Statement: Free Walid Daqqah!

Statement: Free Walid Daqqah!

Statement: Free Walid Daqqah!

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The Palestinian Youth Movement put out this statement pressing for the freedom of Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqah. Click here to sign onto the petition.]

We, the undersigned, call on international actors to demand the immediate release of Walid Daqqah. In the next week, an Israeli occupation court will determine whether Daqqah will appear before an early release committee. Leading up to this decision, it is vital that all progressive, international forces place pressure on the occupying force – Israel – to guarantee Daqqah’s release and expose the illegal nature of its continued imprisonment of him. We are deeply concerned for the well-being of Daqqah and thousands of Palestinians who continue to be held in Israeli prisons or detention centers under harsh conditions, including unhygienic conditions, solitary confinement, physical and psychological torture, harassment, lack of proper medical care, denial of family visits and denial of due process. We demand that Daqqah receive comprehensive medical treatment urgently and that he be allowed to see his family. 

Walid Daqqah is a 61-year-old Palestinian writer, intellectual and organiser who has been imprisoned in Israeli jails since 1986 for his resistance. He has been detained for almost 37 years now. He has been denied the right to have a family, to raise his own daughter, and to see his dying parents. Last year, Daqqah was diagnosed with Myelofibrosis – a rare form of bone marrow cancer that disrupts the body’s normal production of blood cells. Despite his deteriorating health, Israel refused to release him or provide him access to urgent, life-saving medical care. The occupation is killing Walid Daqqah in an act of deliberate medical negligence. This medical negligence on behalf of the Israeli state is a brazen violation of international humanitarian law that guarantees the rights of prisoners in occupied territories and access to necessary medical care for those who are sick.

Throughout his imprisonment, Daqqah has faced severe medical negligence from Israeli prison authorities, including repeated delays in treatment and the denial of an urgent bone marrow transplant, all of which has led to serious deterioration in his condition and overall health. Earlier this year he underwent surgery to remove part of his lung, after which he was placed in intensive care. He was transferred again to intensive care in May of this year due to his further deteriorating health, but authorities quickly transferred Daqqah back to his prison clinic, without allowing him time for proper treatment.

Israel’s denial of necessary medical treatment to Walid Daqqah is an illegal practice regularly used to kill Palestinian prisoners. In December 2022, Israel killed Palestinian leader Nasser Abu Hamid in prison by refusing to provide the necessary medical treatment for his cancer. Just this May 2023, Palestinian leader Khader Adnan was martyred in prison as a result of Israel’s deliberate medical negligence. We condemn Israel’s murder of imprisoned Palestinian leaders and refuse this to become Daqqah’s fate. 

The undersigned call on all international actors to place immediate and persistent pressure on Israel and the ‘Israel Prison Services’ to ensure the immediate release of Daqqah. In line with his family's campaign, we call on Amnesty International; the United Nations; the International Committee of the Red Cross; and Human Rights Watch to take immediate action by:

1. Publicly condemning the Israeli regime for their unlawful treatment of Walid Daqqah and the policy of medical negligence inside of Israeli prisons at large. 

2. Amplify our demands for Walid Daqqah’s immediate release and ensure that he receives the urgent, life-saving medical care that he needs.

3. Urgently form a medical team in communication with his family campaign and prisoners' institutions to visit Walid, in order to break the medical blackout about his condition.

4. Pressure the occupying power to allow Daqqah’s family unrestricted access to visitation rights and knowledge on the progression of his health.

5.  Urge the United Nations Security Council to take action by referring this grave violation of international law to the International Criminal Court. Israel’s medical negligence against Daqqah is a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention which enlists the rights of prisoners in occupied territories. It “is illegal and can be defined as a war crime or crime against humanity.”

SIGN THE PETITION!

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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