Israel: Open Independent Investigation into the Suspicious Death following Interrogation of Palestinian Detainee Arafat Jaradat

[Abandoned room and chair. Photo by Brennan Lashever used under a Creative Commons license.] [Abandoned room and chair. Photo by Brennan Lashever used under a Creative Commons license.]

Israel: Open Independent Investigation into the Suspicious Death following Interrogation of Palestinian Detainee Arafat Jaradat

By : Adalah

The undersigned human rights organizations call on the Israeli Attorney General (AG) to open an independent and impartial investigation into the circumstances of the death of thirty year-old Palestinian detainee Arafat Jaradat in the Meggido Prison according to the Investigation into Circumstances of Death Law. The organizations also call on the international community to demand that the Israeli government respect the rights of Palestinian prisoners and protect their health and lives.

Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I), and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) view with extreme gravity the treatment of Palestinian detainees and prisoners held in General Security Service (GSS) facilities and in prisons in Israel.

On many occasions, we have appealed to the Israeli courts and other authorities against the illegal interrogation methods used by the GSS, the incarceration conditions in which detainees and prisoners are held, and against their ill treatment; and demanded the investigation of serious allegations of torture and cruel and inhuman treatment. We frequently asserted that interrogation methods and detention procedures do not comply with Israeli law and international law standards which are meant to defend the rights of Palestinian detainees and prisoners and protect their dignity, health, and lives.

We lament the death of Arafat Jaradat in the course of his detention and interrogation and express our grave concern regarding the deterioration of the health of the hunger-striking detainees. These bitter and tragic examples remind us of deep-rooted practices that blatantly violate the rights of detainees under interrogation and prisoners, endangering and threatening their lives.

The GSS and the Israel Prison Service (IPS) cannot shirk their responsibility for the violation of the human rights of Palestinian detainees under interrogation and of prisoners who are held in Israel.  We, therefore, demand that an independent an impartial investigation be opened into the circumstances of the death of the prisoner Arafat Jaradat under the Investigation of Circumstances of Death Law, and that the investigative authorities refrain from employing illegal means of interrogation that will cost additional lives.

We also call on the IPS to refrain from harming and punishing hunger-striking prisoners. We also demand the release of all administrative detainees imprisoned without charge or trial and all fourteen Palestinian prisoners who were released as part of the prisoner exchange but whose incarceration was recently renewed under a new military order allowing re-arrest for the slightest of infractions and the imposition of their full sentence even on the basis of secret  evidence.

We furthermore demand a halt to the use of inappropriate practices that may cause emotional and/or physical injury tantamount to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which could seriously harm the health of detainees and prisoners and cause their death. These practices include:

1. Granting a sweeping exemption to the police and the GSS from the duty to make a video and audio recording of the interrogations of individuals suspected of security offenses, which carry a sentence of more than ten years.

2. Violating the basic rights of Palestinian detainees and denying guarantees that ensure due process, such as preventing meetings with counsel during the period of interrogation and reducing judicial oversight over the detention and interrogation process.

3. Administrative detention and imprisonment without trial under Sections 185 and 186 of Order Regarding Security Provisions (No. 1651) which allows the army to repeatedly detain released prisoners whose sentence was reduced and compel them to serve their original term of imprisonment because of their involvement in minor offenses on the basis secret evidence and not by way of conviction by a court.

4. The employment of illegal interrogation methods including: interrogation for prolonged hours while prisoners are cuffed by their hands and legs; threatening prisoners and their families; incarceration in appalling conditions as a form of psychological pressure and as a means of weakening the body; shackling detainees in painful positions; physical violence such as beating, tightening shackles, and suddenly yanking the prisoner`s body and bending his back.

5. Shackling hunger-striking prisoners to their beds in hospital

6. Forbidding hunger-striking prisoners from meeting with independent physicians (apart from meetings that take place following an individual appeal to a court which allows a one-time visit with the prisoner).

7. Denying family visits to prisoners on hunger-strike.

8. Discrimination against Palestinian prisoners and worsening their conditions of confinement due to their classification as “security prisoners,” including limiting family visits, preventing conjugal visits with their partners, a ban on academic studies, and denial of participation in educational and rehabilitation programs within the prison.

Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel

Physicians for Human Rights - Israel

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412