Open Letter Regarding the Detention of Zakaria Zubeidi

[Entrance of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, West Bank. Image by Guillaume Paumier. From Wikimedia Commons.] [Entrance of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, West Bank. Image by Guillaume Paumier. From Wikimedia Commons.]

Open Letter Regarding the Detention of Zakaria Zubeidi

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following letter was issued by a number of concerned individuals in response to the Palestinian Authority`s detention and treatment of Zakaria Zubeidi, co-founder of the Freedom Theater.]

Open letter regarding the detention of Zakaria Zubeidi, co-founder of the Freedom Theatre.

For the attention of President Mahmoud Abbas:
 
We the undersigned write to ask you to ensure the proper application of Palestinian law in the case of Zakaria Zubeidi, and all cases of illegal imprisonment.
 
We respect Mr Zubeidi’s choice to follow cultural resistance and are dismayed at his current treatment, which circumvents Palestinian law.
 
We fully respect the independence of Palestinian law, and join Mr Zubeidi’s attorney in calling for equality and due process before the law.
           
Mr Zubeidi has been juggled between military and civilian law and for long periods of time been held at facilities run by the Palestinian Preventative Security Forces, with his case handled by the Military Prosecutor’s Office. This is despite Mr Zubeidi’s civilian status and the limit imposed by Palestinian law, which says detention by the Preventative Security forces must be limited to twenty-four hours.
 
We call for Mr Zubeidi’s case to be handled in the civilian courts in accordance with Palestinian law.
 
Mr Zubeidi was denied access to his attorney for the first forty-five days of his imprisonment and he was also denied the right to speak to his family for weeks after the arrest.
 
Mr Zubeidi is imprisoned in Jericho, despite the fact that he is being interrogated in connection to an incident that took place in Jenin, that he was arrested in Jenin and that his residency is in Jenin. This is illegal according to Palestinian law. Mr Zubeidi was also arrested without a warrant and his family was not notified until several days later.
 
Human Rights Watch has brought up a number of grave examples of inhumane treatment of Mr Zubeidi throughout his detention. During interrogation, officials forced Mr Zubeidi to drink water from a toilet. His arms were repeatedly tied together and raised in a painful elevated position for two days at a time, requiring him to stand and preventing him from sleeping. Mr Zubeidi was also tied to an iron door outside in the heat of the day.
 
We call for Zakaria Zubeidi’s immediate release from punitive detention, and ask for your help in ensuring a fair trial for any allegations for which there is sufficient evidence to stand up in court.
 
We call upon you to ensure that Palestinian law is upheld in this matter, and in all other matters involving illegal imprisonment or treatment of prisoners.
 
Signed,
 
Jonathan Chadwick, Artistic Director, Az Theatre
Nejwa Ali, activist
Maha Rezeq
Pilar Salamanca
David Solomon, Tower Hamlest Jenin Friendship Association
Gunnar Zetterberg, Tel Aviv
Paul Meyersburg, screenwriter
Noelle Ghoussaini, theatre artist
Najaty S. Jabary
Ibrahim Jabary Salamanca
Omar S. Jabary
Sehnaz Kiymaz
Jonatan Stanczak,
Zoe Lafferty, Associate Director, The Red Room
Bitte Isacsson
Linda Chapman, Associate Artistic Director, New York Theatre Workshop
Frida Ullberg, former employee at The Freedom Theatre 
Naomi Wallace, writer
Jen Marlowe, Board Member, Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre
Erin Mee, New York University
Alexis Ramsden, drama therapist University of Beirut
Carol Murry, Doctor of Public Health
Helga Edvindson, Tour Manager, Riksteatret
Maren Hoff, actress
Alexis Ioannou, actor
Sian Goff, actor
Topher Campbell, Artistic Director, The Red Room
Giovanni Pappotto, director
Arabella Lawson, actor
Jo Tyabji, director
Madalena Santos
Ines Fiehn
Emily Smith, Photographer
Karin Pally, Women in Black Los Angeles
Robert Lyons, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies University of Gothenburg
Barbara Peter
Sonia Fayman, Chair of the French Friends of the Freedom Theater in Jenin
Paul Birchard, actor and director
Rebecca Tsekouras,
Dorothy M. Zellner,
Katie Carson
Valentine Sergo, actor and director
Eric Burnier
Elisa Banfi
Aline Cesar
Johann Henry
Jacqueline Ricciardi, actor
Julie Gilbert, author
Veronica Byrde
Kim Edmaier
Marjolaine Werckmann
Nicole Utzinger
Guy Shennan
Caroline Day, Tower Hamlets Jenin Friendship Association
Tony Liao
Joop Hoekstra, Women in Black Groningen
Daniel Gott, Head of Drama, British School of Bahrain Performing Arts Academy
Rafi Magnes
Liz Magnes
Daniel Menotti

 

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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