Supporting Prisoners Against Their Jailer

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Palestinian media, and the Arab media generally, usually speak at length about the strikes of prisoners in Zionist jails, and writers, analysts, and commentators do the same. Calls to support the prisoners become especially active in Palestinian circles, with festivals, sit-ins, and protests organized, and so on, expressing popular solidarity with a just cause. It becomes clear each time that popular feeling is united in solidarity with the prisoners, even though actual participation remains very limited, confined to certain political, partisan, and organizational activities.

During periods of hunger strike, everyone is busy praising the prisoners’ heroism, their steadfastness, and their unyielding capacity to endure hunger and the machinery of Zionist repression. And this is just, because the prisoners truly do resist, persevere, and insist on achieving their demands, and martyrs of past strikes have already fallen in pursuit of better detention conditions and an end to the humiliating measures practiced by the prison administration. But it is important to recognize that what drives the prisoners to strike is the absence of any alternative to striking. A hunger strike is painful, and it is certainly a confrontation with death, especially since it constitutes a challenge to the will of an arrogant enemy.

Palestinians, particularly the resistance factions, ought to have a strategy for freeing the prisoners, exactly as resistance movements and revolutions elsewhere in the world have always done. Freeing the prisoners is a fundamental duty that imposes itself on those outside detention, who must develop methods and means, within a clear vision, aimed at freeing the prisoners in spite of the enemy, and it is a disgrace for prisoners of revolutionary movements to remain in prison for periods exceeding ten years. Hezbollah, for example, pursued a policy of freeing its prisoners and succeeded on many occasions, and the Afghan Taliban do the same, as did Vietnam.

In the Palestinian case, soldiers have been captured over time, and several prisoner-exchange operations have taken place, the most famous of them the 1985 exchange, but this was never carried out within a clear strategy under an independent command whose sole aim was freeing the prisoners, and the resistance factions never carried out an operation to capture Israelis through prior planning and careful preparation except in the case of the soldier Shalit. The Palestinian arena has remained far removed from planning exchange operations that would force the Zionists to release Palestinian prisoners, and the matter has been absent, or kept absent, from any plan, to the point that prisoners came to be described as “martyrs with a stay of execution” — meaning that despair is the dominant feature, and that Palestinians must surrender to the enemy’s will.

Since there is no strategy, and since the release of prisoners or the improvement of their detention conditions depends on unplanned, incidental circumstances that may or may not arise, the prisoner has nothing but his own weapons, foremost among them the weapon of the hunger strike. The hunger strike is a substitute for the failure of those outside to come to the rescue of those inside. This is exactly like the intifadas, which take on the role of resistance in confronting the enemy, and of expressing the injustice endured by the people of Palestine.

For this reason we must continually ask ourselves: what have we done to ease the prisoners’ suffering and secure their release? If we do nothing, we are pushing our prisoners toward the pains of hunger and confrontation with the enemy on empty stomachs.

Opinions on how to support the prisoners are many, and numerous writers have offered their views. What follows is my own vision, which overlaps on a number of points with the views of other distinguished writers.

The means and methods of supporting the prisoners can be divided into:

Principal, essential, or vital methods and means — those that influence the Zionist decision regarding the Palestinian cause in all its branches, including the prisoners’ cause;

Secondary, supporting methods that reinforce the principal methods — of no use on their own, but useful as a supporting factor;

Feeble methods, of the sort meant merely to lift blame from oneself, which are nearly devoid of any benefit, and may even be harmful.

The principal methods are as follows:

Capturing Zionist soldiers and insisting on exchange. This is not an easy matter, but it is one that can be achieved, particularly if it is adopted as a strategy within a joint operations room run by the Palestinian resistance in confronting the Zionist entity. It has been proven historically that an exchange operation overpowers Israel and forces it to accept the Palestinian conditions, or most of them;

Activating an economic boycott of the entity and putting a complete stop to normalization with it, on the following fronts:

First: the Gaza front, which still purchases Israeli goods the Strip does not need, and which it could live without;

Second: the West Bank front, which must stop normalization with the entity in all its forms, including canceling negotiations and security coordination and returning to the national square;

Third: the front of the Arab countries and the Arab League. If the Arab League is to take any effective action, it must halt normalization with the entity, withdraw the Arab Peace Initiative offered to it, and call on the Arab countries that have normalized and that maintain relations with the entity to reverse course. This would place great pressure on the entity, because it represents a strategic turning point;

Fourth: the front of Arab intellectuals, or those who call themselves such, who maintain relations with Zionism, normalize with the entity, praise it, and call for understanding with it. These have harmed the Palestinian cause and everything that branches from it, and their retreat from these positions would have an effect on the entity and on those who support it.

Activating the Palestinian street, at both the popular and factional levels. The factions can activate matters through confrontation and by heightening tension across the region as a whole, not through sit-in tents. And ordinary people can heighten tension through broad popular activities that contribute to raising tension rather than venting it. But the problem is that the Palestinian public, whether inside Palestine or outside it, suffers from frustration, and no longer trusts the factions and the Palestinian leaderships or their calls for participation;

The forces of resistance and steadfastness [muqawama and mumana’a] have a role in which to prove themselves. The current position poses a real challenge to these forces, given that the youth of Palestine — who are the youth of Bilad al-Sham, of the Arab homeland, and of the Islamic world — are facing death, and are in the direst need of support and backing. This is a question now posed with great force before Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, and Hamas.

As for the supporting factors, which will be of no use apart from the methods above, they are as follows:

Intensifying media pressure on the Zionist entity and on those Arabs and Palestinians allied with it. The Palestinian media are not equal to the responsibility, and Arab and foreign media must be mobilized to lend a hand of help and assistance. The Palestinian media are narrow, factional, and unprofessional;

Going to the United Nations and the international courts;

Appealing to international and local human rights organizations, and to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

As for the feeble methods, they are as follows:

Speeches, festivals, statements, and fiery declarations;

Sit-in tents, which give the enemy the impression that the Palestinian people are indifferent. These tents have, in fact, served those who arrest Palestinians in defense of Israelis, by providing cover under which to do so.

The excessive proliferation of seminars and lectures that chew over the same old phrases, neither nourishing nor satisfying.

If these methods contribute anything at all, their contribution is limited and local. And it seems that some of them actually harm the prisoners’ cause, because they confirm the weakness of the Palestinians.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “دعم الأسرى في مواجهة السجان” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.