Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel

by Abeer Baker (Editor), Anat Matar (Editor)

Overview

Palestinian prisoners charged with security-related offences are immediately taken as a threat to Israel's security. They are seen as potential, if not actual, suicide bombers. This stereotype ignores the political nature of the Palestinian prisoners' actions and their desire for liberty.

By highlighting the various images of Palestinian prisoners in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Abeer Baker and Anat Matar chart their changing fortunes. Essays written by prisoners, ex-prisoners, Human rights defenders, lawyers and academic researchers analyse the political nature of imprisonment and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners. These contributions deal with the prisoners' status within Palestinian society, the conditions of their imprisonment and various legal procedures used by the Israeli military courts in order to criminalise and de-politicise them. Also addressed are Israel's breaches of international treaties in its treatment of the Palestinian prisoners, practices of torture and solitary confinement, exchange deals and prospects for release.

This is a unique intervention within Middle East studies that will inspire those working in human rights, international law and the peace process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783714322
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	05/06/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	282
File size:	697 KB

About the Author

Abeer Baker is a senior lawyer with Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (NGO) and heads the Legal Clinic for Prisoners' Rights, in the Law Faculty of Haifa University. She is the co-author of Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel (Pluto, 2011).

Anat Matar is a senior lecturer of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and a political activist. She is the chair of the Israeli Committee for the Palestinian Prisoners and the co-author of Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel (Pluto, 2011).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Centrality of the Prisoners' Movement to the Palestinian Struggle against the Israeli Occupation: A Historical Perspective

Maya Rosenfeld

INTRODUCTION: A PERSISTENT ISRAELI POLICY OF MASS IMPRISONMENT

By the latter months of 2009, approximately 7,000 Palestinian prisoners, residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), were being held in Israeli jails, detention compounds and interrogation facilities. Some 5,000 of them (approx. 70 percent) had been sentenced to various imprisonment terms, around 1,500 (approx. 20 percent) were detainees awaiting their sentence and slightly less than 300 were administrative detainees (held without trial). Nearly 85 percent of the prisoners were residents of the West Bank; Gaza residents comprised some 10 percent of the total and East Jerusalemites the remaining 5 percent.

In comparison with most recent years, 2009 saw a decline in the number of prisoners, which ranged between 7,952 and 8,595 during 2008, and between 8,441 and 9,344 during 2007, and which reached a peak of around 9,600 in October 2006.

Nonetheless, as is clearly evident from the above and additional figures, the "post-Oslo" era, which started with the outbreak of the second Intifada in late September 2000, was and remains marked by an especially high incidence of detentions of Palestinians by the Israeli army, police, and GSS (General Security Service) on the grounds of what is referred to as "security offences." Indeed, it was recently estimated by the former statistician of the Palestinian National Authority's (PNA) Ministry of Prisoners and former Prisoners' Affairs that approximately 69,000 Palestinians were detained between October 2000 and November 2009, among them 7,800 children (youths under the age of 18) and 850 women.

Yet, when placed within the broader perspective — that of 43 years of Israeli military occupation over the Palestinian territories — the figures on prisoners and detentions in the post-Oslo era appear as part of a continuum, evidently a striking one: According to another estimate by the Ministry of Prisoners and former Prisoners' Affairs, approximately 650,000 Palestinians had been arrested in the course of four decades of Israeli military control (between June 1967 and April 2006), this with respect to a population that numbered around 1 million in 1967 and around 3.8 million in 2006. While this approximation is most probably far from accurate due to inadequate counting methods and to the lack of distinction between hours-long arrests and long-term imprisonment, it is nevertheless very important. No matter what the number of incidents that would be subtracted following the necessary adjustments, the final figure will remain extremely high by all standards.

The statistics are indicative, therefore, of the persistence of an Israeli policy of mass imprisonment in reaction to the varying manifestations of Palestinian resistance to Israel's military occupation. One main exception to this generalization is traced to the Oslo period (1994–October 2000), which opened with a mass release of political prisoners and continued with a marked decline (albeit not a complete cessation) in the scope of detentions and imprisonment. A second major exception pertains to Palestinian women, who despite the noticeable role they have played in the ranks of all the political organizations and their widespread participation in grassroots anti-occupation activism, did not become subjected to mass imprisonment at any stage.

Taking the persistence of an Israeli policy of wide-scale imprisonment as an overriding structural factor, then, the current chapter seeks to examine the effect that this condition has exerted upon the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation from the time of its inception in the aftermath of the 1967 War to the second Intifada.

THE PERVASIVENESS OF THE PRISON EXPERIENCE: SOME SOCIAL MANIFESTATIONS

That mass imprisonment has had a fundamental impact on Palestinian society in the OPT is amply manifest in a range of spheres and areas. To start with, it is rare to find a family in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip that has not experienced the incarceration (even if short-term) of at least one of its male members and many a family has faced the imprisonment of two or more members. In a survey that I conducted in 1993 among hundreds of households in the Dheisheh refugee camp, I found that 47.8 percent of the men who then belonged to the generation aged 25–40 had experienced some form of imprisonment for periods ranging from several weeks to 15 years; nearly 85 percent of the families of origin of these young men experienced the imprisonment of at least one male member and 58 percent of the families faced the imprisonment of two or more of their male members.

The pervasiveness of imprisonment, including that of administrative detention, was particularly high during the first Intifada (December 1987 through 1992), during which time it significantly surpassed the current (post-October 2000 through 2009) incidence of the phenomenon. Cases wherein three and even four brothers were held simultaneously in Israeli jails (at times in the same prison) were not uncommon; I recall the words of a Dheisheian father to four sons, then in their early, mid and late twenties, all of whom had spent time in jail when they were in high school or at university, and all of whom were detained again during the first Intifada and held under administrative detention: "Just as it was clear to me that every living creature eventually dies, it became evident that every Palestinian man would eventually be taken to prison." The lengthy — at times decades-long — active participation of the prisoner's family members, especially that of female members, in caring for their prisoners and their needs and the fact that similar experiences, toils and hardship were shared by the majority of families were grounds for profound socialization and politicization processes; this gave rise to novel social formations on the community and regional levels, first and foremost of which was the solidarity networks of prisoners' families.

For the tens of thousands of families whose male members spent years behind bars, the imprisonment experience also implied an economic setback as a result of the prolonged absence of the imprisoned husband/son/brother and the subsequent loss of the latter's contribution to the household income. Such disruption commonly gave rise to a new, alternative division of labor in the family, often based on female primary providers, that is, the prisoner's wife, mother and/or sister. To this one should add the detrimental impact of the interrupted high school or college education of many a prisoner, and the enormous difficulties of finding employment encountered by former prisoners. Indeed, up until the establishment of the PNA and the subsequent mass recruitment of former prisoners into its security forces and to various other branches of its public sector, the overwhelming majority of former prisoners faced lengthy unemployment that often rendered them economically dependent on their families of origin (in the case of the unmarried) and/or on their wives (in the case of married ex-prisoners).

Turning to the public political sphere, the impact of mass imprisonment is most directly discernible in the biographies of entire strata of political officials, public figures and community leaders in the West Bank and Gaza. The centrality of the imprisonment experience to their ascent became exposed to the Israeli public, albeit on a rather superficial level, during the Oslo years, when the media zoomed in on a rank of prominent political figures, most of them members of the middle and younger generation of al-Fatah movement, who grew up and came of age in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: Jibril Rajoub, Kedura Fares, Marwan Barghuthi, Sufian Abu Zaida, Hisham Abd al-Razeq and Hussein al-Sheikh are just a few examples of the more well-known names. The common denominator for all included seniority in Israeli prisons (some had served prison terms of over 15 years), a most impressive command of Hebrew, remarkable familiarity with the dynamics of Israeli politics, and an unequivocal support of Palestinian participation in what was then "the peace process," in line with the political program of the PLO. The conspicuousness of "the prison years" in the life stories of this generation of leaders ran parallel, more or less, with the salience of events and episodes such as "Black September" (aylul al aswad), "the Beirut years" (ayyam Beirut) and the Lebanon War (1982) in the biographies of their peers, members of the military, political and administrative apparatus of the PLO, who returned to the OPT in the wake of the Oslo Accords after decades of exile.

THE FORMATIVE NATURE OF "THE PRISON YEARS"

As emerged unambiguously from the many dozens of interviews that I conducted with former political prisoners in Dheisheh, the formative nature of "the prison years" in terms of the contribution to the political education and maturation of the individual was not merely a derivative of the long time periods that activists spent in Israeli jails, although the latter factor was undoubtedly a weighty one. Rather, it is traced back to the process by which Palestinian prisoners succeeded in organizing themselves inside Israeli prisons and building what they referred to as an "internal order/organization/regime" (nitham dakhili), which countered the imposed prison order and challenged it. While the roots of organizing in prison go back to the early years of the Occupation (the late 1960s and early 1970s), the prisoners' organization, or as it is alternatively named, the prisoners' movement, gained ground in the second decade of the occupation and possibly reached its peak in the mid- and late 1980s and the very early (pre-Oslo) 1990s. What made the "counter-order" especially powerful was its all-inclusive, indeed "total" nature, embodied in the attempt and more so in the ability to encompass and address all spheres of the prisoner's daily life, starting from the material conditions and basic facilities in the prison cell and from the fundamental necessities of those confined to it, continuing with education (formal, non-formal, political), and culminating in the prisoner's ongoing (daily) participation in political discussion and democratic decision making.

Much evidence appears to support the generalization that none of the organizations and movements that gained ground in the OPT during the 1970s and 1980s, not even the most progressive, socialist-oriented factions of the Palestinian left, was able to implant and sustain equally comprehensive programs and institutions as those that were upheld by the prisoners' organization. This unique nature of the prisoners' organization received ample manifestation in the accounts of former prisoners, which attributed clear transformative qualities to their participation in the "prisoners' order" and in the organized studies program in particular. Indeed, dozens of my interviewees underscored similar aspects of the change they underwent and often employed similar expressions and metaphors when they evaluated the differences between "before" and "after" (the prison experience). For example:

Before being in prison, I was connected emotionally to the national struggle, but in jail I became connected to it intellectually and ideologically. It was in prison that I read the theory. Love of the homeland became more rooted, for two reasons: my discussions with other people and my reading pamphlets and books. ...

Given the pervasiveness of the prison experience in the life histories of generations of Palestinian activists and given the seminal impact that it bore for individuals and families, the main part of this chapter attempts to draw an outline for the analysis of the interrelationship between the development of the organization/movement of Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli prisons and between the development of the national-political struggle against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

THE INTERRELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PRISONERS' MOVEMENT AND THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL MOVEMENT IN THE OPT UP TO OSLO

The first general observation that I elaborate on is that, when put in historical perspective, the growth and consolidation of the prisoners' movement in the OPT coincided with the gradual transformation of local resistance to the Israeli occupation into a full-blown, mass-based, decentralized movement; a distinct yet indivisible branch of the Palestinian national movement and, as such, affiliated with the PLO. One should bear in mind that when Israel took over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 War, the two territories were ruled and administered by different regimes: the West Bank had been officially annexed to the Hashemite Kingdom in 1950, and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian military rule. By that time, various shades of Palestinian nationalism had struck root in both territories, mainly through the influence and under the banners of three movements, all of which had been outlawed by the two regimes: the Movement of Arab Nationalists, which promoted Arab nationalism and upheld the ideal of Arab unity; the Fatah movement, then still in its infancy, which espoused particular Palestinian nationalism and an independent Palestinian struggle, and the Communists (the Jordanian Communist Party in the West Bank and the Palestinian Communist Organization in Gaza; both originating from the Palestine Communist Party), which continued to endorse the partition plan (the "two-state solution") throughout. Activism in the two territories took place separately, however, and was largely shaped and determined by local circumstances; by no means was there, at the time, a unified, cross-country platform of Palestinian national action.

The immediate aftermath of the 1967 War saw a steep decline in the popularity of Arab nationalism among Palestinians in Palestine and the Diaspora and a corresponding upsurge among them in the appeal of distinct Palestinian nationalism. Influenced by the anti-colonial, revolutionary struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, and elsewhere the emergent independent Palestinian organizations — including the by-then senior al-Fatah and the nascent PFLP and DFLP — adopted guerrilla warfare as a core element in their strategies of national liberation. Yet the attempt by al-Fatah and others to build and sustain an infrastructure of armed struggle in the West Bank and Gaza was aborted, before long, by the Israeli army and intelligence, and thousands of young men who took part in this endeavor were quick to find themselves in prison.

Alongside the latter group of "aborted" fighters, the first generation of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, those imprisoned between 1967 and 1975, also included thousands of youths who had been apprehended by the Israeli army on grounds of their association with locally based and often locally initiated clandestine formations that engaged in sporadic, most often uncoordinated acts of violence against the army, and yet others, much fewer in number, who were involved in terrorist action against Israeli civilians. The great majority of these prisoners were very young and inexperienced, lacked military and political training, and exhibited only a loose affiliation with the factions of the Palestinian resistance movement. In prison, they met with a particularly harsh regime that denied them the most basic human needs and rights; extremely over-crowded, cramped rooms, lacking, or rather, absent facilities, unhygienic conditions, insufficient and bad-quality food, a prohibition on books and on writing utensils, the excessive use of violence and physical punishment on a regular basis, were among the most common features. On top of this, they were denied official recognition as political prisoners and were dealt with instead by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) as "security" prisoners, more commonly referred to as terrorists. As emerged from the accounts of veteran former prisoners, the attempts to build a prisoners' organization/counter-order during these early years centered mainly on the struggle to improve prison conditions. The following excerpt from the panoramic testimony of Noah Salameh, a former prisoner who entered prison in 1970 at the age of 17 and was released in 1985, is revealing:

One can say that our struggle was conducted hour by hour and day by day around every "right" and every subject. We paid a high price for the notebook, the book, the mattress, the blanket, the shower and for food and health care. It is important to remember that conditions differed from one prison to another, and this too was a deliberate policy adopted by the authorities. You found that something that you had fought for in one prison for months was a recognized "right" in another prison.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Threat"
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Copyright © 2011 Abeer Baker and Anat Matar.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface: The Palestinian Prisoners: Politicization and De-Politicization, by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar
Notes on Contributors
Part I – Analyses
1. The Centrality of the Prisoners' Movement to the Palestinian Struggle against the Israeli Occupation: A Historical Perspective, by Maya Rosenfeld
2. Towards a Materialist Reading of Political Imprisonment in Palestine, by Esmail Nashef
3. Who Is a Security Prisoner and Why? An Examination of the Legality of Prison Regulations Governing Security Prisoners, by Alon Harel
4. The Security Risk as a Security Risk: Notes on the Classification Practices of the Israeli Security Services, by Yael Berda
5 Palestinian Women Political Prisoners and the Israeli State, by Nahla Abdo
6. Prison Policy and Political Imprisonment in Northern Ireland and Israel, by Alina Korn
Part II – Arrest, Interrogation, Trial, Release
7. The Arrest and Persecution of Elected Political Leaders Interview with Sheikh Muhammad Abu-Teir, Interviewed by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar
8. My Arrests, My Interrogations, by Osama Barham
9. Colonel and Major (poem), by Avigdor Feldman
10. Welcome to Shin Bet Country, by Avigdor Feldman
11. A Decade after the High Court of Justice “Torture” Ruling, What’s Changed?, by Bana Shoughry-Badarne
12. The Mysteries of Administrative Detention, by Tamar Pelleg-Sryck
13. Reframing the Legality of the Israeli Military Courts in the West Bank: Military Occupation or Apartheid?, by Sharon Weill
14. Are There Prisoners in this War?, by Smadar Ben-Natan
15. Institutional Schizophrenia: The Release of "Security Prisoners" in Israel, by Leslie Sebba
16. Prisoner Exchange Deals: Between Figures and Emotions, by Mounir Mansour
Part III – Inside Prison
17. Females Prisoners and the Struggle: A Personal Testimony, by Ittaf Alian (Hodaly)
18. Devil's Island: Transfer of Palestinian Detainees into Prisons within Israel, by Michael Sfard
19. Family Visits to Palestinian Prisoners Held inside Israel, by Sigi Ben-Ari and Anat Barsella
20. Isolation and Solitary Confinement of Palestinian Prisoners and Detainees in Israeli Facilities, by Sahar Francis and Kathleen Gibson
21. The Impact of Isolation on Mental Health, by Ruchama Marton
Consciousness Molded or the Re-Identification of Torture, by Walid Daka
Index

Editorial Reviews

'A timely and urgent volume that brings to the fore the systematic injustices endemic to the Israeli imprisonment of Palestinians''Offers not only nuanced information and unconventional insights, but also the feasibility of an anti-occupation, anti-colonial life of action, developed together by Palestinians and Jews'An imperative illustration of how the Israeli Occupation has imprisoned the political voices of the Palestinian people. Featuring a spectrum of authors with a range of expertise, this volume offers readers a refreshing insight into and documentation of Israel's revocation of Palestinians' right to justice''No one reading this book will come away without new insight into one of the key areas of Israel's on-going distortion of Palestinian society by the removal of so many men and women key to its development'

From the Publisher