Reports From Inside Israel's Gulag On Hunger Strike And Reprisals #DignityStrike #PalHunger

Supporters participating in the Salt Water Challenge post videos of themselves drinking the only thing prisoners
planned to consume during their hunger strike prior to Israeli prison officials confiscating their salt.

I am sharing this news from my inbox received today from Addameer, which in Arabic means "conscience." Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association published their reports on attempting to visit prisoners who have been on hunger strike since April 17.

I would like to dedicate this post to Eric Axelman, a young Jewish friend in Maine currently raising funds for post production on his important documentary 70 Years Across the Sea: American Jews and 21st Century Zionism. To support this effort to educate English speaking folks on the ongoing brutal occupation of Palestine, click here.

Today, 25 April 2107, Addameer’s attorneys visited Nafha, Hadarim and Asqlan prisons, where they were not able to visit hunger-striking prisoners and detainees due to Israeli Prison Service (IPS) refusal. However, they managed to visit prisoners who were not on hunger strike that informed the attorneys of the hunger strike's recent developments.

During a visit to the Hadarim prison, prisoner Thabet al-Mardawi explained to Addameer’s attorney Mona Naddaf, that the IPS started transferring prisoners from one section to another on the second day of the strike, 18 April 2017. He added, that Marwan Barghouthi and Karim Younis were placed in isolation in Al-Jalama prison, and Anas Jaradat and Mahmoud Abu Sorour were placed in isolation in Ela prison. He added that about 36 prisoners were transferred to Ramle prison, and the rest of the prisoners were placed in different prisons across occupied Palestine.

Additionally, sick prisoners were transferred to the cells of Section 5 in Hadarim, which is a civilian detention room located in the civil section of the prison. The prisoners live in a completely isolated situation, where there is no television, no electrical devices and were only given sleeping mats.

Prisoner Thabet explained that the IPS isolated 102 hunger-striking prisoners before placing them in different prisons. Special unit forces stormed and raided the hunger-striking sections confiscating personal belongings. All of the prisoners have been stripped of their possessions; only one blanket has been kept for each prisoner and one set of clothing in addition to the “Shabas clothing” or prison uniform. Prison administration also seized salt in the first days of the strike, and strikers have had to drink water from the tap as the administration does not provide them with drinking water.

The prison administration has also imposed several punitive sanctions on the hunger-striking prisoners. The most important of these is the denial of family visits, as well as the denial of recreation, denial of access to the “canteen” (prison store).

In Nafha prison, Addameer’s attorney Samer Samaan visited prisoners Ayman Odeh and Raed al-Saadi, who told him during the visit that the number of hunger striking prisoners in Nafha is 250 from all political factions. The IPS also started isolating hunger strikers from their fellow prisoners, raided their sections and banned them from having attorney visits.

In Ashkelon prison, Farah Beyadsi visited prisoner Sharif Hamid, who is not on hunger strike. He informed her that the IPS transferred all the prisoners who are not on hunger strike to Section 12 of the prison. And transferred hunger striking prisoners to  Section 3 and placed them in isolation. 42 prisoners in Ashkelon prison are on hunger strike.

“In Ashkelon there are 5 rooms, each room has about ten prisoners, the prisoners are forbidden from communicating with anyone, and they are denied family visits and access to the prison canteen. They are not allowed to see their attorneys as well,” Hamid added. The prison administration in Ashkelon also stripped hunger striking prisoners of their possessions, and strikers have had to drink water from the tap as the administration does not provide them with drinking water. They also prohibited them from participating in group prayers on Friday.

Addameer Prisoner Support urges supporters of justice around the world to take action to support the Palestinian prisoners whose bodies and lives are on the line for freedom and dignity.

Addameer urges all people to organize events in solidarity with the struggle of hunger-striking prisoners and detainees. Addameer further calls upon the international community to demand that the Israeli government to respect the will of hunger strikers who use their bodies as a legitimate means of protest, which has been recognized by the World Medical Association (WMA) Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikes as “often a form of protest by people who lack other ways of making their demands known.” 

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Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association

P. O. Box: 17338, Jerusalem

3 Edward Said Street
Sebat Bldg.
1st Floor, Suite 2
Ramallah, Palestine

Tel: +972 (0)2 296 0446 / 297 0136
Fax: +972 (0)2 296 0447

Email: info@addameer.ps
Website: www.addameer.org
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Forgetting To Remember: Palestine's 50 Year Occupation vs. The Holocaust Industry

I spent my week off from school looking at art. One of the stops on my tour was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where I spent time in peaceful space with ancient representations of the Buddha and various boddhisattvas, balm to my soul.

I also found my way to two special exhibitions of interest. "I must tell you what I saw -- objects of witness and resistance" was a small display of art and artifacts from various bad patches of history including the Armenian Genocide, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  

Chalk mold, Armenia, 1900
During the Armenian Massacres the Ouzounian family, who owned the mold,
were spared by the Ottomans because the army needed the chalk.

Placed deliberately adjacent was "Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross" made up of hundreds of rare prints made from once buried (literally) negatives of Jewish life in Poland from 1940-1945.

WOLBORSKA STREET (DESTROYED BY GERMANS 1939), 1940

Gelatin silver print. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift from Archive of Modern Conflict, 2007. © Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017.

Nowhere to be seen: artifacts or photographs of the now fifty year brutal occupation of Palestine, including the long ghettoization of the people of Gaza.

Most of those imprisoned in Gaza are refugees or the descendents of refugees from violent displacement during al Nakba (the Catastrophe) in 1946-7. The MFA makes no mention anywhere in its collection of this highly significant event, a human rights disaster with huge implications for those who endure it and the rest of us.

Screenshot of the MFA search results. Yes, I tried al-Nakba, too.

In case you have never been to the MFA in Boston, let me tell you that it is vast. It would take days to see everything on display. But a search of their database reveals what my visit suggested: virtually every example of art related to Palestine is a colonial artifact of the French and British occupations that paved the way for violent Zionist takeover.

An artifact related to Palestine from the Boston MFA's collection 

Besides a handful of Palestinian films shown at the MFA in the past few years, there is one item in their enormous collection that relates to contemporary Palestine: "Emergency Room, Gaza, 1989" is a photo (image unavailable) by American photographer James Nachtwey.

This is not a coincidence. The enormous "Holocaust industry" that supports important exhibits like the work of Henryk Ross deliberately suppresses any narrative suggesting that the state of Israel engages in ongoing, deliberate crimes against humanity.

Poster of journalist Muhammad al-Qiq held by his wife and child. Al-Qiq was imprisoned by Israel without charges or trial and has been on a hunger strike since February protesting the illegal nature of his detention. Photo credit: Wisam Hashlamoun / APA

This year on April 17 -- Palestinian Prisoners Day -- thousands of those imprisoned by Israel began a mass hunger strike. 

In a momentous break with its Zionist tendencies, the New York Times even published "Why We Are On Hunger Strike In Israel's Prisons" by prominent intellectual Marwan Barghouti. In it he wrote, "an Israeli court sentenced me to five life sentences and 40 years in prison in a political show trial that was denounced by international observers." 

Bowing to subsequent pressure from Israel, the NYT added an editor's note to its original description of the author as a "Palestinian leader and parliamentarian."

Hunger strike supporters wave banners with Barghouti depicted. Photo credit: ABBAS MOMANI/AFP

Getting the word out is tremendously difficult for Palestinians who are up against well-resourced establishments like the NYT, the MFA and a host of others. 

Just working as a journalist in occupied Palestine is extremely dangerous. According to Charlotte Silver reporting on the news site Electronic Intifada:

Over a dozen more Palestinian journalists and media workers remain behind Israeli bars. Some are being held without charge or trial, like al-Qiq, and others have been hit with incitement charges related to their work.

What to do about the world's vast failure to tell the Palestinian story?

Here's one thing I did. The photographs of the Lodz ghetto resonated particularly for me because I had just finished reading the Definitive Edition of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. It is definitive because editors have restored about 30% of the material which was left out by Anne's father when he submitted the diary for publication. Much of what would interest a young person had been removed -- Anne's reflections on her emerging awareness of sexuality, and her reports on the struggle to separate from her parents and achieve autonomy.

I mentioned the book to a friend who said her teenage granddaughter would probably like to read it. So, I also recommended a coming of age novel that would make a worthy companion in detailing how a young person copes with the cruelties of occupation, displacement and human rights abuses visited on people she loves: The Shepherd's Grand-daughter by Anne Laurel Carter. 

I would have preferred to recommend a Palestinian author but I think the reader is a bit young for The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist by Emile Habiby. 

I was looking for a parallel story to Anne Frank's. I did not know at the time that Carter's honest depiction of the growth of settlements in occupied Palestine has earned several awards but also has drawn the wrath of Zionists who lobbied in Canada to have it withdrawn from the recommended reading lists of schools calling it "anti-Israeli propaganda."

So that's what Palestinians and those who seek to share some truth about Palestine are up against. Why not order a copy, read it, and share it with a young friend?

Then get busy with your boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) efforts before 2,000 Palestinian prisoners starve to death.