The latest wave of mass hunger strikes continue for the 14th day as Palestinian prisoners demand the end of the policy of administrative detention. Administrative detention is a procedure in which Palestinians are arbitrarily arrested and detained without charge or trial based on a secret file. There are currently 183 Palestinians under administrative detention, 9 of them members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. On 24 April 2014, the administrative detainees announced a mass hunger strike to demand their freedom. Detainees will periodically continue to join the hunger strike if the demands are not met. There are currently 95 detainees on hunger strike in Ofer, Megiddo and Naqab prisons. It should be noted that Ofer and Megiddo prisons are provided services by the British-Danish company G4S, which installed cameras and surveillance equipment used to control the Palestinian prisoners. According to one hunger striker who spoke with Addameer lawyer Mahmoud Hassan, the detainees in the Naqab Prison have all been transferred to an isolated section, separate from the other prisoners. The cells are covered in sand. They have been ill-treated; suffering from daily searches of their cells and being permitted to change their undergarments only twice since the beginning of the strike. They are bound and handcuffed in their cells for ten hours a day. Three of the hunger strikers in Naqab prison, Fadi Hammad, Fadi Omar and Soufian Bahar, are now in solitary confinement and one detainee, Ahmad Abu Ras, was transferred to an undisclosed location. Furthermore, the IPS has been denying the hunger strikers salt for the last two weeks. Prisoners who engage in hunger strikes still take liquids and salt, as they are essential for survival. Denial of salt is a continuation of the punishments against hunger strikers, and despite the grave danger it imposes on the lives of the detainees, has been institutionalized by the Israeli Supreme Court. In 2004, the Israeli Supreme Court denied a petition by Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and several other Palestinian and Israeli NGOs that demanded the IPS provide salt on a daily basis to hunger-striking prisoners as its denial breaches the constitutional rights of the prisoner. The hunger strikers can potentially face harsher punishments if the IPS’s most recent proposed bill to legalize force-feeding is approved in the Knesset. The memorandum is currently up for public critique. In addition, 42 hunger strikers have been transferred to Ayalon / Ramleh Prison, including Abd Al Rizziq Farraj and Salem Dardasawi. On 4 May 2014, their cells were raided and the hunger strikers beaten. Mohammad Maher Badr’s finger was broken during the attack and Mohammad Jamal Al-Natsheh had to be hospitalized for the injuries sustained from the attack. The prisoners are in overcrowded isolation cells, with seven hunger strikers in each. They are in their cells at all times and denied recreational hours in the yard. Addameer maintains that the Occupation’s authorities are solely responsible for the lives of the hunger strikes. Addameer also demands that all contracting parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention pressure Israel to immediately release all administrative detainees and cease the use of administrative detention.
If the people of ‘Azzun seem nervous, they have a right to be. The town (population approximately 10,000) sits on crossroads – Qalqiliya is to the west, Nablus to the east, Salfit to the south and Tulkarem to the north. This is a junction that is vulnerable to road closures and flying checkpoints. On either side, the illegal settler colonies of Ma’ale Shomeron and Alfe Menashe loom large. Six Israeli surveillance cameras surround ‘Azzun, meaning that the population is being watched all day, every day.
Because of its precarious geographical position, occupation forces have been particularly brutal in ‘Azzun. Currently, 230 Palestinian children are imprisoned in Israel jails. 68 of those children come from ‘Azzun. There are an additional 112 adult prisoners from here, victims of regular night raids. In 2013, the Israeli military conducted 300 operations inside the town, and soldiers have entered the town on foot every night for the last week.
Those who are not imprisoned face other difficulties. Most of the population are professional farmers; however most of the town’s land has been stolen by the surrounding settlements. This has left ‘Azzun with a 46% unemployment rate. Many of the employed work across the Green Line, facing regular harassment at the checkpoints. During the Second Intifada, checkpoint gates were installed at the entrances of the town, enabling the Israeli military to create flying checkpoints, which happens multiple times per week.
Such was the case yesterday, when 8 jeeps arrived at 1 pm to close the gate leading to road 55 which runs from Qalqilya towards Nablus. After the soldiers arrived, several of them entered the village and grabbed Osama, a nine year old boy, seemingly at random. The soldiers told the surrounding villagers that they arrested Osama because he had been seen throwing rocks immediately prior to their arrival. Eyewitnesses from ‘Azzun refuted this claim, saying that they had seen the boy playing with his friends in the town square at the time when the rocks were allegedly thrown. Regardless, the soldiers detained Osama in the back of one jeep, and did not allow any Palestinians to sit with the boy, even though he was crying and visibly distressed. The boy’s father arrived quickly, but since he did not have his Hawiyya ID card on him, he was forced to go home and retrieve it before he was allowed to see his son. Osama was alone with the soldiers in the jeep for over one hour, and remained in detention for another hour and a half after his father returned, before being released. Throughout this time, people from the town surrounded the military jeeps, in an effort to support the child. The incident was captured by Palestine TV, and can be seen below. The offending soldiers released Osama to his home that night, but claimed that he had officially confessed to throwing stones.
Often, ‘Azzunee children who are arrested or detained are offered release if they sign a confession, often written in Hebrew, a language they don’t read or write. These children are usually alone with soldiers, with neither their parents nor lawyers present (which is in direct contravention of Israel’s own laws), and are under great physical and mental duress. These confessions are designed to implicate other children – often by having other names written in. Since the children do not know what they are signing, they are tricked into implicating their friends in falsified crimes.
In some instances, children who are accused of throwing stones at settlers have also been ordered to pay ‘compensation’ for ‘causing distress’ to the settlers (who cannot even prove they had stones thrown at them), sometimes up to 30,000 shekels. This is a further burden for economically unstable ‘Azzun. Those who cannot pay the compensations in the allotted time are forced to spend double the time of their original sentence in jail.
While the town is definitely happy that Osama has returned home, the story is not yet over. Since the Israeli soldiers have a forced confession to stone throwing, they may return again to raid Osama’s house, or potentially use this ‘confession’ as evidence to arrest other children from the village.
6th May 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil Team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine
Residents of Qeitun area of Al-Khalil, near Shuhada St. are presented with a very different kind of daily routine than other areas of the occupied West Bank. Israel occupation forces not only raid houses and harass people on a daily basis, but also use the local population as part of their military training.
On Tuesday, the 29th of April, the Israeli army was training for the erecting and working of a flying checkpoint, pulling over cars on the main road of the area which leads to the military base, also called Qeitun. During this training the commander was instructing the soldiers how to stop and search drivers and their cars.
Photo by ISM
Two days later, on Thursday 1st of May at 11:30pm, ISM activists were called out to witness the Israeli army performing a massive operation of night raids, with approximately 100 soldiers. When the activist got to the area, the army had detained an 18-year old. The youth was released 30 minutes after the arrival of the activists. Many of the local people, still in their nightdresses, were out in the streets while the soldiers were inside their houses.
At around 1:00am the soldiers left the area and had what seemed like a quick evaluation of the whole operation, making it difficult to know whether it was an actual military operation or just some sort of training, similar to the flying checkpoint training that took place two days earlier. For the people of Qeitun there’s no actual difference between “training” and a live military operation of the occupation forces.
In an ISM visit with a family of the Qeitun area, they report that the soldiers have been starting the raids as early as 9pm and had raided a total of 50 houses. They also reported that during one of the raids the soldiers had broken into a house with such violence that an elderly woman with a heart condition, had gone into coma and had to be rushed to the hospital.
The family reported that the area experiences night raids at least two or three times a week. Israeli soldiers enter and harass the locals on a daily basis and the army has arrested two minors during the last month.
During the second intifada almost all families living in the houses located near Shuhada St. were forced out by the Israeli army, allegedly for security reasons, making this part of the area a ghost town.
In Mapping Exile and Return: Palestinian Dispossession and a Political Theology for a Shared Future, American Mennonite theologian and aid worker Alain Epp Weaver explores a legacy of Palestinian Christian exile, and struggle for return. The book’s terrain ranges from the ethnically-cleansed villages of the Galilee to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Weaver focuses particularly on contending geographies: how “Palestinians have been ‘abolished from the map,’ in the words of Palestinian cartographer Salman Abu-Sitta,” and the prospect of “counter-cartographies that subvert colonialism’s map-making.”
His book encompasses the work of specialists, like Abu-Sitta’s maps, the writings of Edward Said, the Institute for Palestine Studies’ encyclopedic volume All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, as well as “memory production” by thousands of Palestinians through collaborations like the web archive Palestine Remembered.
“In the face of Zionist rejection of Palestinian refugee return, international indifference, and an ineffectual and compromising Palestinian leadership for whom the refugee question is a source of irritation, Palestinian refugees pin their hopes on memory,” Weaver writes.
Significantly, he also includes extended histories of two key initiatives: the struggles for return by the ethnically-cleansed Christian villagers of Kufr Birim and Iqrit in the Galilee, and Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to “remembering the Nakba in Hebrew.”
Rites of return
The residents of Kufr Birim and Iqrit, Weaver writes, “pioneered and in turn inspired activism on the part of other internally displaced persons (IDPs) inside Israel” through mass mobilizations, as well as “rites of return.”
Through the latter, ranging from personal visits to destroyed family homes to community festivals, like Iqrit’s recent Easter celebrations, villagers “carry on a dual struggle, both against the Israeli state and its institutions that deny their rights to the land and against sedentary tendencies and forgetfulness,” Weaver writes.
Later he likens Zochrot’s public mappings of ethnically-cleansed villages to “at least some practices of Palestinian refugees” as “exilic vigils.”
But at times, Weaver’s heavy-handed application of his own theology, and efforts to find its reflection in Palestinian Christianity, pose a bigger challenge.
His analysis is steeped in the writings of another American Mennonite, John Howard Yoder, popular among Catholic Workers and other Christian activists, as well as Mennonites. Like his Mennonite forebears, Yoder viewed nations and their political institutions critically.
At his most succinct, he told a 1957 Mennonite peace conference near Karlsruhe, Germany, “The state is a pagan institution in which a Christian would not normally hold a position” (John Howard Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility, Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, Herald Press, 2003, p. 25).
Following Yoder’s “theology of galut [exile] as vocation,” Weaver argues for “accepting one’s exilic status, even when one is at home,” and advocates a binationalism “differentiated from the one-state solution.”
Theological cartography
His prescription bears some resemblance to the description of a “very fluid model” of “overlapping claims” in ancient Palestine offered by Hebrew Bible scholar Rachel Havrelock.
And in each case study in the book, Weaver searches “for a theological cartography of land and return in which exile and return function as potentially interpenetrating, instead of irreducibly opposed, realities.”
In his section on Edward Said, Weaver may find what he seeks. In another, he fairly claims, “Abu-Sitta’s maps can (but need not) be interpreted as escaping the statist character of most national maps.”
At a low point, Weaver reproaches recently-retired Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Elias Chacour, a displaced resident of Kufr Birim and noted writer as well as community leader, for a statement of Chacour’s own, fairly standard Christian belief.
“[N]ow we have a new understanding of the Chosenness,” Chacour wrote in 1999. “Who is Chosen? Man and Woman — every man and every woman — are invited to take part in the divine banquet” (“Reconciliation and Justice: Living with the Memory,” Holy Land, Hollow Jubilee: God, Justice, and the Palestinians, ed. Naim Ateek and Michael Prior (London: Melisende, 1999), p. 112).
This clear opinion “fails to do justice to Chacour’s nuance at other points in his writings,” Weaver states, before divining the position he would prefer Chacour hold instead from his choice of a Bible translation. In such passages, it becomes painfully obvious that what Weaver hopes to find is simply not there.
In 1970, black liberation theologian James H. Cone wrote that “there can be no theology of the gospel which does not arise from an oppressed community.” Theology, Cone added, “cannot be separated from the community which it represents” (James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 2010, p. 5, 9).
Divide and rule
Weaver’s account offers a testimony to both the world’s oldest Christian community’s theological response to its own oppression, and the risks of viewing its struggle through a lens that may, in another context, make perfect sense.
In Kairos Palestine’s recent Easter Alert, Hind Khoury, Sabeel’s vice-president and former Palestinian Authority minister of Jerusalem affairs and Palestine Liberation Organization ambassador to France, writes, “Each one of us is targeted in our very survival and the integrity of our community, as in the integrity of our identity and our culture. Even our memory and our future are being hijacked.”
“One of the latest such laws, for example, decreed that Palestinian Christians are not Arabs in order to further divide and rule and confuse Palestinian cohesive identity,” she added.
Palestinians facing not only occupation and exile, but also denial of their heritage and sectarian attempts to fragment it, may find belonging, identity and nationality more liberatory, for themselves and the world around them, than those of us who share Weaver’s “location within political and theological maps of power and privilege” as “descendant[s] of European immigrants who settled on land claimed by Pawnee and Cheyenne nations,” among a great many others.
And it is the commonality of Palestinian experience and destiny that politically-engaged Palestinian Christians stress, from religious figures like Greek Orthodox ArchbishopAtallah Hanna to boycott, divestment and sanctions organizer Sandra Tamari, who wrote for Mondoweiss last year: “I am uncomfortable with the identity of Palestinian Christian because — thankfully — Palestinians have not fallen into sectarian traps that divide along religious lines.”
“We must create spaces for listening to the broad spectrum of Palestinian stories,” she added. “We cannot do that by excluding the majority of Palestinians who happen to be Muslims.”
Nor, while Israel’s sectarian legislation and attempts to recruit Christians into its army, and what the Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land yesterday called “a wave of anti-Christian fanaticism and violence” by Israelis continue, is it likely to happen through the detachment Yoder suggested and Weaver champions.
Instead most Palestinians, regardless of faith, may find more promise in the “firm national position of the Christians in refusing to join a military that exercises violence against the rights of the Palestinian people,” expressed Friday by Archbishop Hannah and retired Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, and in the Easter sentiments of Sabbah’s successor, current Patriarch Fouad Twal: “We are the rightful/lawful owners, and you will hear our voice before all governments worldwide.”
3rd May 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Ramallah Team| Occupied Palestine
Yesterday, Saturday 3rd of May was the United Nations World Press Freedom Day. Yesterday, journalists celebrated, remembered, and protested, on a date commemorated worldwide since 1992.
In Palestine, the 3rd of May calls for a protest by members of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), and yesterday this was at the Beit El military checkpoint.
We witnessed approximately 70 journalists gather in the city of Ramallah, driving towards the Bet El checkpoint, before leaving their cars and attempting to walk through the military gate.
The journalists carried nothing but signs and cameras, chanting for freedom from the Israeli occupation. It was a completely non-violent demonstration.
On arrival to the checkpoint, Israeli Border Police first closed the gate, and then called many more soldiers to the area, who proceeded to watch and film the demonstrators with their private smart phones.
The journalists then tried to open the gate, which is when Israeli Border Police started to throw stun grenades at the demonstrators. More than eight stun grenades were thrown, seemingly directly at the legs of the protesters. One stun grenade hit my ISM colleague in the foot, she was lucky to be wearing thick running shoes and jeans, so did not receive an injury.
The level of aggression was surprising to me, I commented upon this to a demonstrator, a Palestine journalist, causing him to turn to me and smile.
“Maybe they don’t know we’re journalists.”
“Sorry?” I asked.
“If they did, they wouldn’t throw them [the stun grenades] at us.”
He laughed, and walked back toward the gate.
Several times during the protest, the journalists tried to open the gate, each time it was swiftly closed by Israeli forces. After approximately 40 minutes, it seemed the demonstration was ending, and a large group of the journalists began to walk away from the gate.
It was at this point that the Israeli forces present began to throw more stun grenades, roughly six, and one tear gas grenade. Ironically this caused the demonstration to last longer, as after this attack the journalists decided to continue the protest for a further 30 minutes.
After the demonstration ended, in which there were fortunately no injuries or arrests, we had the opportunity to speak to Omar Nazzal, a board member on the steering committee of the PJS.
Omar has been active in journalism for 30 years, and a member of the PJS for the last 18. The PJS was created in Jerusalem in 1978; it was originally named the ‘Arab Journalists League’ as they were not allowed to use ‘Palestinian’ in the title. This changed in 1994, after the Oslo Accords the organization could be renamed.
The PJS has approximately 1300 members, 800 in the West Bank and 500 in the Gaza Strip. It is a member of the Arab Journalists Union and of the International Federation of Journalists.
An issue that is impacting the journalism profession in Palestine, as it does with many workers worldwide, is the impact of globalization. As multinational companies buy out smaller media outlets, individual journalists are loosing their jobs. Or, forcing journalists to move towards shorter-term contracts, loosing their rights, leading to lower wages and little or no insurance.
Omar explained that there are many problems of being a journalist in Palestine, and one huge issue is their treatment by the Israeli authorities.
“They don’t consider Palestinian journalists to be journalists.”
Horrifying statistics echo this statement.
Since the year 2000, approximately 300 journalists have been imprisoned, over 500 have been injured, and 21 Palestinian journalists have been killed by the Israeli military.
Omar continued: “Sometimes they beat journalists, arrest them, shoot them, they’re forbidden to move freely.”
Currently there are nine Palestinian journalists in Israeli military prisons.
Muhammed Muna, one of the imprisoned nine, is a West Bank correspondent of the UK-based Quds Press International News Agency. He was arrested in August 2013. He was sentenced to six months in administrative detention, which essentially means that the Israeli government can hold a person indefinitely without charge. Muhammed’s detention was renewed for a further six months earlier this year, with no release date in sight.
