Press Release: NLG Fact-Finding Delegation Calls for End of U.S.-Backed Administrative Detention of Palestinians by Israel

Press Release: NLG Fact-Finding Delegation Calls for End of U.S.-Backed Administrative Detention of Palestinians by Israel

Press Release: NLG Fact-Finding Delegation Calls for End of U.S.-Backed Administrative Detention of Palestinians by Israel

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issused by the National Lawyers Guild on 29 May, 2014.]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NLG Fact-Finding Delegation Calls for End of U.S.-Backed Administrative Detention of Palestinians by Israel

NEW YORK -- Approximately 200 Palestinians from the West Bank have been held for months or years by Israeli occupation forces without access to a just legal system, members of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) learned in a fact-finding delegation from May 18-24, 2014. A formal report is forthcoming, but several observations merit preliminary mention.

About 135 incarcerated Palestinians have begun a hunger strike—and more are joining daily—demanding an end to administrative detention, which under the Fourth Geneva Convention is permitted for only a very short time and in situations of severe urgency. After a widely publicized 2012 mass hunger strike, Israel agreed to improve some security prison conditions throughout the system and release a number of administrative detainees. But it has abrogated many of its promises and re-arrested many of those released, again without charge or trial. 

As in 2012, the health of several current strikers is failing fast, exacerbated by inadequate medical care. The NLG joins these Palestinian prisoners, most of whom have now been on hunger strike for over 33 days, in calling for the immediate end of the policy and practice of administrative detention. 

The NLG delegation concluded that administrative detention is used primarily as a tool to intimidate and deter political resistance and undermine the popular indigenous leadership. This is in contradiction to Israel’s supposed commitment to diplomatically end its 47-year-old occupation of the West Bank.

The U.S. government is in large part responsible for the increasing oppression of Palestinian life under occupation. “Despite pretending to be an honest broker, the U.S. has continued to provide Israel with more than $3 billion a year in military aid along with diplomatic and other financial backing. That aid must immediately stop,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, NLG President and delegation participant.

The delegation learned that approximately 5,000 Palestinians currently held in military prisons –including hundreds of children – suffer from conditions far worse than those of Israeli convicts and the handful of settlers convicted of security offences such as violent attacks on Palestinians or destruction of Palestinian property. The assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, for instance, has been allowed to marry and father children in prison – an unheard of perk when it comes to Palestinian “security” prisoners, the vast majority convicted of charges that were political in nature. Military courts rely on thousands of arbitrary military orders to define charges and sentences. 99.74% of Palestinians who go before military courts are convicted, most on the basis of coerced confessions.

Most administrative detainees are  political leaders, including, for instance, elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, now defunct in part because of the arrests. A military judge can order them held for up to six months at a time—renewable indefinitely—based on supposed secret evidence of unknown offenses and no trial. 

The NLG delegation met with human rights advocates in the West Bank and in Israel and learned of many other techniques used to fortify the occupation and pave the way for Israeli annexation of large swaths of territory. Methods include the oppressive “separation barrier” that drastically restricts movement and violent repression of civil protest against it—including the widely publicized killing of two unarmed teens just before the delegation arrived; relentless land confiscations for expansion of Jewish-only settlements; widespread home demolitions and discriminatory residential rules reminiscent of apartheid in areas where ethnic cleansing is an openly stated goal; and pervasive economic exploitation of labor, resources and consumers. These measures stand in stark violation of international humanitarian law.

On May 23, delegates heard firsthand from the family of a “wanted” 26-year-old, Moataz Washahe. In the town of Bir Zeit in February 2014, hundreds of soldiers rocketed and bulldozed their home, then shot Washahe 65 times, killing him. Washahe was unarmed. “Backing by the U.S. government gives Israel the cover of legitimacy to continue its violations of human rights and the rule of law,” said delegate Andrew Dalack, Co-Chair of the NLG Palestine Subcommittee. 

A detailed report from delegation members is forthcoming for submission to Congress, the Obama administration and the general public.

Contact:
Tasha Moro

Communications Coordinator
communications@nlg.org
212-679-5100, ext. 15

 

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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