Concern Over Arrest of Human Rights Defender Zainab Al-Khawaja

[Ms. Zainab Al-Khawaja. Image from frontlinedefenders.org] [Ms. Zainab Al-Khawaja. Image from frontlinedefenders.org]

Concern Over Arrest of Human Rights Defender Zainab Al-Khawaja

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by Front Line Defenders on 1 March 2013.]

On 27 February 2013, human rights defender Ms Zainab Al-Khawaja was arrested by security forces during a peaceful sit-in in front of the Royal Palace in Al Qudaybiyah. Meanwhile, on 28 February 2013, the Court of Appeal rejected an appeal lodged by the human rights defender against a sentence of two months imprisonment, while an appeal against another one month imprisonment sentence was also rejected by the Court.

Zainab Al-Khawaja is a prominent human rights defender and blogger who has been active in calling for political reform and democracy in Bahrain. She currently remains in detention in Hoora Detention Centre.

On 27 February 2013, Zainab Al-Khawaja was arrested while protesting against the authorities` refusal to hand over the body of Mr  Mahmoud Issa al-Jaziri, a pro-democracy activist killed during a demonstration on 14 February 2013 marking the second anniversary of the uprising in Bahrain.

The activist was reportedly killed after being hit in the head by a tear gas canister, when security forces reportedly attacked demonstrators in Nabi Saleh, South of Manama..

On 28 February 2013, in a seperate development, the Court of Appeal rejected two appeals against prison sentences filed by Zainab Al-Khawaja. The first appeal related to a verdict issued on 10 December 2012, which sentenced Zainab Al-Khawaja to one month of imprisonment. The sentence was based on charges of alleged participation in an unauthorised demonstration on 12 February 2012 and the alleged unlawful entry to Pearl Roundabout, which the authorities reportedly consider as a restricted area, despite the absence of an official decision or law confirming the area as restricted.

As Zainab Al-Khawaja has already served eight days of the above-mentioned sentence, 22 days of detention remain. The second appeal related to a sentence of two months imprisonment issued against the human rights defender, on charges of allegedly destroying property belonging to the Ministry of Interior. Both rejection of both appeals could result in Zainab Al-Khawaja serving a total period of two months and 22 days imprisonment.

Zainab Al-Khawaja has been campaigning since April 2011 for the release of her father, Mr Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, a prominent human rights defender and former Front Line Defenders Protection Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, who is serving a life sentence passed following a grossly unfair trial.

As a result of her human rights work, Zainab Al-Khawaja has been subjected to a number of previous acts of judicial harassment. For more information on previous acts of judicial persecution faced by Zainab Al-Khawaja, please see Front Line Defenders` urgent appeals issued on 16 February 2012 and 20 December 2011.

Front Line Defenders is seriously concerned at the arrest of Zainab Al-Khawaja and the rejection of two appeals, actions which Front Line Defenders believes are solely motivated by the human rights defender`s peaceful and legitimate activities in calling for political and democratic reform in Bahrain. Front Line Defenders denounces the continuous judicial harassment of Zainab Al-Khawaja and expresses concern for her physical and psychological integrity in light of previous reports of ill-treatment during detention.

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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