The Canadian ship Tahrir and the Irish ship Saoirse have successfully reached international waters, marking the start of the Freedom Waves to Gaza campaign.  The boats are currently in the Mediterranean Sea, preparing to sail for Gaza within a matter of hours.

[MR: This past June, the Saoirse was attacked by saboteurs while still in port, preventing it from sailing to Gaza.  The Tahrir was blocked from sailing by the Greek government, apparently under intense pressure from Israel and the US.]

The Freedom Waves to Gaza initiative is a non-violent, civil society movement to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

“Flowing out of the Freedom Flotillas, the Freedom Waves to Gaza are now underway,” says Canadian Boat to Gaza organizer Ehab Lotayef from on board the Tahrir.  Also on board in this citizen-to-citizen initiative are delegates from Australia, the US, and Palestine.  “We are now in international waters and hope to reach the shores of Gaza in a matter of days.  Among the significant obstacles in our way are Israel’s military and the complicity of the Harper government, but we have the wind of public opinion at our back and in our sails, which strengthens our resolve and determination to challenge the illegal blockade of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.”

“The fact that we have reached international waters is another victory for the movement,” says Canadian Boat to Gaza organizer David Heap from on board the Tahrir.  “Despite economic blackmail, despite the outsourcing of the blockade to Greece, despite being forcibly boarded by the Greek Coast Guard, and despite Israel mobilizing a significant portion of its navy to stop us, we are now even closer to reaching Gaza, breaking the blockade, and occupying the occupation.”

Ehad Lotayef adds, “The Palestinians living in Gaza want solidarity not charity, and have made it clear to the world that their primary demand is for freedom.  While humanitarian aid is helpful, Gazans are still prisoners with no freedom of movement.  Israel’s illegal blockade prevents not only imports into Gaza, but exports as well.  And the blockade prevents Palestinians from moving freely between Gaza and the West Bank, in violation of fundamental human rights.”

Restrictions at the eleventh hour by port authorities have meant that only one third of the assembled delegates and media have been allowed to embark.  Bios of the delegates on board are available here.

Despite this latest challenge, the Tahrir and Saoirse will soon be at full speed ahead toward Gaza.  Various media outlets will be reporting on developments aboard the Tahrir, including Democracy Now and Al Jazeera.

“While the Tahrir will be delivering much-needed medicines, our primary aim remains to help free Palestinians from the open-air prison known as Gaza,” says Heap.  “There’s a song from the civil rights movement with the chorus of ‘we who believe in freedom cannot rest.’  And we will keep challenging the illegal blockade until Gaza and the rest of Palestine are free.”

Track the progress of the Freedom Waves to Gaza boats here.

Video coverage from Democracy Now, onboard the Tahrir, here.

A call to action in support of Freedom Waves to Gaza here.

An urgent message from Bil’in village leader Mohammed Khatib:

We need your help.

On Friday, October 21st, during the weekly demonstration in our village of Bil’in, Israeli soldiers arrested Ashraf Abu Rahmah yet again.

On any Friday morning, no demonstration begins without Ashraf Abu Rahmah walking at its front, holding the Palestinian flag.  Usually, he is the last to walk home.  That is, if he is not injured or arrested.

This week, demonstrators marched as usual to demand the dismantling of the Wall, but Ashraf was not among us.  One day before, on Thursday, October 27th, a military judge decided to extend Ashraf’s arrest indefinitely, for the duration of the legal proceedings against him, despite overwhelming evidence pointing to his innocence of any charges.

The judge ordered the extension of Ashraf’s arrest despite extensive evidence brought by the defense to prove the charges false.  The court was presented with two affidavits from a B’Tselem employee and a lawyer who were both present at the scene.  The depositions stated that Ashraf did not at any stage partake in stone-throwing.  Footage supporting the affidavits was also filed, showing Ashraf’s arrest.  The video depicts him walking peacefully towards the jeeps holding a flag, and the soldiers initially ignoring him.

His lawyers have already submitted an appeal.  It will be heard on Thursday.  [MR: That’s tomorrow, November 3, but in the strong likelihood that the military court upholds the original judge’s decision, as it nearly always does, Ashraf will still be held unjustly in prison.]

Now, we need your help to stop Ashraf’s persecution.  Please take action to demand that Israel release him.

Sincerely,
Mohammed Khatib.

[MR:  Mohammed, a village leader in Bil’in, has also suffered imprisonment on trumped up charges, though currently he’s free – as free as it’s possible to be free in a besieged village.  He is featured in the concluding chapter of Our Way to Fight, and in earlier posts on this blog.

Arbitrary arrests like these are common, and escalating, across the West Bank.  Why does the Israeli regime want leaders of the Palestinian non-violent resistance movement in jail?  A military state is very comfortable with violence – they always have much, much bigger guns –  but military leaders actually admit they don’t have a clue how to deal with non-violent resistance.  Their goal is to remove the leadership and infuriate the Palestinians, especially the young men, until they see no option but to meet violence with violence.  Mohammed Khatib puts it beautifully in Our Way to Fight:

“It’s our right as Palestinians to resist the occupation, but we must choose the method that we think will have the most benefit.  Why engage your opponent in a fight that you know you will lose?  Instead you compete in a way that you think you can win, and show what we have as Palestinians.  We don’t have an army, or tanks, or nuclear weapons like Israel.  What we have is our rights and our own power.  How can we show this power?  By using non-violence.  What we are doing is difficult, it’s more dangerous than to shoot a gun and then run away.  If you tie yourself to a tree, you wait for the army to come, maybe to shoot you, to kill you.  You also have to learn how to control yourself, because when you react to violence with violence, you are out of control, and in that field your opponent will always win.”

If Palestine is ever to be free, and Israel with it, it is people like these who will have built the foundations.   All the more reason to do what we can to help get justice for Ashraf Abu Rahmah.

More about him:

Ashraf is the brother of two Bil’in residents who were killed while participating in the village’s non-violent protests against the wall and the occupation.  His brother, Bassem, was shot dead during a peaceful protest on April 17th, 2009, when soldiers fired a high-velocity tear-gas projectile directly at him from a distance of about 40 meters, crushing his chest.  Ashraf’s sister, Jawaher, died of cardiac arrest caused by poisoning, from inhaling massive amounts of tear-gas on January 1st, 2011.

Ashraf himself has been the subject of gross military misconduct.  On July 7th, 2008 in the entrance to the West Bank village of Ni’lin, soldiers shot him in the foot at close range while he was bound and blindfolded.  The event was caught on tape, and caused international outrage.  Due to the concern raised by people around the world, the Israeli authorities were eventually pressured to indict the shooting soldier and the officer who ordered the shooting.  Both were convicted of gross military misconduct, a rare occurrence in the Israeli justice system.

Given this history and the lack of current evidence, Ashraf’s arrest and continued detention strongly suggest that Israeli authorities are unjustly persecuting him for past events.

Click here to stand up for freedom and justice for Ashraf Abu Rahmah.

We are meant to be mesmerized by the acts and pronouncements of the powerful, endlessly amplified by compliant media that assume the right – and ability – to occupy our minds.  One of their primary goals is to make us feel helpless.  Global warming, economic collapse, the Middle East – it’s all so complicated, so overwhelming, really, what can you do.  ‘What can you do’ erodes from being a practical question into a weary statement of defeat.

In fact none of these huge, apparently overwhelming forces are all that complicated.  All of them are created by human agency, and all of them are subject to change.  It’s a question of how we see them.

If we look at the world through one lens, we see it in a particular way.  Through another lens, it looks quite different.  The people who would control our perceptions, opinions and lives, do so first by controlling the lens through which we see the world and our place in it.

For a variety of reasons the extra-ordinary people I feature in Our Way to Fight came to realize they could no longer trust the lens that was provided to them.  Over time and through experience they learned to see the world around them through a new lens, with fresh eyes.  What they saw compelled them to act.

On the ground in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Chile, Iceland, Spain, Britain, in many US and Canadian cities and thousands of other places we’ll probably never hear about, people are shedding the lenses they inherited, to reclaim their own vision, and they are acting on what they see: immense power unjustly and dangerously concentrated in far too few hands, causing catastrophic harm to the earth and to the vast majority of its inhabitants.  Whatever comes of these many uprisings – those who horde power hardly ever share it without a fight – this is a stunning moment in the human story.   On the streets and in the squares, people are reclaiming ‘what can you do’ as a real question: What can you do?

Alice Walker, African–American writer, responded beautifully at a press conference in Athens, June 27, 2011.  Explaining her decision to participate in the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, she said:  “We are freeing ourselves of the myths that have occupied us.”

Palestinians have been struggling for six decades to free themselves from military occupation and its dominant myth, that the occupier is so powerful and so ruthless that resistance is either futile or too dangerous to imagine.  The forces arrayed against the Palestinians are dangerous indeed: the most powerful military state in the Middle East, unconditionally backed by the most powerful military state on the planet and its servile junior partners (Canada, Britain, Australia, etc), and underlying these, our insatiable addiction to oil, and a deeply conditioned Christian hatred for Muslims/Arabs as old as the Crusades.

By this devastating combination of forces, Palestinians have been driven from their land, killed, tortured, imprisoned, betrayed by the world’s elites and their own self-anointed elites, isolated, brutalized and humiliated in nearly all the ways that human imagination at its worst can conceive.

Yet still they struggle, still they resist.  In Arabic it’s called sumud, steadfastness, holding your ground.  They put their lives on the line for the same simple, reasonable goal that drives us all:  the right and the means to live a liveable life.  It’s not much to ask.  And ever-increasing numbers of people outside Palestine are standing with them in their struggle.

The Our Way to Fight cover photo shows Sayat Um-Said, a Palestinian villager, at a Friday protest in al-Ma’asara.  Behind her is a line of barbed wire, and behind that a squad of Israeli soldiers.  Sayat Um-Said is in focus and in the foreground, the soldiers are not, which is exquisitely appropriate, a fine rebalancing of human priorities.

The photograph was taken by Nicolas Weinberg, a French Jewish photographer.  He and Sayat Um-Said both consented graciously to the use of the photo on the cover.  That combination – Palestinian villager, Jewish photographer – struck me as a perfect expression of Our Way to Fight.  It offers grounds for hope.  Both these people have found their own answers to the urgent question, What can you do?

So – what can you do?  Here’s one possibility:

“Welcome to Palestine 2012.”  This is a high profile initiative, not for everyone, but for some an ideal expression of hope, solidarity and determination.  It builds on a similar initiative that occurred in July 2011, when people from Europe and North America were invited by Palestinians to join them for a week of non-violent activities in the occupied West Bank. Continue reading →

Surely more than enough has already been said about the current Israel-Palestine prisoner exchange.  But then this pungent commentary arrived from Israeli writer Uri Avnery.

Avnery has been active in the trenches of war and peace for a long, long time.  Here he shares some new (to me), provocative thoughts on the prisoner exchange and some of its implications.  Uri Avnery:

THE MOST sensible – I almost wrote “the only sensible” – sentence uttered this week sprang from the lips of a 5-year old boy.

After the prisoner swap, one of those smart-aleck TV reporters asked him: “Why did we release 1027 Arabs for one Israeli soldier?”  He expected, of course, the usual answer: because one Israeli is worth a thousand Arabs.

The little boy replied: “Because we caught many of them and they caught only one.”

FOR MORE than a week, the whole of Israel was in a state of intoxication.  Gilad Shalit indeed ruled the country (Shalit means “ruler”).  His pictures were plastered all over the place like those of Comrade Kim in North Korea.

It was one of those rare moments, when Israelis could be proud of themselves.  Few countries, if any, would have been prepared to exchange 1027 prisoners for one.  In most places, including the USA, it would have been politically impossible for a leader to make such a decision.

In a way it is a continuation of the Jewish ghetto tradition. The “Redemption of Prisoners” is a sacred religious duty, born of the circumstances of a persecuted and scattered community.  If a Jew from Marseilles was captured by Muslim corsairs to be sold on the market of Alexandria, it was the duty of Jews in Cairo to pay the ransom and “redeem” him.

As the ancient saying goes: “All Israel are guarantors for each other”.

Israelis could (and did) look in the mirror and say “aren’t we wonderful?”

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the Oslo agreement, Gush Shalom, the peace movement to which I belong, proposed releasing all Palestinian prisoners at once.  They are prisoners-of-war, we said, and when the fighting ends, PoWs are sent home.  This would transmit a powerful human message of peace to every Palestinian town and village.  We organized a joint demonstration with the late Jerusalemite Arab leader, Feisal Husseini, in front of Jeneid prison near Nablus.  More than ten thousand Palestinians and Israelis took part.

But Israel has never recognized these Palestinians as prisoners-of-war. They are considered common criminals, only worse.

This week, the released prisoners were never referred to as “Palestinian fighters”, or “militants”‘ or just “Palestinians”.  Every single newspaper and TV program, from the elitist Haaretz to the most primitive tabloid, referred to them exclusively as “murderers”, or, for good measure, “vile murderers”.

One of the worst tyrannies on earth is the tyranny of words.  Once a word becomes entrenched, it directs thought and action.  As the Bible has it: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21).  Releasing a thousand enemy fighters is one thing, releasing a thousand vile murderers is something else.  Continue reading →

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.

Please give this message wings by passing it on to others.