinian people are harshly punished, and the
resulting victimization of those brave enough to resist is overlooked
almost everywhere.  If we side with those who resist, as was done during World
War II <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II> when those Europeans
mounted militant forms of resistance against German occupation and criminal
practices, we glorify their deeds and struggle. Yet if the occupier enjoys
our primary solidarity we tend to criminalize resistance without any show
of empathy. To some extent, this book cuts through this ideological myopia,
and lets us experience the torment of these prisoners as human beings
rather than as Palestinian ‘soldiers’ in the ongoing struggle against
Israel.



In the past year, heroic Palestinian hunger strikers, initially Khader
Adnan and Hana Shalabi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hana_Shalabi>, did
their best to call attention to the abusive character of Israel’s
terrifying violent arrests in the middle of the night followed by
imprisonment for lengthy periods without even making charges or holding
trials. Israeli recourse to administrative detention takes place even in
circumstances where the person being confined was engaged in no activities
that could be remotely considered to pose a security threats.  It is
notable that despite hunger strikers putting their own lives at severe risk
to protest such inhumane behavior by Israel in its role as the occupying
power, the world refuses to pay attention even to such hunger strikers,
which is somewhat shocking despite decades of lectures to the Palestinians
to renounce armed resistance, and engage instead in nonviolent forms of
resistance, and if they do so, they will win political support for their
grievances even from governments allied with Israel, including the United
States<http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.8833333333,-77.0166666667&spn=10.0,10.0&q=38.8833333333,-77.0166666667%20%28United%20States%29&t=h>.
To date the evidence suggests a far uglier pattern: when Palestinians
resist by way of armed struggle, their actions are denounced and their
grievances are ignored, while when they resist nonviolently, their actions
and their grievances are ignored. What is worse, while this shift in
Palestinian tactics has taken place in recent years, the Israeli governing
process moves steadily to the right until now in March 2013, the latest
governing coalition in Tel Aviv is avowedly settler oriented. The
international background music has not changed, and Washington loses no
opportunity to sound the trumpets while declaring its unconditional and
undying loyalty to Israel, pretending not to notice violations of
international law and the deliberate efforts to make the two state solution
yesterday’s dream, today’s nightmare.



The preoccupation of these prisoners with the fate of the singular Israeli
prisoner at the time, Gilad Shalit, was something of a surprise for me,
although it is understandable. Why, the Palestinians ask themselves, does
the world make such a fuss about a single Israeli being held in Gaza after
being captured during a military mission, and ignore the fate of the many
thousands of Palestinians detained for year after year because they fought
for the freedom of their country? Once considered, such a question is both
natural, and once asked, the grotesque display of double standards seems
self-evident. But there is also an opposite appreciation of the
significance of Shalit expressed, which recognizes that the October 2011
deal struck to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners would not have happened
had Shalit not been captured. In this sense, the Palestinians in recording
their feelings realize that their freedom has been made possible because
Hamas succeeded in capturing and holding Shalit. This was no small
achievement. During the massive attacks by Israel on Gaza in 2008-09,
Operation Cast Lead, IDF commanders told their troops that this violence
had been unleashed so as to gain the release of Shalit. Had Hamas allowed
Shalit to go free or had be been killed in the operation, then there would
have been no negotiations for the release of Palestinian prisoners. It is
as simple as that. Of course, it is not simple. Many of those released were
soon rearrested by Israel, once more undermining even minimal trust between
the two peoples, and again showing that Israel can defy legal and moral
obligations without facing any adverse consequences, a metaphor for the
overall stranglehold of the occupation.



Above all, these texts in almost every page confirm that particularly
prized Palestinian collective public/private virtue of *sumud* or
steadfastness. Such exhibitions of courage indirectly shames those of us
who suffer far less or not at all, and yet find ourselves discouraged and
dispirited by the ills of the world to an extent that we retreat from
public engagement to the comfort zones of sanctuaries of escape. These
prisoners have no such option, maintaining their commitment to the
Palestinian struggle in the darkest of circumstances, consigned to spending
their most energetic years behind bars or surrounded by dank prison walls.
We can ask ourselves where does such courage come from? There is no
definite common answer. Yet what comes across from these diary pages are
deep commitments  rooted in love of family and homeland as strengthened by
religious faith and practice and sustained by prison camaraderie or in
embittered reaction to the dehumanizing atmosphere of enduring prison life
year upon year.



We should not forget that there is a callous and manifest unlawfulness
about this network of Israeli prisons, all but one of the 19 being located
in Israel, in direct violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention governing belligerent occupation: “Protected persons accused of
offenses shall be detained in the occupied country, and if convicted they
shall serve therein.”  Underlying such a provision of law is a humane
impulse: compelling an individual to be imprisoned in the occupying country
imposes a geographic separation from family and homeland, which in the
Israeli case is accentuated by a permit system that as a practical matter
makes family visits from occupied Palestine a virtual impossibility. With
respect to prisoners from Gaza, there are virtually no prison visits
allowed even if sentences are for several decades or lifetime. As is widely
known, the people of Gaza have been subject to a punitive blockade
maintained ever since mid-2007 that involves a massive imposition of
collective punishment on the civilian population, a crime of war so
specified in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.



Israel’s cruelty toward Palestinian prisoners is underscored by its recent
practice of releasing West Bank hunger strikers at death’s doorstep, then
deporting them for a period of years to Gaza, that is, beyond access to
their families and normal places of residence, at a moment when their
physical condition is so deteriorated that they could not possibly become a
security threat and when most in need of nurture and familiar surroundings.
Hana Shalabi, who was particularly close to her family, was so deported to
Gaza for three years and just days ago. Ayman Sharawneh was similarly
deported for ten years as part of a plea bargain. Such shocking practice is
worthy of global condemnation. It involves another form of collective
punishment inflicted both on the person so confined to Gaza and to his or
her family that is not allowed to travel from the West Bank to Gaza. There
is a triple  perverseness about this practice of prisoner release: Gaza
itself an open-aired prison also serves Israel as a site of punitive
internal exile, and makes the distinction between ‘prison’ and ‘freedom’
almost disappear into surreal thin air.  One can only imagine the global
protest movement if Hamas had conditioned Gilad Shalit’s release on his
confinement in a Salafi controlled region of Egypt!



This pattern of unlawful imprisonment and unjust deportation also
interferes with the preparation of adequate defense representation as
Palestinian lawyers also experience routine difficulties in obtaining
permits and visiting rights. Article 76 also requires that prison
conditions for those living under occupation should under no condition be
worse than those of Israeli prisoners in Israel, which makes the
disallowance and obstruction of family visits for Palestinians unlawful, as
well as cruel.



It is increasing evident that international humanitarian law falls short
when it comes to offering suitable protection to the Palestinian people who
have been living under occupation since 1967, with no end in sight. It is
not only occupation, but a continuous process of encroachment that
cumulatively has assumed the character of de facto annexation via the
massive settlement phenomenon. Under these circumstances, and given the
inalienable right of self-determination that belongs to the Palestinian
people, there is posed some protection for rights of resistance. These
rights need to be exercised in a manner respectful of civilian innocence,
but difficult issues of identification are posed in relation to armed and
violent Israeli settlers. True, those who act in resistance are not
technically prisoners of war, who are protected the Third Geneva
Convention, but they are acting to fulfill fundamental rights being
violated by those who occupy their land and sit in judgment when they act
defensively. What is needed, beyond all doubt, is a code of conduct, if not
an additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions, that fills in this gap
associated with resistance. Resisters should be treated with the same
dignity under international humanitarian law as is associated with
Prisoners of War. Their acts, even if violent, are in keeping with
prevailing societal and civilizational values, and perpetrators, even when
confined for reasonable security reasons, should be treated with
appropriate dignity. Unlike sociopathic common murderers, rapists, and the
like (and even they should also be treated in accord with international
standards), the acts of Palestinian prisoners are viewed as heroic by their
own society and political culture, as well as many people throughout the
world. They deserve international recognition and protection. Their
‘crimes’ will eventually be vindicated by history as part of a final
chapter in the struggle against European colonial rule.



I believe it to be a moral obligation of all of us who care about human
rights and freedom to read this book, and share it with others. The
Palestinians, whose rights and dignity have been long trampled upon,
especially deserve our deepest empathy, as well as our solidarity in their
struggle. Reading the words of these prisoners vividly discloses the nature
of such a struggle in the form of witnessing by those Palestinians who have
put their lives at risk for the sake of recovering their stolen homeland.
We also owe a debt of gratitude to Norma Hashim who has edited this
collection as a work of devotion and an expression of solidarity with and
reflection on the Palestinian struggle. Its publication in book form is
timed to coincide with Palestinian Prisoner’s Day, April 17th.


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