28th August | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil | Hebron, occupied Palestine
UPDATE: A court just ruled to keep Vittorio Fera in prison until an actuall decision is taken on Monday. He was violently thrown to the ground and arrested by Israeli soldiers in Nabi Saleh yesterday. He is being accused of throwing stones and attacking the soldiers at the demo – a baseless claim without any evidence. At the demonstration he was filming the vicious assault of Israeli forces on a Palestinian boy, that was attacked and choked by a soldier. Still, the Israeli court ruled to keep him in prison till Monday.
Watch a video taken of the soldiers attacking Vittorio and arresting him: https://youtu.be/KoYEMHi2xbM
On Friday the 28th of August 2015, two peaceful demonstrators were violently arrested and a child viciously attacked by Israeli soldiers in the Palestinian village Nabi Saleh in occupied Palestine. Every Friday the people of Nabi Saleh protest against the illegal settlement build on the villages’ land.
Israili soldier threatning Palestinian women and children at non violent demonstration in Nabi Saleh. Photo credit: IssamRimawi
Today at around 3 pm one Palestinian male, Mahmoud Tamimi, and one international activist was arrested in the Palestinian village Nabi Saleh close to Ramallah. They were arrested during a Friday demonstration against the illegal settlements on the land belonging to the people of Nabi Saleh.
Only a few minutes after the protesters peacefully started their march towards the gate, which is regularly blocked by the military preventing any movement in- or outside of the village, the Israeli army began attacking the non-violent protesters with dozens of rounds of tear gas.
The soldiers then ambushed the demonstrators escaping the clouds of tear gas by surrounding them. They attacked and then arrested Mahmoud Tamimi, shoving him down the hill towards the illegal settlement, where he was forced to lie on the ground.
Israili soldier strangulating a Palestinian boy at non violent demonstration in Nabi Saleh. Photo credit: Karam
Around the same time, a Palestinian boy was violently attacked by a soldier throwing him to the ground, choking and almost suffocating him in the process. “While the boy was screaming in pain his family came to rescue him from the soldiers’ vicious assault”, Josephine, a Danish activist explains.
Israili soldier attacking Palestininan boy at non violent demonstration in Nabi Saleh. Photo credit: Karam
A group of peaceful international demonstrators trying to document the attack on the boy, was ambushed by another group of soldiers, who violently pushed a 31-year old Italian man to the ground and proceeded to arrested him.
Both the Palestinian and the international were being held captive in a military jeep by the Israeli army for almost nine hours, before being brought to a police station.
This Monday 24th of August, as every Monday, the families of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have gathered at the Red Cross headquarters in Gaza City. Tens of people joined them in order to show their support, denounce the conditions that the prisoners suffer and to demand the freedom of all the Palestinians kidnapped by the occupation.
In a new proof of its solidarity with the oppressed people of the world, the Palestinian former prisoners have shown its support to all the Anarchist prisoners jailed around the world, during the second “International Solidarity Week for Anarchist Prisoners”, 23-30 August 2015.
“International Solidarity Week for Anarchist Prisoners”
At the same time it took place at the UN headquarters in Gaza City a huge demonstration where the Union of workers of UNRWA demanded the Agency Commissioner-General to back down from its decision of reducing the number of teachers, increasing the number of students per class, stopping the recruitment of new staff and reducing the medical services to the refugees.
Demonstration in Gaza against the Agency Commissioner-General\s decision on less teachers and mre children in each class.
They also demanded the salaries owed to them and asked the UNRWA to reconsider its policies regarding the recruitment of foreign staff as it takes a disproportionate share of the UNRWA budget.
Demonstration in Gaza against the Agency Commissioner-General\s decision on less teachers and mre children in each class.
They also demanded the UN States to assume its commitment with the Palestinian refugees and to stop denying them their rights.
Sunday morning around 300 Palestinians and Internationals demonstrated side by side to block the uprooting of olive yards related to the construction of the apartheid-wall. The protesters where all non-violent and all stood up for the Palestinians rights and for a free Palestine.
Demonstrators carrying away the gate
Protesters successfully removed the illegal metal fence, which was put up by the Israeli occupation forces to prevent local Palestinians from reaching their land and harvesting their olives. The fence was carried away by internationals and Palestinians. This was a huge success for the the local Palestinians, whose land have had their land taken away.
Border Police showering demonstrators with teargas
After the fence was taken down, Israeli forces brutally attacked the non-violent protesters, shooting rubber-coated steel bullets, sound-grenades and dozens of teargas canisters. Three persons had to go to the hospital for suffering of excessive tear gas inhalation.
The demonstrators trying to escape the clouds of teargas
The Israeli state confiscating land of Beit Jala people using the expansion of apartheid wall as an excuse to clear the way of land-grab and expanding illegal settlements near the village. This is a huge problem for the local Palestinians who can’t harvest their fields and live their live freely.
Over 1,000 Black activists, artists, scholars, students, and organizations have launched a statement expressing their solidarity and commitment to ensuring justice for Palestinians. Signatories to the statement span a wide cross-section of Black activists and scholars, including Angela Davis, Boots Riley, Cornel West, dream hampton, Emory Douglas, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Pam Africa, Patrisse Cullors, Phil Hutchings, Ramona Africa, Robin DG Kelley, Rosa Clemente, Talib Kweli, and Tef Poe. 38 organizations signed on, including The Dream Defenders, Hands Up United, Institute of the Black World 21st Century, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Organization for Black Struggle.
Picture of a Palestine2Ferguson sign at the main march during Ferguson October. (Photo by Christopher Hazou)
The statement is printed in full below:
“The past year has been one of high-profile growth for Black-Palestinian solidarity. Out of the terror directed against us—from numerous attacks on Black life to Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and chokehold on the West Bank—strengthened resilience and joint-struggle have emerged between our movements. Palestinians on Twitter were among the first to provide international support for protesters in Ferguson, where St. Louis-based Palestinians gave support on the ground. Last November, a delegation of Palestinian students visited Black organizers in St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit and more, just months before the Dream Defenders took representatives of Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, and other racial justice groups to Palestine. Throughout the year, Palestinians sent multiple letters of solidarity to us throughout protests in Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore. We offer this statement to continue the conversation between our movements:
On the anniversary of last summer’s Gaza massacre, in the 48th year of Israeli occupation, the 67th year of Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba (the Arabic word for Israel’s ethnic cleansing)—and in the fourth century of Black oppression in the present-day United States—we, the undersigned Black activists, artists, scholars, writers, and political prisoners offer this letter of reaffirmed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the liberation of Palestine’s land and people.
We can neither forgive nor forget last summer’s violence. We remain outraged at the brutality Israel unleashed on Gaza through its siege by land, sea and air, and three military offensives in six years. We remain sickened by Israel’s targeting of homes, schools, UN shelters, mosques, ambulances, and hospitals. We remain heartbroken and repulsed by the number of children Israel killed in an operation it called “defensive.” We reject Israel’s framing of itself as a victim. Anyone who takes an honest look at the destruction to life and property in Gaza can see Israel committed a one-sided slaughter. With 100,000 people still homeless in Gaza, the massacre’s effects continue to devastate Gaza today and will for years to come.
Our support extends to those living under occupation and siege, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the 7 million Palestinian refugees exiled in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. The refugees’ right to return to their homeland in present-day Israel is the most important aspect of justice for Palestinians.
Palestinian liberation represents an inherent threat to Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, an apparatus built and sustained on ethnic cleansing, land theft, and the denial of Palestinian humanity and sovereignty. While we acknowledge that the apartheid configuration in Israel/Palestine is unique from the United States (and South Africa), we continue to see connections between the situation of Palestinians and Black people.
Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black people in the US, including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries. Soldiers, police, and courts justify lethal force against us and our children who pose no imminent threat. And while the US and Israel would continue to oppress us without collaborating with each other, we have witnessed police and soldiers from the two countries train side-by-side.
US and Israeli officials and media criminalize our existence, portray violence against us as “isolated incidents,” and call our resistance “illegitimate” or “terrorism.” These narratives ignore decades and centuries of anti-Palestinian and anti-Black violence that have always been at the core of Israel and the US. We recognize the racism that characterizes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is also directed against others in the region, including intolerance, police brutality, and violence against Israel’s African population. Israeli officials call asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea “infiltrators” and detain them in the desert, while the state has sterilized Ethiopian Israelis without their knowledge or consent. These issues call for unified action against anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and Zionism.
We know Israel’s violence toward Palestinians would be impossible without the US defending Israel on the world stage and funding its violence with over $3 billion annually. We call on the US government to end economic and diplomatic aid to Israel. We wholeheartedly endorse Palestinian civil society’s 2005 call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and call on Black and US institutions and organizations to do the same. We urge people of conscience to recognize the struggle for Palestinian liberation as a key matter of our time.
We offer this statement first and foremost to Palestinians, whose suffering does not go unnoticed and whose resistance and resilience under racism and colonialism inspires us. It is to Palestinians, as well as the Israeli and US governments, that we declare our commitment to working through cultural, economic, and political means to ensure Palestinian liberation at the same time as we work towards our own. We encourage activists to use this statement to advance solidarity with Palestine and we also pressure our own Black political figures to finally take action on this issue. As we continue these transnational conversations and interactions, we aim to sharpen our practice of joint struggle against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and the various racisms embedded in and around our societies.”
Visit www.blackforpalestine.com for the full list of signatories and more information. You can also follow the statement on Facebook and Twitter. Kristian Bailey is a co-author of the statement along with Khury Petersen-Smith.
20th August 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil Team |Hebron, Occupied Palestine
Last Tuesday Palestinian lawyers went on a hunger strike. Hatem Shahin, vice-president of the Palestinian Bar Association for lawyers, explains why thirteen of the Association’s members decided to take this radical step: “The main goals are to break the isolation of the Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike as well as to send a message to the entire world. Palestinian voices need to be heard”. Therefore the Palestinian lawyers gathered in central Hebron to carry out their action.
The lawyers form a human chain around the poster of Mohammed Allan
Whereas the immediate motivation for the strike is the grave situation of Mohammed Allan, it is also a protest against the illegal practice of administrative detention. Administrative detention allows Israel to detain almost exclusively Palestinians without charge or trial for a maximum of six months which can be renewed indefinitely. The alleged high security risk of the concerned prisoner to the Israeli settler-colonial state is emphasized to legitimize the application of administrative detention. This practice “is the most extreme measure that international humanitarian law allows an occupying power to use against residents of occupied territory” as the prisoner support and human rights association Addameer puts it. Under international law administrative detention should only be used “against protected persons in occupied territory for ‘imperative reasons of security’ (Fourth Geneva Convention, Art. 78)”. However, Israel applies this procedure frequently ever since the Nakba of ‘48 which resulted in the construction of the Israeli state. Administrative detention leaves the prisoners and their families and friends in a prolonged state of uncertainty and isolation. “We do not feel respected as human beings because of this treatment”, expresses former administrative detainee Badran Jaber. “We live lonely in front of the occupying power”.
One day after the solidarity hunger strike was started by the Palestinian lawyers, the news is received that Israel’s High Court suspends the detention of Mohammed Allan. His health severely deteriorated which led him to be hospitalised in Barzilai Medical Centre in Ashkelon, southern Israel on Friday the 14th of August. After a medical examination it was found that Mohammed Allan now suffers from brain damage. Given his current medical condition, he does not pose a security threat any more and thus administrative detention is not legitimized according to the court’s ruling. However, it is unclear whether the brain damage is permanent and, should his medical condition improve, whether administrative detention will be re-applied.
Mother and brother of Mohammed Allan embrace after the court’s ruling
The news of Mohammed Allan’s release has been met with enthusiasm, relief and a sense of victory by supporters within occupied Palestine and beyond. However, critics also point out that the attainment of freedom through the application of extreme damage to oneself can hardly be called justice. Furthermore, the interest in Mohammed Allan’s struggle should not deviate attention from the 180 Palestinian prisonerswho are on hunger strike since the 11th of August 2015. Therefore, because of the uncertainty of a potential re-application of administrative detention should Mohammed Allan’s health improve, the continuing struggle of Palestinians inside Israeli prisons and the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine, the road to justice is still a long way ahead.
ISM spoke with lawyers, supporters and a former administrative detainee in Hebron. Watch the video below.
