In Defense of Life and Breath: Free Khalida Jarrar

In Defense of Life and Breath: Free Khalida Jarrar

In Defense of Life and Breath: Free Khalida Jarrar

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The free mind is a mind that is constantly practicing and in praxis. Nefarious forces of oppression will always target a mind in praxis and one that is committed to practicing towards freedom: this is who Khalida Jarrar has been and this is who she shall remain, even in captivity.

On August 12, 2024, Zionist prisoner authorities violently transferred researcher and lecturer at Birzeit University, Khalida Jarrar, into solitary confinement. This occurred after nearly eight months of an unjust imprisonment without charge, where she has been held under illegal administrative detention. In the early morning hours of December 26, 2023, the Israeli settler army invaded Khalida Jarrar’s home and stole her away from her family and her work. Khalida Jarrar is a political leader and a researcher and lecturer. Over the course of her life as a feminist activist and political scholar, the Israeli state has consistently tried to silence her. This most recent solitary confinement is part of the landscape of structural violence against Palestinians and an intensification of its war of elimination of Gaza and all of Palestine.

According to the statement released by the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs and Palestinian Prisoners’ Society on August 28, 2024, Israeli forces stormed the cell where Khalida Jarrar was held captive in Damon Prison, detained her for an entire day in a filthy and infested cell without warning, without notice and without explanation. On August 13, 2024, she was put into the Bosta (the nefarious transfer technique) and taken to the Neve Tirza prison in al-Ramlah. She has since been held in isolation in a 2 meter by 1.5 meter cell without windows, without light and without any ventilation. No one has been informed of any reasons for this action. The harsh and inhumane conditions of her solitary confinement are not only illegal, but also inhumane under any rubric of humanity. That she has been confined for nearly three weeks is part of the work of barbarian intent on the genocidal annihilation of an entire people. Jarrar is literally being deprived air and being forcibly denied the breath of life. Her voice, like that of all Palestinian prisoners, will not be silenced and her work, like that of all Palestinians fighting for freedom, will not stop.

Khalida Jarrar is a volunteer researcher in BZU’s Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights working on a research project titled: “The Class and Gender Dimensions of the Palestinian Prisoners Movement and their Implications for the National Liberation Project.” She has also participated in teaching several courses on human rights and the Palestinian prisoners’ movement. She is a lucid thinker, a human rights activist and bold mind who speaks truth to power and has devoted her life to fighting occupation and oppression. Imprisoning Jarrar under these conditions is clearly an attempt to silence her voice and yet another instance of targeting Palestinian lives and all who dare to speak out in defense of our right to live in freedom and with dignity. The criminals will not silence us. We call on all people of conscious to loudly cry out against this attempt at silencing Khalida Jarrar and to cease the torture and abuse of our political prisoners and demand an end to this genocide against Palestinian life. We send this scream in support of our colleague Khalida Jarrar and all of colleagues and students at Birzeit University and beyond. The violence of the settler state cannot be tolerated in a world that claims to covet life and human rights. We demand freedom for all of our political prisoners, and an end to this genocidal war and demand that zionists and their partners finally be held accountable for all the mayhem they have wreaked.

We demand freedom for Khalida Jarrar and all of our prisoners. Palestine will be free.

29 August 2024
Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees, Occupied Palestine 

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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