The New York Times reports: The newest heroes of the Palestinian cause are not burly young men hurling stones or wielding automatic weapons. They are gaunt adults, wrists in chains, starving themselves inside Israeli prisons.

Each day since April 17, scores of Palestinian prisoners have joined a hunger strike that officials say now counts more than 1,500 participants. And on Thursday, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of detainees said that if Israel did not yield to their demands for improved prison conditions, the remaining 3,200 would soon join in.

The two longest-striking prisoners, who have gone without food for 66 days, appeared in wheelchairs before Israel’s Supreme Court on Thursday morning, pleading for their release from what is known here as administrative detention — incarceration without formal charges. One of them, Bilal Diab, 27, fainted during the hearing.

“I am a man who loves life, and I want to live in dignity,” the other man, Thaer Halahleh, 33, testified, according to an advocacy group that had a supporter in the courtroom. “No human can accept being in jail for one hour without any charge or reason.”

As the strike has swelled, the prisoners’ names and faces have been plastered on protest tents in villages throughout the West Bank. With the peace process stalled and internal Palestinian politics adrift, many analysts here see nonviolent resistance as a critical tactic for the Palestinian national movement, and the hunger strike as a potential catalyst to bring an Arab Spring-style uprising to the West Bank. [Continue reading…]

Raed Salah writes: In June 2011 I came to Britain to begin a speaking tour to draw attention to the plight of my people, the Palestinian citizens of Israel. The tour was meant to last 10 days. Instead I had to stay for 10 months in order to resist an attempt by the home secretary, Theresa May, to deport me – itself the result of a smear campaign against me and what I represent. I fought not just for my own sake, but for all who are smeared because they support the Palestinian cause.

Since 1990 I have visited the UK several times to speak publicly. On this occasion I was arrested, imprisoned, and told I was to be deported to Israel because my presence in the UK was “not conducive to the public good”. A judge later ruled that I had been illegally detained, but bail conditions continued to severely restrict my freedom, making it impossible for me to speak as I had intended.

After a 10-month legal battle, I have now been cleared on “all grounds” by a senior immigration tribunal judge, who ruled that May’s decision to deport me was “entirely unnecessary” and that she had been “misled”. The evidence she relied on (which included a poem of mine which had been doctored to make it appear anti-Jewish) was not, he concluded, a fair portrayal of my views. In reality, I reject any and every form of racism, including antisemitism.

I have no doubt that, despite this, Israel’s cheerleaders in Britain will continue to smear my character. This is the price every Palestinian leader and campaigner is forced to pay.

My people – the Palestinians – are the longstanding victims of Israeli racism. Victims of racism, anywhere, should never condone or support the maltreatment of another people, as Israel does.

The suffering of the Palestinian citizens of Israel has been ignored for decades. But there is today a growing awareness of it, which partially explains this smear campaign against me. In December 2011, EU ambassadors in Israel raised serious concerns about Israeli discrimination, noting that “not only has the situation of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel not improved, but it has further deteriorated“. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are expected to embark on hunger strikes this week to draw attention to imprisonment without charge and solitary confinement. They will build on a protest that has resulted in deals to release two inmates who refused food for prolonged periods.

At least 11 prisoners are already on hunger strike, three of whom have been transferred to hospital. One began refusing fluids last week, increasing concern about the rate of deterioration of his health.

A wave of hunger strikes is planned to begin on or around Prisoners’ Day on Tuesday, held under the slogan: “We will live in dignity.” About 1,600 prisoners have agreed to take part in the protest, according to Palestinian prisons minister Issa Qaraqi. “The situation inside Israeli prisons has become very dangerous and serious,” he was quoted as saying.

There are around 4,600 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, according to the prisoners’ rights group Addameer. More than 300 are held under “administrative detention”, meaning they and their lawyers are not informed of accusations or evidence against them, no trial is held, and their term of imprisonment is determined by an Israeli military judge.

Khaled Diab interviews Zaid Shuaibi, a young Palestinian activist: A hip bar in Ramallah named after a famous cocktail where friends and lovers come to hang out and chill is probably not the most obvious place to meet a young Palestinian revolutionary. While around the world people do drink and drive for change, outsiders tend to view Palestinians as straight-laced teetotallers, especially since the rise of Hamas, but judging by the number of watering holes in Ramallah, the truth is another country.

Taybeh, Palestine’s only domestically produced beer, even once had as its motto, “Taste the revolution”. And armed with a large glass of Taybeh, I had come to get a taste of what a new generation of savvy young Palestinian activists were brewing.

Zaid Shuaibi

Zaid Shuaibi couldn’t be further from the traditional Western image of the wild-eyed Arab fanatic. He is soft-spoken, measured, understated and seems at harmony with the mellow, subdued ambiance of our meeting place. Though only 22, his maturity and depth cannot be measured in simple years.

Shuaibi, who I have met a number of times, spent the first half of his life in Saudi Arabia before his family returned to Ramallah, where he has lived ever since. Despite the hardships they‘ve endured, they have no regrets about having resettled in their native land.

Zaid discovered his passion for political activism at Birzeit university, though he emphasises that, despite his left-leaning, secular views, he is not aligned to any particular political party or current, partly as a demonstration of his independence and partly because he finds none of the established parties is fully satisfactory.

As a sign of his dedication to the Palestinian cause, he gave up the prospect of pursuing a career with an international agency in order to free himself up for his activism. He now works as an outreach coordinator for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign and is closely involved with the Palestinian youth activist movement.

Speaking with this young activist is inspiring and encouraging on so many levels. He and his co-resistors belief in peaceful protest, and the creative new techniques they are employing, especially after the disaster of the second intifada, that non-violence is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the Palestinian arsenal. Their recognition of the need for major, internal Palestinian reform is also timely and necessary.

Nevertheless, the odds they are up against can seem depressingly insurmountable. The situation on the ground is changing rapidly and, in many ways, perhaps irreversibly, as Israel’s settlement express train continues largely unhindered. This has caused a sense of inertia among Palestinians, to which even creative young activists can succumb. There is a widespread sense that the two-state option is dead, or at the very least comatosed in intensive care, and any possible Palestinian state will not only be small and lack territorial congruity, but will also not enjoy true sovereignty or independence.

But Shuaibi and many other activists, even though they believe in a single, democratic state for all Israelis and Palestinians, are reluctant or unwilling to act on this conviction now and fight for one now by transforming their struggle into a civil rights movement for full and equal citizenship, which I personally believe is the most effective way forward, at least for the foreseeable future. Of course, Palestinians deserve an independent state, but what they’re likely to get, if anything, is a virtual state, a state on paper, or, worst of all, a continued state of denial of their rights.

I know that, after so many decades of struggle and their rapidly shrinking prospects of independent statehood, the idea of becoming “Israelis” sits uncomfortably with most Palestinians, but with full enfranchisement they will be able to leave their imprint on the Israeli system, change it from within and gradually transform it into a state for all its citizens.

But given the worsening situation since the Oslo years, when Palestinians and Israelis regularly met and co-operated, and in light of the traditional Arab discourse regarding “non-normalisation”, not only does the idea of becoming Israelis not appeal, but positions are hardening even towards the idea of dealing with Israelis. Although I admit I could be wrong, I feel this refusal is not only a case of meeting wrong with wrong but is also counterproductive.

Working with Israeli activists and challenging and courting Israeli public opinion is, in my view, crucial, because Israel holds most of the cards and, after decades of waiting, the idea that the international community will come galloping in on its white steed to deliver the Palestinians their rights looks, it is safe to say, highly improbable.

That said, Palestinian and Israeli activists are increasingly resisting the occupation together, as demonstrated in so many cases, such as the joint protests against the Israeli separation wall, and a sizeable minority do recognise the importance of co-activism. Moreover, today’s young Palestinian activists are borrowing from the tactics of the American and South African civil rights movements. And the next logical step, once enough admit that the two-state solution is dead in the water, would be to adopt the objectives as well as the tactics of civil rights.

It is largely up to Palestinians and Israelis to come to some sort of accommodation on their own, and this requires direct engagement. And, as the weaker party, the most powerful weapon the Palestinians possess is people power.

And inspired by the popular mass movements that have emerged across the region, Palestinian activists are rediscovering the spirit of the largely peaceful first intifada which succeeded in changing so much (yet so little). But can they heal the internal rifts within Palestinian ranks, agree on a reinvented effective strategy and inspire the masses to take action? [Continue reading — interview]

Ben White writes: A one-state solution in Palestine/Israel is a subject being increasingly discussed and debated. One way in which the conversation has emerged is through an analysis of the current situation as a de facto one state, a regime which privileges Jews above Palestinians (the latter being granted or denied different rights according to geography and legal status).

This challenges the orthodoxy that makes a clean distinction between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In doing so, it not only provides a framework for interpreting various policies, but also counters the fragmentation of Palestinians over the decades into “Israeli Arabs”, “West Bank” or “Gaza” Palestinians, Jerusalemites – and of course, refugees.

But apart from this discursive “reintegration”, as the apartheid regime has been consolidated irrespective of the “Green Line”, a new generation of Palestinian activists is breaking down old divisions imposed by Israel and forging new connections and strategies of resistance.

Lana Khaskia is an activist from Haifa. Last October, she worked alongside other comrades to organise a hunger strike in support of Palestinian prisoners. The action went under the name “Hungry for Freedom”, a slogan Lana says covers “many demands that can be summarised in one demand: ending Zionist colonialism in all of historic Palestine”. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: From his cell in an Israeli prison, one of the Palestinians’ most revered figures Marwan Barghouti called on Monday for a new wave of civil resistance in their decades-long quest for statehood and for severing all ties with Israel.

Barghouti is a leading figure in the Fatah movement, who was seen as a driving force behind the Palestinians’ last intifada launched in late 2000.

“The launch of large-scale popular resistance at this stage serves the cause of our people,” Barghouti said in a statement commemorating the tenth year of his imprisonment by Israel.

“Stop marketing the illusion that there is a possibility of ending the occupation and achieving a state through negotiations after this vision has failed miserably,” he said in a message read to a crowd of supporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Despite his multiple life sentences on charges of orchestrating lethal attacks and suicide bombings, Barghouti is viewed as a potential successor to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is also Fatah’s leader.

The call to action comes at a combustible period in the West Bank as economic malaise, moribund diplomacy, and simmering popular discontent bode ill for any peaceful breakthroughs.

Al Jazeera reports: An Israeli military court has rejected the appeal of a Palestinian woman on hunger strike for 39 days.

“The Israeli military court rejected the appeal and now we will go to the High Court,” lawyer Jawad Bulus said, adding that his client Hana Shalabi “will continue her hunger strike”.

Shalabi was detained on February 16, and a military court initially ordered her held for six months. That was later reduced to four months – the decision she unsuccessfully appealed.

The Israeli army has said the 30-year-old is “a global jihad-affiliated operative” and was re-arrested on suspicion that she “posed a threat to the area”. But no charges have been filed against her and no specific allegations have been made public.

Inspired by Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, who pressured Israel with a 66-day hunger strike, a growing number of his fellow detainees are launching similar protests.

The tactic appears to be spreading among the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, who see themselves battling for their rights with the only weapon they have: “empty stomachs”.

This is part of Sunday’s “Up with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC. The earlier parts of the the show can be viewed here.

Arthur Nelson writes: On 26 May 2009, I had finished an interview at the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) headquarters in Gaza City and was taking photographs outside for a book I was writing about Palestinian identity. Visitors to the Strip were few and far between then, especially after the kidnap of the BBC journalist Alan Johnston by Palestinian militants in 2007. I’d worked with Alan at the BBC World Service, and after his abduction I put off going to Gaza for as long as I could. But after his release, and then Israel’s bombing campaign and invasion the following winter, I needed to return. Mental health groups were reporting an epidemic of post-traumatic stress sweeping the Strip that no book about Palestinian identity could ignore.

That day as I crouched, snapping away, a finger tapped my back. I turned and hauled myself up to see a young, trim-bearded man in a red bandanna, smiling from ear to ear. He looked so pleased to see me that I automatically smiled back and said, “Ahlan wa sahlan” (“Greetings”). But the man, whom I will call Khalid, seemed in a trance. Still smiling, he held up a long, red-and-white-handled dagger. Then he unsheathed the blade, raised it above his head and plunged it towards my chest. A split-second of dissonance between the smile and the dagger broke with a jolt as I spun around and sprinted off down the street, yelling for help.

Palestinians are famously welcoming to foreign visitors, sometimes embarrassingly so. But this time, as if in a nightmare, everyone I passed on the street seemed to ripple towards the walls, which were high, ringed with barbed wire and had no doors. In my initial dash, I had got about 10 yards on Khalid, but he was younger than me, determined, and inexorably catching up. After 200 metres, I stopped at a road junction, unable to run farther without exhausting myself beyond any hope of self-defence.

As I shouted and pleaded for help from frightened-looking strangers, a bearded man peeped out from behind a doorway and frantically ushered me into a security compound. From inside, a Hamas policeman in a black uniform barged past me, the door swung shut behind him and two gunshots exploded deafeningly on the street outside. More officers spilled out after him, one offering me his pistol as he went – I declined – and Khalid was quickly overpowered and arrested.

Despite my lack of physical injury, I didn’t sleep well after the attack. Death seemed to be everywhere and I would jump at the sound of a banged door. It felt as if someone had turned up the contrast and colour on the outside world. I feared that Khalid was an al-Qaida-style jihadist, but friends said he had been taken to a psychiatric hospital. So I carried on interviewing psychiatrists, taxi drivers and tunnel engineers, but tried to stay off the streets and began varying my daily routines.

The rumour that Khalid had been released began a week after the attack. Gaza’s Hamas government often let Salafist offenders go, to assuage national-religious sentiments among its members, to convince them it was not going soft on the Islam agenda and to prevent more radical challenges to their authority. But if that also meant that Khalid wasn’t mentally ill, my environment was suddenly more dangerous.

A Gazan journalist I knew went to the psychiatric hospital to inquire about Khalid’s case for a possible story. She was berated by the clinic’s director for her lack of Islamic dress and questioned as to why she was helping a non-Muslim. Khalid had already been freed. For a few days after that, I carried a pair of scissors in my back pocket, in case of another attack. They would not have helped much, but I felt an acute sense of vulnerability.

Hamas had an interest in protecting internationals, and its officers had saved my life. But there was an unpredictable element in the mix. The interior minister, Fathi Hamad, knew that I was Jewish from a disastrous interview the year before, which he had used instead to interrogate me about my motives for not converting to Islam. The cops who arrested Khalid also knew I was Jewish. My statement after the attack had been a straightforward affair, until the translating officer was asked to read my full name from my passport. A long pause followed his recitation of my second name, Isaac. “What?” the chief officer queried, and asked for my name to be repeated. The translator did so, using “Yitzhak” – a Hebraised version of Isaac. A longer and much more uncomfortable silence followed, before the officer asked for my address in Gaza. Shortly after that, two Hamas secret policemen took up a permanent presence in a car outside my apartment. It had never been much of a reassurance, but with Khalid’s release it began to feel sinister.

When the border crossing at Erez reopened a few days later, I made a beeline for the exit, my interviews unfinished, never expecting to return. But the question of who Khalid was, and what circumstances led him to the UN building that day, stayed with me. It was a bit like walking out of a paranoid Hollywood thriller before the end. My political sympathies were definitively with the Palestinians, but the murder in Gaza of the pro-Palestinian activist Vittorio Arrigoni in April 2011 – apparently by would-be jihadists – demonstrated that this was no guarantee of safety. Khalid’s smiling face was a blank canvas on to which I could project orientalist fears. But I did not want to live like that. And if Khalid was not a Salafi jihadist, I did not need to. So I launched my own inquiry. [Continue reading…]

The Independent reports: It was only after talking with lucidity and animation for an hour about her husband’s 61-day hunger strike that Randa Jihad Adnan’s eyes, visible though the opening of her nekab, filled with tears. Until then, this articulate 31-year-old graduate in sharia law from Al Najar University in Nablus, the pregnant mother of two young daughters aged four and one and half, had described with almost disconcerting poise the two months following the arrest of her husband, Khader Adnan, on 17 December.

He was seized at 3.30am by some of the scores of Israeli military and security personnel who surrounded the family home in a West Bank village south of Jenin, and is now being held in the Israeli Rebecca Ziv hospital in Safed. On Wednesday she was allowed to visit him with the children and her father-in-law.

There they found him, weak and extremely thin, his beard unkempt and his fingernails long. He was shackled by two legs and one arm to his bed, and was connected to a heart monitor. Though mentally alert, he could speak only with difficulty. “I was shocked,” she said yesterday. “I couldn’t speak for about three minutes, and it was the same for my daughters.”

Mrs Adnan is convinced that the Israeli authorities only allowed the visit because they wanted the family to put pressure on her husband to end his hunger strike. He had started this on 18 December in protest at his arrest, his treatment and the subsequent detention order served on him.

“My father-in-law said to him: ‘We want you to stay alive. You cannot defeat this state on your own.’ He told him he wanted him to end the strike. I told him I wished he would drink a cup of milk. But he said: ‘I did not expect this from you. I know you are with me all the time. Please stop it.” Mrs Adnan said yesterday: “I know my husband. He will not change his mind. I expect him to die.”

The day before the visit, a Red Cross delegation had gone to her home to warn her that her husband’s heart could fail “at any minute”. They told her that he was suffering from muscular atrophy, which was affecting his heart and stomach, that his pulse was weak, and that his life was now in extreme danger.

Richard Falk writes: The world watches as tragedy unfolds beneath its gaze. Khader Adnan is entering his 61st day as a hunger striker in an Israeli prison, being held under an administrative detention order without trial, charges, or any indication of the evidence against him.

From the outset of his brutal arrest in the middle of the night – in the presence of his wife and young daughters – he has been subject to the sort of inhumane and degrading treatment that is totally unlawful and morally inexcusable. Its only justification is to intimidate, if not terrify, Palestinians who have lived for 45 years under the yoke of an oppressive occupation. This occupation continuously whittles away at Palestinians’ rights under international humanitarian law – especially their right to self-determination, which is encroached upon every time a new housing unit is added to the colonising settlements that dot the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The case of Khader Adnan is a revealing microcosm of the unbearable cruelty of prolonged occupation. It draws a contrast in the West between the dignity of an Israeli prisoner and the steadfast refusal to heed the abuse of thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails through court sentence or administrative order.

Mr Adnan’s father poignantly highlighted this contrast a few days ago by referring to Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas in captivity for several years and recently released in good health: “Where are the mother and father of Gilad Shalit? Do they not feel for me in this humanitarian case? Where are they?” He went further in drawing this comparison: “My son was arrested from his house, from among his wife and children, was taken prisoner. He was not carrying any weapon. Whereas Shalit was fighting against the people of Gaza, and destroying their homes, and firing upon, and Shalit was released.”

It is true that foreign authority figures, from the UN Secretary General on down, showed their empathy for the agony experienced by Israelis concerned for the wellbeing of Shalit, but these same personalities are notably silent in the much more compelling ordeal being experienced before our eyes in the form of Mr Adnan’s captivity, seemingly unto death. It should not be surprising that surviving family members of IRA hunger strikers should step forward expressing solidarity with Mr Adnan and compare the Irish experience of resistance to that of the Palesinians.

Daoud Kuttab writes: Apologists for Israel’s continued occupation and control over Palestinian lives have long contended Israel is more interested in peace than the Palestinians. One exaggerated argument, repeatedly put forward to justify military rule, is that Palestinians teach their children to hate Jews.

Politicians in the U.S., especially during election campaigns, find that bashing Palestinians has no downside and yields a vote (and donation) jackpot.

Palestinian textbooks are scrutinized for any hostile reference to Israel — or praise for Palestinian nationalism — and every frame broadcast on Palestinian television stations is analyzed by experts to see if it contains any incitement to violence.

Palestinian-Israeli committees spent hours researching these issues and concluded that there is no textbook glorification of violence or hate. European and bipartisan American committees reached similar conclusions. But the anti-Palestinian attacks never stopped. All the efforts to respond scientifically and comprehensively to the unsubstantiated barrage of attacks failed to change the narrative that anti-Palestinian forces, especially in the United States, were keen on perpetuating.