[Prefatory Note: I am re-posting this text because of its relevance to ongoing events and with this new Prefatory Note, partly because illness has kept me from a normal blogging rhythm. The post below is the text of my foreword to Suzanne Hammad’s important book, which explores from an ethnographic perspective, the deep and often hidden roots of resistance to alien occupation, and gives an account based on her lived experience about the specificities of Palestinian resistance in the West Bank town of Bil’in, a place known for public protests against the intrusive presence of Israel’s unlawful separation wall. This tale of resistance is also anguishly relevant to ongoing relevant to the criminal onslaught being carried out by Israel in Gaza, illustrating the extremities of violence relied upon by the Occupying Power to a totally vulnerable entrapped Palestinian population of 2.3 million persons as its regime of apartheid culminates in textbook genocide, a human catastrophe like no other in its transparency accentuated by support received from liberal democracies in the West.]
RAF Foreword to
Hammad, Toward a Theory of Emplaced Resistances: Everything
Starts and Ends with the Land (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
[Prefatory Note: I am re-posting this text because of its relevance to ongoing events and with this new Prefatory Note, partly because illness has kept me from a normal blogging rhythm. The post below is the text of my foreword to Suzanne Hammad’s important book, which explores from an ethnographic perspective, the deep and often hidden roots of resistance to alien occupation, and gives an account based on her lived experience about the specificities of Palestinian resistance in the West Bank town of Bil’in, a place known for public protests against the intrusive presence of Israel’s unlawful separation wall. This tale of resistance is also anguishly relevant to ongoing relevant to the criminal onslaught being carried out by Israel in Gaza, illustrating the extremities of violence relied upon by the Occupying Power to a totally vulnerable entrapped Palestinian population of 2.3 million persons as its regime of apartheid culminates in textbook genocide, a human catastrophe like no other in its transparency accentuated by support received from liberal democracies in the West.]
RAF Foreword to Suzanne Hammad, Toward a Theory of Emplaced Resistances: Everything
Starts and Ends with the Land (Rowman & Littlefield, 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[MK1] 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[MK2] 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
Rome, July 24, 2023
Hammad, Toward a Theory of Emplaced Resistances: Everything
Starts and Ends with the Land (Rowman & Littlefield, 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[MK1] 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[MK2] 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
Rome, July 24, 2023
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Historic Hunger Strikes: Lightning in the Skies of Palestine
8 MayThere is ongoing militant expression of Palestinian resistance to the abuses of Israel’s 45 years of occupation and de facto annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and five year blockade of Gaza taking the form of a series of hunger strikes. Recourse to this desperate tactic of courageous self-sacrifice is an extreme form of nonviolence, and should whenever and wherever it occurs be given close attention. Palestinians have protested by hunger strikes in the past but failed to inspire the imagination of the wider Palestinian community or shake the confidence of Israeli officialdom. Despite the averted gaze of the West, especially here in North America, there are some signs that this time the hunger strikes have crossed a historic threshold of no return.
These strikes started by the individual exploit of a single person, Khader Adnan, at the end of 2011. Dragged from his home in the village of Arraba near Jenin by a night raid by dozens of Israeli soldiers, humiliated and roughed up in the presence of his two and four year old daughter, carried away shackled and blindfolded, roughly interrogated, and then made subject to an administrative decree for the eighth time in his young life, Adnan’s inner conscience must have screamed ‘Enough!’ and he embarked on an open-ended hunger strike. He continued it for 66 days, and agreed to take food again only after the Israeli authorities relented somewhat, including a pledge not to subject Adnan to a further period of administrative detention unless further incriminating evidence came to the surface. Upon release, Adnan to depersonalize his ordeal insisted on visiting the families of other Palestinians currently under administrative detention before returning to his own home.
He has spoken out with firm gentleness and invited persons of conscience everywhere to join in the struggle to induce Israel to abandon administrative detention, and the accompanying violations of Palestinian human rights. Khader Adnan’s open letter to the people of the world is reproduced below to convey the tone and substance of his struggle.
Following Adnan, and inspired by him, was Hana Shalabi, a young Palestinian woman subject to a similar abusive arrest, accompanied by humiliations associated with her dress and sexual identity. Shalabi was from the villange of Burqin also near Jenin, and had been released a few months earlier in October 2011 as part of the prisoner exchange that was negotiated to obtain the release of the sole Israeli captive, Gilad Shalit. She had seldom strayed from her family home prior to the re-arrest on February 16, 2012, and her life was described as follows by her devoted sister, Zahra: “The four months between October and February were trouble-free days, bursting with dreams and ambitions. Hana loved to socialize and meet with people. She was busy with getting her papers in order to register for university, with her eyes set on enrolling at the American University in Jenin. She wanted to get her driver’s license, and later buy a car. She went on a shopping spree, buying new carpets and curtains for her bedroom…and she dreamed of getting married and of finding the perfect man to spend the rest of her life with.” It is little wonder that when arrested in the middle of the night she reacted in the manner described by Zahra: “She was panicking, and kept repeating over and over again that she was not going with the soldiers because she didn’t do anything.”
As with Adnan, Shalabi was released after she was in critical condition, but in a vindictive manner, being sent to live in Gaza for three years, thereby separated from her family and village, which were her places of refuge, love, and nurturing. She also made it clear that her experience of resistance was not meant for herself alone, but was intended to contribute to the struggle against prison abuse and the practice e of administrative detention, but even more generally as engagement in the struggle for Palestinian rights, so long denied. The example set by Adnan and Shalabi inspired others subject to similar treatment at the hands of the Israelis arrest and prison service. Several Palestinians detained by administrative detention decrees commenced hunger strikes at the end of February, and as many as 1650 others, and possibly more, initiated a massive hunger strike on Palestinian Prisoner’s Day, April 17th that is continuing, and has been named ‘the battle of empty stomachs.’ The main battlefield is the mind of the oppressor, whether to give in and seem weak or remain firm and invite escalating censure, as well as Palestinian militancy, should any of those now in grave condition die.
The latest news suggests that Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, continuing their hunger strike that started on February 28th of this year, are clinging to life by a thread. A few days ago they were both been finally transferred to civilian hospitals. Mr. Halahleh after the 70th day without food announced that he was no longer willing even to drink any water or accept further medication.
As might be expected the voices of concern from the international community have been muted and belated. The International Committee of the Red Cross has finally expressed in public its concern for the lives of these strikers. The UN Envoy to the Middle East, Robert Serry, never someone outspoken, acknowledged a few days ago in a brief and perfunctory statement that he was ‘deeply troubled’ by the danger to these hunger strikers, as if such a sentiment was somehow sufficient to the outrages being inflicted.
More persuasively, several human rights NGOs, including Physicians for Human Rights–Israel have been reminding Israel of its obligation to allow family visits, which prison authorities have repeatedly denied, despite it being an accepted tenet of medical ethics that is affirmed in Israel’s Patient’s Rights Law.
On May 7, 2012 the Israel’s High Court of Justice denied urgent petitions for release from administrative detention filed on behalf of Mr. Diab and Mr. Halahleh. The Court in a classic example of the twisted way judges choose to serve the state rather than the cause of justice declared: “Hunger strikes cannot serve as an element in a decision on the very validity of administrative detention, since that would be confusing the issue.” Would it be so confusing to say that without some demonstration of evidence of criminality rejecting such a petition amounts to imposing a death sentence without even the pretensions of ‘a show trial’ that relies on coerced confessions? Israel’s highest judicial body leaves no doubt about their priorities by invoking anti-terrorism as a blanket justification, saying that Israel “should not have to apologize for securing its own safety.”
Other reports that the Israeli government has yet to feel pressure from European governments to act in a more humanitarian manner in response to these hunger strikes, but is worried that such pressure might come soon. After
remaining silent for a long time, Robert Serry, the UN Envoy to the Middle East, a few days ago timidly issued a public statement saying that he was ‘deeply troubled’ by the near death condition of the Mr. Diab and Mr. Halahleh.
On a wider canvas, the hunger strikes are clearly having some effect on Israeli prison policy, although it is not clearly discernible as yet. The Israeli Public Security Minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, convened a meeting in which he voiced the opinion that Israeli reliance on administrative detention was excessive, and should be reduced. There is also some discussion with officials of the Israeli Prison Service and a committee representing some of the April 17th prisoners on a series of demands relating to prison conditions.
The following demands have been articulated by the April 17th hunger strikers, under the banner of ‘The Prisoners Revolution’:
1. Ending the Israeli Administrative detention and solitary confinement, in which Palestinians were imprisoned for more than ten consecutive years, in solitary cells that lack basic human necessities of life.
2. Allowing family visits to those from the Gaza Strip due to political decisions and unjust laws, such as the so-called “law of Shalit.
3. Improving the livelihood of prisoners inside Israeli Jails and allowing basic needs such as a proper health treatment, education and TV channels and newspapers.
4. Putting an end to the humiliation policy carried by the Israeli Prison Service against Palestinian prisoners and their families, through humiliating naked inspection, group punishment, and night raids.
***********
Khader Adnan’s Open Letter to the Free People of the World
In the name of Allah, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful,*
* Praise be to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of
Allah.*
Dear free people of the world. Dear oppressed and disenfranchised around
the globe. Dear friends of our people, who stood with me with a stern belief in freedom and dignity for my people and our prisoners languishing
in the Occupation’s prisons.
Dear free women and men, young and elderly, ordinary people as well as
intellectual elites everywhere – I address you today with an outpouring of
hope and pain for every Palestinian that suffers from the occupation of his
land, for each of us that has been killed, wounded or imprisoned by the
state of terror, that denies anything beautiful in our lives, even the
smile of our children and families. I am addressing you in my first letter
following my release – praying it will not be the last – after Allah
granted me freedom, pride and dignity. I was an “administrative detainee”
in the jail of occupation for four months, out of which I have spent 66
days on hunger strike.
I was driven to declare an open-ended hunger strike by the daily harassment
and violation of my people’s rights by the Israeli Zionist occupation. The
last straw for me were the ongoing arrests, the brutal nighttime raid on my
house, my violent detention, during which I was taken to the “Mavo Dotan”
settlement on our land occupied 1967, and the beatings and humiliation I
was treated to during arrest interrogation. The way I was treated during
the interrogation at the Jalameh detention center, using the worse and
lowest verbal insults in the dictionary. After questioning, I was sentenced
to imprisonment under administrative detention with no charges, which
proves mine and others’ arrests serve only to maintain a quota of
prisoners, to harass us, to restrict our freedom and to undermine our
determination, pride and dignity.
I write today to thank all those who stood tall in support of my people,
with our prisoners, with Hana al-Shalabi and with myself. I call on you to
stand for justice pride and dignity in the face of occupation. The assault
on the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people is an assault on free
people of the world by a criminal occupation that threatens the security,
freedom and dignity of all, no matter where.
Please, continue in exposing this occupation, boycotting and isolating it
internationally. Expose its true face, the one that was clearly exposed in
the attack of an Israeli officer on our Danish cohort. Unlike that attack,
the murder our people is a crime that goes by unspoken of and slips away
from the lens of the camera. Our prisoners are dying in silence. Hundreds
of defenders of freedom are on hunger strike inside the prisons, including
the eight knights, Bilal Diab and Thaer Hlahalh, who are now on their 61st
day of hunger strike, Hassan Safadi, Omar Abu Shalal, Mahmoud Sarsak,
Mahmoud Sarsal, Mohammad Taj, Jaafar Azzedine (who was arrested solely for standing in solidarity with myself) and Ahmad haj Ali. Their lives now are
in great danger.
We are all responsible and we will all lose if we anything happen to them.
Let us take immediate action to pressure the Occupation into releasing them
immediately, or their children could never forgive us.
Let all those free and revolutionary join hands against the Occupation’s
oppression, and take to the streets – in front of the Occupation’s prisons,
in front of its embassies and all other institutions backing it around the
world.
With deep appreciation,
*Khader Adnan *
++++
Having followed these hunger strikes for several months, I am convinced that these individuals subject to administrative detention are ordinary persons living a normal life, although chafing under the daily rigors and indignities of prolonged occupation. Israeli commentary tends to divert humanitarian concerns by branding these individuals as ‘terrorists,’ taking note of their alleged affiliation with Islamic Jihad. Adnan who is obviously preoccupied with his loving family, a baker by profession, working in his village, does not seem a particularly political person beyond the unavoidable political response to a structure of domination that is violent, cruel, and abusive. The language of his Open Letter is one that exhibits moral intensity, and seeks support for the Palestinian struggle for a sustainable peace with justice. It has none of the violent imagery or murderous declarations found in Al Qaeda’s characteristic calls for holy warfare against the infidels.
I was impressed by Hana Shalabi’s sister’s response when asked about the alleged connection with Islamic Jihad. Zahra responded to the question with a smile saying, ‘She’s not really Islamic Jihad. She doesn’t belong to any faction. When Israel imprisons you, their security forces ask which political faction you belong to. Hana chose Islamic Jihad on a whim.’ Even if it was than a whim, for a religious person to identify with Islamic Jihad it does not at all imply a commitment to or support for terrorist tactics of resistance. Zahra asks rhetorically, ‘Does she have missiles or rockets? Where is the threat to Israel? ..Why can’t we visit her? She has done nothing.’ And finally, ‘I would never place my enemy in my sister’s position…I would not wish this on anyone.’
Israel has by vague allegations of links to terrorist activities tried its best to dehumanize these hunger strikers, or to dismiss such actions as the foolish or vain bravado of persons ready to renounce their lives by their own free will. But their acts and words if heeded with empathy, their show of spiritual stamina and sense of mission, convey an altogether different message, one that exhibits the finest qualities that human beings can ever hope to achieve. Those of us who watch such heroic dramas unfold should at least do our best to honor these hunger strikers, and not avert our eyes, and do our utmost to act in solidarity with their struggles in whatever way we can.
We cannot now know whether these hunger strikes will spark Palestinian resistance in new and creative ways. What we can already say with confidence is that these hunger strikers are writing a new chapter in the story line of resistance sumud, and their steadfastness is for me a Gandhian Moment in the Palestinian struggle.
Tags: Adnan, Gilad Shalit, Hungerstrike, Israel, Jenin, Middle East, Palestinian people, West Bank