Solidarity with the Palestinian Prisoners

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Ever since Shalit’s capture — the Zionist soldier taken captive by the Hamas movement — the Palestinian people has been crying out to the world that Shalit is not the only captive; there are thousands of Palestinian prisoners deserving attention, and pressure on Israel to release them. But the world became preoccupied with Shalit, treating his case as a priority Hamas needed to resolve quickly, leaving Palestinians to tend their own wounds, with no helper or supporter.

Indeed, many states, the Western states foremost among them, considered the Palestinian prisoners to be murderous terrorists, and their remaining under punishment as easing the path toward peace in the Arab-Islamic region. A small few states and individuals showed sympathy for the Palestinian prisoners, but this never produced pressure forcing Israel to take measures toward releasing any number of them, and about a thousand of them were freed only through a prisoner exchange operation.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Hunger Strike

Thousands of Palestinian prisoners — not all of them — have been on hunger strike since April 17, 2012, aiming to end administrative detention and improve detention conditions. Israel, it should be noted, holds thousands of Palestinians in administrative detention — that is, without trial, based instead on secret information obtained through various means, spies especially, and it does not wish to disclose the sources of this information or the charges, so as not to harm these sources.

The period of administrative detention is six months, renewable. As a result, Palestinians spend years in administrative detention without trial or specific charges. As for detention conditions, Israel has taken several measures to further squeeze detainees, and has tightened its penalties against those demanding detention rights under international standards. Israel has also turned Megiddo Prison, located in the Jezreel Valley in northern Palestine occupied in ‘48, into a testing ground for understanding the Palestinian psyche and behavior patterns, according to a stimulus-response formula.

Palestinian detainees have previously waged strikes in Zionist prisons to improve detention conditions. Palestinians have been subjected to many forms of repression, such as a lack of adequate mattresses and bedding, having to rise early from bed, fold their blankets, and sit in a certain position for the entire day, food that was insufficient or lacking the various nutritional requirements the body needs, and detainees have long been subjected to insults, abuse, and humiliation.

Detainees have managed to win back many rights through their strikes — food improved, in quantity and quality, the conditions of the daily walking period (fourah) inside the prison improved, and family-visit conditions developed — but the price was steep, and martyrs fell inside the prison.

It is clear, from the historical course of these strikes, that limited gains can be achieved in confrontation against the prison administration and the Israeli government, and the current strike benefits from previous experience, and from the experience of the released prisoner Khader Adnan, who went on strike for sixty-six days and extracted an Israeli decision not to renew his administrative detention.

The Strike and the Absence of External Action

The strike itself is an effective means for reclaiming rights, but it is painful at the same time, because hunger is painful in itself, affecting the striker’s health, and could cost him his life — it is the last tool the detainee has left to obtain freedom or improve detention conditions.

There is great risk in long-term strikes adopting the slogan “freedom or death,” particularly since Israel does not easily respond to Palestinian demands, and has previously let some detainees die, killing others in one way or another.

According to the experience of nations that have fallen under occupation or colonialism, a detainee is not supposed to remain in detention for a long period — he is supposed to be freed by his brothers or fellow fighters, who take up arms, or possess enough strength to pressure the occupiers, or dig liberation tunnels and set escape traps. The forces of revolution or resistance are supposed to adopt a specific strategy for freeing their prisoners, as the Vietnamese, Afghans, and Lebanese did, forcing their enemies into prisoner exchanges or submission to conditions backed by effective revolutionary or resistance action.

But if such a strategy is absent, and the forces of revolution cannot free their prisoners, the prisoner faces two options: either he resigns himself to his condition, surrenders, and accepts what he is in, or what is offered to him by his captors, or he takes some action to free himself from captivity, such as self-hanging or a hunger strike.

For this reason, the strike is a substitute for the failure of forces outside the prison to force the enemy to open the doors of the detention centers. Had alternatives been available, had the prisoner been hopeful that someone was working to free him, he would not have had to resort to the power of hunger and empty intestines to affect the world outside the prison, hoping the occupying power might respond to his protest.

The strikes of Palestinian detainees closely resemble the Palestinian uprisings that began in 1920, which filled a gap in struggle the Palestinian arena suffered from. Palestine’s leaderships have failed, across the years, to achieve fundamental accomplishments toward preserving or restoring Palestinian rights, and the people have repeatedly been forced to take to the streets, angry, expressing their outrage at the existing situation and demanding it change.

Even though the uprisings achieved some benefits for the people, they could not secure the fixed national rights of the Palestinian people. And instead of the leaderships waking up and deciding to change their own condition, they worked to call on the people to take their place and play their role. This is what is now happening regarding the prisoners’ strike, as the leaderships sing the praises of the strikers’ heroism without offering any real alternatives to get them out of prison. The level of leadership impotence toward the prisoners has reached the point of describing them as “martyrs with a suspended sentence.”

Prisoner Exchanges

The Palestinian factions have managed to carry out prisoner exchange operations, freeing thousands of Palestinian detainees. An exchange took place in 1979, and another in 1983. But the great exchange took place with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, freeing hundreds of prisoners with heavy and life sentences in exchange for three Zionist soldiers. Then thousands of prisoners with lighter sentences, and a small few with heavy sentences, were released under the Oslo Accord and the agreements that followed it.

The latest exchange, which took place in 2011, took on great media significance because it involved a clear challenge to Israel from the Hamas movement in Gaza, which captured a Zionist soldier and managed to hold him for several years until reaching an exchange agreement.

Palestinian resistance captured a Zionist soldier through prior planning, with the aim of freeing Palestinian prisoners, and succeeded in this, and this action was unique in the history of Palestinian resistance, expressing a new vision of the factions’ responsibility for freeing prisoners.

Generally speaking, the Palestinian factions have been unable, across more than forty years, to free more than 1% of the total number of Palestinian detainees held by Israel, and these factions have not developed a well-planned strategy for forcing Israel to release the captives. In recent years, some resistance factions in Gaza have begun speaking of a strategy, but it has so far succeeded only in capturing that one soldier.

Solidarity with the Striking Prisoners

Striking detainees look forward to the broadest possible movement of solidarity with them, at the local, Arab, and global levels, but this hope collides with conditions and circumstances that demand a great deal of modesty in expectations. In short, I see the picture as follows:

At the Palestinian level: there is a near-absence of Palestinian popular solidarity with the prisoners, popular participation confined to the families of detainees, or some of them, and to limited visits to solidarity tents set up in major cities such as Nablus, Hebron, Ramallah, and Tulkarm. Popular turnout is weak, not because people lack patriotism or are unaware of the prisoners’ plight, but mostly because they have lost trust in the Palestinian factions calling for participation and setting up the solidarity tents. The Gaza Strip is the most engaged with the prisoners’ strike, while engagement in the West Bank and the diaspora camps is very low.

At the official level, the factions and the Palestinian Authority behave as they have for years, confining themselves to issuing rousing, passionate statements, calling on people to go out demonstrating in support of the prisoners and denouncing Israel, giving television interviews, and taking part in protocol marches that soon end in a fiery statement that changes nothing. What is striking here is that the Palestinian Authority, in all its branches and media, expresses its adoption of the prisoners’ tragedy at the very same time it arrests Palestinians and subjects them to the harshest kinds of torment for political reasons later converted into civil charges.

Seriousness requires releasing Palestinian prisoners held in Palestinian prisons, and permanently ceasing the interrogation of Palestinians who oppose the occupation.

At the international level, there are activities by Palestinian associations and some Arabs in many countries of the world, but they are incapable of mobilizing vast numbers of Arabs and non-Arabs capable of pressuring states to stand with the cause of Palestinian prisoners. Even the capacity of these activities to generate media momentum is very limited.

Regarding states, the Western states, represented by their governments, are not expected to stand with the prisoners’ cause, because they consider the prisoners terrorists, and consider it Israel’s right to keep them in prison so they do not threaten its security. This was clear in their positions, which sided with the Zionist soldier Shalit, without a single word uttered in favor of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners.

The Effectiveness of Solidarity

For solidarity with the prisoners to be effective, the following must be achieved:

1. The Palestinian factions should stay away from the scene, because their intervention and their attempts to lead popular protests in solidarity with the prisoners keep the masses of people away from participating. The alternative is to let Palestine’s youth decide for themselves what activities they see fit, since they are driven by national motives, with no interest in showmanship or issuing orders to people.

2. The movement of Palestine’s youth, inside and outside the country, leads to clashes with the occupation, which provokes Arab and global media into paying attention to the cause, and forces Israel to seriously search for a solution to it.

3. The resistance factions, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees especially, should think about creating events that heighten tensions and draw international and media attention to the prisoners’ cause.

4. We need to see movement from the forces of resistance and steadfastness in the region. Martyrs may fall because of the strike, and slogans may be raised, but holding solidarity festivals is a waste of effort and time.

The solidarity currently in place is ineffective, and Israel and the Western states pay it no heed — and if the goal is genuine solidarity to help the prisoners, then nothing will work with Israel except measures that shake its very foundations.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “التضامن مع الأسرى الفلسطينيين” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.