Addameer 2018 Annual Violations Report

Addameer 2018 Annual Violations Report

Addameer 2018 Annual Violations Report

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association is a Palestinian non-governmental, civil institution that works to support Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian prisons.]

Addameer 2018 Annual Violations Report


In 2018, the Israeli occupation authorities continued implementing their main policy to enshrine the apartheid and racism regime against Palestinians, this policy is integrated within its laws, judiciary and practices. One example is enacting bills based on reactions to incidents, or as part of election campaigns and propaganda for their different political. Also, the occupation’s judiciary continues with preforming what could be seen as mock trials to serve political objectives without ensuring the minimum guarantees of fair trials. This is mainly shown through the issuing of administrative detention orders against all segments in the Palestinian society, or to prisoners whose sentences have ended or those who have received release orders.

In 2018, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) arrested around (6500) Palestinians, including (1080) children, (133) women, (6) PLC members and (17) journalists. Additionally, they issued (912) administrative detention orders, (398) of which were new. In 2018, the IOF continued its policy of arbitrary detention of Palestinians. The year, 2018, ended with 5700 Palestinian detained in Israeli prisons, this number included (230) were children, (54) are females including one minor, approximately (500) administrative detainees, (19) journalists, (8) PLC members, and around (700) prisoners with health issues needing urgent medical attention. There are also (27) long-term prisoners who were arrested before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993; including the two longest serving prisoners, Karim and Maher Younis, who were arrested in 1983.

On an annual basis, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association publishes a comprehensive report covers the violations against Palestinians from the moment of their arrest, to interrogation and then imprisonment. The annual violations report also details the daily living conditions in prisons, which are in violation of international treaties and conventions signed and ratified by the Israeli government, including the Convention Against Torture of 1984. The rules of protection for detainees provide a range of legal guarantees under international law, including: prohibition of the arbitrary detention, the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment and treatment, the right to a fair trial, the right to visitation and other basic standards of living such as the right to health and access to education. Additional treaties also provide special protection for the violation of women and children’s rights in detention. 1. It should be noted that these figures do not reflect the full picture of intensive arrests throughout the oPt. There are cases that have not been monitored, for prisoners who were detained and interrogated for hours; some of them were released with or without conditions. 5 Israeli occupationing state systematically violate all of these international treaties despite signing and ratifying them.

The 2018 annual violations report is published in conjunction with Addameer’s ongoing efforts to free all political prisoners in the occupation’s jails. As we work towards our goal of creating a world without political prisoners, we also continue our efforts in cooperation with international and local human rights organizations to ensure that prisoners have full protection and rights enshrined by international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

The annual violations report is a tool to detail and document the systematic violations of the prisoners’ movement and to monitor the conditions inside the prisons. This report is also an essential component of Addameer’s efforts to expose the IOF’s practices and treatment of Palestinian prisoners on a wide scale. It is also a tool to document and track the changes in policy, procedures and legislation issued by the Knesset (Israeli parliament) regarding the rights of the prisoners and the Palestinian people as a whole.

The statistics, case studies and information contained in this report are based on the documentation, human rights monitoring and legal work of Addameer. This report also includes an overview of the changes in the regulations and systems within the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) in 2018 and makes a comparison to the international standards on the treatment of prisoners. This report covers Palestinian political prisoners as a holistic case despite various geographical, identification, and legislative fragmentations imposed by the Israeli occupation. It deals with the issue of the prisoners as a holistic case, based on Addameer Association belief that the prisoners of Jerusalem, the Palestinian prisoners from the 1948 territories and the prisoners of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are united under the same oppressive structures of the occupation.

By presenting the major violations and incidents that took place in Israeli prisons in 2018, we urge the relevant authorities to immediately intervene and carry out their legal duty to hold the Israeli occupying state accountable until they halt the torture, ill-treatment and illegal detention of Palestinian political prisoners.

[Download the full report here. Addameer is a prisoner ]

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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