Israel uses "primitive, racist" policies against Palestinian prisoners

Mel Frykberg

The Electronic Intifada

Ramallah

11 August 2011

Thousands of Palestinian families have a loved one in Israeli prison.

(Haytham Othman /Maan Images)

 

RAMALLAH (IPS) - “I’m sick with worry about my daughter,” Yehiya al-Shalabi says. “I’m afraid of what they are doing to her. She has done nothing to deserve this. If they have anything against her why don’t they bring her to trial?”

Hana al-Shalabi, Yehiya’s 27-year-old daughter, has been languishing in Israeli administrative detention for more than two years. She is the longest serving Palestinian female political prisoner in administrative detention.

According to her lawyer, the young woman from Jenin in the northern West Bank does not know why Israeli soldiers arrested her several years ago. She also does not know how long they will keep her in jail or what they will charge her with.

Shalabi, like nearly 200 other Palestinian prisoners, is being held in Hasharon prison. A senior Israeli military officer has just renewed the administrative detention order against her for the fourth time.
Israel’s “administrative detention” policy states that Palestinian political prisoners can be held for six months without trial or charges being brought against them. The detention order can be renewed every six months.

According to the official narrative, the policy of administrative detention is used by the Israeli military when they have “classified and secret” information against Palestinian prisoners. Both the prisoner and their lawyer are forbidden from seeing the classified information, and therefore are unable to challenge accusations or to question those who made the accusations.

The administrative detention policy is used when Israeli authorities have “secret witnesses” such as Palestinian informants, or has obtained intelligence in a clandestine manner which would not stand up in an Israeli civilian court but are par for the course in Israeli military courts.

No fair trial

“It’s a primitive and racist way to hold a trial and no civilized country in the world uses such methods. Needless to say Israel’s legal system could never do this to an Israeli Jew. Even the Israeli settlers who carry out acts of terror against Palestinians in the West Bank are not treated in this manner,” Qadura Fares, the president of the Palestinian Society Prisoners’ Club in Ramallah, said.

“Administrative detainees are not given a fair trial. Basically the Israeli military prosecutor and the military judge are in agreement. It is very rare for a judge to disagree with the military prosecutor,” Fares says.

In the 1970s Ali Jamal, also from Jenin, spent seven years in administrative detention. He holds the record for the longest administrative detention to date.

“At that time the Israeli military courts relied on confessions from Palestinian prisoners for convictions,” Fares explained. “But Jamal wouldn’t confess so the laws were changed to allow the ‘secret witnesses and secret files’ to be used by the IDF [Israeli military] to convict political prisoners.”

The soldiers came for Hana al-Shalabi in the middle of the night over two years ago. “They ransacked the house and assaulted me when I tried to stop them from taking my daughter away,” Yehiya al-Shalabi said. “My daughter had finished her studies and was engaged to get married. She was very diligent and stayed home most of the time except for when she helped tend our agricultural crops. She had no social life outside and wasn’t political in any way.”

However, Israeli special forces assassinated Hana’s 24-year-old brother several years ago after they accused him of being a member of Islamic Jihad, Yehiya said. “They had shot and wounded him. He phoned us, as he lay badly injured on the ground. But before he could finish the call the death squad moved in and shot him at close range, several times in the head and in the eye.”

The conditions in administrative detention are harsh, just as they are for all Palestinian prisoners.

Confessions through coercion

“Confessions are coerced through physical and verbal humiliation, torture, emotional blackmail such as bringing in elderly or sick relatives who are held as hostages until the prisoner confesses,” Fares said.
Imani Nafa, aged 47, spent ten years in an Israeli jail as a young woman, from 1987 to 1997 during the first Palestinian intifada. Nafa had everything going for her. She had finished university and was working as a nurse. But, she became politically involved and had planned to carry out a shooting and bombing attack against Israeli soldiers.

Nafa was caught and kept in a filthy, cramped cell with no window. Fluorescent lights were kept on permanently, causing sensory deprivation and the inability to distinguish between day and night.
“I was beaten and held in stress positions while handcuffed for several days, unable to move. I was deprived of sleep and when the interrogation finished I was forced to drink from the drain in my cell and eat mouldy food,” Nafa said. “I was told that if I worked with them to spy on other prisoners I would be freed, but if I refused to do so I would be imprisoned for a very long time and harshly treated.”

http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-uses-primitive-racist-policies-against-palestinian-prisoners/10256

Israel’s prison walls cannot keep us apart

Diaries: Live from Palestine

Fidaa Elaydi

The Electronic Intifada

Dallas

28 July 2011

 

The author’s grandmother holding a photo taken in 2006, the last time she was able to visit her son.

(Fidaa Elaydi)

 

It’s been six months since I was in Gaza and I miss everything about it. I miss the company of my large extended family, the delicious food we enjoyed from communal trays as we sat on the ground, the gorgeous sunsets on the beach and the peace of mind and serenity that only come with the feeling of being home. I think about the kind but tortured people I met and the impossible-to-forget harshness of life in Gaza. But out of all of the inmates of this outdoor prison, there is one in particular that cannot escape my thoughts.

Although all of Gaza’s 1.6 million residents feel suffocated by siege and closure, there are nearly 700 Gazans who have it immeasurably worse. They are the Gazans being held illegally in Israeli prisons. During my two months in Gaza, I heard about a prisoner from Bureij refugee camp who had been released after being imprisoned for more than a decade. His family rejoiced upon his return, welcomed him back with what was described to me as a parade, and married him to a beautiful young bride to celebrate his freedom and assist him in finally beginning his life. Everyone in my family was thrilled to share this story, and although no one said it, all we could think about was the day we’d finally be able to celebrate like the family from Bureij when my incarcerated uncle is freed.

During the first intifada, my uncle was a college student majoring in chemistry. It was common for Israeli soldiers during this period to arbitrarily arrest young Palestinian men and then compile a list of charges to pin against them using the testimonies of other tortured inmates. Like most of Palestine’s young men, my uncle was detained without being charged, and a few days before his scheduled release, two severely tortured men told similar stories to Israeli authorities that implicated my uncle in what Israel would define as criminal acts. Quickly after this, my uncle was sentenced to several consecutive life sentences without a fair trial or legitimate evidence against him.

He has been in prison for more than twenty years now, but I’m told that I knew him when I was a toddler. I am also told that I visited him in prison a number of times as a young child. I don’t remember ever meeting him, but that doesn’t change how much I miss him. It has been nearly five years since anyone from our family has seen him. In the past, my grandmother would travel twenty hours to visit him every week. Then things grew more difficult; my grandmother’s health worsened and security at the border tightened, causing visits to be terminated for extended periods of time. After Hamas’ electoral victory in Gaza in 2006, visits became nearly impossible. In June of 2007, when Hamas assumed control of Gaza and Israel sharpened its policy of collective punishment against Gaza’s population, the visits were completely banned. In December of 2009, the Israeli high court upheld this inhumane practice, preventing Palestinians in Gaza from visiting their imprisoned relatives across the boundary with Israel.

At present, the only communication we have with my uncle is through cell phones smuggled into the prison and hidden by the prisoners. My grandmother speaks to him frequently, but their conversations are short and fragmented. This contraband cell phone is our only link to him but we know that if it is found by the Israeli guards, he will be severely punished. This, in fact, happened at my uncle’s prison while I was in Gaza last winter. Prison guards found a cell phone hidden inside the wall of a prison cell and began a cell-by-cell search to discover any more hidden communication devices.

They searched the walls, ripped open pillows and mattresses and rummaged through the prisoners’ belongings. As this took place, each prisoner was held back by four guards and even after their cells were searched they were chaperoned minute by minute, day and night in their cells. We didn’t hear from my uncle for more than a week and everyone grew very worried, expecting the worst. Not only do the relatives of the imprisoned have to deal with the anguish of being apart from their loved ones, they have to worry about torture and abuse — “accidents” like the one that took the life of Mohammad al-Ashqar in 2007 when he was brutally shot during a drill aimed at boosting the morale of the Israeli prison guards. Palestinian prisoners endure a lack of treatment for health problems and illness, inadequate clothing and linens (especially in the winter) and poor quality and limited amounts of food.

While I was in Gaza, I spoke to my uncle three times on the phone. Although it wasn’t the ideal way for an uncle and niece to meet and get acquainted with one another, we were grateful for the opportunity. I told him about my life and goals, gave him short biographies on my siblings in the US and told him about all of the things I’d seen and learned in Gaza. Although all of our conversations together totalled less than one hour, these were some of the most meaningful moments I spent in Gaza. He didn’t complain to me about his terrible fate or the prison guards and the terrible food; he told me about how lucky he was and how others have it so much worse.


Now that I am on the other side of the world and my uncle’s cell phone can’t reach me, I crave his wisdom and insight. There is a remarkable calmness in the souls of imprisoned Palestinians. Maybe because for years they have breathed the ancient and poetic winds of the Naqab (Negev) desert. Maybe it’s the countless hours they dedicate daily to contemplation and reflection on life. Maybe it’s the sense of patience they have been forced to develop. Or maybe it’s their well-tested faith. But there is something that distinguishes the Palestinian prisoner from any other person in the world. They are the living martyrs. Their immortalized faces aren’t postered on the alleys of refugee camps and their names aren’t sung in intifada anthems. They are not memorialized but their sacrifice is just as great.

Fidaa Elaydi is a Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions activist and law student. She recently traveled to Gaza and completed a internship with a Palestinian nongovernmental organization. As a third generation refugee, she strongly believes in the right of return and plans to soon fulfill this right.

http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-prison-walls-cannot-keep-us-apart/10217

France honors educator of Gaza’s children

Rami Almeghari

The Electronic Intifada

Gaza

26 July 2011

 

The author interviews Reem Abu Jaber at the Qattan Centre for the Child.

(Shadi Alqarra /The Electronic Intifada)

 

In a special ceremony at the French Cultural Center in Gaza City earlier this month, a representative of the French consulate in Jerusalem presented the National Order of Merit award to Reem Abu Jaber, head of the Qattan Centre for the Child in Gaza. The medal is considered to be the highest award bestowed on non-French citizens.

“It took me three days to try to understand why,” Abu Jaber told The Electronic Intifada after the ceremony. “Why me, Reem Abu Jaber? I am doing nothing but loving and taking care of my work with the children of Gaza.”

Abu Jaber has helped develop the center almost from scratch. The Qattan Centre for the Child offers research and workshops on child education, activities for children such as drawing, drama and music, and maintains a large children’s library. Recently, the center established mobile libraries in different parts of the Gaza Strip. Abu Jaber has been in charge of the center since 2005.

“The real work on the ground began with the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2000,” Abu Jaber said. “Back then, we faced a lot of troubles like Israeli roadblocks. During that time, we used to sometimes walk on foot for many hours to reach our workplace. However, we did our best to serve the children of Gaza by bringing in various books from abroad.”

When she began working with the center in May 2000, it was nothing more than an old building that belonged to the Gaza municipality. However, the new Qattan building, which was built in 2005, is well-structured and includes a large lobby and a library with countless shelves of books. There are computer stations, staff offices and paintings on the walls whose yellow, brown and blue colors make a comfortable and relaxing atmosphere.
“Five years later, after all the preparations, architecture and many other related things had been completed, we all moved to this beautiful building for children in Gaza,” she said.

Abu Jaber says that the center’s library is of key importance. The center is home to an estimated 110,000 books in Arabic, English and French — making it one of the largest children’s libraries in the Arab world — and provides classes for computer skills, drama, music and painting. The center also brings mobile libraries to children in more remote parts of Gaza, and it has cooperated with local organizations by providing library services to their offices, especially during summer holidays.

Investing in Palestine’s children

“Perhaps because we are Palestinians, perhaps because we live under the Israeli siege, we must realize that children are the most important people to invest in and work with,” Abu Jaber said. “Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan [the center’s founder] has encouraged and promoted the cultural aspect of life in Gaza by investing in children. He has taught us how we can create change by investing in children.

“Gaza’s children live in a totally different environment than that of children worldwide. I think we are playing an important role in directing the energy of children to the right track,” she added.

Never affiliated to any political party in Gaza, Abu Jaber believes that political change comes by educating Palestinian children. “Books have been a motivation for me to try and create change in the life of the children in Gaza, through promoting the habit of reading at the Qattan Center,” she said.

Abu Jaber is living proof of the value in investing in education. A life-long resident of the central Gaza Strip town of Deir al-Balah, Abu Jaber was born to a farming family indigenous to Gaza, whose ownership of land stretches back to the time before the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine in 1948.

Abu Jaber went to university in Cairo, where she graduated with a degree in library science. A few years later, she undertook further studies in the Egyptian capital, securing a master’s degree in strategic planning for libraries.

From 1995 to 2000, Jaber headed the documentation division of the UN Agency for Palestine refugees’ (UNRWA) education department in Gaza. During that period she read and became influenced by many books including the famous Arabic-language volumes of Ibn Khaldoun and the work of Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri.
A single woman in her late thirties, Abu Jaber says that although Gaza society is male-dominated, she has not encountered much sexism in her career.

“Every man who knows me has encouraged me and the most important encouragement I have ever had from has been from my father, who has been really amazing,” she said. “In Gaza, despite the many contradictions in this kind of community, including the conservative way of life, the Israeli siege and the bad economic situation, one can make something of oneself. For me, I am not waiting anymore or blaming anymore, like blaming the international community for its lack of action towards changing the reality here.”

Determination against the odds

This resilience was exemplified by Palestinians in Gaza when they came under attack during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008-09.

“Right after the Israeli war on Gaza in January 2009, we in the Qattan Centre decided to fix some of the slight damage that was done to the center,” Abu Jaber said. “Two hours after we entered the center to do what we had decided on, we found that dozens of children came over to the center to resume their activities as usual. We then changed our minds and opened up the doors to welcome them all. They began reading, drawing and sharing with each other stories about the war.”

In Gaza, which has endured a four-year-long siege, she noted, people can live without electricity and survive with just the basic necessities.

“The people who I have met in Gaza have taught me how to be strong. The people’s ability to cope has been really inspiring to me. I think their ability is unbelievable so I am not like a beaten soul that needs someone to help,” she said.

Gaza’s war and siege weary children

Abu Jaber considers herself to be lucky to be able to work with children in Gaza. “Gaza is the most beautiful place in the world, though it is full of all kinds of contradictions. In Gaza, I have found my goal and my mission as the people of Gaza are really beautiful, especially the children, who deserve much more care and attention,” she said.

Gaza’s children, who make up half of the population, are growing up under extreme conditions. As The Electronic Intifada reported last week, more than 90 percent of Palestinian children in Gaza suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder following Israel’s winter 2008-09 attacks on Gaza, including bed-wetting and depression.

The Israeli siege has also made it difficult for the center to obtain books for the library. It takes months for the center to receive ordered titles. But the center is determined to carry out its mission, including in remote areas of Gaza, such as villages near the militarized buffer zone along the boundary with Israel.

During a time when the Gaza Strip lacks institutions that provide an outlet for children such as sports clubs, theaters, cinemas, public parks or other similar places of entertainment, the Qattan Centre has offered a valuable opportunity for Gaza’s children. For the past three years, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) has been organizing summer camps for Gaza youth, but children only spend a few days in such camps, staying indoors for the rest of the summer break. It is important for the children to not be idling their time away.

“I think that children are the main means for us Palestinians to maintain our Palestinian identity,” Abu Jaber said.

“Later, once they are older, these children will have a role to play in their society and they might have a battle with their society. But at the end of the day, they are the builders of the future of Palestine, something that cannot be achieved without education.”

Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.

http://electronicintifada.net/content/france-honors-educator-gazas-children/10211

Who is the real oppressor of Gaza women’s rights?

Yasmeen El Khoudary

The Electronic Intifada

Gaza Strip

22 July 2011

 

The fate of family members in Israeli prisons is of greater importance to women in Gaza than the “right” to ride a motorcycle.(Wissam Nassar/Maan Images)

Recently, I was at a meeting with a foreign diplomat who wanted to hear about the problems that young people in Gaza face, and hear our suggestions for how the international community can lend a helping hand.
We were a group of seven young people of different professions and backgrounds. The hour and a half discussion touched on topics such as problems resulting from the Hamas-Fatah division and the lack of sport facilities in Gaza. Toward the end of the discussion a particularly quiet young woman in the group decided to speak out.

“As a young woman in Gaza, I face a real problem.” Eagerly waiting for her contribution, I was expecting her to say that despite their higher university enrollment and success rates, young women in Gaza find very few job opportunities, for instance. “I am not convinced by the hijab [headscarf], but I cannot take it off.”
While this comment left the rest of the now embarrassed group trying to figure out a quick way to solve the mess, the look on the diplomat’s face signaled that she had just had an epiphany. The diplomat suggested that the international community she represents come to Gaza and teach its Hamas-suppressed people, particularly women, about their rights.

The story of our life: the White Man (and Woman) come to Palestine to teach us about our rights, while supporting the very entity that is continuously depriving us of them. In Gaza, add to that blaming the deprivation on the local government, and taking the burden off the real cause of this deprivation: Israel’s siege and occupation.

After the discussion was over, I spoke to the girl who made the comment, reminding her that the Hamas government does not ban girls from not wearing the hijab. If she comes from a conservative family or lives in a conservative area of the Gaza Strip, it’s not the government’s fault, and the foreign diplomat did not need to hear about it.

There’s a fine line between our mildly conservative traditions and the rules that Hamas imposes on our society, and the two need not be mixed for the sake of our image.

Yet, no matter how hard we try or how vocal we are, international media will always focus on personal issues that are not representative of the public to describe a “problem” faced by the general population. Why? It is because the issue of women’s rights in particular is such a sensitive one and using it is guaranteed to evoke anger or sympathy in the heart of the listener, regardless of the logic behind the argument.

For instance, a few months ago, a “unique” story was covered by several major news agencies that described the harshness of the Hamas regime in Gaza by stating that women in Gaza are not allowed to ride motorcycles.

This spurred a lot of talk and media attention among the good-hearted international media community, so very concerned about the situation of women under the Hamas government in Gaza.

But did any of these media agencies care to ask even as few as ten women in Gaza what they thought of the “right” to drive motorcycles? No, because they know that these women, who really have no time to spare on such needless matters, would have ridiculed them. The women would be more wiling to discuss real issues that matter to them, such as women in Israeli jails, poverty, lack of adequate health care, lack of education and job opportunities that are mainly attributable to the Israeli occupation.

Instead, international media decide to focus on mundane, yet “attractive” issues that affect very few women in Gaza, but that do a good job in ruining the image of Gaza and of Hamas. Real issues do not matter. Put aside issues that are caused by the occupation — we already know those, we are told. Tell us about problems caused by the Hamas government.

A year after the Hamas government imposed a law banning women from smoking water pipes in public places in Gaza, international media agencies still raise the issue when they cover the situation of women, even though the law was cancelled. And recently, news about banning male hairdressers from styling the hair of women has made headlines all over the world even though the issue is limited to hairdressers themselves and their customers, not the whole female population of the Gaza Strip.

I am against political affiliations, which is why my first and only affiliation is with Palestine and the Palestinian cause, not Fatah, Hamas or any other faction.

But I cannot stand the hypocrisy of international media in exploiting a subject as sensitive as women’s rights to lift the burden off of Israel’s shoulders.

When will the world understand that the deterioration of the situation of women in Gaza over the past four years is not solely attributed to Hamas’ control, but mainly because of the Israeli siege, which tends to be left out in such discussions? I take pride in saying that Gaza in particular and Palestine in general is one of the few places in the world where women and men enjoy equality in rights — or rather equality in the lack thereof.
Indeed, Israel implements excellent standards of affirmative action in making sure that both men and women are equally deprived of their most basic human rights, so please stop attributing the results of this deprivation to others whose role in the grand scheme of our lives is marginal.

Yasmeen El Khoudary is a freelance writer and researcher based in Gaza City, Palestine. Her blog is yelkhoudary.blogspot.com and she can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.

http://electronicintifada.net/content/who-real-oppressor-gaza-womens-rights/10203