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Palestine, Iran, and Populist Resistance: The Limits of Law, Morality, and the UN

3 May

[Prefatory Note: An interview with the Qods News Agency (Qodsna), the first specialized news agency in Iran, focusing on issues related to the Palestinian cause. The interview was published a week ago in Iran, and is reprinted in modified form that seeks to take account of the Palestinian struggle as connected with wider regional and global conflict patterns, and is giving rise to worldwidestudent protests against genocide and complicity with genocide, as well as a tidal wave of global consciousness sweeping away the cobwebs of political and moral complacency.]

  1. Given the fact that Israel has killed over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, and prevented the entry of international humanitarian aid into the besieged strip, what is your opinion on nearly 200 days of onslaught in Gaza and its aftermath on Palestinians’ lives? How do you describe the genocidal onslaught and war crimes in Gaza?

What has taken place over the last 200 days in Gaza is the most transparent genocide in all of human history. It is the first time that the daily atrocities were broadcast and seen by the peoples of the world in real time. Past genocides have been known almost totally in retrospect through official reports, films and memoirs, which reconstruct horrifying events but after a passage of time. Those Palestinians who managed to survive physically such sustained violence of this extreme character are reported to be suffering from mental disabilities that could persist for their entire life. It is a tragic, dehumanizing ordeal, above all for children. It is further shocking that Israel should remain insulated from denunciation and accountability despite its continuing practice of such extreme criminality.

Genocide should be understood to exist from three quite distinct moral, political, and legal perspectives. The moral perspective is made clear in Gaza by the declared intentions, policies, and practices of Israel’s highest leaders, and carried out in a totally disproportionate, indiscriminate, and lawless manner, and aggravated by consistently sadistic and demeaning treatment of Palestinian civilians who fall under the control of the Israeli armed forces. The political perspective is established in Gaza by numerous trustworthy witnesses and victims, as well as by vivid visual evidence of genocide in line of justifications adopted by Israel and its supporters. Yet the political assurances about the commission of genocide is vulnerable, as here, to the be overridden by geopolitical considerations and strategic calculations. The legal perspective relies on the presentation of evidence and interpretations of international law, above all by the delineation of genocide in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Provisional conclusions as to international law can be derived from the opinions of legal experts holding important professional positions. For instance, the current UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, Francesca Albanese issued an excellent report in March 25, 2024 entitled ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ [A/HRC/55/73]that carefully analyzed the elements of the crime and concluded that the facts and law supported the allegation of genocide. And yet until a qualified national or international tribunal with jurisdictional authority to assess the charge of genocide examines the evidence and hears the arguments of the defendant government or political actor it is impossible to say with technical propriety that the behavior in question is genocide from a legal perspective.

2-How can the world public put pressure on governments to force Israel to stop atrocities in Gaza?

It has proven difficult to challenge Israel effectively at the UN and elsewhere. Powerful countries in the Global West are complicit in supporting Israel’s policies and practices, including Israel’s misleading claim that it possesses an unlimited right to defend itself in response to the Hamas attack of October 7. The liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America are prominent among governments lending varieties of support to Israel that extends to endorsing Israel’s gross distortions of facts and law, which has had a detrimental effect on the authority of international law and the UN. The US above all has been guilty of double standards, using international law as a policy instrument to attack its adversaries such as Russia and China and disregarding its relevance with respect to the behavior of allies and friends such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and India.

It is important to also understand the more passive complicity of Israel’s main Sunni Arab neighbors that fear challenges from Hamas-type Islamic movements more than intrusions on their autocratic stability associated with the establishment of Israel or post-colonial intrusions by Western powers. It was a surprise to many in the West that the governments of Jordan and Saudi Arabia cooperated in defending Israel on April 13 against the Iranian retaliation for Israel’s April 1st attack on its Syrian consular facility, killing two of its top military advisors. This pattern of regime politics in the Arab world does not reflect the outlook of the population in these countries, which shares a strong affinity with the Palestinian struggle and is often oriented with Islamic leadership of populist, protest Arab politics as was evident during and after the Arab Spring.

South Africa has been applauded widely for taking the initiative to bring allegations of genocide to the International Court of Justice under Article XI of the Genocide Convention that legally empowers any party to the treaty to bring a dispute with another party before the ICJ. Although the ICJ rose above politics by rendering an historically important, near unanimous interim decision granting several of South Africa’s requests for Provisional Measures on January 26, 2024. Unfortunately, this preliminary ICJ order had little behavioral effect as Israel defied the interim obligatory adjustments in Gaza pending a subsequent decision on whether the allegation of genocide has been legally established after fully weighing pro and con arguments.

Israeli defiance and US dismissive attitude toward the authority of the ICJ given its view of Israeli violence in Gaza fully exposed ‘a UN crisis of implementation’ of great significance. Given Israel’s refusal to comply meant that any effort to enforce the ICJ Interim Orders would depend on action by the Security Council, which would almost certainly be vetoed by the United States. Additionally, an ICJ decision on the merits with respect to genocide must await comprehensive oral arguments and written pleadings, as well as the time needed by the judges to do their own inquiries, a legal process that would not be completed for several years, which would likely be after present emergency conditions in Gaza had been resolved for better or worse.

Nevertheless, the ICJ Interim Order was an impressive vindication of international law and a legitimating demonstration of the legal professionalism and political independence of the Court. It has also had an authenticating impact on the governments of the Global South and even more worldwide in relation to civil society, including even in the United States and other complicit countries where the surge of student pro-Palestinian protest activism cannot be wholly disconnected from the authoritative findings of the ICJ disregard in policy by Washington almost as much as by Tel Aviv. Whether this pressure will remain robust enough to result in coercive actions by way of boycotts and sanctions, and pariah status, remains to be seen, but at minimum it suggests that even in this unfavorable political setting international law and populist activism offer some hope that genocide can be stopped and its perpetrators held accountable, if not formally, then by the action of peoples around the world.   

3-What do you think about Palestinian resistance fighters’ right to initiate the October 7 operation against Israel?

The right of resistance on the part of a people long occupied and abused is well established. Prior to October 7, Israel’s commission of the crime of apartheid in its manner of governing the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian minority in Israel had been documented in detailed reports by several of the most respected human rights NGOs including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as by the Israeli NGO, B’tselem, and by UN’s ESCWA.

While the right to resist is certainly justified by the conditions imposed over the long period of occupation, which featured Israeli failure to uphold its duty as Occupying Power to protect Palestinian civilians under its control, it does not confer unlimited rights of resistance. Tactics of resistance, as for other armed groups including those operating under the authority of a sovereign state, are obliged to comply with international criminal law, and not abuse or target civilians, impose collective punishment, and commit atrocities. Yet unlike the apartheid and genocide allegations against Israel, there is as yet no authoritative account of what happened on October 7. There were, at first, luridly exaggerated claims of barbarous behavior reported to the world by Israel, but later modified by retractions and much skepticism about Israel’s depiction of events on that day. Until an international factfinding commission is established and given full cooperation there will be doubt about the extent to which the criminality of the Hamas attack tainted its resistance claims, and the degree to which Israel itself was negligent about heeding warnings and otherwise responsible for the lapse of border security.

4-How can the Palestinian people achieve their rights and overcome the ongoing occupation?

The Palestinian people are winning the struggle for public support in civil society and among many governments in the Global South. The rise of popular support for Palestinian rights even in complicit governments may erode somewhat their willingness to continue normal relations with Israel. Whether this political post-Gaza reappraisal is enough at this stage to make a difference with regard to ending Israeli occupation is not clear at present. Prior anti-settler colonial struggles have been eventually won by a colonized people if they manage to survive the almost inevitable genocidal assault by settlers to their existence. The breakaway British colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand managed through genocidal tactics to marginalize or eliminate the resistance of native and indigenous peoples and complete their settler colonial projects; South Africa failed, and the project collapsed. Israel is in that space where it will either join the settler colonial ‘success’ stories or it will succumb to national resistance, with Jews either giving up the Jewish supremacy claims of Zionism or finding a means to coexist with Palestinians on the basis of true equality and mutual respect, presupposing a honest accounting of the past as with some sort of truth and reconciliation process that has smoothed a transition from repressiveness to constitutionalism. The best example of managing such a transition was South Africa, benefitting from the leadership of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, yet also experiencing bumps in the road along the way. Its pro-Palestinian ICJ initiative was a symbolically important way of honoring the enduring legacy of Mandela’s anti-apartheid struggle.

5-As you know, Israel attacked Iran’s consulate, killing its military advisors in Syria which is considered contrary to international conventions, which prompted a military response by the country. What is your take on Iran’s punitive response to Israel, especially in terms of international laws?

The Iranian retaliatory strike against Israel caused neither deaths nor damage, although had its array of missiles and large number of drones not been destroyed, it might have had a war-generating disproportionate effect. The interpretation of Iran’s retaliation remains ambiguous. Did it intend to display its military capabilities to attack Israel directly without inflicting major damage or was it an operational failure in the sense that the intention was to be as destructive as possible. Without clarity on this question, it is impossible to make an intelligent assessment of the relevance of international law to the events of April 13th.

The legal status of retaliatory violence is a gray area of conflicting opinions among law experts, often colored by political identities and jurisprudential orientations. On the one side are legalists who suggest that all retaliations violate the UN Charter and international law by validating uses of international force only in situations of a sustained armed attack across an international border. By this reading even a modest retaliation against the Damascus attack was not lawful.

As with other issues, this strict reading of international law is not descriptive of international practice with respect to acts of retaliation, which in practice over the years validate ‘reasonable’ retaliations so long as proportionate in relation to the provocation. Israel’s second attack on Iran, however, would seem to be unlawful as it ignored the reality that it initiating the cycle of violence on April 1st by its lethal attack on Iran’s consular facility in Damascus, and to regard it as entitled by any standard of law or reasonableness would tend to continue the cycle of interactive violence indefinitely.

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Suzanne Hammad on Embedded Palestinian Resistance in Bil’in in West Bank: Rooted in Land and Home

6 Feb

[Prefatory Note: I wanted to share a foreword that I wrote to an exceptional ethnographic study of everyday resistance by residents of the Palestinian village of Bil’in, quite near Ramallah, based on the Suzanne Hammad three years of residence and informed observation. It enriches our understanding of core forms of resistance embedded in home and land. It offers a parallel to the commin perception of resistance as distinct protest activity, both violent and non-violent, for which Bil’in was previously international known as a result of its weekly protests that were provoked by the intrusive construction of the Israeli separation wall. This book written well before October 2023 when the genocidal onslaught by Israel on Gaza was published in 2023 by Rowman & Littlefield, and available in a Kindle edition, unfortunately with a high price-tag.]

Suzanne Hammad, Toward a Theory of Emplaced Resistances: Everything

            Starts and Ends with the Land, Foreword by Richard Falk, 2023.

This fascinating book gives us not only creative ways of grasping the underlying continuities of the Palestinian ordeal but also a truly original conception of why the long arc of resistance and resilience, stretching across time and taking certain distinctive forms, has been sustained for more than a century in the face of assorted trials and tribulations. None of these tests of Palestinian resistance was greater than the double assault on the fundamentals of Palestinian normalcy in the West Bank than that posed by the ever-expanding settlement movement and the connected construction of an encroaching Separation Wall on mostly occupied Palestinian land commencing in 2001.

Suzanne Hammad views the evolving Palestinian reality through an ethnographic lens that complements what the media reports, leaders and intellectuals have to say, and militants achieve by direct confrontation with the daily experience of Palestinians living under the heavy boot of Israel’s apartheid regime which pursues with accelerating vigor its own agenda of ethnic cleansing and dispossession of people from their land. To carry out such an exploration led Hammad to conduct her field research for three years in a single West Bank community, the village of Bil’in. The implications of her findings have a broad resonance for Palestinian studies as they illuminate the realities of many similar villages subject to occupation, and indeed inform the situation and consciousness of all Palestinians regardless of whether living under occupation, in Arab refugee camps, or in pre-1967 Israel. In this sense, Bil’in with its population of less than 2000 offers us a rich metaphor by which to decipher the entire Palestinian predicament, and better appreciate the various modes of response that underpin resistance not only to the existential abuses being experienced under occupation but to the foreshadowing of an inevitable liberation that Israel’s state violence is capable of punishing harshly, yet unable so far to destroy. It might even be unable to comprehend such resistance. It is bringing to light these under-appreciated facets of Palestinian sumud or steadfastness that makes this book illuminating reading for all who wish to gain a deeper comprehension of this tragic struggle that remains horizonless as to beginning and end.

Although Bil’in is but one of many West Bank villages, its selection by the author as her main case study is hardly accidental or arbitrary. This village distinguished itself from many other superficially similar villages in at least two important ways. First, residents experienced the severe intrusion of the Wall upon its living space, vividly exemplified by the barbed wire, electrified fence passing through Bil’in in ways that cut its residents off from 60% of their agricultural growing and grazing land, as well as the surrounding ‘empty’ areas used for recreation, reflection, and spiritual growth, including gatherings of the whole community during holidays, and even more during the harvesting times, especially of olives. Bil’in’s inhabitants were cut off by a permit system that was required to pass the single gate in the wall that granted them permission to go beyond the mostly residential part of the village, and in some cases, gain access to their own farmland. Secondly, residents reacted through collective anti-Wall protests every Friday for at least 15 years starting in 2005. The continuity and persistence of these protest dramatized Palestinian opposition to the Wall and the resolve of villagers to resist non-violently, yet with courage and resolve. This activism in Bil’in contrasted reliance on peaceful methods with the violent brutality of Israel’s apartheid regime, which imposes Jewish supremacy even in occupied Palestine and in defiance of international humanitarian law. In relation to the Wall, Israeli defiance became overt as Israel rejected the near unanimous (14-1) findings of the World Court’s Advisory Opinion of 2004. Such an authoritative legal endorsement of Bil’in fundamental grievance added legitimacy to the Friday protests by confirming that it was unlawful for Israel to construct a supposed security Wall on Occupied Palestinian Territory, and hence the Wall should be dismantled, and the Palestinians given reparations for the harm sustained. Implicit in the Advisory Opinion was the related idea that Israel’s situating the Wall on Palestinian territory was more a land grab than a genuine security measure.

We ignore the special contribution of Hammad’s inquiry if we are content with this most visible level of interaction, which is to depict both the depth of Palestinian suffering and its transcendence in the lived daily life of the residents of Bil’in. On the one side a deprivation so severe that it prompts inhabitants to pronounce their condition by such sayings as ‘we’re alive only because we are not dead yet” or “if we had the chance we would choose death over living under occupation.” And yet, this is not at all the bleak understanding that Hammad seeks to impart, which is rather a seemingly contradictory sense in Bil’in that our life is not worth living and yet if we will go on living our values, resisting Israel’s encroachments, and transcending their harmful intentions, by nurturing the pride and pleasure associated with sustaining our way of life in the face of hardships, humiliations, and humbling adjustments we will be living the best possible life given the circumstances. To get at this interface between despair and transcendence, Hammad enables us to listen closely to the voices of Bil’in’s people, which dominate the text. This witnessing by Bil’inians decries the pain of profound loss yet seamlessly affirms their pride and meaning of life by maintaining organic connections as best they can with the land and their ancestral homes by doing as much of what they did before the Wall by walking alone or with a friend in the arid wilderness beyond the fertile land or convening the village children and elders to take part in the annual olive harvests that are more than agricultural and livelihood happenings, but are truly sacred rituals that combine work, play, festivals of remembrance, and defiant reaffirmations of a sense of belonging that guns, settlements, and provocations are incapable of damaging, let alone destroying.

Along the way we become privy to many telling details that add credibility to this seeming impossible atmosphere of existential contradiction. For instance, the residents of Bil’in do not waste a moment of regret lamenting their decision to stay in their homes as near as possible to their land on the wrong side of the Wall, come what may in terms of settler violence, encroachment, and Israeli tactics of repression. On the contrary, those Palestinians who departed from their homes and land increased their experience of injustice and suffering associated with Israeli 1948 tactics of dispossession and subsequent reenactments of the nakba; in retrospect, those so coerced, should for their own sake have stayed, resisted, and even accepting death as preferable to displacement, however cruelly induced to attain the Zionist settler colonial goals.

In another telling example, Hammad show us how those Bil’in residents rendered unable to grow their own subsistence food on their diminished farmland, losing the dignity associated with living off the produce yielded from one’s own land as generations before them had done. A further creative initiative undertaken not only for practical reasons, but in the spirit of nonviolent resistance is a food sovereignty movement in Bil’in which seeks to act collectively as a community to maintain local subsistence living standards without outside dependence.

These ways of balancing the ordeal of the occupation against a resolve to live as authentically as possible in traditional ways is what most truly captures the complex truths of life in Bil’in. In other words, the weekly protests that gave Bil’in worldwide prominence are the visible display of stubborn resistance. These marches to the wall opposed by Israel’s active military presence are the front story, but it is the back story of the daily lived life of residents that is the core of a resistance-unto-death that is quietly enacted on an hourly basis by the people of Bil’in. This extended exposure to the voiced experiences of Bil’in’s residents also abandons the conventional reliance of scholarly inquiry on the binary optics of oppressor/victim or victim/resister. This enriches the appreciation that Palestinian life under occupation is not properly interpreted as an either/or reality, but is more truly constituted by a richer interwoven texture of creative adaptation, stubborn revolt, depressing captivity, and liberating defiance.

Suzanne Hammad’s relationship to this account of her experience in Bil’in is at once deeply personal while at the same time managing to uphold the best traditions of academic rigor. She does not obscure her own background whose father left Nablus in the 1967 War for the sake of economic opportunity to start a family outside, taking refuge in an Arab country. She makes no effort to offer a balancing rationale for the Zionist Project or set forth the Israeli security narrative, yet this book came across to me as not only revelatory but entirely trustworthy. Hammad attains her goals by allowing the people of Bil’in to speak about their lives in ways that enlighten readers no matter how familiar they are with the large literature on the Palestine struggle. This study is also a rebuke to those who insist that objectivity requires a total detachment from partisan perspectives by achieving an understanding of Palestinian resistance that has eluded conventional scholarship for more than seven decades.

There are some lingering questions that make me urge Hammad to consider undertaking a sequel.

            –Is this attachment to home and place especially strong in Bil’in because the fence/Wall bisects the lived life of the village, or has this sense of loss transcended the physicality of Bil’in to become part of a broader Palestinian imaginary by way of empathy and projection?

            –If after a few years, will a renewed immersion in Bil’in after a year or so confirm the persistence of Hammad’s findings, given the heightened Israeli provocations of the extremist leadership that took over the Israel government at the start of 2023, and put the West Bank at the top of its expansionist policy agenda?

            –How do the daily lives of city dwellers in Jenin or Nablus exhibit resistance in ways that either resemble or differ from Bil’in and from one other?

            –And even more wider afield, is everyday Palestinian resistance, with its pride of place and home attached to sumud unique to the Palestinian reality, or is it paralleled in other national situations of sustained repression of an ethnically distinct people in similar or differing ways? For example, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Tibet, Rohingya (Rakhine State, Myanmar)?

Hammad’s inspiring study has many additional ramifications that invite further study, but as a way of conceiving the Palestinian ordeal this book presents the most convincing, compassionate, and imaginative understanding of just how deep and abiding are the roots of Palestinian resistance. It is a great achievement as well as a loving tribute to the forms of resistance enacted by the village people of Bil’in against the apartheid regime of mighty Israel.

Richard Falk

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Triple Jeopardy: Refugees/Migrants/Palestinian Prisoners

25 Apr

Triple Jeopardy: Refugees/Migrants/Palestinian Prisoners

 

[Prefatory Note: This post was published in a somewhat altered form in Transcend MediaService on April 20, 2020 under the title “Triple Jeopardy and the Plight of Palestinian Prisoners.]

 

Double Jeopardy for Refugees/Migrants

Recently reflecting on the plight of refugees fleeing war zones in the Middle East and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and Central America I was struck by the analogy to ‘double jeopardy.’ As widely understood, double jeopardy is a procedural rule of criminal law that prohibits prosecution by a state of an individual more than once for the same crime. It is deservedly treated as a human right that protects persons from being harassed after judicial acquittal by repeated allegations of the same alleged crime. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) in Article 14(7) defines double jeopardy: “No one shall be liable to be tried or punished again for an offense for which he has already been finally convicted or acquitted in accordance with the law and penal procedure of each country.” (There are exceptions for acquittals tainted by fraud, confessions by the accused, and the wording of the rule should be corrected for its gender bias implying that it is only ‘men’ who could be victimized by vindictive re-prosecution).

 

For some years, the images of violent border security associated with keeping masses of needy refugees or migrants from crossing international boundaries to reach more peaceful or affluent countries in Europe or North America is what prompted me to sense an analogy to the kind of ordeal that exists when someone wins an acquittal after a long, emotionally and economically costly trial, and is then confronted by a new indictment for essentially the  same supposed criminal offense. In a well-administered democracy, the double jeopardy rule is taken for granted, and prevents such injustices from happening. But what of the world of refugees and migrants?

 

What made the double jeopardy comparison apt for me were these haunting images of doubling down on punishment of those who were not only innocent, but already victimized by circumstances beyond their control, and then again punished for acts that deserve empathy and accommodation, not punishment, if humanitarian values were extended to  refugees/migrants. My existential premise, borne out by some experience, is that persons almost never leave their place of birth and family residence without overwhelming provocation, and are especially hesitant to use their small saving and meager borrowings to embark on a voyage to a distant land with a different language and culture. Most of us, even if dissatisfied with conditions in our native land or our personal circumstances will still not voluntarily depart from the familiarities of family and friends, and of language, traditions, and nationality. Only circumstances of grave danger such as presented by ravaged combat zones or resulting from grinding poverty found in societies that confront residents and entire communities with gray horizons of hopelessness that offer neither safety nor security, can induce most persons to so uproot themselves. In other words, the motivation underlying the emotional reality of the overwhelming majority of refugees and migrants is one of desperation, of grasping at straws and escaping doom. Of course, the small nomadic elites of adventurers, exiles, and expatriates are examples of persons leaving their home countries not from necessity, but in pursuit of the exotic and the paradisiac.

 

This sad depiction of the decision to flee to safety or to search for economic security is then generally accompanied by a treacherous and harrowing journey that often drains the traveler of his or her small savings. Many trips end with death and illness for many in the group, or perilous trips across stormy seas or barren deserts, only to be confronted by a coercive ‘no’ in the form of barbed wire, walls, detention centers, and even live ammunition if and when the destination is reached. To be placed in detention centers with long waits may be the best that can be hoped for by such forsaken souls, often including young children, that experience the depths of insecurity in their homeland, and also along the way that reaches a negative climax when and if the national goal is ever reached.

 

I am not suggesting that this refugee/migrant experience is double jeopardy in a legal sense, but it seems to possess the same ingredients of the unjust repetition of indictment and prosecution, itself punitive, that is prohibited as a part of civilized behavior in a society responsive to the rule of law, and protective of human rights. It is a kind of morally grounded, culturally and spiritually debasing, and often life-threatening duplication of criminal prosecution without any account being taken of human dignity and fundamental innocence of those being victimized, or the ordeal of struggling against a criminal allegation.

 

And yet, moral outrage or a call for compassion does not acknowledge the complexity of the issues raised. Unlike the individuals accused of the same crime a second time, the refugee/migrant does not, as such, pose real threats to the countries that are being expected to act as benign hosts or to extend hospitality to strangers in need. This is notto say that a country does not have the right to deny entry to those with criminal records or contagious diseases, provided due process is accorded, and similarly have authority to insist that those who enter do legally.

 

We live in a state-centric world where international boundaries define the outer limits of community, which has not changed fundamentally no matter how much we hear cosmopolitan sermonizing and ecologically persuasive calls for planetary identity. In such a framework, the citizenry of a country feel threatened in various ways by the influx of large numbers of strangers, especially if their racial and cultural characteristics clash with that of the country asked to show hospitality or grant asylum. The reality of this resistance is producing extremisms of scapegoating and xenophobia, which make moderates search for compromises in the form of requiring lawful entry, quotas, job training, and language and civilizational educational resources. Given the scale of the challenge, and the unlikely emergence of greater receptivity, the main line of an effective and humane response structure should be a large investment in overcoming the conditions in foreign countries that give rise to massive displacement and large numbers of persons desperate to find more sustainable life conditions. Overcoming double jeopardy in these settings depends on a self-interested globalization of responsibility for achieving peace and security, as well as lifting the curse of poverty, and this requires the drastic reform of the way the benefits of neoliberal globalization are distributed much more equitably than in the past.       

 

 

Triple Jeopardy for Palestinian Prisoners at a Time of Pandemic

 

This metaphor for layers of unjust suffering initially occurred to me while preparing a ZOOM presentation on the abuse of Palestinian prisoners in the context of the health dangers associated with the COVID-19 challenge. Such dangers were present for Palestinians under pre-pandemic conditions, but greatly aggravated by Israeli failures to mitigate the additional and aggravated risks that come from keeping around 5,000 Palestinian prisoners in overcrowded prisons where some of the guards and security personnel were reported as testing positive for the virus yet continued to interact with prisoners without prescribed personal protective gear (PPE), and where insufficient hospital and medical capabilities existed in the event that the disease started to spread. This overall sub-par situation was further accentuated in relation to an. estimated 172 child prisoners, many elderly and disabled prisoners, and almost all inmates incarcerated for nonviolent security offenses that should never have been criminalized because of falling within the scope of a right of resistance possessed by persons living under an apartheid regime, which is itself a serious violation of international criminal law. The right to resist Israeli apartheid, at least within the limits of international law regulating violence by reference to choice of targets and other considerations. Israel has not accepted WHO guidelines or a variety of humanitarian appeals by respected NGOs to release at least ‘low-risk’ prisoners as well as those with ‘underlying conditions,’ children, and the elderly.

 

Taking these considerations into account the ‘triple jeopardy’ framing seems justified to underscore the layers of injustice endured by Palestinian prisoners at this time. As the Palestinian writer, Ramzy Baroud, writes, “..all of Palestine has been in a state of ‘lockdown’ since the late 1940s when Israel became a state and the Palestinian homeland was erased by Zionist colonialists with the support of Western benefactors.” To drive the point home, Baroud adds, “In Palestine, we don’t call our imprisonment a lockdown, but a ‘military occupation’ and apartheid.” [See Baroud, “A Palestinian Guide to Surviving a Quarantine: On Faith, Humour, and ‘Dutch Candy,’” Middle East Monitor, April 5, 2020]. In effect, Baroud is insisting that all Palestinians are enduring an unjust ‘imprisonment’ that has lasted for more than 71 years with no signs of abatement, and is itself a punishment of individuals of a certain ethnicity for the ‘crime’ of existing.

 

On this basis, the criminalization of resistance, including nonviolent and symbolic forms, extending even to poem and poets (for example, Dareen Tatour, and her crime, the poem “Resist, my people, resist them”), has resulted in harsh confinement in Israeli prisons, including reliance on such legally dubious mechanisms as ‘administrative detention’ (imprisoning without charges or any due process for extended periods) and the unlawful transfer of prisoners from detention in Occupied Palestine to prisons in Israel [behind the green line], andd out of reach of family members). In effect, the imprisoning of any Palestinian in Israeli jails is Double Jeopardy because it puts Palestinians already punishment by lockdown, displacement, and dispossession behind bars because they dared to assert their right of resistance.

 

The allegation of Triple Jeopardy arises from the failure to suspend or mitigate prison condition in light of the Coronavirus Pandemic, and the related failure to take responsible steps to protect those so confined from contracting a highly contagious and potentially lethal disease. A virtual death sentence hangs over every single Palestinian prisoner for as long as the pandemic lasts, and poses especially acute risks with respect to particularly vulnerable categories of Palestinians living in prisons.

 

 

 Toward Solutions?

 It is not possible to set forth detailed proposals to overcome double and triple jeopardy as depicted. I will only indicate the vectors that point in a direction sensitive to practical and normative aspects of the challenge.

 For Double Jeopardy: seek to accommodate an ethos of hospitality and empathy with a major commitment at the UN and by national governments to take steps to remove the conditions of mass desperation prompting large numbers to leave their homelands, an undertaking ideally funded by a globally administered tax on luxury goods, financial transactions, fossil fuels, and transnational air travel.

 For Triple Jeopardy: release all Palestinian political prisoners immediately, with a sense of urgency, and commit to ending apartheid as the essential step toward a sustainable and just peace based on the equality of rights of Jews and Palestinians.

 

 

 

 

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