By trying to break the will of the Palestinians through torture, humiliation and rape, Israel wants to restore a different kind of deterrence, which it lost on October 7.
For Palestinians, these are acts of resistance that demonstrate the power of the Palestinian people: even in prison, handcuffed to a hospital bed, denied every basic human right, a Palestinian can fight, and win. Awawdeh did.
This is not what Palestinians are expecting from the United Nations, an organization that supposedly exists to end armed conflicts and bring about peace and security for all.
History has taught us that Muslims, Christians and Jews can peacefully coexist and collectively thrive, as they have done throughout the Middle East and the Iberian Peninsula for millennia. Indeed, this is a prediction, even a prophecy, that is worth striving for.
While profit generation is understandably the main goal of companies like Google and Amazon, this goal can be achieved without necessarily requiring the subjugation of a whole people, who are currently the victims of the world’s last remaining apartheid regime.
While Israel is permitted, thanks to the deafening silence of the international community, to maintain its military occupation of Palestine, to cement its apartheid and to deepen its control of Palestinian life everywhere, it should not be permitted to expand this matrix of control to the digital realm as well.
It is quite a powerful imagery to think that a dying man, tied to a hospital bed, would force Israel to concede on such a crucial issue as that of the freedom of a Palestinian.
It is true that Israel operates outside the minimum standards of international and humanitarian laws, but it is the responsibility of the international community to protect Palestinians, whose lives remain precious even if Israel disagrees.
Without that genuine and engaged Palestinian intellectual, the world’s priorities will continue to gravitate towards Israeli priorities, towards US interests and their subsequent fraudulent language about ‘peace,’ security’ and such.
Though it is ultimately the people who liberate themselves, international solidarity is essential to the process of national liberation. This was the case in South Africa, and will surely be the case in Palestine, as well.
No amount of Israeli propaganda and smear campaigns can turn the tide back in favor of Israel. While it may be too early to speak of a major paradigm shift, it is certainly no longer far-fetched to imagine that such a possibility is finally at hand.
Perhaps this Ramadan can serve as the opportunity for social justice to be finally enacted and for the oppressed to be heard so that their hymn of torment and hope may rise above the clouds.
While Palestinians remain cautious about the future of the investigation, hope is slowly rising that, this time around, things may be different and that Israeli war criminals will eventually be held accountable for their crimes. Time will tell.
So, even if Biden is able to overcome pressure from the military, from the CIA, and from Congress to shut Guantánamo down, justice will still be absent, not only because of the numerous lives that are forever shattered but because America still refuses to learn from its mistakes.
Even in the eyes of many Israeli Jews, the Israeli government no longer possesses any democratic ideals. Indeed, as B’Tselem has succinctly worded it, Israel is a regime of Jewish supremacy ‘from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.’
Israeli racism is the core of a sophisticated plan that aims at the political marginalization and economic strangulation of Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority within a constitutional, thus ‘legal’, framework.
Before I was brought to Nafha, I endured several long bouts of torture, each extending for 55 hours at a time. They had me stand blindfolded in the same position for 12 hours at a time. They placed me in a refrigerator-like room and kept lowering the temperature until I thought I was going to die from cold.
Let me strongly recommend Ramzy Baroud’s book, 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.
According to Professor Falk, history is clearly on the side of Palestinians, who are already “winning the legitimacy war”.
Palestine Chronicle TV hosted Professor Emeritus of International Law Richard Falk. Professor Falk, an acclaimed author, was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights between 2008-14.
It was refreshing to talk to Palestinians who are taking the decisive step of declaring that they are not numbers, because it is only through this realization and resolve that Palestinian youth can challenge all of us and assert their own collective identity as a people.
Watch this compelling video, share it, and obtain the book. There is a whole new Palestine waiting to be told.
Mohammed’s father, Khalil Al-Halaby, joined Ramzy Baroud on Palestine Chronicle TV, on May 20, to speak about his son’s ordeal.
Neglecting the refugees while fighting to halt the spread of the coronavirus is as foolish as it is inhumane. The last few months have taught us that provisional and self-centered strategies do not apply in the cases of global healthcare crises.
Far greater focus should be placed on the fact that Israel is, itself, a notorious human rights violator that should be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians, who are often used as guinea pigs in the testing stage of Israel’s technology of death.
What is needed is a fundamental and structural change that would emancipate the Palestinian healthcare system from the horrific impact of the Israeli occupation.
By Ramzy Baroud Khalida Jarrar is a Palestinian feminist, a lawyer, educator and an elected parliamentarian. Over the years, she came to symbolize Palestinian popular resistance in the occupied West Bank, enraging the Israeli occupation authorities that arrested her repeatedly. Despite her failing health, as she is suffering from multiple ischemic infarctions and hypercholesterolemia, the […]
Palestinian author, journalist and Palestine Chronicle Editor, Ramzy Baroud delivers a speech in Arabic at the workshop: Palestinians in Diaspora between Theory and Practice: Role, Representation, and Challenges, in Istanbul, on February 1.
On Monday, January 20, Clarity Press, Inc. of Atlanta announced the launch of These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons, by Palestinian author and journalist, Ramzy Baroud, and The Palestine Chronicle Editorial Team. Bookended by a Foreword by Khalida Jarrar Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and an Afterword by […]
Friends, it is finally here. “THESE CHAINS WILL BE BROKEN: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” is the story of Palestine written by its foremost heroes and heroines, the true organic intellectuals of this noble struggle. Listening to Khalida Jarrar, Dareen Tatour and Mohammed al-Deirwai conveying their stories, and reading the words […]