For the past week, western mainstream media have featured the name and image of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier released in the current Israel-Palestine prisoner exchange.

Of the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to be released, some of them into forced exile, we know nothing.  They have no faces.  We don’t even know their names.

As usual with Israel-Palestine news, a few other facts have gone conveniently missing.  For example:

• Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit was not “kidnapped.”  He was captured while on military action in 2006, and was, until his release, a prisoner of war.
•  According to a March 2011 United Nations report, about 6,000 Palestinians are currently imprisoned in Israel and the West Bank.  Some have been denied contact with the outside world, including their families, for as long as five years.
• Since Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, more than 650,000 Palestinians – one of every four Palestinians in occupied Palestine – have spent time in Israeli occupation jails.  An estimated 10,000 of these are women.
• Since 2000, more than 6,000 Palestinian children have been imprisoned by Israel.  In the first quarter of 2011, Israeli soldiers abducted 150 children and all of them were interrogated in prison – subjected to hitting, psychological abuse, and other violence or threat of violence without a parent or adult representative present.
• Palestinian prisoners have no access to international or Israeli law, only military law, as dictated by the occupying army.  Half of them are never given a trial.  Israeli military commanders can detain an individual for up to six months without charge or trial.  On or just before the expiry date, detention orders are frequently renewed.

On June 23, 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu announced that he would use collective punishment of Palestinian prisoners to force the return of Staff Sergeant Shalit.  Collective punishment is illegal under international law.

On September 27, approximately 500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails launched a hunger strike to protest increasingly discriminatory, inhumane and illegal treatment by the Israeli government.  Their main demands:

• End the abusive use of isolation;
• End restrictions on university education in the prisons;
• End the denial of books and newspapers;
• End the shackling to and from meetings with lawyers and family members;
• End the excessive use of fines as punishment;
• And ultimately end all forms of collective punishment, including the refusal of family visits, night searches of prisoners’ cells, and the denial of basic health treatment.

In response, the Israeli Minister of Internal Security has threatened to escalate the repression, moving all prisoners participating in the hunger strike into isolation and solitary confinement, and forcibly transferring them to other prisons in the occupation system.

On September 30, the hunger strikers issued a call for international solidarity.

UFree, a Norway-based organization that promotes and defends the rights of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, urges all human rights advocates to:

• Add your name to the hunger strikers’ petition, which calls on the Israeli authorities to stop the collective punishment.
• Use Facebook and Twitter to encourage others to do the same.
• Email your country’s Israeli embassy with the same demands.  UFree provides suggested wording on its website.
• Contact your legislative or parliamentary representative to ask him or her to raise the issue with their government’s foreign affairs office.

For more detail on current reality for Palestinian prisoners, the several thousand who will not be released, see this report from UFree:

Background: International law

Whatever land a person calls home, travels to or is detained in, basic human rights are guaranteed through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.  In 1990, the United Nations made clear that prisoners retained many of those same rights, in a resolution titled, Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners.  However, detention without due process and inhumane treatment are rampant among Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

For example, the violations start with where they are held.  Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids occupiers from transferring prisoners outside of their own territory.  Yet the vast majority of Palestinian prisoners are held in Israel — making it impossible for many family members to visit.

Education is another basic right guaranteed to prisoners.  The UN is now on record as stating that people in prisons retain “right to take part in cultural activities and education aimed at the full development of the human personality.”  In contrast, since the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Israeli government has made it almost impossible for Palestinian prisoners and detainees to pursue higher education – including children as young as 16, who are incarcerated with the adult inmates.  For example, in 2011, more than 300 Palestinian prisoners were excluded for the third consecutive year from taking their secondary school exams – required to graduate and go to college.

When Palestinian prisoners are punished, often with no provocation, the penalty is harsh. PFLP Secretary General Ahmed Sa’adat has been held in solitary confinement for three years.

Palestinian prisoners at a glance

Since the extension of the occupation of Palestine to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, more than 650,000 Palestinians have been taken prisoner – one out of every four Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. Forty percent of male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have spent time in occupation jails.

“Administrative Detention”

At least half of prisoners are never given a trial.  Israeli military commanders can detain an individual for up to six months without charge or trial.  On or just before the expiry date, the detention order is frequently renewed.  This process can be continued indefinitely.  Administrative detention is often used against Palestinian writers, advocates or community organizers who are difficult to charge in military court.  Administrative detention orders are issued either at the time of arrest or at some later date and are often based on secret evidence.  Neither the detainee, nor the detainee’s lawyers are given access to the secret evidence.  There are currently 221 Palestinians in administrative detention, including 20 elected parliamentarians of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Child prisoners

There are no juvenile prisons for Palestinians, and children often serve their sentences in the same cells as adults.  More than 6,000 Palestinian children have been detained since 2000, and there were 209 Palestinian prisoners under 18 as of January 2011 — 29 under the age of 16.

In March 2011, the Palestinian Ministry of Detainee Affairs published a new report documenting the torture of children as young as seven in Israeli prisons.  Between January and March of 2011, Israeli soldiers abducted 150 children and all of them were interrogated during the course of their imprisonment – with many subjected to hitting, psychological abuse, and other violence or threat of violence without a parent or adult representative present.

Women prisoners

An estimated 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested and detained by the Israeli military since 1967, including 34 currently according to the July 2010 update from the Women’s Organization for Political Prisoners (the latest numbers available).  The Addameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association reports that Palestinian women prisoners are subjected to severe abuse during interrogation, including various forms of torture, denial of medical treatment and threats of sexual abuse and rape.

Longterm prisoners

At the other end of the spectrum are older prisoners, 143 of whom have served terms of more than 20 years.  Palestinian Fakhri Barghouthi, for example, is the world’s record-holder.  The 54-year-old Barghouthi, originally from Ramallah, has been in custody for 33 years, after being detained on 4 April 1978 at the age of 21 for a suspected bombing.  He has been in prison 12 years longer than he was free, and continues to be denied visits by his sister.  Another is Akram Mansour, who has been jailed for 33 years and is quite ill with cancer.

2011 Hunger Strike

On June 23, 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu announced that he would use collective punishment of Palestinian prisoners – a type of blackmail – to try to force the return of Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit, one of its soldiers who has been a POW since 2006.  What followed were increasing numbers of prisoners sent to solitary confinement, diet restrictions for everyone, a ban on new enrollments in higher-education classes, and severe cut-backs in family visits and telephone calls.

For decades, Palestinian prisoners have engaged in hunger strikes to demand – and win – their rights, putting their bodies on the line to demand freedom and dignity for themselves, their people, their homeland, and their nation.  This time was no different.  According to Palestinian Prisoners Affairs Minister Issa Qaraqea, since 18th October 2011 approximately 500 inmates are refusing to eat altogether, and others are saying “no” to food three days a week to show their solidarity.

Their demands include: Stop using solitary confinement as a weapon. Permit inmates from the Gaza Strip to have family visits, reversing a ban in place since 2007.  Permit all prisoners to make phone calls and receive visits from relatives other than parents or the spouse.  Remove the glass “separation wall” and allow children to touch their imprisoned parent.  Stop tying prisoners’ hands and legs during family and lawyer visits.  Allow prisoners timely access to needed preventive and medical care.  Allow inmates to pursue secondary, graduate, and post-graduate education.  Stop all collective punishment in response to the perceived wrongdoing of one.

In response, the Israeli Minister of Internal Security has threatened to escalate the repression, moving all prisoners participating in the hunger strike into isolation and solitary confinement, and forcibly transferring them to other prisons in the occupation system.  Prisoners are frequently transferred by occupation forces in an attempt to break up social bonds and disrupt organizing against prison repression.  Israeli prison officials have reportedly told the prisoners that for each day they spend on hunger strike, they will be banned from family visits for one month. Already, during one family visit, Israeli prison authorities confiscated the identity cards of the relatives of Palestinian prisoners Mahmoud Abu Wahdan and Raed Sayel.  The families were told that because their imprisoned relatives refused to break their hunger strike, they were not allowed to visit them.

Elsewhere, in Asqelan Prison, the Israeli prison administration prevented lawyers from visiting detainees.  A lawyer who came to Asqelan to visit prisoners Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh, Allam Al-Kaabiand Shadi Sharafa was banned from visiting the prisoners and informed that these three and all prisoners from the PFLP who are on hunger strike are prohibited from receiving lawyer visits.  In addition, female prisoners participating in the hunger strike –Sumoud Kharajeh, Linan Abu Ghoulmeh, Duaa Jayyousi and Wuroud Kassem – have been moved into isolation and solitary confinement.  In the Ofer prison, Israeli authorities placed nine detainees – members of the PFLP – in solitary confinement and confiscated all their personal effects, clothing and other belongings.

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Encouraging news arrived yesterday from Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.

Among mainstream churches, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has been a leader in the movement for ethical investment.  As the report makes clear, it’s no easy task.

While international power games grind away over our heads, initiatives like this represent one of very few vehicles by which people outside the power structure – most of us, that is – can take practical action for human rights and a just peace in Israel-Palestine.   [For an in-depth look at Israelis and Palestinians in the grassroots BDS movement, see chapter 17, Our Way to Fight.]

Here’s the news:

The Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Committee on Mission Responsibility through Investment has recommended that the church divest from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions due to their relationship to Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied territories.  This decision comes as the result of a corporate engagement process which began in 2004 and sought to influence corporate policy vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  From the church press release:

“The General Assembly asked us to do everything we could to bring about change through dialogue, and we have done this, even asking the Assembly for more time over the years,” said committee chair the Rev. Brian Ellison, a pastor from Kansas City, Missouri. “Today we are sadly reporting that these efforts have not produced any substantive change in company policies or practices, and that there is little reason for hope they will do so in the future.  According to the Assembly’s prior directives and the church’s ordinary engagement process, we have little choice but to recommend divestment.”

The committee has been engaging several companies profiting from non-peaceful pursuits in the region, including activity connected with Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, since the 2004 General Assembly.  MRTI’s recommendations will be presented in February 2012 to the General Assembly Mission Council and then, with the Council’s approval, to the General Assembly in July 2012.

“We have not made this decision lightly, but have undertaken it with prayer and great care,” Ellison said.  “We have appreciated the witness of brothers and sisters around the church in our process, both from presbyteries where these corporations are located and from those who have called us to move more quickly in this direction.  We continue to pray for employees of these companies and their congregations as they are affected by this decision.  We also continue to pray that all companies and individuals in the region will redouble their efforts to seek a just peace and support for human rights for all Israeli and Palestinian people.”

The press release also included the following information about the companies in question:

“Caterpillar has profited from sales of its products to Israeli military and civilian authorities, including its D-9 bulldozers which are used to demolish Palestinian homes and construct settlements and Israeli-only roads on Palestinian land, acts deemed illegal under international law.  The company has never accepted responsibility for how its products are used and has not responded to requests for dialogue since 2009 from MRTI or other religious groups.

Hewlett-Packard has profited from sales of specialized technology used in invasive and unjust biometric scanning processes at checkpoints in the separation wall constructed on Palestinian territory.  It has also provided hardware used by the Israeli Navy in its internationally condemned blockade of the Gaza Strip and in the municipal governments of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, deemed illegal under international law. Discussions with the company have been unproductive, and the company has been unwilling to address serious issues of concern.

Motorola Solutions, one of two companies to emerge from a corporate reorganization of Motorola at the start of 2011, has profited from providing communications technology to the Israeli military used in operations in the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, and has built and supported high-tech surveillance systems in the separation barrier and Israeli settlements built illegally on Palestinian land.  The company has consistently declined to have dialogue with religious investors.”

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The founder of the Israeli organization Zochrot [featured in Our Way to Fight, chapter 14], Eitan Bronstein is deeply thoughtful, a practical visionary, and a brave man.  Despite repeated attacks and death threats, he refuses to be silenced on the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their land of origin.  Although Israel and its backers have succeeded in keeping this matter entirely off the table, in fact it lies immovably at the deep, raw heart of the conflict.

Here is Eitan Bronstein’s latest argument, published September 7 in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Why not return?

No idea in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has had as much potential and been so neglected and rejected as that of return of the Palestinian refugees.

[MR: I offer a little context here.  On May 11, 1949, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 admitted Israel to the United Nations, after Israel promised to implement prior UN resolution 194.  Article 11 of Resolution 194 calls for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, which is established practice under international law, and in every other conflict in the world.  As of 2011, Israel has yet to honour its promise.  Eitan continues:]

Israel’s denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, beginning at the end of the 1948 war and continuing today, focused public discussion about the refugees’ return on an argument about that right and left no place for new visions and political practices to develop as part of public debate.

The Palestinians declare their right of return, dream of it and recently have also been trying to implement it by returning to the places from which they were expelled, thereby challenging the borders of the Jewish state.  Israelis, for their part, reject this fundamental right, viewing its implementation as a dreadful apocalyptic scenario, no less than a second holocaust.

At the same time, a new possibility is developing: utopian thinking about the actual return of Palestinian refugees.  This skips over the question of right, although it assumes its existence, in order to focus on practical issues raised by the refugees’ return.

An exhibit opening September 19 in the gallery of Zochrot – an organization which focuses on the Nakba and encourages Israelis to understand and accept its reality – will display various projects dealing with practical aspects of the return of Palestinian refugees.  Israelis, Palestinians and others present their preliminary efforts to imagine refugees returning to their homeland, taking into account the great changes on the ground which have occurred since their uprooting.  These efforts are based on two fundamental assumptions:  no one will be displaced from the home they live in, and all the refugees and their descendants have the right to choose to actually return.

A range of projects are displayed, differing in their conceptual approach to return as well as in the media in which they are presented, such as “man-in-the-street” video interviews with Israelis and Palestinian refugees and the results of the “counter-mapping” workshop in which Israelis and refugees from Miska village planned how it could be rebuilt in its original location between Ramat Hakovesh, Sde Warburg and Mishmeret.

The exhibition provides a workshop in which visitors are able to propose their own ideas.  It will be accompanied by a series of evening discussions open to the public in which these ideas and the overall vision will be critically examined.  In addition to the importance of public involvement, the exhibition’s conception recognizes the preliminary nature of this endeavor, which is like the stammering of a child learning a new language.  Zochrot doesn’t intend to present perfectly developed, final ideas about the return of Palestinian refugees, but instead to raise the questions about it.

How many refugees will want to return and where will they live?  How will they earn a living?  What will happen to the historic village core?  Will it be rebuilt or otherwise preserved?  What about refugees who don’t choose to return?  What will be the relations between the returnees and residents of nearby localities?  What will be the nature of the state to which they return – a Jewish state, as it is today, solely for Jews?  Will the returnees own their homes and be able to sell them in the free market?  If so, is there a danger that the localities to which refugees return will become the focus of real estate speculation?  What will happen to the fabric of existing communities in the refugee camps whose members come from various localities of origin?  Will these communities be broken up even though most of their members never lived in the localities of origin and the only community in which they lived was that of the refugee camp?  What effect will return have on the current “host” cities and societies (Damascus, Amman, etc.)?  How will Jews and Arabs living in Israel today arrange to absorb the returning refugees?

The mapping workshop developed the idea that the return of Palestinian refugees contains the hypothetical potential of opening up Israel’s Jews to the Arab world in whose midst they live.  New relationships will thereby develop between Israel’s Jews and the geographical and human environment in which they live.  The idea behind this exhibit may seem illusory and fantastic today.  But if we dare imagine such a future, of Israelis and Palestinians living together, without fear, perhaps we’ll also see its life-giving potential rather than simply anticipating the next war.

[MR: Please give this message wings by passing it on to others.]

Two weeks from now Palestinian officials will seek statehood status from the UN General Assembly.  Maybe.  What kind of state are they seeking?  Who knows?  It’s a secret.

According to the urgent call for transparency that follows below, issued yesterday by the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-apartheid Wall Campaign, the official secrecy that continues to shroud the initiative poses grave dangers to the Palestinian people, over whose heads and behind whose backs it has been packaged.

The governments of more than 100 countries have already declared their support for the idea of a Palestinian state – of some kind.  On the other hand, Israel continues to escalate its high-level manoeuvring to kill the initiative, and US officials faithfully vow that they will never allow it to happen.  Whatever it is.

Among progressive commentators, debate rages, and ultimately comes down to this:  ‘The statehood initiative is the best chance Palestinians will ever have to achieve even a measure of freedom’ versus ‘this will officially lock Palestinians forever into a disconnected series of prisons, or bantustans (as in apartheid South Africa), or Indian reserves (as in North America).’

By my own reading of history, I’m more convinced by the second argument than the first, but really it’s hard to say, because no one except a few select Palestinian officials know what the proposal contains.   Which is the problem, as outlined in the call below.

A note about the source:  The Palestinian Grassroots Anti-apartheid Wall Campaign is a coalition of Palestinian non-governmental organizations and village popular committees that work hard and courageously to stop and eventually to dismantle the Apartheid Wall, and to resist the Israeli military occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.

Much of what we hear about Palestine and Israel is the official version, dropped on us from above.  This call comes from the ground where people live, behind the wall.   Please read it through.  It’s an eloquent testament to clear thought and real democracy:

At two weeks from the crucial date of September 21, still no one knows what the text and details of the proposed initiative at the UN are.  As many Palestinian organizations, intellectuals, and activists have stated, we will not and cannot support an initiative, the content of which we do not know. The core of the issue is the fact that our leadership has moved this initiative forward without any open discussion about it and now wants the Palestinian people to blindly support it.  This is indicative of a much deeper problem within the Palestinian body politic and begs an urgent call for transparency, accountability, and popular participation.

Palestinians all remember the moment in 1993 when the Palestinian leadership took everyone by surprise presenting them with the fully negotiated Oslo Accords.  After decades of struggle, sacrifice, and suffering of a people in its entirety there was trust in the leadership.  We believed them when they assured us that the Oslo Accords were a step towards the attainment of our rights.  Nobody was really informed about the Paris Accords, the economic agreement that completed the Oslo Accords and further strangled Palestinian life.

In the following twenty years, the same people that negotiated Oslo continued negotiations in secretive meetings and without any publicly and collectively agreed upon terms of reference.  As the Palestine Papers published by al-Jazeera ultimately revealed, the many rumours told about those endless negotiations behind closed doors were real: far too many times our negotiators have negotiated about our rights themselves rather than for ways to attain them.

Today, the “peace process” and the associated negotiations are almost unanimously considered a failure, an instrument at the hands of Israel to continue the colonization of our land, the theft of our resources,  and the displacement of our people.  On top of it, the Oslo process was a circus mirror depicting occupation and apartheid as peace and  understanding. However, the same people responsible for the two decades of failed “peace” process ask us now once again to trust another initiative, the risks and content of which is still kept away from the public.

It almost seems as if the Palestinian official leadership does not want to acknowledge the massive gap that separates it from the people; as if it wanted us to forget that the elections for the PNA [Palestinian National Authority] and Palestinian Legislative Council did not provide accountability and legitimacy because of Western interference, that the structures of the PLO have been lingering in neglect since the early nineties, and that their representativity has been eroded.  All the while, the Palestinian leftist parties are seemingly caught in the same position of indecision as in 1993,  unable to propose an alternative or even to offer a significant intervention on this issue.

Thankfully, Palestinian society as such has learned two lessons from the past two decades: first, where the destiny of an entire people is concerned, the people must have their word, and second, don’t believe in processes without aims and deadlines.

Unsurprisingly, one of the founding demands of the Palestinian youth movement that has emerged in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ is the call for immediate and direct elections to the PLO National Council to allow peoples’ participation in the political processes.  Yet another generation of Palestinians is growing to pick up the struggle from where we brought it to and to join the popular resistance.

However, once again the Palestinian leadership expresses the same attitude of arrogance in front of its people. Instead of supporting its people in the struggle, the PNA continuously seeks to limit and control popular mobilization in the areas under its administrative control.  Confrontations with the occupation are curtailed in an attempt to transform popular resistance into a manifestation of support for this or that initiative.  As a result, true popular resistance today is only growing in areas C, where the PNA does not exercise any police presence.

While there is certainly a wide consensus within the Palestinian people that a shift in strategy away from negotiations is overdue, there is as well an urgent need to collectively, democratically, and openly discuss where to go next.  Rethinking and re-strategizing of the Palestinian struggle is indeed necessary and cannot be left in the hands of a few.  The Palestinian leadership must not lose the notion of service to its people and expect instead that the people serve the leadership.

The proposed move at the UN might potentially  – depending on the still opaque content of the proposal – be a monumental shift away from the national liberation struggle towards a dispute between a factual and a virtual state, a move that could jeopardise venues for claims regarding Palestinian refugee rights and change structures of official representation. Others argue that instead the UN initiative does not touch on any of these issues and would only bring Palestinians more opportunities to hold Israel accountable in international forums.  This begs the question why the PLO has so far not used the instruments already at hand.  Why in seven years has there never been any attempt at activating the decision on the legal consequences of the Wall issued by the  International Court of Justice on July 9, 2004?  Does the PLO actively support Turkey in its intention [announced by the Turkish government this week] to bring the siege on Gaza before the same international court?  Why is the Goldstone report not being used to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes?

In conclusion, the current UN initiative marks the peak of a crisis within the political structures of representation and urgently requires short term and long term responses.  In the short term, we  need immediate clarity on the exact content of the UN initiative, and an open and inclusive forum of discussion where popular and expert concerns are taken seriously and integrated into the proposal; a forum that includes Palestinians and their political and social expressions from all over our homeland and from the diaspora.  In the mid and long term, direct elections for the National Council of the PLO and a general reversal of the current attitude of our leadership towards greater respect, trust, and support for the struggle of the people are essential.  Only in this way can we build new processes that make possible a true consensus on a post-Oslo Palestinian national strategy.

If in the coming two weeks our leadership shows readiness for a truly transparent, accountable, and participatory process, then not only will the UN initiative profit from it, but this approach could open the way to a restructuring of the Palestinian body politic, close the gap between the leadership and the people, and lay the basis for an effective rethinking of the Palestinian national strategy.

Until then: we will not buy anything within a closed bag.

This message just arrived from the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, occupied Palestine:

When the Israeli army attacked the Freedom Theatre on July 27th [MR: see several previous blog posts], they took away two of our members, Adnan Naghnaghiye and Bilal Saadi.

After a month in prison without charges, an illegal practice under international and Israeli law, both men were finally released on August 22nd.  Theatre school student Rami Hwayel, also seized by the military at a checkpoint, is expected to be released in a few days.

However, also on August 22nd, the army seized Freedom Theatre security guard Mohammed Eisht Naghnaghiye, brother of Adnan.  Once again heavily armed soldiers came in the night.  Furniture was thrown to the floor and broken, and dog excrement left on the floor. The army also took another three residents of the camp that same night.

Yesterday the army extended Mohammed Eisht Naghnaghiye’s illegal arrest by 15 days.

In addition, another student at the theatre school, Momeen Syatat, has been informed by the army that he is to hand himself in for interrogation on September 1st.  [MR: This procedure is standard for the occupying army, and gives the false impression to Israelis and foreigners that compliance is voluntary.]

Further, two technicians at The Freedom Theatre, Mohammed Saadi, 21 years old and Ahmad Matahen, 20 years old, have also been told to hand themselves in at the Salem military base outside of Jenin. [MR: It is also standard practice for the occuping army to arrest young people arbitrarity, then to offer them a way out of brutal interrogation by collaborating, ie spying, on their fellow citizens.  Such forced collaborations often include making false accusations as required by the military handlers.]

The outcome of the previous interrogations confirms what we at the theatre have claimed from the start – these people are not suspects and could have been questioned without being arrested at all, not to mention the inhumane treatment they suffered.  They all cooperated in giving any information they had, to assist in finding the person(s) who murdered our beloved co-founder Juliano Mer-Khamis.  [MR: The Israeli army claims to be conducting a criminal investigation into the April 2011 murder, but given that Jenin is Palestinian territory, Israel actually has no legal jurisdiction there.  On the contrary, harassment of a vital and widely respected cultural institution that challenges power is a much more likely cause of the army interventions.  The occupier would like nothing better than to see the Freedom Theatre close.]

All of us at the theatre want more than anything that the murderer of Juliano Mer-Khamis be brought to justice, and therefore Mohammed and Ahmad have decided to obey the order and contribute any information that might help.  However this is on condition that they are treated in accordance with rule of law.  To walk into the arms of the Israeli security service quite often means disappearing from the surface of the earth, never knowing when you will come back and knowing that you most certainly face harsh treatment.

We demand that Mohammed, Ahmad, Momeen and Eisht be treated no worse and no better than any Israeli citizen brought in to participate in a civil criminal investigation.  Their legal rights, as stipulated by international law, must be honoured.

Mohammed and Ahmad will go voluntarily to the Salem military base only on condition that their lawyer is allowed to accompany them and to see them immediately before and after interrogation, and that they will not be arrested and not be denied access to their lawyer as has been done in the previous cases.  This demand has been relayed to the Israeli security and we are awaiting their answer.

In the meantime, these continuing cruel and unnecessary arrests have forced the Freedom Theatre to hire a lawyer to protect the rights of its members.  Legal fees already approach 5000 EUR [MR: At current rates that’s about $7000 Cdn, or 4400 British pounds].

We fear that costs may increase further as the cycle of Israeli arrests does not seem to end.

The Freedom Theatre is unable to allocate this money from our project funding without jeopardizing our progams, and the families of the innocent arrestees are also unable to cover the fees.  We therefore ask our friends and supporters around the world to contribute to the legal costs.

These cases will also enable us to expose the discriminatory legal system applied to the Palestinians.

You may make your donation here.  Please mark your donation with “Legal”.

For the Freedom Theatre

Jacob Gough, acting general manager

[MR:  And please give this message wings, by passing it on to others.]