Press Release: Let Palestinian Prisoner Sami Abu Diak Die with His Family

Press Release: Let Palestinian Prisoner Sami Abu Diak Die with His Family

Press Release: Let Palestinian Prisoner Sami Abu Diak Die with His Family

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was released via social media concerning the imrisonment and deteriorating health of Sami Ab Diak.]

“I call upon your consciences, to tell you that I am now living my last days or even hours. I am asking for one last wish, which is to live these last moments of my life with my mother, relatives and loved ones. I do not want to pass away while handcuffed in front of a jailor who enjoys seeing us [detainees] suffering. Will anyone respond?” —Sami Abu Diak

The Palestinian detainee Sami Abu-Diak, 37 years old, who is facing severe deterioration of his health and imminent death due to deliberate medical negligence by Israeli occupation authorities. Abu Diak was detained seventeen years ago, and was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in addition to thirty years by an Israeli military court, which is designed and operated to ensure unfair and discriminatory persecution of Palestinian detainees. Abu Diak is currently suffering from advanced stages of bowel cancer, as well as renal and pulmonary failure. In 2015, he was urgently transferred to Israel’s Soroka Medical Center where he suffered poisoning as a result of misdiagnosis and a medical error. This medical negligence led to the removal of 80cm of his intestines and he was consequently diagnosed with kidney and pulmonary failure. 

The Commission of Detainees’ Affairs has urgently requested the Israeli occupation authorities to release Abu Diak considering his dire health condition especially that the most optimistic assessment for his life expectancy is now less than two years. The first two requests were denied by the Israeli occupation authorities after alleging that his health is getting better and that he was responding to treatment. However, the third urgent request for his early release was denied, because criteria for early release allegedly did not apply to Abu Diak’s case.

According to a recent report by Hurryyat Center’s lawyer, who was recently allowed to visit him, Abu Diak’s health condition is worsening as his weight has dropped to 48 kilograms. The report also confirmed that Abu Diak is suffering from severe blood loss and pain but he is only medicated with pain killers in extensive doses, which puts him at risk of coma.

The case of Abu Diak is one example of systematic and deliberate medical negligence carried out by the Israeli occupation authorities. In September 2019, Palestinian detainee Bassam Al-Sayeh died inside an Israeli detention center, of cancer and heart failure as a consequence of such discriminatory policies of medical negligence. Al-Sayeh and Abu Diak both were detained in Al-Ramleh Israeli detention center, a place known amongst Palestinian detainees as a “slaughterhouse” because of the terrible conditions of this center that are not in line with international standards as well as the policy of mistreatment and medical negligence. Palestinian detainees have frequently complained that Israeli occupation authorities disregarded their needs and health care as they give painkillers to ill detainees no matter what their ailment is, even if it was a serious illness such as cancer, hypertension or diabetes.

Abu Diak is facing imminent death. His only request is to be released so he could take his last breath around his family and have a dignified burial in accordance with his traditions and religious customs. Abu Diak is afraid to be forced to face the same fate as other detainees, whose bodies are still withheld by Israeli occupation authorities after dying of medical negligence in Israeli detention centers.

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