organization:popular front for the liberation of palestine

  • Does Being ’Zionist Feminist’ Mean Betraying Women for Israel? - Tikun Olam תיקון עולם
    https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2017/03/16/zionist-feminist-mean-betraying-women-israel


    Rasmea Odeh participates in Detroit Black Lives Matter rally

    March 16, 2017 by Richard Silverstein Leave a Comment

    Yesterday, I wrote a critique of Emily Shire’s diatribe against the Women’s Strike Day USA protest. She especially singled out platform statements supporting Palestinian rights. Shire, a professed Zionist feminist, dismissed the criticisms of Israeli Occupation contained in the event platform as irrelevant to the issue of women’s rights. Then she launched into an attack on one of the conveners of the Strike Day, Rasmea Odeh. Shire alleges that Odeh is a convicted terrorist and former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S. designated terror group.

    A comment Deir Yassin published yesterday here got me to thinking further about this issue. I researched Rasmea’s case and the torture she endured. My view is this is precisely the sort of case and individual any women’s movement should embrace. Here is a summary of the facts of the case. In 1969, a cell of the PFLP planted bombs at a Jerusalem Super-Sol. They exploded, killing two Hebrew University students.
    shin bet torture

    Afterward, security forces arrested Odeh and jailed her without charges or access to counsel. She was tortured, by her account, for 45 days. Here is how she described her treatment in testimony to a UN commission on torture in Geneva:

    …”They beat me with sticks, plastic sticks, and with a metal bar. They beat me on the head and I fainted as a result of these beatings. They woke me up several times by throwing cold water in my face and then started all over again.”

    In addition to this physical torture, Odeh also faced sexual torture. Her father, a U.S. citizen, was also arrested and beaten, “and once they brought in my father and tried to force him under blows to take off his clothes and have sexual relations with me.” Later, interrogators “tore my clothes off me while my hands were still tied behind my back. They threw me to the ground completely naked and the room was full of a dozen or so interrogators and soldiers who looked at me and laughed sarcastically as if they were looking at a comedy or a film. Obviously they started touching my body.” In her father’s presence, interrogators threatened to “violate me” and “tried to introduce a stick to break my maidenhead [hymen].” Shackled naked from the ceiling, interrogators “tied my legs, which were spread-eagled, and they started to beat me with their hands and also with cudgels.”

    Every method described in her account is known from previous descriptions of the treatment of Arab terror suspects. We know, for example, that Doron Zahavi, an IDF AMAN officer, raped Mustafa Dirani in Prison 504. The beatings and positions she describes are also previously described in testimony by the Public Committee to Prevent Torture in Israel. Therefore, it’s not just conceivable that Rasmea endured the treatment she claims, it’s almost a certainty. Especially given that two Israelis were killed in the bombing.

    In summary, the Shin Bet tried to force her father to rape her. The interrogators themselves raped her and further degraded her sexually. And her father was tortured as a means of compelling her to confess. If this isn’t a perfect portrait of a cause that all feminists should embrace, I don’t know what is. So when Shire claims that Palestine is the farthest thing from what Women’s Strike Day’s mission should be, she’s engaging in willful blindness to the plight of another woman. A woman who happens to be Palestinian.

    Rasmea was tried and convicted in an Israeli military court, which features military judges and prosecutors using rules that favor the prosecution and shackle the hands of the defense. It can rule any evidence secret and so prevent the defense from seeing it, let alone rebutting it. Such a conviction could never withstand scrutiny under U.S. criminal procedures or even Israeli civilian courts.

    Further, Shire justifies her denunciation of Odeh by noting that Israel denies torturing Rasmea. So you have an Israeli security apparatus which is well-known for lying when evidence against it is damning. And you have Rasmea’s testimony, supported by scores of accounts by other security prisoners as to their treatment under similar circumstances. It reminds me of the story of the husband who returns home to find his wife in bed with another man. The man jumps out of bed and says: “Hey, this isn’t what this looks like. Nothing happened. I swear it. Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lyin’ eyes?” Emily Shire prefers to believe the agency that lies to her with a straight face. In doing so, she shows that she is a Zionist first and foremost; and a feminist second, if at all.

    As for the citizenship application infractions which the Justice Department is exploiting in order to expel her from the U.S.: she had been tortured once by Israel. Her decision to hide her previous conviction was surely founded on a fear that she might be deported once again back to Israel or Jordan (where Israel had sent her after her release from prison). The Jordanian security apparatus collaborates closely with Israeli intelligence. The former is quite handy with torture itself. Further, the U.S. judge in her first trial prohibited her attorney from raising torture as part of her defense. Her second trial will explicitly permit such testimony. Though I’m not privy to the defense strategy, I hope it will demand that a Shabak officer who participated in her interrogation testify at trial. And if his testimony diverges from the truth, I hope there is means to document this and hold him accountable. It would be one of the first times such an agent would be held accountable legally either inside or outside Israel.

    In the attacks against Rasmea, it’s certainly reasonable to bring up her participation in an act of terrorism: as long as you also examine the entire case against her. She admitted participation in the attack. But she denied placing the bomb in the supermarket. Despite her denial, this was the crime for which she was convicted. Further, Rasmea was released after serving ten years as part of a prisoner exchange. If Israel saw fit to release her, what is the point of using her alleged past crime against her today?

    As for her membership in a terror organization, she has long since left the militant movement. Her civic activism is solely non-violent these days. Further, virtually every leader of Israel for the first few decades of its existence either participated directly in, or ordered acts of terror against either British or Palestinian targets. Why do we grant to Israel what we deny to Palestinians?

    It may be no accident that two days before Shire’s broadside against the U.S. feminist movement (and Rasmea) in the NY Times, the Chicago Tribune published another hit-piece against her. The latter was credited to a retired Chicago professor. Her bio neglected to mention that she is also a Breitbart contributor who is the local coördinator for StandWithUs. This sin of omission attests either to editorial slacking or a deliberate attempt to conceal relevant biographical details which would permit readers to judge the content of the op-ed in proper context.

    The Tribune op-ed denounces Jewish Voice for Peace’s invitation to Rasmea to address its annual conference in Chicago later this month. As I wrote in last night’s post, what truly irks the Israel Lobby is the growing sense of solidarity among feminist, Jewish, Palestinian, Black and LGBT human rights organizations. Its response is to divide by sowing fear, doubt and lies in the media. The two op-eds in the Times and Tribute are stellar examples of the genre and indicate a coordinated campaign against what they deride as intersectionality.

    #Palestine #femmes #résistance #zionisme

  • Israel releases PFLP leading member Khalida Jarrar
    Feb. 28, 2019 12:25 P.M. (Updated : Feb. 28, 2019 12:25 P.M.)
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=782702

    JENIN (Ma’an) — The Israeli authorities released leading member of the PFLP and former Palestinian lawmaker, Khalida Jarrar, early Thursday, after being held under administrative detention for 20 months.

    Jarrar was released at the Salem Israeli military checkpoint, in the northern occupied West Bank district of Jenin, in the early morning hours to prevent family and activists from organizing a welcome ceremony for her.

    Israeli forces had detained Jarrar on July 2nd, 2017, a year after her release, and confiscated her personal belongings including a computer and a mobile phone; her detention was renewed four times.

    Jarrar, a leading member of the PFLP, deputy at the PLC (Palestinian Legislative Council), heads the PLC’s prisoners’ committee and acts as the Palestinian representative in the Council of Europe, an international organization promoting human rights and democracy around the world, was previously detained in 2015 and had spent 14 months in Israeli jails.

    #Khalida_Jarrar

    • Israël libère une députée palestinienne après vingt mois de détention
      Khalida Jarrar avait été arrêtée en 2017 pour des activités au sein du Front populaire de libération de la Palestine, mouvement considéré comme « terroriste » par Israël.
      Le Monde, le 28 février 2019
      https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/02/28/israel-libere-une-deputee-palestinienne-apres-vingt-mois-de-detention_542952

      #guillemets #Palestine #FPLP #détention_administrative #prison

    • Ashrawi: ’Israel’s administrative detention an assault on human rights’
      March 1, 2019 10:53 A.M. (Updated: March 1, 2019 10:53 A.M.)
      http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=782711

      RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — Commenting on Israel’s release today of Palestinian lawmaker and prominent human rights defender Khalida Jarrar after spending 20 months in administrative detention, Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee Member, said Israel’s administrative detention policy is “an assault on universal human rights.”

      Ashrawi said in a statement, on Thursday, “After twenty months in Israeli captivity, Khalida Jarrar is finally free. This imprisonment was yet another chapter in a lifetime of persecution and oppression from the Israeli occupation to this prominent human rights defender and elected representative, including several arrests, house arrest, and a ban on travel due to her activism against occupation and her work in defending the national and human rights of her people.”

      She added, “As we celebrate the release of Khalida, we must not lose sight that nearly 500 Palestinian citizens, including children and other elected officials, are languishing in Israeli prisons, without charge or trial, under so-called administrative detention.”

      “This form of open-ended detention is a tool of cruel punishment and oppression that the Israeli occupation regime has employed against thousands of Palestinian activists throughout the past fifty-two years of occupation. It is an abhorrent practice that violates international law, including international humanitarian law and international criminal law, as well as the basic rights and dignity of Palestinians.” (...)

    • Israël libère une députée palestinienne après 20 mois de détention
      Par RFI Publié le 28-02-2019 - Avec notre correspondante à Ramallah, Marine Vlahovic
      http://www.rfi.fr/moyen-orient/20190228-israel-libere-une-deputee-palestinienne-apres-20-mois-detention

      Khalida Jarrar avait été arrêtée en juillet 2017 à son domicile de Ramallah en Cisjordanie occupée par l’armée israélienne. Membre du Front populaire de libération de la Palestine (FPLP), un parti placé sur la liste des organisations terroristes par Israël, les Etats-Unis et l’Union européenne, cette députée palestinienne a passé près de deux ans en détention administrative, sans véritable procès, avant d’être finalement libérée ce jeudi 28 février. (...)

  • Reminder: Israel is still holding a Palestinian lawmaker as political prisoner indefinitely
    Haaretz.com - Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarrar has been incarcerated in an Israeli jail without a trial for 20 months. Another period of ‘administrative detention’ will soon expire. Will she come home?
    Gideon Levy and Alex Levac Feb 14, 2019 5:20 PM
    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-reminder-israel-is-holding-palestinian-lawmaker-as-political-priso

    Ghassan Jarrar, the husband of Khalida Jarrar, holds a portrait of her on April 2, 2015 at their home in the West Bank city of Ramallah.AFP PHOTO / ABBAS MOMANI

    Ghassan Jarrar says his life is meaningless without Khalida. In his office at the children’s toys and furniture factory he owns in Beit Furik, east of Nablus, its chairs upholstered with red fake fur, the face of the grass widower lights up whenever he talks about his wife. She’s been incarcerated in an Israeli prison for 20 months, without trial, without being charged, without evidence, without anything. In two weeks, however, she could be released, at long last. Ghassan is already busy preparing himself: He knows he’s liable to be disappointed again, for the fourth successive time.

    Khalida Jarrar is Israel’s No. 1 female political prisoner, the leader of the inmates in Damon Prison, on Mt. Carmel, and the most senior Palestinian woman Israel has jailed, without her ever having been convicted of any offense.

    The public struggle for her release has been long and frustrating, with more resonance abroad than in Israel. Here it encounters the implacable walls of the occupation authorities and the startling indifference of Israeli public opinion: People here don’t care that they’re living under a regime in which there are political prisoners. There is also the silence of the female MKs and the muteness of the women’s organizations.

    Haaretz has devoted no fewer than five editorials demanding either that evidence against her be presented or that she be released immediately. To no avail: Jarrar is still in detention and she still hasn’t been charged.

    She’s been placed in administrative detention – that is, incarceration without charges or a trial – a number of times: She was arrested for the first time on April 15, 2015 and sentenced to 15 months in jail, which she served. Some 13 months after she was released from that term, she was again put under administrative detention, which kept getting extended, for 20 consecutive months, starting in mid-2017: two stints of six months each, and two of four months each.

    The latest arbitrary extension of her detention is set to end on February 28. As usual, until that day no one will know whether she is going to be freed or whether her imprisonment will be extended once again, without explanation. A military prosecutor promised at the time of the previous extension that it would be the last, but there’s no way to know. Typical of the occupation and its arbitrariness.

    In any event, Ghassan is repainting their house, replacing air conditioners and the water heater, hanging new curtains, planting flowers in window boxes, ordering food and sweets in commercial quantities, and organizing a reception at one checkpoint and cars to await her at two other checkpoints – you can never know where exactly she will be released. A big celebration will take place in the Catholic church of Ramallah, which Ghassan has rented for three days on the last weekend of the month. Still, it’s all very much a matter of if and when.

    Reminder: On April 2, 2015, troops of the Israel Defense Forces raided the Jarrar family’s home in El Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah, and abducted Khalida, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

    She was placed in administrative detention. In the wake of international protests over Israel’s arrest without charges of a lawmaker who was elected democratically, the occupation authorities decided to try her. She was indicted on 12 counts, all of them utterly grotesque, including suspicion of visiting the homes of prisoners’ families, suspicion of attending a book fair and suspicion of calling for the release of Ahmad Saadat, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who has been in prison for years.

    The charge sheet against Jarrar – an opponent of the occupation, a determined feminist and a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee – will one day serve as the crushing proof that there is not even the slightest connection between “military justice” and actual law and justice.

    We saw her in the military court at Ofer base in the summer of 2015, proud and impressive, as her two daughters, Yafa and Suha, who returned from their studies in Canada after their mother’s arrest, wept bitterly with their father on the back benches of the courtroom. No one remained indifferent when the guards allowed the two daughters to approach and embrace their mother, in a rare moment of grace and humanity, as their father continued to cry in the back. It was a scene not easily forgotten.

    Three months ago, she was transferred, along with the other 65 female Palestinian prisoners, from the Sharon detention facility where she’d been incarcerated to Damon, where the conditions are tougher: The authorities in Damon aren’t experienced in dealing with women and their special needs, Ghassan says. The showers are separate from the cells, and when a prisoner is menstruating, the red fluid flows into the yard and embarrasses the women. But at the same time, he says, the prison authorities are treating Khalida’s health situation well: She suffers from a blood-clotting problem and needs weekly medications and tests, which she receives regularly in her cell.

    “You are my sweetheart” is inscribed on some of the synthetic-fur toys in the production room in Beit Furik. There are dolls of Mickey Mouse and of other characters from the cartoon world, sporting bold colors, along with padded rocking chairs and lamps for children’s rooms, all designed by Ghassan and all bespeaking sweet innocence and creativity. He’s devoted much less time to his factory since his wife’s incarceration. Of the 19 employees he had, only seven remain, one of whom, a deaf woman, is his outstanding worker. It’s a carpentry shop, an upholstery center and a sewing workshop all under one roof. Ghassan sells most of his products to Israel, although he’s been denied entry to the country for years.

    Now his mind is focused on his wife’s release. The last time he visited her in prison was a month ago, 45 minutes on a phone through armor-plated glass. During her months in prison, Jarrar became an official examiner of matriculation exams for the Palestinian Education Ministry. The exam papers are brought to the prison by the International Red Cross. Among others that she has graded were Ahed Tamimi and her mother, Nariman. Ahed called Ghassan this week to ask when Khalida’s release was expected. She calls her “my aunt.”

    The clock on the wall of Ghassan’s office has stopped. “Everything is meaningless for me without Khalida,” he says. “Life has no meaning without Khalida. Time stopped when Khalida was arrested. Khalida is not only my wife. She is my father, my mother, my sister and my friend. I breathe Khalida instead of air. Twenty months without meaning. My work is also meaningless.”

    A business call interrupts this love poem, which is manifestly sincere and painful. What will happen if she’s not released, again? “I will wait another four months. Nothing will break me. I don’t let anything break me. That is my philosophy in life. It has always helped me.”

    Ghassan spent 10 years of his life in an Israeli prison, too. Like his wife, he was accused of being active in the PFLP.

    In the meantime, their older daughter, Yafa, 33, completed her Ph.D. in law at the University of Ottawa, and is clerking in a Canadian law firm. Suha, 28, returned from Canada, after completing, there and in Britain, undergraduate and master’s degrees in environmental studies. She’s working for the Ramallah-based human rights organization Al-Haq, and living with her father.

    Both daughters are mobilized in the public campaign to free their mother, particularly by means of the social networks. Khalida was in jail when Yafa married a Canadian lawyer; Ghassan invited the whole family and their friends to watch the wedding ceremony in Canada on a large screen live via the Internet. Ghassan himself is prohibited from going abroad.

    During Khalida’s last arrest, recalls her husband, IDF soldiers and Shin Bet security service agents burst into the house by force in the dead of night. They entered Suha’s room and woke her up. He remembers how she shouted, panic-stricken at the sight of the rifles being brandished by strange men in her bedroom wearing black masks, and how the soldiers handcuffed her from behind. As Ghassan replays the scene in his mind and remembers his daughter’s shouts, he grows distraught, as if it had happened this week.

    Not knowing know what the soldiers were doing to her there, and only hearing her shouts, he tried to come to his daughter’s rescue, he recalls. He says he was almost killed by the soldiers for trying to force his way into Suha’s bedroom.

    After the soldiers took Khalida, preventing Ghassan from even kissing her goodbye, despite his request – he discovered his daughter, bound by plastic handcuffs. After he released her, she wanted to rush into the street to follow the soldiers and her captive mother. He blocked her, and she went to the balcony of the house and screamed at them hysterically, cries of unfettered fury.

    Last Saturday was Khalida’s 56th birthday. It wasn’t the first birthday she’d spent in prison, maybe not the last, either. Ghassan’s face positively glows when he talks about his wife’s birthday. He belongs to a WhatsApp group called “Best Friends” that is devoted to Khalida, where they posted his favorite photograph of her, wearing a purple blouse and raising her arms high in the courtroom of the Ofer facility. The members of the group congratulated him. Umar quoted a poem about a prisoner who is sitting in his cell in complete darkness, unable even to see his own shadow. Hidaya wrote something about freedom. Khamis wrote a traditional birthday greeting, and Ghassan summed up, “You are the bride of Palestine, renewing yourself every year. You are the crown on my head, al-Khalida, eternal one.”

    #Khalida_Jarrar

  • Felicia Langer. Remembering Israel’s human rights law trailblazer, a Holocaust survivor who called to boycott Israeli products

    A communist labeled ’the terrorists’ attorney,’ Felicia Langer called her clients ‘resistance fighters.’ In 1990 she gave up and left for Germany, where she died over the summer

    Ofer Aderet SendSend me email alerts
    Nov 06, 2018

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-remembering-israel-s-human-rights-law-trailblazer-1.6632132

    After the Six-Day War, attorney Felicia Langer opened an office near the Old City in Jerusalem and began representing Arabs. Langer was a strange type in the local topography: a Jewish Holocaust survivor with a Polish accent who adhered to European manners and believed in the ideology of communism.
    “Her engagement with Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip was perhaps the strangest thing in the Middle East,” wrote attorney Michael Sfard. Her acquaintances saw in her a pathfinder in legal battles that advanced the human rights of Palestinians. Her enemies saw in her a traitor and accessory of terrorists.
    >> Holocaust survivor and Palestinians’ rights lawyer Felicia Langer dies in exile at 87
    She was born in the city of Tarnov, Poland in 1930 as Felicia Amalia White. In World War II she fled with her family to the Soviet Union, where her father died. After the war, she returned to the land of her birth and married Holocaust survivor Moshe Langer. In 1950 they immigrated to Israel – “not because of Zionist ideology,” according to her, but to live near her mother.
    Archival documents attest to the tense relationships between her and the Israeli establishment. In 1968 an intelligence officer in the military government in Hebron testified before the Legal Attaché of the West Bank that she “held extreme left-wing opinions.” In 1975, the Foreign Ministry reported that the Shin Bet security service viewed her legal activities as being guided by political motivations to harm “the state and the image of the state.” She faced threats to her life throughout her career. Occasionally, she felt compelled to hire a bodyguard.
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    Langer fought the expulsion of Palestinian leaders, housing demolitions of terror suspects, administrative detentions (imprisonment without charges), and torture. “She never hesitated to accuse the establishment of crimes and to represent her clients as victims of an evil regime,” wrote Sfard.

    When they called her “the defense attorney of terrorists,” she replied that her clients were not terrorists, but “resistance fighters.” “A people under occupation has the right to wage violent struggle,” she said. Among her famous clients was the mayor of Nablus, Bassam Shakaa, one of the leaders of resistance to the occupation, whose expulsion Langer succeeded in preventing. Other clients included the parents of the attackers of Bus 300, who sought to sue the state for killing their sons, and a young Dutch woman who was detained at Ben-Gurion International Airport after she gathered intelligence for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Langer maintained that she was just a “small cog.”
    In 1990, she immigrated to Germany, after handling what she estimated to have been 3,000 cases. “I could no longer help the Palestinian victims in the framework of the existing legal system and its flouting of international law, which is supposed to protect the people that I defended,” she said in an interview with Eran Torbiner. “It is forbidden to be silent; silence also can kill,” she said, in explaining her call for the boycott of Israeli goods. As a German citizen, she called on Germany to fight the occupation.
    Langer lived in Tübingen, teaching and writing books. Critics were angered by her comparison of Israel to the Nazis, and accused her of hypocrisy for ignoring the crimes of communist regimes. When she was asked once to describe her “love of homeland,” she answered: “Hatred of occupation.” In June, Langer died of cancer at age 87.

    Ofer Aderet
    Haaretz Correspondent

  • Return to Haifa.

    Filmed in Tripoli. Based on Ghassan Kanafani’s novel. Performed with the participation of over 3000 Palestinian refugees themselves, dressed in the very clothes the were wearing at the moment of forced exile. Interspersed with actual footage from the events themselves. Funded by the PFLP. It is perhaps where we first hear Kanafani’s most incredible statement: “A person is a cause.” Although in the film, the characters also do not remember who said that, a piece of self-deprecating irony that only a prophet like Kanafani could create.

    We don’t just inherit our ancestors stories, but also their suffering. We are obligated not just to remember them, or commemorate them, but to continue their struggles. - Asim Rafiqui

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRyGCMLkt0&feature=youtu.be

  • Israel renews detention of Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarrar
    June 16, 2018 3:01 P.M.
    https://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=780244

    RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — The Israeli authorities renewed the administrative detention of leading member of the PFLP Khalida Jarrar for three months for the third consecutive time.

    The Israeli military court of Ofer approved the renewal order that would keep Jarrar in detention for three more months.

    The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) said that the renewal of Jarrar’s detention would not stop her from continuing her initial role in resisting the occupation.

    The PFLP said in a statement that “this is an attempt to absent influential leaders from events and developments in Palestine.

    The renewal of her detention comes two weeks before Jarrar’s release date. (...)

    #Khalida_Jarrar

    • 17 juin 2018
      La détention administrative de Khalida Jarrar a été prolongée – Poursuivons la campagne pour sa libération !
      Par Samidoun
      http://www.ism-france.org/campagnes/La-detention-administrative-de-Khalida-Jarrar-a-ete-prolongee-Poursuivon

      16.06.2018 - Selon les médias palestiniens, l’ordonnance de détention administrative de la dirigeante, parlementaire, féministe et militante de gauche palestinienne, Khalida Jarrar, a été renouvelée dans la soirée du jeudi 14 juin, soit deux semaines avant la date prévue pour sa libération après un an d’emprisonnement sans accusation ni procès. Elle avait été kidnappée par les forces d’occupation israéliennes qui avaient fait irruption dans sa maison familiale à El-Bireh le 2 juillet 2017, à peine une semaine après sa libération d’un précédent emprisonnement politique.

      La détention administrative de Khalida Jarrar a été prolongée – Poursuivons la campagne pour sa libération !

  • The biography of the founder of the Palestinian Popular Front makes it clear: The leftist leader was right -

    Israelis considered George Habash a cruel airline hijacker, but Eli Galia’s new Hebrew-language book shows that the PFLP chief’s views would have been better for the Palestinians than Arafat’s compromises

    Gideon Levy Apr 13, 2018

    https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-biography-makes-it-clear-this-palestinian-leftist-leader-was-right

    George Habash was Israel’s absolute enemy for decades, the embodiment of evil, the devil incarnate. Even the title “Dr.” before his name — he was a pediatrician — was considered blasphemous.
    Habash was plane hijackings, Habash was terror and terror alone. In a country that doesn’t recognize the existence of Palestinian political parties (have you ever heard of a Palestinian political party? — there are only terror groups) knowledge about the man who headed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was close to zero.
    What’s there to know about him? A terrorist. Subhuman. Should be killed. Enemy. The fact that he was an ideologue and a revolutionary, that his life was shaped by the expulsion from Lod, changed nothing. He remains the plane hijacker from Damascus, the man from the Rejectionist Front who was no different from all the rest of the “terrorists” from Yasser Arafat to Wadie Haddad to Nayef Hawatmeh.
    Now along comes Eli Galia’s Hebrew-language book “George Habash: A Political Biography." It outlines the reality, far from the noise of propaganda, ignorance and brainwashing, for the Israeli reader who agrees to read a biography of the enemy.
    Presumably only few will read it, but this work by Galia, a Middle East affairs expert, is very deserving of praise. It’s a political biography, as noted in its subtitle, so it almost entirely lacks the personal, spiritual and psychological dimension; there’s not even any gossip. So reading it requires a lot of stamina and specialized tastes. Still, it’s fascinating.
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    Galia has written a nonjudgmental and certainly non-propagandistic biography. Taking into consideration the Israeli mind today, this isn’t to be taken for granted.
    Galia presents a wealth of information, with nearly a thousand footnotes, about the political path of Habash, a man who was considered dogmatic even though he underwent a number of ideological reversals in his life. If that’s dogmatism, what’s pragmatism? The dogmatic Habash went through more ideological changes than any Israeli who sticks to the Zionist narrative and doesn’t budge an inch — and who of course isn’t considered dogmatic.

    The exodus from Lod following an operation by the Palmach, 1948.Palmach Archive / Yitzhak Sadeh Estate
    In the book, Habash is revealed as a person of many contradictions: a member of the Christian minority who was active in the midst of a large Muslim majority, a bourgeois who became a Marxist, a tough and inflexible leader who was once seen weeping in his room as he wrote an article about Israel’s crimes against his people. He had to wander and flee for his life from place to place, sometimes more for fear of Arab regimes than of Israel.

    He was imprisoned in Syria and fled Jordan, he devoted his life to a revolution that never happened. It’s impossible not to admire a person who devoted his life to his ideas, just as you have to admire the scholar who has devoted so much research for so few readers who will take an interest in the dead Habash, in an Israel that has lost any interest in the occupation and the Palestinian struggle.
    The book gives rise to the bleak conclusion that Habash was right. For most of his life he was a bitter enemy of compromises, and Arafat, the man of compromise, won the fascinating historical struggle between the two. They had a love-hate relationship, alternately admiring and scorning each other, and never completely breaking off their connection until Arafat won his Pyrrhic victory.
    What good have all of Arafat’s compromises done for the Palestinian people? What came out of the recognition of Israel, of the settling for a Palestinian state on 22 percent of the territory, of the negotiations with Zionism and the United States? Nothing but the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the strengthening and massive development of the settlement project.
    In retrospect, it makes sense to think that if that’s how things were, maybe it would have been better to follow the uncompromising path taken by Habash, who for most of his life didn’t agree to any negotiations with Israel, who believed that with Israel it was only possible to negotiate by force, who thought Israel would only change its positions if it paid a price, who dreamed of a single, democratic and secular state of equal rights and refused to discuss anything but that.
    Unfortunately, Habash was right. It’s hard to know what would have happened had the Palestinians followed his path, but it’s impossible not to admit that the alternative has been a resounding failure.

    Members of the Palestinian National Council in Algiers, 1987, including Yasser Arafat, left, and George Habash, second from right. Mike Nelson-Nabil Ismail / AFP
    The Palestinian Che Guevara
    Habash, who was born in 1926, wrote about his childhood: “Our enemies are not the Jews but rather the British .... The Jews’ relations with the Palestinians were natural and sometimes even good” (p. 16). He went to study medicine at the American University in Beirut; his worried mother and father wrote him that he should stay there; a war was on.
    But Habash returned to volunteer at a clinic in Lod; he returned and he saw. The sight of the Israeli soldiers who invaded the clinic in 1948 ignited in him the flame of violent resistance: “I was gripped by an urge to shoot them with a pistol and kill them, and in the situation of having no weapons I used mute words. I watched them from the sidelines and said to myself: This is our land, you dogs, this is our land and not your land. We will stay here to kill you. You will not win this battle” (p.22).
    On July 14 he was expelled from his home with the rest of his family. He never returned to the city he loved. He never forgot the scenes of Lod in 1948, nor did he forget the idea of violent resistance. Can the Israeli reader understand how he felt?
    Now based in Beirut, he took part in terror operations against Jewish and Western targets in Beirut, Amman and Damascus: “I personally lobbed grenades and I participated in assassination attempts. I had endless enthusiasm when I was doing that. At the time, I considered my life worthless relative to what was happening in Palestine.”
    “The Palestinian Che Guevara” — both of them were doctors — made up his mind to wreak vengeance for the Nakba upon the West and the leaders of the Arab regimes that had abandoned his people, even before taking vengeance on the Jews. He even planned to assassinate King Abdullah of Jordan. He founded a new student organization in Beirut called the Commune, completed his specialization in pediatrics and wrote: “I took the diploma and said: Congratulations, Mother, your son is a doctor, so now let me do what I really want to do. And indeed, that’s what happened” (p. 41).
    Habash was once asked whether he was the Che Guevara of the Middle East and he replied that he would prefer to be the Mao Zedong of the Arab masses. He was the first to raise the banner of return and in the meantime he opened clinics for Palestinian refugees in Amman. For him, the road back to Lod passed through Amman, Beirut and Damascus. The idea of Pan-Arabism stayed with him for many years, until he despaired of that as well.
    He also had to leave medicine: “I am a pediatrician, I have enjoyed this greatly. I believed that I had the best job in the world but I had to make the decision I have taken and I don’t regret it .... A person cannot split his emotions in that way: to heal on the one hand and kill on the other. This is the time when he must say to himself: one or the other.”

    Militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Jordan, 1969.1969Thomas R. Koeniges / Look Magazine Photograph Collection / Library of Congress
    The only remaining weapon
    This book isn’t arrogant and it isn’t Orientalist; it is respectful of the Palestinian national ideology and those who articulated and lived it, even if the author doesn’t necessarily agree with that ideology or identify with it. This is something quite rare in the Israeli landscape when it comes to Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Nor does the author venerate what’s not worthy of veneration, and he doesn’t have any erroneous romantic or other illusions. Galia presents a bitter, tough, uncompromising, very much failed and sometimes exceedingly cruel struggle for freedom, self-respect and liberation.
    And this is what is said in the founding document of the PFLP, which Habash established in December 1967 after having despaired of Palestinian unity: “The only weapon left to the masses in order to restore history and progress and truly defeat enemies and potential enemies in the long run is revolutionary violence .... The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence” (p.125).
    But this path too met with failure. “The essential aim of hijacking airplanes,” wrote Habash, “was to bring the Palestinian question out of anonymity and expose it to Western public opinion, because at that time it was unknown in Europe and in the United States. We wanted to undertake actions that would make an impression on the senses of the entire world .... There was international ignorance regarding our suffering, in part due to the Zionist movement’s monopoly on the mass media in the West” (p. 151).
    The PFLP plane hijackings in the early 1970s indeed achieved international recognition of the existence of the Palestinian problem, but so far this recognition hasn’t led anywhere. The only practical outcome has been the security screenings at airports everywhere around the world — and thank you, George Habash. I read Galia’s book on a number of flights, even though this isn’t an airplane book, and I kept thinking that were it not for Habash my wanderings at airports would have been a lot shorter. In my heart I forgave him for that, for what other path was open to him and his defeated, humiliated and bleeding people?
    Not much is left of his ideas. What has come of the scientific idealism and the politicization of the masses, the class struggle and the anti-imperialism, the Maoism and of course the transformation of the struggle against Israel into an armed struggle, which according to the plans was supposed to develop from guerrilla warfare into a national war of liberation? Fifty years after the founding of the PFLP and 10 years after the death of its founder, what remains?
    Habash’s successor, Abu Ali Mustafa, was assassinated by Israel in 2001; his successor’s successor, Ahmad Saadat, has been in an Israeli prison since 2006 and very little remains of the PFLP.
    During all my decades covering the Israeli occupation, the most impressive figures I met belonged to the PFLP, but now not much remains except fragments of dreams. The PFLP is a negligible minority in intra-Palestinian politics, a movement that once thought to demand equal power with Fatah and its leader, Arafat. And the occupation? It’s strong and thriving and its end looks further off than ever. If that isn’t failure, what is?

    A mourning procession for George Habash, Nablus, January 2008. Nasser Ishtayeh / AP
    To where is Israel galloping?
    Yet Habash always knew how to draw lessons from failure after failure. How resonant today is his conclusion following the Naksa, the defeat in 1967 that broke his spirit, to the effect that “the enemy of the Palestinians is colonialism, capitalism and the global monopolies .... This is the enemy that gave rise to the Zionist movement, made a covenant with it, nurtured it, protected it and accompanied it until it brought about the establishment of the aggressive and fascistic State of Israel” (p. 179).
    From the Palestinian perspective, not much has changed. It used to be that this was read in Israel as hostile and shallow propaganda. Today it could be read otherwise.
    After the failure of 1967, Habash redefined the goal: the establishment of a democratic state in Palestine in which Arabs and Jews would live as citizens with equal rights. Today this idea, too, sounds a bit less strange and threatening than it did when Habash articulated it.
    On the 40th anniversary of Israel’s founding, Habash wrote that Israel was galloping toward the Greater Land of Israel and that the differences between the right and left in the country were becoming meaningless. How right he was about that, too. At the same time, he acknowledged Israel’s success and the failure of the Palestinian national movement. And he was right about that, too.
    And one last correct prophecy, though a bitter one, that he made in 1981: “The combination of a loss of lives and economic damage has considerable influence on Israeli society, and when that happens there will be a political, social and ideological schism on the Israeli street and in the Zionist establishment between the moderate side that demands withdrawal from the occupied territories and the extremist side that continues to cling to Talmudic ideas and dreams. Given the hostility between these two sides, the Zionist entity will experience a real internal split” (p. 329).
    This has yet to happen.
    Imad Saba, a dear friend who was active in the PFLP and is in exile in Europe, urged me for years to try to meet with Habash and interview him for Haaretz. As far as is known, Habash never met with Israelis, except during the days of the Nakba.
    Many years ago in Amman I interviewed Hawatmeh, Habash’s partner at the start and the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which split off from the PFLP in 1969. At the time of the interview, Habash was also living in Amman and was old and sick. I kept postponing my approach — until he died. When reading the book, I felt very sorry that I had not met this man.

  • A dangerous 71-year-old
    http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.809634
    The Israeli military authorities are keeping a retired Palestinian history teacher in detention without trial, and we’re not allowed to know why. Next comes the decision whether he’s healthy enough for prison

    By Amira Hass | Aug. 30, 2017 | 1:04 AM

    Badran Jaber , 71, is endangering the security of the region. Thank God we have the Shin Bet security service, which sent soldiers on the night of August 9 to break into his home, hold his seven terrified grandchildren (ages 2 to 10) in a room separate from the adults, and detain him. Jaber, a retired history teacher, is so dangerous that he and we aren’t even allowed to know the suspicions against him.

    An administrative detention order for four months was issued against him on August 13, and the military authorities can extend the injunction repeatedly. And so Jaber was added to the 450 or so Palestinians who are now imprisoned without trial. On August 16 the secret information was whispered into the ear of the military judge, Maj. Rafael Yemini, who approved the detention — without evidence, witnesses, an indictment and a right to respond. Has an Israeli judge, military or civilian, ever been born who doubted the word of the Shin Bet?

    I’ll let you in on a secret: Jaber is opposed to the Israeli occupation. The same is true of his seven children and his wife. When asked his opinion, he doesn’t hide it. There are pictures of him from a few years ago demonstrating with Palestinians and Israelis in Hebron against the destruction of the city by one of the most violent species of settlers.

    “He’s very proud of his relationship with left-wing activists in Israel,” said his daughter Bissan, referring to his ties with Tarabut-Hithabrut, an Arab-Jewish social movement, and the joint conferences in Hebron of the Palestinian left and a genuine, socialist and anti-colonialist Israeli left. When she and her brothers weren’t allowed to travel abroad, she said, they were told that it was because of her father. Israel, the military and democratic power, is intimidated by his words and opinions. Or it’s sending a message: Imprison your thoughts and your words. Keep quiet.

    With chains on his feet, Jaber will once again be brought into the military courtroom in Ofer. He will be holding a bag full of medication. Military occupation isn’t a recipe for one’s health, nor were Jaber’s previous periods of detention. Between 1972 and 2006 he spent almost 12 years in prison: in administrative detention, in detention during an investigation, and after being convicted of political activity for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

    Each time he was behind bars for two to three months to a maximum of 27 months. On Thursday it will be decided whether he is fit for detention, as an anonymous prison service doctor has determined, or not, as his lawyer, Mahmoud Hassan of the prisoner support and human rights group Addameer, will try to prove.

    Jaber will be holding a bag full of medication because there’s no way of knowing how long he’ll be kept handcuffed in a kind of waiting cage before being brought into the trailer that serves as the courtroom. During the first extension of his detention, on August 10, which was one of the hottest days of the year, he was kept in that situation from 8:30 A.M. until about 5 P.M. A kind of torture, even for a healthy man, and certainly for someone suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure, has had open heart surgery, is taking medication for prostate cancer and is connected to a catheter.

    Bissan, 26, is a lawyer. On the morning before his detention, the proud father joined her when she was furnishing her new office. Thirteen years ago, after being tortured for an entire day in the cage where he was awaiting trial, he told her, his youngest daughter: I want you to be my lawyer the next time. Sure enough, she was there for the extension of his recent detention, before the administrative order was issued.

    Her presence didn’t prevent the torture. After about six hours in one cage with a water faucet, he was transferred to another cage without one. There she was allowed to see him. She wanted to give him her water bottle, but the alert prison service guards prevented her and other lawyers from doing so. Beyond the letter of the law the guards brought him a bottle that they filled with water.

    During their meeting, Bissan told him that she and her fiancé planned to postpone their wedding, which was scheduled for August 18, until her father’s release. “Absolutely not,” he told her. “I’ll be angry if you postpone it, if you let that interfere with your plans. Our lifelong struggle is only so that we’ll be able to live.”

  • 13 PLC members held by Israel after Khalida Jarrar detained in overnight raidsJuly 2, 2017 10:49 A.M. (Updated: July 2, 2017 5:07 P.M.)
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=777878

    BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Israeli forces detained Palestinian parliamentarian Khalida Jarrar during predawn military raids carried out across the occupied West Bank on Sunday — just over a year after she was released from Israeli prison — bringing the number of Palestinian lawmakers imprisoned by Israel to 13.

    At least 11 other Palestinians were detained in the raids, included the chairwoman of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.

    Israeli forces detained Jarrar, a deputy at the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) for the leftist faction the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), after raiding her home in Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank.

    She was released from Israeli prison on June 3, 2016 on a suspended sentence of 12 months within a five-year period.

    Following her detention 14 months prior, she was initially sentenced to six months of administrative detention — internment without trial or charge — though international pressure forced Israeli authorities to bring charges against her, all 12 of which focused on her political activism.

    Jarrar was charged with security-related offenses related to her membership and activities with the PFLP — a Palestinian political party Israel considers a “terrorist” organization, along with the majority of other Palestinian political factions — and accused of inciting violence.

    At the time, Jarrar accused the Israeli military prosecution of working to keep her in jail as long as possible, adding that she “did not expect anything from military courts. They are a joke, it’s like a big theater, I do not trust them and my detention has been political since the beginning.”

    Jarrar also said that she refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court, stating that all charges pressed against her were “ridiculous” and related to completely legal activities, including social and political work as a member of parliament.

    A statement released by the Israeli army Sunday morning claimed that Jarrar was detained for activities within PFLP and that her detention was not related to her post as member of the PLC.

    Jarrar is also the head of the Prisoners’ Commission in the PLC, and vice-chairperson of the board of directors of Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer.

    Addameer said in a statement Sunday morning that “the arrest of Khalida Jarrar constitutes an attack against Palestinian political leaders and Palestinian civil society as a whole. It also constitutes one arrest in the context of continuous arrest campaigns against Palestinians.”

    #Khalida_Jarrar

    • Israël arrête de nouveau une députée palestinienne
      18h03, le 02 juillet 2017 | Par Rédaction Europe1.fr avec AFP
      http://www.europe1.fr/international/israel-arrete-de-nouveau-une-deputee-palestinienne-3377807

      Khalida Jarrar, figure du Front populaire de libération de la Palestine (FPLP), a de nouveau été arrêtée par l’armée israélienne. Elle était sortie des prisons israéliennes il y a tout juste un peu plus d’un an.

      L’armée israélienne a annoncé avoir de nouveau arrêté la députée palestinienne Khalida Jarrar, accusée d’activités au sein d’une organisation considérée comme « terroriste » par Israël. Une arrestation qui intervient 13 mois après la sortie de prison de la députée.

      La députée arrêtée 13 mois après sa sortie de prison. Khalida Jarrar (54 ans), une des figures les plus connues du Front populaire de libération de la Palestine (FPLP), avait été libérée en juin 2016 après avoir passé 14 mois dans une prison israélienne pour avoir, selon l’Etat hébreu, encouragé des attaques contre des Israéliens. Elle a été arrêtée dans la région de Ramallah en Cisjordanie.

      Le FPLP est une formation de la gauche historique palestinienne considérée comme terroriste par Israël. De nombreux responsables de cette organisation d’inspiration marxiste ont été arrêtés à de multiples reprises.

      Khalida Jarrar arrêtée pour avoir « repris ses activités au FPLP ». Selon l’armée israélienne, « après sa libération, Khalida Jarrar a repris ses activités au sein de l’organisation terroriste du FPLP » dont elle serait une des dirigeantes en Cisjordanie. « Elle a été appréhendée parce qu’elle a repris ses activités au FPLP et non en raison de son statut de membre » du Conseil législatif palestinien (Parlement), a ajouté l’armée israélienne.

      Khalida Jarrar est membre du Parlement palestinien élu en 2007. Plusieurs députés palestiniens sont actuellement détenus par Israël.

      Une dizaine d’autres arrestations. L’ONG palestinienne Addameer a précisé qu’au cours du même raid, une dizaine d’autres personnes avaient été arrêtées par les forces israéliennes, dont Khitam Saafin, présidente de l’Union des comités pour les femmes palestiniennes.

  • Actualisation de la situation des prisonniers politique palestiniens au 17 Mai 2017 | Agence Media Palestine
    17 Mai 2017, 31 ème jour de grève des prisonniers palestiniens.
    http://www.agencemediapalestine.fr/blog/2017/05/17/actualisation-de-la-situation-des-prisonniers-palestiniens-au-1

    L’avocat d’Addameer (association des Droits de l’Homme et de défense des prisonniers palestiniens) Farah Bayadsi, a rencontré Ahmad Sa’adat, gréviste et secrétaire général du Front Populaire pour la Libération de la Palestine (PFLP). L’avocat d’Addameer s’est déjà vu refusé le droit de visite, mais a reçu l’approbation suite à une requête de la Haute Cour présentée le 10 mai 2017.

    Sada’at a informé l’avocat d’Addameer que les prisonniers sont soumis à deux raids de recherche violents tous les jours, au cours desquels les prisonniers sont forcés de quitter leur chambre, ce qui est épuisant physiquement pour les prisonniers en raison de leur état de santé. Il a également ajouté que 10 prisonniers sont détenus dans une cellule exiguë avec un évier et un toilette, pas de ventilateur ni de climatisation et chaque prisonniers reçoit 3 couvertures. Il a précisé par ailleurs que les examens médicaux effectués par l’IPS (Israel Prison Service) ne sont pas suffisants, car seule la pression sanguine et le poids des grévistes de la faim sont examinés.

    L’IPS impose des restrictions aux prisonniers grévistes, y compris une amende disciplinaire de 200 NIS (équivalent à 50 euros environ), l’interdiction de visite familiale pendant deux mois, l’interdiction d’accès à la « cantine » (boutique où les prisonniers peuvent acheter des produits de la vie courante, tel que des cigarettes) et la saisie de sel ainsi que de tous les vêtements, uniquement un seul vêtement par prisonnier est autorisé.

    Plus inquiétant encore : l’IPS a rendu extrêmement difficile pour les médecins indépendants de rendre visite aux prisonniers grévistes et a fourni aux prisonniers des tasses en plastique afin de boire du robinet plutôt que de l’eau potable, habituellement fournie.

    35 autres prisonniers politiques palestiniens se sont joint à la grève dimanche 14 mai, a rapporté le média « Asra Voice ».

    (...) Sa’adat a également noté que les prisonniers en grève avaient refusé de rencontrer des délégués du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge (CICR), qui sont venus pour leur visite, parce que les délégués du CICR ont refusé d’entrer dans les sections et les salles des prisonniers afin de voir par eux-mêmes les conditions de détention.

    Les prisonniers en grève de la faim ont donc rejetés cette « proposition » du CICR et ont demandés au CICR de prendre ses responsabilités dans la protection des détenus et de leurs droits. (...)

    • Compte-rendu de la rencontre du vendredi 13 mai avec 3 responsables français du Comité International de la Croix Rouge au sujet de la situation dramatique des 1.800 prisonniers politiques palestiniens à leur 26e jour de grève de la faim illimitée

      Par Association Palestiniens IDF

      Nous étions 5 camarades représentant l’Association de Palestiniens en Ile-de-France, l’Union Générale des Etudiants de Palestine, le Forum Palestine Citoyenneté, l’Association Femmes Égalité, l’Association France Palestine Solidarité Paris-Sud – Campagne BDS France et avons :

      – rappelé le caractère unitaire de cette grève pour la dignité et la liberté et les risques encourus par les prisonniers politiques palestiniens (la mort, si le silence complice des diverses institutions, dont celui du CICR se perpétue), ainsi que leurs revendications, dont : fin de la détention administrative illégale, la fin des interdictions et interruptions des visites familiales, l’accès aux soins médicaux appropriés et la fin de la négligence médicale délibérée, la libération des prisonniers malades, en particulier des personnes handicapées et celles atteintes de maladies incurables, la fin de la tortures et humiliations...
      (...)
      Les 3 représentants du CICR ont répété à plusieurs reprises que cette organisation a choisi la confidentialité et que ses délégués mènent des discussions aussi bien avec les israéliens qu’avec les prisonniers, établissant ainsi une sorte d’égalité entre les bourreaux et les victimes.

      Nous avons dénoncé l’inefficacité de la méthode du CICR puisqu’il n’a obtenu aucune amélioration des conditions de détention des prisonniers politiques palestiniens, que celles-ci se sont aggravées, sont contraires à la dignité humaine et qu’elles les ont amenées a décidé une grève de la faim illimitée.

      Suite à cette rencontre et d’après les déclarations de ces trois représentants, la confidentialité du CICR se poursuivra, même en cas de décès de l’un des prisonniers. Cette déclaration confirme que le CICR a échoué dans sa mission de protéger les personnes emprisonnées en temps d’occupation et qu’il ne dénoncera pas les conditions de détentions qui condamne les prisonniers palestiniens à plus ou moins long terme à mort. Là est leur complicité dans les crimes de l’occupation.

      Tout en continuant à affirmer notre solidarité avec la résistance des prisonniers politiques palestiniens, nous devons aussi dénoncer tous ceux qui comme le CICR se rendent complices de l’occupant en lui écrivant :
      Siège du Comité International de la Croix Rouge (CICR) à Paris
      10 Bis Passage d’Enfer, 75014 Paris
      par_paris@icrc.org

  • Israel assassinates Shalit-deal prisoner in Gaza, Hamas says
    March 25, 2017 10:33 A.M.
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=776104

    GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — The Hamas movement announced Friday night that former prisoner 35-year-old Mazen Fuqahaa was assassinated by unidentified assailants in southern Gaza City, accusing Israel of carrying out the targeted killing.

    Unknown assailants opened fire at Fuqahaa at the entrance to a residence in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood in southwestern Gaza City, shooting four bullets into the man’s head before they fled the area, witnesses said.

    The assassination was carried out with a gun equipped with a silencer, according to member of Hamas’s politburo Izzat al-Rishq.

    Fuqahaa, from the northern occupied West Bank district of Tubas, was released from serving a life sentence in Israeli custody in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoners exchange deal, and then exiled to the besieged Gaza Strip.

    According to Israeli media, Fuqahaa was a senior member of the al-Qassam Brigades, and had been sentenced to life in prison for planning a suicide bombing in northern Israel in 2002 that left nine people dead and tens of others wounded.

    In a statement, the brigades said that it was “clear and obvious that this crime was arranged by the Zionist enemy,” referring to the state of Israel.

    They went on to warn that “this enemy will be the ones who suffer the consequences and take responsibility for this crime,” and that Israel would “regret the day” they began carrying out stealth assassinations against “resistance fighters in Gaza.”

    The Hamas movement called the assassination “a cowardly attack by the occupation,” promising that Israel would “pay for its crimes.”

    The Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the military wing of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine also denounced the assassination, saying the killing “must be met with a harsh response by all resistance factions.”

    The Islamic Jihad movement said Fuqahaa’s assassination marked the start of “a new offensive” by Israel against Palestinian resistance, and that the resistance had the right to respond and defend themselves.

    Spokesperson for Gaza’s Ministry of Interior Iyad al-Buzm said security services had opened an investigation into the details of the incident.

    #Palestine_assassinée

    • Le Hamas ferme le point de passage entre Gaza et Israël
      AFP | 26/03/2017
      https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1043011/le-hamas-ferme-le-point-de-passage-entre-gaza-et-israel.html

      Le Hamas a fermé dimanche le point de passage entre la bande de Gaza qu’il dirige et Israël après l’assassinat d’un de ses responsables, que le mouvement islamiste palestinien a imputé aux services israéliens de renseignement.

      Dans un communiqué, le ministère de l’Intérieur à Gaza précise avoir fermé le point de passage d’Erez pour une durée indéterminée le temps que se déroule l’enquête sur le meurtre de Mazen Faqha, 38 ans, tué par balles vendredi par des inconnus dans l’enclave palestinienne.
      Israël n’a fait aucun commentaire sur la fermeture du point de passage côté gazaoui ni sur le meurtre de ce responsable palestinien.

      Selon des médias israéliens, Mazen Faqha dirigeait des cellules de la branche armée du Hamas en Cisjordanie, territoire palestinien occupé depuis 50 ans par Israël et séparé géographiquement de la bande de Gaza par l’Etat hébreu.
      Faqha avait été arrêté et condamné à de la prison pour des attaques suicide qui avait tué des Israéliens durant la deuxième intifada entre 2000 et 2005.
      Il faisait partie du millier de prisonniers palestiniens libérés en 2011 en échange du soldat israélien Gilad Shalit, que le Hamas détenait depuis cinq ans. M. Faqha avait été transféré vers Gaza.

      Erez, dans le nord de la bande de Gaza, est la seule porte d’entrée et de sortie pour les personnes entre l’enclave palestinienne et Israël. Un autre point de passage, Kerem Shalom, est réservé au passage des marchandises.

      La bande de Gaza est soumise depuis dix ans à un blocus de la part d’Israël et les deux parties se sont livré trois guerres depuis 2008.

  • Leila Khaled (PFLP) on Daesh and Islamism, Syria and Palestine | the real Syrian Free Press
    https://syrianfreepress.wordpress.com/2016/09/15/pflp-leila-khaled

    An Interview of Leila Khaled
    to Dimitris Konstantakopoulos ~ Katehon

    ISIS is a criminal organization which was created, and is used, by the USA. As for Syria, it was not only the intervention of Russia, which in any case came after a number of years of war. It was also the ability of the Assad government to defend itself, in particular by securing the economic viability and nutritional sufficiency of Syria but also by forging an army capable of defending its country. This is emphasized by Leila Khaled, leading cadre of People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in the following interview.

    The People’s Front (PFLP) is, after Fatah, the second most powerful grouping in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It has its headquarters in Damascus and is the most important organization of the Palestinian Left, with more combative positions than those of Fatah. We took advantage of Leila Khaled’s recent visit to Athens, where she participated in the festival “Resistance”, organized by the newspaper “Dromos tis Aristeras” (Left Road) to obtain from first hand, the judgements of one of the centres of the Palestinian movement, on the dramatic developments that are now unfolding in all of the Middle East.

    A terrorist for the Israelis, Khaled was a symbol throughout the world for the Palestinian armed struggle, following her participation in one of the four simultaneous hijackings of September 1970, inspiring songs, films and works of art internationally. These hijackings were part of the Palestinian “response” to the ignominious defeat they suffered with the occupation of their territories by Israel in 1967 and their massacre by Jordan in the “Black September” of 1970.

    Because the PFLP was a Marxist organization with an internationalist ideology it was feted by the circles both of the European “anti-imperialist” Left (such as, for example, the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency [TMRI], an international organization headed by the Greek Michaelis Raptis (Pablo) ) and by the “Third Worldist” groupings such as the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. These forces also contributed practically to the international (outside the Arab world) armed actions of the PFLP. Conversely, their cadres were trained in Palestinian refugee camps. They included Greek opponents of the military dictatorship and Cypriot socialists, who wished to prepare for similar forms of action for the liberation of their island from Turkish occupation.

  • Palestinian former hunger striker Bilal Kayid released from prison
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=774389
    Dec. 12, 2016 5:04 P.M. (Updated : Dec. 12, 2016 5:04 P.M.)

    NABLUS (Ma’an) — Israeli authorities released former hunger-striking Palestinian prisoner Bilal Kayid to his home in the village of Asira al-Shamaliya in the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus on Monday afternoon, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS).

    Kayid went on hunger strike in June after Israeli authorities sentenced him to administrative detention — an Israeli policy of internment without charge or trial based on undisclosed evidence — on the day he was scheduled to be released from prison after serving a 14-and-a-half year sentence.

    After refusing medical treatment, vitamins, and salt supplements, living off only water for 71 days, Kayid suspended his hunger strike in late August after reaching an agreement with Israeli authorities to end his administrative detention and release him on Dec. 12.

    Kayid a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was originally detained in 2002 for alleged involvement in the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades — the armed wing of the PFLP.

    He was transferred between several prisons during his 14-and-a-half-year sentence and was frequently placed into solitary confinement, the last stretch of which left him in isolation for nearly a year at Ramon prison after Israeli authorities learned of his leadership activities among Palestinians inside Israeli prisons.

    “““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““
    Muhammad et Mahmoud Balboul et Bilal Kayed, trois héros palestiniens ex-grévistes de la faim, libérés des geôles sionistes
    Par ISM-France | 12 décembre 2016
    http://www.ism-france.org/temoignages/Muhammad-et-Mahmoud-Balboul-et-Bilal-Kayed-trois-heros-palestiniens-ex-g

    Bilal Kayed, qui a été libéré cet après-midi (photo ci-dessous par Hafez Omar), a été emprisonné à l’âge de 19 ans, le 14 décembre 2001, au début de la Deuxième Intifada. Le 13 juin 2016, date prévue de sa libération après 14 ans et demi d’incarcération, des « juges » du régime d’occupation ont décidé de prolonger de 6 mois son incarcération, sous le régime de la détention administrative. Le 15 juin, Bilal décidait d’entreprendre une grève de la faim illimitée pour contraindre l’occupant à respecter ses droits. Après 71 jours de grève, de nombreuses protestations et mobilisations en Palestine et dans le monde, le régime sioniste acceptait de ne pas renouveler la détention administrative de Bilal et de le libérer, 15 ans presque jour pour jour après le début de sa détention. (2)

  • Rare interview of PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani revealed
    http://www.albawaba.com/loop/rare-interview-pflp-leader-ghassan-kanafani-australian-journalist-revealed

    La vidéo n’est viible que sur facebook https://www.facebook.com/khajaj/videos/10153779969401556
    Ghassan Kanafani...this is an amazing video of the late Australian journalist Richard Carleton interviewing Ghassan Kanafani discussing his view of history – which he describes as “weak people fighting strong people” – and the justice of the Palestinian struggle..
    The interview is filmed in Beirut and demonstrate the brilliant intellect of Kanafani and the uncompromising position of his struggle. Interestingly his fiercest critique is aimed at other Arab leaders and especially King Hussein. Richard Carlton did an amazing job in gaining this interview and demonstrates what a great journalist he was..
    http://oumma.com/13350/y-a-40-ans-mossad-assassinait-grand-ecrivain-palestini

  • Hamas, Fatah no longer the only candidates in Palestinian elections
    http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/08/palestine-left-wing-united-local-council-elections-october-8.html

    This is the first time that left-wing factions run in Palestinian elections as part of a unified list. In the previous Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 these factions ran in separate lists, such as the list of Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Alternative list affiliated with the coalition of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Palestinian Democratic Union (FIDA), the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP) and the Independent Palestine list affiliated with the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI).

    In a July 28, 2015, interview with a PFLP-affiliated website, Kayed al-Ghul, a member of the PFLP’s political bureau, said, “The five left-wing factions — the PFLP, DFLP, PPP, FIDA and PNI — agreed to form a unified list consisting of figures affiliated with the democratic current to participate in the Oct. 8 local council elections.”

    Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/08/palestine-left-wing-united-local-council-elections-october-8.html#ixzz4G

  • What a Palestinian Parliament Member Learned in an Israeli Prison

    Khalida Jarrar knew a lot about prisoner issues, but her 14 months behind bars offered plenty of surprises.
    Amira Hass Jun 19, 2016 5:18 PM
    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.725721

    Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarar after her release from prison.Majdi Mohammed/AP

    In her first few days after being released from prison on June 2, Khalida Jarrar still described things in the present tense.

    “We go to the yard twice a day, from 10:30 A.M. to 1 P.M. and from 2:30 to 5 P.M.,” she told friends. Or: “We are 61 women and girls, minors, in prison — 41 in Hasharon Prison and 20 in Damun Prison.”

    The women who are still awaiting trial are in Damun Prison, while those who have been sentenced, the minors and the wounded — usually by Israeli bullets while they were waving a knife or trying to stab a soldier (one was seriously burned by a gas-cylinder explosion) — are in Hasharon.

    Ten wounded prisoners were with Jarrar in the wing, five adults and five minors. At the press conference immediately after her release she didn’t explain what that meant — to live with the shooting victims in the same room or wing.

    In personal conversations she said a little more, always careful not to infringe on the privacy of the women. And she constantly praised the longtime prisoner Lena Jerboni, who took on the difficult and sensitive jobs such as washing the wounded, accompanying them to the infirmary and to physiotherapy, and cooking.

    Jarrar, a Palestinian member of parliament, also spoke in the plural. She didn’t speak of her own difficulties during her 14 months in prison. The cameras and journalists focused on her, the “famous” one, but she spoke in the name of the collective, where the intensive living gave her the chance to use her abilities, political experience and status as a public figure.

    As part of this status, for example, she and Jerboni demanded from a prisoner who was an Israeli citizen and who supported the Islamic State organization to keep her dangerous opinions and thoughts to herself and not share them with the other women.

    After she was convicted on two of 12 charges (relating to incitement and providing services to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Jarrar used the last five months of her term to conduct a field study of her fellow inmates, from the perspective of gender.

    Palestinian society, which estimates that some 800,000 of its sons and daughters have been imprisoned in Israel since 1957, doesn’t lack research on and testimonies from prison. But mostly this research describes the experience from the perspective of the prison majority: men.

    Jarrar focused on gender in the process of arrest and imprisonment from two perspectives: the prisoner’s and the jailer’s. She interviewed 36 women at length and about many aspects: the period before the imprisonment, the arrest (and injury), the investigation, the trial and the imprisonment. Some told her she was the first to ask them about their lives and listen so attentively.

    She can suggest some generalizations because of the dramatic rise in the number of Palestinian women who entered Israeli prisons during her own term. This is the rise of the phenomenon of women who were pushed into being arrested for “social reasons.” This is also what brought a delegation of four representatives of Israel’s Justice Ministry to Hasharon Prison, Jarrar told Haaretz.

    “They asked what could be done for those women,” she said. “I told them their place wasn’t in prison; they should be freed, and our role in Palestinian society was to treat and take care of them and the issues that motivated them.”

    Women activists are certain that if these women are not sent to prison, the “social reasons” phenomenon would be reduced.

    An example of “social reasons” could be heard last week at the military court in Ofer, near Ramallah. A woman we will identify only by her initials, A.B., was arrested early in the week near a checkpoint in Hebron. She had a 15-centimeter-long knife in her bag and did not resist arrest.

    In her interrogation and at two detention hearings (on Monday and Tuesday), the circumstances were brought up: She quarreled with her husband, who does not help to provide for their children.

    Nitza Aminov, a left-wing activist who monitors the Ofer military court, reported that the prosecutor, Capt. Elhanan Dreyfus, said the prosecution knows that many women come to the checkpoints with knives because of problems at home. Nonetheless, he requested that A.B. remain in custody.

    The judge, Maj. Naftali Shmulevich, agreed and wrote in his ruling that the understanding in the region was that “possessing a knife outside the home is for purposes of carrying out a crime.”

    Rocky ride in the bosta

    Even before her arrest, Jarrar devoted a great deal of time to political and social activities relating to Palestinian prisoners. She ran Addameer, a human rights group supporting Palestinian prisoners. She was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006 as a member of the left-wing slate of Abu Ali Mustafa, the Popular Front’s secretary-general assassinated by Israel in August 2001. And she heads the monitoring committee on prisoners.

    Asked whether anything surprised her in prison, Jarrar told Haaretz: “I was surprised there were things that various [prisoners’ rights] institutions hadn’t managed to solve,” she said, emphasizing the transportation of detainees to court, hospitals and other prisons.

    “Why is it impossible to solve this problem? After all, all the prisoners complain about it — Jewish and Palestinian, criminal and security [prisoners] — and Israeli institutions have criticized it too.”

    Unequivocally, prisoner transport was the most difficult experience for Jarrar during her arrest and imprisonment, and the only one for which she occasionally mixes an “I” into the description.

    For the eight months of her trial she was transported in a bosta, as the prison vehicles are known, about 40 times. She joked that she knew all the members of Nahshon, the security unit that accompanies prisoners.

    But with serious tone she said, switching from “I” to the collective: “If we, the healthy ones, were sick for two or three days after every transport, what can we say about those wounded by gunfire?”

    The medical treatment for the wounded and sick women prisoners is good, said Jarrar, as opposed to the initial treatment in Israeli hospitals immediately after their arrest. One of the seriously injured women fell ill one night, was rushed from her cell to a civilian hospital and the next day was brought to a court hearing. And all of it in the bosta.

    The bosta is a kind of bus or truck whose passenger cabin is divided into several two-person compartments. They leave the prison at about 2 A.M. The iron benches are not padded, and every rock, pothole and bend in the road sends waves of pain through the bouncing body of each passenger.

    A guards cuff the prisoners’ hands and feet before they enter the vehicle, so they must hop carefully up the steps. When they also have baggage, such as when being transferred between prisons, this maneuvering becomes an art.

    After a few trips, Jarrar stopped reminding the guards that the prison doctor had instructed that she not be placed in restraints because of her chronic blood-vessel disease.

    Jews, Arabs, common criminals, religious people, women and men, all may ride together in the bosta. Jerboni has filed a number of complaints with the prison service on behalf of women who complained of sexual harassment and racist abuse during these rides, Jarrar said.

    After the prisoners are placed in the iron cells, they are driven to the prison in Ramle, where the “transfer center” is located, the place where inmates are gathered from various detention facilities on their way to the military courts, hospitals and other prisons. They wait three, four, five hours, which feel like 50. They are kept shackled in the bosta, without being able to go to the bathroom. As a result, many women prefer not to eat or drink before the transport.

    One can decide to spend the waiting time at Ramle Prison, in a room divided into iron cells, instead of in the boosta. The humiliating search before entering a waiting “cage” in Ramle prison, instead of waiting in the bosta, discourages many women from choosing this option.

    Time in the ‘refrigerator’

    At the Ofer military court, southeast of Ramallah, the detainees are kept for hours in a sort of cell they call the zinzana or the “refrigerator,” until they are taken to the prefab building that serves as the military courtroom. It’s cold there even in summer. In the winter it’s freezing and “we all shiver,” Jarrar said. It’s also filthy.

    After the court session, the detainees are returned to the “refrigerator” and wait for the return trip, first via Ramle, where the shackled human cargo waits again in the bosta for hours. Then they are returned to the prison — sometimes at midnight, sometimes at 2 A.M.

    Jarrar began to learn Hebrew in prison, so she could understand the guards and communicate her requests and protests.

    In the “refrigerator” she met other Palestinian women who were detained in Ashkelon or Ramle prisons, for lack of space in the women’s prisons.

    It was clear they had not been allowed to shower for days or change out of the clothes they were wearing at the time of their arrest. Some had bloodstained pants, as they were not provided with menstrual products.

    “I was shocked. I didn’t expect to witness such prison conditions in the 21st century,” Jarrar said. Jerboni informed the prison authorities that the Hasharon prisoners were willing to sleep on mattresses on the floor if they would only transfer the other prisoners there, said Jarrar.

    Later the wing in Damun was opened, with its own problems — over 10 prisoners in a cell, with a single toilet, and for a long time, until a female deputy was assigned, a male warden. The overcrowding problem was partially solved, and in March the women at Hasharon were moved to a different wing.

    It was in an old building and it was filthy, crawling with roaches, dripping with water and lacking essentials such as shelves and wardrobes. There were also bees, and everyone was stung.

    Jarrar said that when the women complained that the place was unfit for human habitation, they were told “everything is fine.” They returned their lunches in protest, and workers were sent immediately to fix the situation.

    “All told, the time in prison wasn’t particularly difficult,” Jarrar said. She got the impression that the administration at Hasharon didn’t want to increase tensions, and some problems could be solved through negotiation. Jerboni was the main negotiator for the prisoners.

    The administration also allowed a Palestinian teacher from Israel to teach the minors for a few hours, three days a week. Jarrar taught them English and instructed the adults on how to prepare youths for the matriculation exams. They were also busy cataloguing the books they had.

    Near the end of her sentence, Jarrar met with one of the senior wardens. Jarrar said she told her that the problem was the occupation, and will end with its end. Her impression was that the warden agreed.

  • How will Palestinians resolve internal divisions?
    Adnan Abu Amer Posted June 14, 2016
    http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/06/pflp-member-khalida-jarrar-release-israeli-prisons.html
    _ Khalida Jarrar , a member of the political bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), said in an interview with Al-Monitor that the gateway to resolving the contentious issue of Palestinian reconciliation and electing a new president lies in revitalizing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and holding democratic elections_

    Al-Monitor: What is your opinion concerning the effort that France is leading to resume negotiations? Can a breakthrough be achieved in light of the political atmosphere that prevails in Israel today?

    Jarrar: I do not think that French efforts will lead to palpable results. On the contrary, I view them as a waste of time and an attempt to circumvent international resolutions. Instead of the French or other similar efforts, it would be better to demand the convening of an international conference endowed with far-reaching powers, in keeping with international resolutions relevant to the Palestinian cause, which, above anything else, affirm the need to end the Israeli occupation.

    Al-Monitor: There are those who posit that Israel decided to punish you due to your strong support for joining the International Criminal Court [ICC]. Do you agree with this assessment, and are you satisfied with the pace of Palestinian efforts to join the court?

    Jarrar: Israeli authorities arrested me for many reasons, among them my membership on the Supreme National Committee for Coordination with the ICC and because I refused to abide by a decision of the Israeli occupation forces to send me to the city of Jericho [as banishment] in August 2014. Add to that the fact that I constantly visited Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails and participated in many of the political and cultural events held in the West Bank. As a result, occupation authorities wanted to distance me from my Palestinian community. As for Palestinian efforts to join the ICC, to date I have not witnessed any serious Palestinian efforts to follow-up on the dossier, which, in my opinion, demonstrates clear laxity on the part of the Palestinians.

    Al-Monitor: What are the latest developments concerning the relationship between the PFLP and the Palestinian Authority [PA] in light of the latest crisis subsequent to their dispute about the PA’s political conduct and [the] April 2016 decision [by Mahmoud Abbas, in his capacity as PLO chairman] to withhold funding to the PFLP, which exacerbated tensions between them to the point where PFLP members burned effigies of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza?

    Jarrar: Irrespective of the details associated with these differences, it is clear that the situation of Palestinian division has preoccupied people with the multitude of its internal conflicts, sometimes between Fatah and Hamas and other times between other Palestinian factions that oppose one another. All these actions and practices emanate from a lack of national responsibility, particularly in light of the fact that Palestinians are passing through a critical historical and political period that requires drafting a unified strategy that transcends internal Palestinian tensions while maintaining the need for Palestinian factions to reassess their espoused political approach.

    Khalida_Jarrar

  • Israël : une députée palestinienne condamnée à 15 mois de prison - Moyen-Orient - RFI - Publié le 07-12-2015
    http://www.rfi.fr/moyen-orient/20151207-israel-une-deputee-palestinienne-condamnee-15-mois-prison

    La députée palestinienne Khalida Jarrar, accusée d’incitation à la violence et au terrorisme, a été condamnée ce lundi à 15 mois de prison par un tribunal militaire israélien. Les Palestiniens, qui se sont beaucoup mobilisés pour cette personnalité connue, dénoncent un jugement purement politique.

    Avec notre correspondante à Jérusalem, Murielle Paradon

    Khalida Jarrar avait été arrêtée chez elle, en Cisjordanie occupée le 2 avril dernier, dans un raid de l’armée israélienne. Cette députée palestinienne était accusée d’incitation à la violence et d’appartenance au Front populaire de libération de la Palestine, un mouvement d’extrême gauche considéré comme une organisation terroriste par Israël.

    Le sort de Khalida Jarrar a beaucoup mobilisé. Féministe, militante des droits de l’homme et en particulier des droits des prisonniers, c’est une personnalité connue. Les Palestiniens ont aussitôt vu dans son arrestation par Israël un geste politique.

    Le jugement rendu ce lundi, 15 mois de prison fermes et 2 500 euros d’amende, est dénoncé comme totalement arbitraire, venant d’un tribunal militaire israélien. Khalida Jarrar a déjà passé huit mois en détention, elle devrait donc sortir de prison l’été prochain. Selon une association de détenus, cinq députés palestiniens sont actuellement emprisonnés dans les geôles israéliennes.

    #Khalida_Jarrar

    • Even a Political Trial Can’t Budge Israel’s Silence of the Ewes

      Palestinian parliamentarian Khalida Jarrar was jailed because of her political beliefs, but few Israelis seem to care.
      Gideon Levy Dec 10, 2015 2:32 AM
      http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.690967


      Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar in Ofer military court, May 2015.Alex Levac

      What is left of concepts like solidarity, sympathy or protest here? And who is left to express them? What could remain of those words when a military court sentences a Palestinian parliamentarian to a prison term for her political activity – and Jewish-Israeli society looks on with complete disinterest?

      It’s unlikely that the Israeli public even heard of it. No man cried out, no woman either. There is not a righteous man in Sodom, nor a righteous woman.

      The banishment, arrest and trial of Khalida Jarrar, not to mention the verdict against her, are among the abominations of the occupation. There have been greater abominations, but this one should have raised some kind of storm in Israel – as it did in the rest of the world – because it concerns an elected official, a fighter for human rights and social justice, a feminist and, of course, an opponent to the occupation.

      She was sentenced to prison solely due to her political activity. That, surely, should have awakened someone here? But we’re only shocked by the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, where there’s a military dictatorship.

      Here’s a brief history of the abomination. A banishment order from the city she lives in; imprisonment without trial; a fabricated indictment, produced in response to the international criticism of her arrest and incarceration, consisting of grotesque charges that even the military prosecution never dared to concoct; the prosecutor’s threat before the court that she would be locked up without trial if it dared release her; and a verdict of 15 months in prison.

      The occupation’s clerks, disguised as prosecutors and military judges – imposters to all intents and purposes - did their job well. This is exactly what is required of obedient bureaucrats in uniform, some of them in skullcaps too.

      The mission was accomplished and Jarrar was neutralized. She will remain in prison for at least seven more months. Her husband, Ghassan, manufactures fur toys. Israel has arrested him 14 times and the furthest he has been allowed to travel in his 55 years is the Ketziot prison in the Negev. He and their daughters, Yaffa and Suha, doctoral students in Canada, will continue to weep, as they did in several court sessions.

      The only person who tried to stop this abomination was IDF Judge Major Haim Balilti, who ordered Jarrar’s release from prison. But Chief Military Advocate Lt. Col. Morris Hirsch threatened that Jarrar would be imprisoned in any case, regardless of the court’s ruling. That had the desired effect on judge Lt. Col. Ronen Atzmon of the appeals court, who did his duty.

      That is how Israel teaches the subjects of its occupation the only lesson it wants them to learn – you must not resist the occupation in any way, on any account, neither with violence nor politics, nor guns nor words. Bow your heads obediently under the boot, raise your hands in subservience and surrender. If you don’t, you will be punished.

      The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the most sophisticated and impressive political movements, is seen by Israeli despotism as a “prohibited organization.” It also has a military wing, with which Jarrar had no contact. Even Jarrar’s visit to a Palestinian book fair was registered as an offense for which there can only be one verdict.

      A lawmaker is banished, arrested, imprisoned without really doing anything wrong or committing a crime – and Israel is silent. Her parliamentary peers – male and female members of the Knesset who grandstand about the “only democracy,” are silent. Apart from MK Aida Touma-Sliman, who visited Jarrar in prison, there was no display of protest or solidarity.

      Where are the MKs, especially the female ones? Hello, Merav Michaeli? Stav Shafir? Meretz? The silence of the lambs, mainly of the ewes. The women’s organizations are silent, the feminists are silent and the legal experts are silent. And, of course, the media, which didn’t even bother to report the verdict, except for Haaretz. Why? What happened? A “terrorist” was sentenced to prison? What’s the story?

      But this is a big story and it should trouble many Israelis, even those who aren’t concerned with the fate of the Palestinians. It won’t stop with Jarrar; it never does.

  • Israeli forces kill Palestinian teen in Duheisha camp
    Dec. 8, 2015 8:59 A.M. (Updated: Dec. 8, 2015 11:45 A.M.)
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769224

    BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Israeli forces shot dead a 19-year-old Palestinian during a predawn detention raid into Duheisha refugee camp to the south of Bethlehem on Tuesday.

    Medics identified the Palestinian as Malik Akram Shahin and said he had been shot in the forehead, where the bullet remained lodged.

    Witnesses said he was “left bleeding for long before he was evacuated to the public hospital in Beit Jala, where medics pronounced him dead.”

    He was killed when large numbers of Israeli forces stormed Duheisha camp in the early hours of Tuesday, detaining a number of local residents and delivering summons to others.

    As the soldiers broke into Palestinians’ homes, they reportedly fired live rounds, tear gas canisters, and stun grenades “indiscriminately” through the camp’s narrow alleys.

    An Israeli army spokesperson said that “overnight, a riot broke out” in Duheisha camp, with Palestinians throwing “pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails” at Israeli soldiers.

    She said the soldiers fired “warning shots” into the air to disperse them. She had no immediate information on Shahin’s death.

    The left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine later said that Shahin had been one of its supporters. The group said in a statement that he fell “during fierce clashes with Israeli troops who raided the camp to detain young men affiliated to the PFLP.”

    The statement added: “The ongoing ugly crimes by the Israeli occupation against our young men who lead clashes at the front line won’t prevent them from escalating the clashes with Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers.”

    Locals identified some of the Palestinians detained during the raid as Mustafa Atiyeh al-Hasanat, 20, Muhammad Ali Abu Ajamiyeh, 19, Diyaa Khalil al-Jaafari, 20, and Muhammad Ilias Sarahnah.

    Shortly after Shahin was shot dead, dozens of young men rallied in the camp in protest. A Bethlehem committee announced a halt to all business across the district and stores were closed.

    At least 113 Palestinians have now been killed in just over two months of unrest across the occupied Palestinian territory.

    #Palestine_assassinée

    • Medics: Bethlehem youth shot dead with illegal ammunition
      Dec. 8, 2015 7:35 P.M. (Updated: Dec. 8, 2015 7:35 P.M.)
      http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769247

      BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Malik Akram Shahin , 19, who was shot dead by Israeli forces in Bethlehem overnight Monday, was killed by an explosive bullet fired at his head, medical sources at the Beit Jala Governmental Hospital told Ma’an.

      Medics said the explosive bullet smashed Shahin’s skull, and exploded inside his head, with the bullet and skull fragments shattering into “hundreds of pieces.”

      The sources said the positioning of the shot, as well as the type of bullet used, clearly indicates that Israeli forces shot at Shahin with every intention to kill.

      The use of explosive bullets, also called expanding bullets or “dum dum” bullets, is illegal under international law, and considered a crime of war under the 1899 Hague Declaration and the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, among others.

      The bullets are banned due to the brutal damage inflicted on the victim, as the bullets are made to splinter apart and become lodged, instead of making a clean exit through the body.

  • What is Islamic Jihad’s role in the intifada? - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
    http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/gaza-islamic-jihad-movement-support-intifada-non-military.html#ixzz3rDl1

    Within the last month, the Islamic Jihad has organized more than nine rallies in the Gaza Strip in support of the intifada that began in early October in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In the past, the movement had typically organized rallies with other Palestinian factions, such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The current rallies organized independently are not part of a military initiative or a border confrontation, but in fact go beyond any demarcation line of Israeli forces in supporting and energizing the intifada from afar. For instance, one rally was called Hebron Martyrs’ Friday, which is also reflective of the group’s adopted practice of individually naming marches held every Friday.

    Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/gaza-islamic-jihad-movement-support-intifada-non-military.html#ixzz3rMT0

  • A propos de Leila Khaled et du film Hijacker de Lina Makboul, trois articles de 2014 en anglais:

    “For me, Palestine is Paradise” – Conversation with Leila Khaled
    http://lemuradesoreilles.org/2014/04/07/for-me-palestine-is-paradise-conversation-with-leila-khaled
    (traduit en français ici: http://seenthis.net/messages/246174 )

    Cinema Politica : a democratic screening space
    http://freecityradio.org/post/128868369500/cinema-politica-a-democratic-screening-space

    Hijacker : interview with filmmaker Lina Makboul
    http://freecityradio.org/post/128864382980/hijacker-interview-with-filmmaker-lina-makboul

    #Palestine #Leila_Khaled #FPLP #PFLP #Hijacker #Lina_Makboul #terrorisme

  • Syria’s Palestinians divided over whom to support - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
    http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/turkey-syria-palestinia-fight-for-syrian-army.html

    Palestinians in Syria are split over the civil war. Those supporting Hamas joined ranks with the opposition, and those affiliated with Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) back the regime.

    In the first four years of the war, 209 Palestinians from Nairab out of 4,000 overall in Syria were killed. I was taken to a tea garden that now serves as the headquarters of the Jerusalem Brigade, which defends Nairab. Its commander, Adnan al Sayyid, is the son of a family expelled from Zefat by Israel. A Fatah member, Sayyid explained that the tea garden had actually been his restaurant, which he turned into a headquarters.

    He listed a series of incidents to explain why his brigade had taken up arms. He said that the armed opposition killed 19 Palestinian young people returning to Nairab from a military camp. After chaining up the driver, the opposition rigged the bus with explosives and it exploded 100 meters (328 feet) from the checkpoint. The opposition then began abducting men from the camp: Hussein Masri, Hikmet Dirbes and Mohammed Jeddah — all civilians — were accused of cooperating with the regime, according to Sayyid. Their bodies were found in a house not far away.

    Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/turkey-syria-palestinia-fight-for-syrian-army.html#ixzz3ksc8gI00

  • Hamas wins Birzeit University student council election for first time since 2007 - Diplomacy and Defense - Israel News | Haaretz
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.653538

    Hamas has scored a convincing victory in the elections for the student council of Birzeit University, which is considered the most liberal of all West Bank Palestinian universities and a reliable indicator of the mood on the Palestinian street. The April 22 elections were a focus of interest over the weekend in the Palestinian political arena, with some observers terming Hamas’ triumph as a political earthquake and a sea change in the mood in the West Bank, while others saw it as a localized failure that harked back to the trend that characterized the campus for many years, particularly in the years immediately following the 1993 Oslo Accords.

    The Hamas-affiliated Islamic Wafaa’ Bloc won 26 out of the council’s 51 seats, compared to 19 seats for Fatah’s student party, five for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and one seat for a coalition of other parties. Hamas won most of the student council elections between 2003 and 2007, when Fatah took the lead. Hamas did not contest the elections in 2009 and 2010, when it accused the Palestinian Authority of persecuting it. In 2012 the results were a mirror image of this year, with 26 council seats for Fatah and 19 for Hamas. In 2013 and 2014 Fatah’s lead over Hamas narrowed, to 23 versus 20.

    Hamas and its supporters consider the student faction’s seven-seat lead over Fatah in this year’s election an overwhelming victory, so much so that in his congratulatory message to the students, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal heralded it as “the first step in the national Palestinian process of completing the establishment of the Palestinian institutions in the Palestinian Authority and in the PLO and in acting to end the occupation.”

    Hamas lawmaker Fathi Qarawi said the Hamas victory was not a surprise, since it reflected the true face of the Palestinian people and its support for the resistance, and proved that the PA’s policy of excluding and persecuting Hamas in the West Bank was a failure. Other Hamas supporters said the victory represented a triumph for the organization’s ideology and for political Islam. Figures in Fatah, for their part, were quick to accept the results of the election and to congratulate their Hamas rivals.

    A central Fatah student activist in the Ramallah and Birzeit area who spoke with Haaretz on the condition of anonymity said Hamas took full advantage of last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip with Israel to obtain the support of students at the university, especially among freshman. He said the vote reflected the disappointment of younger Palestinians with the absence of negotiations with Israel, the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the failure of Fatah and the PA to bring about real change in the Palestinian arena: “In 2007, after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip the election results were pretty similar but in Fatah’s factor, and the young people opposed Hamas policy. Now the trend has been reversed, and that says something,” the Fatah activist said.

    Fatah leaders, on the other hand, said they have no intention of giving up. They noted that Fatah was still clearly in control of the student councils of most of the big Palestinian campuses on the West Bank, such as An-Najah University in Nablus and Al-Quds University, among others.

    It is not clear how the Hamas victory will play out on the Palestinian street, but the election results constitute a definite warning light for both Fatah and the PA.

  • Hamas student list victorious in Birzeit University elections
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=765030

    A day after thousands turned out for a student debate between Fatah, Hamas, and the leftist parties participating, the Islamic List emerged victorious with 26 seats, while the Fatah-affiliated list trailed with 19.
    The leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine list emerged with five, while an alliance of three smaller leftist parties – the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian People’s Party, and Fida — took one seat.