Khader Adnan’s health is extremely precarious, but Israel will continue to hold him in prison until April 17, under the barbaric practice called administrative detention.

At present 308 other Palestinians are imprisoned in the same way.   One has been held for over five years.  24 are elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.  None of them has been charged with any crime.

Amnesty International has launched a petition to demand that Israel ends administrative detention, which clearly violates international law, and immediately releases Khader Adnan and any other prisoner not charged and tried for an internationally recognizable crime “in full conformity with international fair trial standards.”

Adnan’s hunger strike is unlikely to change Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, and neither is this petition.  But both serve to draw wider attention to the cruelty and illegality of the military occupation, and to remind the Israeli authorities that world-wide, people are watching.  It also reminds Palestinians that, as long as our governments grant carte blanche to Israel, they do not speak for us.

The petition is here.

Please take action.  And please pass this message on to others.

Under intense international pressure, the Israeli military has reversed its earlier decision to extend Khader Adnan’s term of administrative detention beyond the four-months originally imposed by a military court in January.  For his part, Adnan agreed to end his protest hunger strike in its 66^th day.

He has not been charged with any crime.  Under administrative detention, Israeli military judges have the power to imprison people for up to six months at a time, and they can renew the detention order repeatedly.  This barbaric practice, a British invention, was the target of Khader Adnan’s hunger strike.

Belfast, Norther Ireland: Khader Adnan solidarity protest

Adnan is to be released from prison on April 17, when the original detention order expires – “if no major new evidence is brought against him.”   So says the army.  Since any alleged evidence is always kept secret, even from defendants and their lawyers, the ‘if’ remains a huge, dangerous loophole for the Israeli occupation regime to exploit.

The agreement was signed less than an hour before the Israeli High Court was due to hear the case.  The New York Times noted, “It forestalled an emergency hearing at the High Court of Justice that could have set off a broader review of Israeli military courts’ practice of administrative detention, which has been used against thousands of Palestinians over time.”  Even though the High Court can nearly always be counted on to back the army, the Israeli regime may have wished to avoid the further international scrutiny that the case would likely have drawn.

International attention has been a key factor in this story.  Most of it was generated through grassroots networks, via the internet and word-of-mouth; the mainstream media picked up the story only within the last couple of weeks.

After 66 days without food, Adnan’s health is seriously impaired.  Physicians for Human Rights – Israel commented recently that he could not survive beyond the next few days.  It is unclear to what degree he may suffer permanent damage.  But he made his point.

This story is larger than Khader Adnan, and he knew it.  A mathematician who makes his living as a baker, according to people close to him he wasn’t interested in drawing attention to himself, but rather to the grotesque injustice of the Israeli occupation.  Though his hunger strike is unlikely to affect policy, it did succeed in throwing an unprecedented international spotlight on administrative detention.  More than 300 Palestinians are currently imprisoned under it, along with thousands more held by other repressive means.

Bassem Tamimi’s story is also larger than himself.  Imprisoned 11 times (so far) by the army, held three years in administrative detention and tortured, he has never been convicted of any crime.  This week Tamimi told an Israeli judge why he continues to lead protests in his village, Nabi Saleh: “I do not know and do not care if they are permitted by your law, as it was enacted by an authority I do not recognize.  International law gives us the right to peaceful protest, to demonstrate our refusal of the policies that hurt us, our daily life and the future of our children.”

These stories manifest a long, intense struggle between elite power and people of conscience.  From its inception the Zionist movement has cultivated elite power very adeptly, first by aligning itself with the British empire which ensured the creation of Israel, then with the American empire, and its junior partners like Canada, which maintain it.

Recently the government of Canada, where I live, announced that it would expand the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement.  Since CIFTA was enacted in 1997, trade between Canada and Israel has more than doubled.  By deliberately ignoring illegal settlement activity and production of goods in Israeli industrial zones within the occupied West Bank, CIFTA effectively legitimizes Israeli territorial control over all of Palestine.  This is elite power at work.

On the other hand, there are the Khader Adnans and Bassem Taminis.  Our Way to Fight features a gallery of brave, creative people who resist tyranny and injustice in myriad ways, as do countless others whose stories we may never hear.

And then there is you, me – us.  Here are two upcoming initiatives, ways to stand and walk with Khader Adnan, Bassem Tamimi, and others:

1)  Global March to Jerusalem (March 30).  “March 30 marks Palestine Land Day, a crucial day in Palestinian national memory.  This year our aim is to mark it as an international event to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians and to protect Jerusalem.  This will be achieved by organizing a Global March to Jerusalem or the nearest point to it.  The march will unite the efforts of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and all citizens of conscience in the world to put an end to Israel’s disregard for international law through the continuing occupation of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestinian land….”

2)  Welcome to Palestine Campaign (April 15-21).  “There is no way into Palestine other than through Israeli control points. Israel has turned Palestine into a giant prison, but prisoners have a right to receive visitors.   Welcome to Palestine 2012 will again challenge Israel’s policy of isolating the West Bank while the settler paramilitaries and army commit brutal crimes against a virtually defenceless Palestinian civilian population.  The participants in Welcome to Palestine 2012 will ask to be allowed to pass through Tel Aviv airport without hindrance and to proceed to the West Bank to take part in a project there for children to benefit from the right to education…”

And always, to counter the elite trade agreements, there is BDS, the grassroots trade agreement, growing, worldwide: Boycott Israel- Boycott Apartheid.

The story of Palestinian political prisoner Khader Adnan has largely been shut out of mainstream media in many countries, especially the US, Canada, Britain and Australia, which continue to provide Israel with carte blanche to do as it wishes, regardless of international law.

Photo:  mondoweiss.net.

Yesterday Richard Falk published the following brief essay, an eloquent cry for justice, in Al Jazeera. 

Richard Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He is currently serving his third year of a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.  He has written extensively on international law.

“The world watches as tragedy unfolds beneath its gaze.  Khader Adnan is entering his 61st day as a hunger striker in an Israeli prison, being held under an administrative detention order without trial, charges, or any indication of the evidence against him.

From the outset of his brutal arrest in the middle of the night – in the presence of his wife and young daughters – he has been subject to the sort of inhumane and degrading treatment that is totally unlawful and morally inexcusable.  Its only justification is to intimidate, if not terrify, Palestinians who have lived for 45 years under the yoke of an oppressive occupation.

This occupation continuously whittles away at Palestinians’ rights under international humanitarian law – especially their right to self-determination, which is encroached upon every time a new housing unit is added to the colonising settlements that dot the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The case of Khader Adnan is a revealing microcosm of the unbearable cruelty of prolonged occupation.  It draws a contrast in the West between the dignity of an Israeli prisoner and the steadfast refusal to heed the abuse of thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails through court sentence or administrative order.

Mr Adnan’s father poignantly highlighted this contrast a few days ago by referring to Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas in captivity for several years and recently released in good health: “Where are the mother and father of Gilad Shalit?  Do they not feel for me in this humanitarian case? Where are they?”

He went further in drawing this comparison: “My son was arrested from his house, from among his wife and children, was taken prisoner.  He was not carrying any weapon.  Whereas Shalit was fighting against the people of Gaza, and destroying their homes, and firing upon, and Shalit was released.”

It is true that foreign authority figures, from the UN Secretary General on down, showed their empathy for the agony experienced by Israelis concerned for the well-being of Shalit, but these same personalities are notably silent in the much more compelling ordeal being experienced before our eyes in the form of Mr Adnan’s captivity, seemingly unto death.  It should not be surprising that surviving family members of IRA hunger strikers should step forward expressing solidarity with Mr Adnan and compare the Irish experience of resistance to that of the Palestinians.

And who is Khader Adnan? We do not know very much about him except that he is a member of the Islamic Jihad Party.  There are no accusations against him that implicate him in violence against civilians.  His fellow prisoner from an earlier period of confinement in Ashkelon Prison, Abu Maria, recalls his normalcy and humanity while sharing a cell, emphasising his interest in informing other Palestinians: “Prison was like a university in those times and he was one of the professors.”  Commenting on his hunger strike that has brought him extreme pain, Abu Maria says he is convinced that Khader Adnan wants to live, but will not live in humiliation: “He is showing his commitment and resistance in the only way he can right now, with his body.”

Adameer, the respected Palestinian NGO concerned with prisoners, “holds Israel accountable for the life of Khader Adnan, whose health has entered an alarmingly critical stage that will now have irreversible consequences and could lead to his fatal collapse at any moment”.  Physicians who have observed his current condition conclude that, at most, he could live a few more days, saying that such a hunger strike cannot be sustained beyond 70 days in any event.  Any attempt at forced feeding to keep a prisoner from dying is widely viewed as an additional abuse, a form of torture.

Finally, the reliance by Israel on administrative detention in cases of this sort is totally unacceptable from the perspective of the Geneva Convention, especially so when no disclosure of the exceptional circumstances that might warrant for reasons of imminent security the use of such an extra-legal form of imprisonment.  There are currently at least 300 Palestinians being held in a manner similar to that of Mr Adnan, and so it is no wonder that sympathy hunger strikes among Palestinians are underway as expressions of solidarity.

Have we not reached a stage in our appreciation of human rights that we should outlaw such state barbarism?  Let us hope that the awful experience of Khader Adnan does not end with his death, and let us hope further that it sparks a worldwide protest against both administrative detention and prisoner abuse.  The Palestinian people have suffered more than enough already.”

Child’s play in Israel.

This is the startling image that opens Making Militarism Visible, the English-language version of New Profile’s touring educational exhibit, Neither shall they learn war anymore (a biblical quote.)

Ruth Hiller reports from Israel that Making Militarism Visible is now available online.  It’s a slide show, 34 images, with text.

For more about Ruth Hiller and New Profile, see Civil-izing Israel, chapter 11 in Our Way to Fight.  But for now, a quick introduction:

New Profile is a registered non-profit Israeli organization devoted to changing Israel “from a militarized to a civil society.”  Though small, volunteer, feminist and rigorously non-violent, it has drawn the fury of the most powerful military state in the Middle East, one of the dozen or so most powerful on the planet.  New Profile members have been arrested and interrogated, and high-level attempts are ongoing to shut down the organization, or at least to make its members shut up.  Why?

Here is a clue:

“New Profile has made its aim to work towards changing Israeli society  –

• from a militarized to a civil society
• from a discriminating and oppressive society to an egalitarian one
• from an occupying nation to a respectful neighbor.”  (from the New Profile statement.)

New Profile defines itself  as a ‘movement for the civil-ization of Israeli society.’   I asked Ruth Hiller what that means.

She replied, “What you see on your travels here, guns and soldiers everywhere, we don’t see at all.  I have to retrain myself to see these things.  That’s how a militarized society works – it’s so regular, so normal, we no longer see it.  Civil society isn’t just about having schools, a fire brigade and such things, it’s also about how we behave as neighbours, it’s about respectful coexistence, and no obvious hierarchy between the military and civil spheres.  Do you want a country with a military or a military with a country?  Who makes a better prime minister, a general or a civilian?  How does military training prepare you for a civilian job?  Creating a civil society means creating something egalitarian, rather than having a male elite run everything as it does here, with qualifications entirely defined by your military background.  But we don’t ask such questions here in Israel, we’re too afraid – we’re people of the book who don’t know how to question.”

New Profile definitely does ask these questions.  So does Making Militarism Visible.

Introducing it, Ruth Hiller says:  “Please take a look.  We invite you to share the exhibit widely, and to use the visuals to explain how Israeli society perceives and justifies our deep and ever present military mindsets.  These images hopefully will provide a better understanding of the mechanisms that keep an entire country mobilized, fearful for its existence, and in a state of emergency for over 63 years.

You are invited to share the complete version or to use those images which you feel are relevant to your audience.”

To my way of thinking, the questions that New Profile insists on asking become more relevant by the day, not just in Israel but also in the United States, and increasingly in Canada, Britain and other countries where the elites are doing their best — or worst — to militarize civil society.