Prof. Richard Falk: I Strongly Recommend Ramzy Baroud’s Book on Palestinian Prisoners
Prof. Richard Falk. (Photo: File)
By Richard Falk
Let me strongly recommend Ramzy Baroud’s book – These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons – which really gives an insight into the torment of the prisoners and their struggle for dignity and how important they are as symbols of the most prolonged resistance to an unjust political situation in modern times. As Nelson Mandela and others pointed out, the Palestinian struggle is the great unresolved moral and legal issue of the world in the post-apartheid atmosphere, after South Africa was emancipated from racism.
The failure of the international community to address the treatment of prisoners is part of this state-centric nature of the world order, where the territorial authorities are given really basically unchallenged control over prisons and prisoners. There’s a very seldom exception, for example at the end of a war, where you have a defeated country that can be charged with various forms of abuse, including abuse of prisoners but short of that, countries impose their own standards of decency in the treatment of prisoners.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is defined in terms of morally right and wrong; where the enemy is demonized as terrorists, and the adversary is viewed as a legitimate normal state. So this heroic form of resistance has affected people that are not at all engaged in armed struggle, as it involves poets and those who have expressed their resistance in non-violent ways and should be honored rather than punished.
So it’s very important that the kind of witnessing that Baroud’s book gives us, offers the opportunity of direct contact with (Palestinian prisoners) so that as many people as possible are exposed to that.
I congratulate him for producing such a book.– Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Visit his blog.
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