On the Prisoner Exchange Deal
and the Palestinian
Hunger Strike
A Statement by the Internationalist
Socialist League of Israel/Occupied Palestine
Free ALL Palestinian Political
Prisoners!
The racist Israeli media is jubilant.
With the exception of some ultra-hardline Zionists who complain that any
Palestinians were freed in exchange for Gilad Shalit, Zionist ideologues are today celebrating the
“homecoming” of the soldier they refer to as “our child.” Meanwhile,
Palestinians celebrate the release from Israeli prisons of 477 prisoners and
the promised release of 550 more in two months' time. At the same time, many
question whether Hamas did not make too many compromises in their agreement to
release Shalit.
Hamas fighters shocked the Zionists in
2006 with their raid on Israeli Defense Forces near the Kerem
Shalom crossing between Gaza and Egypt. After killing two other Israeli
soldiers and despite losing two of their own comrades, the Palestinian fighters
succeeded in seizing Shalit from the tank he was
commanding and since then Hamas has defeated every Israeli attempt to locate
and free him. That Hamas could out-smart and out-fight the Zionists in this way
for five years has been a humiliation for the Zionists, at least until now.
The exchange of over 1,000
Palestinians for Shalit would seem to be an
unqualified victory for Hamas. For those Palestinian prisoners who will be
freed, some of whom spent decades in jail, the achievement is extraordinary.
But it must be recognized that a majority of the first 477 prisoners released
have not in reality be freed, but have rather been released for deportation or
transfer to other territories for a minimum of three years and, in many cases,
permanently. In a further confirmation of how the Palestinian Authority acts as
an extension of the Zionists’ apparatus of repression, some will merely by
transferred to PA jails, where conditions can be just as bad for prisoners as
Israel’s. And of course well over four thousand Palestinian political prisoners
will remain in Israel’s jails, along with thousands more Palestinians who are
not jailed for explicitly “political” crimes.
Importantly, the two most prominent
Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails – elected Palestinian
Legislative Council members and government ministers Marwan Barghouti
and Ahmad Sa’adat – will remain in their cells:
Barghouti has been imprisoned by the Israelis
since 2006 on charges that he directed suicide bombings inside Israel, this
despite the fact that he has repeatedly denounced attacks against Israeli
civilians. Elected to the Palestinian Parliament as a prominent member of
Fatah, Barghouti had accepted the basic outlines of
his party’s sellout to the Zionists by recognizing Israel’s right to exist, but
he remains highly popular among many Palestinians for his support of their
intifadas against the Zionists as well as for his criticisms of the corruption
of other Fatah leaders. Indeed Barghouti’s
imprisonment has long been seen as a gift to Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas because
he would surely be defeated by Barghouti in an
election for Fatah’s leadership;
Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine General Secretary Ahmad Sa’adat will also
continue to be held in an Israeli prison. The Israelis first captured Sa’adat by raiding a PA prison in 2006, where he had
already been held for four years without charge. For the last two years Sa’adat has been held in solitary confinement and only
recently, on September 27, he began a complete hunger strike along with
hundreds of other Palestinian prisoners (and over 3,000 more on partial hunger
strike), demanding an end to the solitary confinement of prisoners, an end to
the arbitrary denial of prisoners’ visitation rights, and an end to the abusive
and humiliating treatment of Palestinians attempting to visit their
incarcerated comrades. As we prepare to release this statement we have received
an unofficial announcement that the prisoners have suspended their hunger
strike after an agreement was reached to end their solitary confinement.
Of course, the struggle to free the
thousands of Palestinian political prisoners who will remain in Israeli and
Palestinian Authority prisons must continue. (For more information on the
plight of Palestinian prisoners and campaigns for their rights and freedom, see
the website of the Addameer Prisoner Support and
Human Rights Association at http://addameer.info.)
The blood-soaked Zionist criminals who
head the Israeli government are of course trying to use this prisoner exchange
to claim that they are reasonable and caring people. No Palestinian will fall
for such nonsense. Rather, the deal was forced on Netanyahu by mass struggle.
To a small extent, the recent mass protests in Israel against high prices for
housing and other necessities played a part; they left Netanyahu government
weakened and desperate to improve on Israelis’ opinion of his government. But
to a far greater extent, the release of the Palestinians from Israeli prisons
has been won by both the continued courageous resistance of the Palestinian people, and the rising level of solidarity with them and
struggle in the rest of the Arab world, particularly in neighboring Egypt.
The revolutionary uprisings
by the Arab masses in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond has revived
Palestinians’ desire for mass struggle after suffering years of defeat. Fear of
a new intifada, and a desire to secure a division of power in a future
government, prompted Fatah and Hamas to announce their unity government earlier
this year. Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who
is widely hated by Palestinians for his collaboration with Israel, then sought
to win a little support among Palestinians with moves toward the largely
symbolic victory of recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations.
Now Hamas, aware that Palestinians’ patience with its rule in Gaza is also
wearing thin, have made a deal with Israel to deliver some real gains, like the
return of some prisoners. Hamas too fears a new intifada and has made clear its
desire to make peace with Israel and share power with Fatah in a future
government on only a tiny fraction of the territory of Palestine.
Can it really be a coincidence that
after the exchange of Palestinian political prisoners for Shalit,
the two prisoners whom Israel, Fatah and Hamas could all fear for their ability
to rally a struggle against the terms of a negotiated settlement with the
Israelis – Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Sa’adat – will remain in Israeli jails? Since the
negotiations over the prisoner exchange have not been made public, it is
impossible to know who demanded their continued incarceration, but all can be
perceived to have an interest in it.
Taking into account all the
compromises involved, there is still no denying that an extraordinary victory
has surely been won for the Palestinian prisoners and their loved ones who have
been freed, some of whom have been imprisoned since the 1980s! Palestinian
militancy has been boosted. The weakness and retreat of the Zionist state has been
confirmed. And Hamas has surely embarrassed its Fatah rivals, who have been
unable to show the Palestinians anything after years of negotiations with
Israel. But for the Palestinian masses, so much
remains ahead and their crisis of political leadership remains. Both Fatah and
Hamas want to secure their power over the Palestinian people by making a peace
deal with Israel and merely disagree over how much to surrender in the process.
The need for a new revolutionary leadership to emerge among Palestinians that
offers a perspective of linking up with the masses’ revolutionary struggles in
the rest of the Arab world is more desperately needed than ever.
Zionist Racism and the Prisoner Deal
It is indicative of the racism of the
Israeli media and Israeli society in general, as well as the racism of the
Western media, that unlike their attitude to the many thousands of Palestinian
political prisoners, Shalit has been treated by them
like a human being: he was given a name, had his story told, and his family were
given a voice to describe their plight. The Palestinians slated for release, on
the other hand, are simply referred to by their number. As anti-racists and
anti-Zionists, we call attention to the list of Palestinian prisoners to be released in the deal that was first published by the
Palestinian news agency Sama and later translated and
published on the website of Al-Akhbar, as well as this table detailing the prisoners released on October 18 published
by Jaddaliya. That we do not have the space to tell
each individual’s story merely shows the utter lack of symmetry between the
oppressive powers of the Zionist state and the Palestinian people it oppresses.
Whenever a Palestinian prisoner’s name
is mentioned in the Israeli media, it is only to relate the (often exaggerated)
story of the act she or he committed before being imprisoned. Often, the crime
can be to merely be a member of some Palestinian organization, or even take
part in some protest. These cases, of course, are not publicized by the Israeli
media – even when those imprisoned are children. Indeed as we went on record as saying long ago: if the racism of Zionists, which
accords Palestinian lives a mere fraction of the worth of the life of an
Israeli Jew, can be used to free many more Palestinian prisoners in exchange
for Shalit, so be it.
In the eyes of most Israelis, Shalit is an innocent soldier who did his duty. They do not
see that this so-called duty was a crime. We understand the pain that the Shalit family has felt. For years they could not hold their
son, speak with him, or be sure that he is well. But we also understand the
pain the families of the more than five thousand Palestinian political
prisoners still held in Israeli jails. They cannot hold their children, speak
with them, or be sure that they have not been tortured.
Many of the Palestinian prisoners
being released from Israel’s jails have been charged with involvement in
terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens. Like all genuine socialists, the ISL
opposes acts of violence against civilians – including Israeli civilians. We do
not support the actions of many who would be released in the deal. But their
actions, as objectionable as they may be, pale in comparison to those committed
by Israel. Only the racism of the Zionist press can condemn a man responsible
for a bombing which kills several Israeli civilians, but praise Israeli
soldiers, many of whom are directly responsible for the cold-blooded murder of
dozens of civilians. The momentary, if terrible, terror that Israeli civilians
feel after a bombing is an inescapable constant of Palestinian life.
Importantly, attacks on Palestinian
and Israeli civilians do not just differ in terms of scale, but are conducted
on different moral registers. Misguided acts of violence by Palestinians are a
response to their oppression and cannot be legitimately compared to the coldly
calculated acts of racist murder that the Israeli state perpetrates on a daily
basis to defend their expropriation and domination of the Palestinians. Indeed
we do not believe the Israeli state, an entirely illegitimate racist colonizing
power, should have any right to judge Palestinians for anything and demand the
release of all Palestinians from Israeli prisons regardless of the crimes they
are charged with.
The Legal Basis for the Oppression of
Prisoners
Israel’s so-called ‘Administrative
Law’ has continued the practice of holding Palestinians for unspecified periods
of time without charge. The Zionists have not spared even the children held in
their prisons, who are often left traumatized as a result of their treatment.
The power to affect administrative
detention was created at the time of the British Mandate by the Defense
(Emergency) Regulations, 1945.
When Israel declared independence in
This is the same law the British
colonialists used during the British mandate. Dov
Joseph, the future Minister of Justice said before the Jewish Lawyers
Association: "there is no guarantee to prevent a citizen from being
imprisoned for life without trial. One does not actually have to commit an
offense; it is enough for a decision to be made in some office for his fate to
be sealed.” Yaacov Shapira,
another future Minister of Justice, said: "the regulations led to a
situation unparallel in any civilized country. Even
in Nazi Germany there were not such laws".
Only a Socialist Revolution Can Bring
True Freedom
The Israeli state cannot and will not
be able to destroy the will of the Palestinians to be free of oppression, no
matter what kind of law it uses. The real criminals are not those who oppose
occupation, repression, the stealing of land and the destruction of homes. The
real criminal is the colonialist oppressor.
While we in the ISL oppose acts of
terrorism against Israeli civilians, we do not recognize Israel’s right to
judge and imprison the people whom it has been expropriating, oppressing and
murdering for decades, no matter what they are accused of doing.
A mass movement to free the prisoners
could pressure the Zionists and their PA tools to improve the conditions of the
prisoners and even to release some more. But true freedom will be enjoyed by
Palestinians only when they have their own state, from the river to the sea,
free of racist oppression, where both Palestinians and Jews can live in peace
and security, free from discrimination.
This state will never be created by
either the collaborationist Fatah forces or Hamas, which has already signaled
its willingness to compromise with Zionism, and which has already exposed its
oppressive nature when it suppressed protests on Nakba
and Naksa days, as well as solidarity actions with
the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere.
The only force which can truly win
liberation for the Palestinians, as well as the rest of the peoples of the
region, is the working class. This is clear when one considers that among all
the uprisings in the region recently, the only ones that have been successful
in toppling their dictators are those where the working class was
overwhelmingly involved: Egypt and Tunisia.
Of course the Tunisian and Egyptian
revolutions have a long way to go. Dictators have been toppled but military
dictatorships remain. Capitalism cannot afford democracy in poor countries like
those because it must keep the masses poor and oppressed. But through their
experience of struggle, the workers are learning. Ultimately the workers will
have to seize power for themselves, with the support of the poor people and
peasants, if democracy and freedom is to be won.
This shows the way for the Palestinian
struggle as well. The Palestinians are not strong enough to achieve liberation
themselves, but once their working-class and poor sisters and brothers in the
region overthrow the regimes that oppress them, their help will be invaluable
in overthrowing the Zionists. On their side, the Palestinian masses, with their
undefeated will to be free, can serve as a vanguard for all these struggles,
giving them not only a rallying cry but also political guidance and
inspiration.
The working class parties that will
come out of the mass struggles in the region will be crucial for this strategy
to be successful. Therefore, we call for the creation of Bolshevik vanguard
parties all over the region, in preparation for the re-creation of the true
party of World Socialist Revolution, the Fourth International.
Free all Palestinian Political
Prisoners – Whether in Israeli or PA Prisons!
For a Mass Movement in Support of the
Prisoners!
For a Palestinian Workers’ State from
the River to the Sea,
in a Socialist Federation of the Middle
East!
