Interview with Palestinian activist Murud Jadallah on the day Khader Adnan beat the Israeli state.
Murud Jadallah works for Addameer, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and is also a member of the Independent Youth Movement in Palestine. He is currently doing a speaking tour around the UK as part of Israel Apartheid week. John Bennett spoke to him in Glasgow.
JB: Tonight people across the world are celebrating the victory of Khader Adnan. Khader put his life on the line to expose the Apartheid nature of the Israeli state. What does his achievement mean for the Palestinian people?
MJ: We are so happy to hear that Khader Adnan succeeded in his hunger strike today. After 66 days the Israeli High Court has finally reduced the period of his administrative detention. From the very beginning Khader said that he would stop his hunger strike if the High Court passed a ruling stating that this would be the last admin detention against him.
Khader Adnan has made history today. His was the longest hunger strike in the history of the Palestinian movement. This is the first time that a Palestinian prisoner has forced Israel to reduce an administrative detention order by hunger strike. From the beginning Khader gave us the feeling that he could succeed. From his first day on hunger strike I knew that this was a leader that would never give up and would not lose his battle. So today we are proud to be here in Glasgow celebrating his victory, our victory, with you.
JB: Parallels have bee drawn between Khader Adnan and Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands, who died after 66 days on hunger strike. Sands became a martyr for the cause of Irish Republicanism. Do you think that the Israeli state were afraid of creating another martyr for Palestine?
MJ: I think that Khader really understood the moment. We must not forget that Israel has been losing on a number of angles. They lost in 2006 and again in 2008. Today Khader has made them lose.
At the very beginning Khader said that he was continuing the battle of prisoners through the decades. He said ‘I am not the only one, I’m not the first one, and I will not be the last one.’ And he made it clear that he was continuing the battle for freedom that Bobby Sands started. Khader Adnan is our Bobby Sands. And he is alive. His victory has made history today. It has changed everything.
JB: You have spoken about administrative detention. What is this and how does it work?
MJ: Administrative detention was first implemented in Palestine by the British during the mandate period. And it has been used against the Palestinian people ever since. It is used against everyone: men, women and children.
It is an order submitted by a military commander of an area saying that he wants to arrest someone for a period of time – say 6 months – because they are risking the security of the area. The problem is we don’t know what that means: there is no clear definition of ‘risk to security’. And no evidence needs to be provided to do this. No charge needs to be brought against the prisoner. The army have a secret file – this could just be a small bit of paper given by the army to a judge saying this person is an activist. Neither the prisoner nor their lawyer can get access to any of the information in this file, and the role of the judge is just to approve the order. Not one Israeli judge in an Israeli military court has ever cancelled an administrative detention order that has put a Palestinian into prison.
JB: How often is this used and how many Palestinians have been affected by this?
MJ: 25,000 administrative detention orders have been used against Palestinians since the second intifada in 2002. Many Palestinians have spent years in administrative detention. One man I know, a journalist, he has been in administrative detention for more than 19 years.
It’s hard to know the exact numbers that have bee arrested. In one week in 2002 the Israelis arrested 2500 Palestinians. In one week!
Since 1967 we know that Israel has arrested more than 800,000 Palestinians. That means that 25% of the Palestinian population have been in jail. 40% of youths and males have been spent time in prison.
We believe that arresting up to ten thousand Palestinians every year is not to protect the security of the state of Israel. It is part of a strategy to destroy Palestinian society. Prisons have a massive psychological impact: most Palestinians need years of therapy after their experience. But we simply don’t have the facilities to help them.
I was in prison for 4 years. They arrested me for the first time when I was 13 years old. I failed my baccalaureate because I ended up losing five years of my education – don’t forget that during the first intifada Israel closed all the schools and universities for more than a year. And when we are in prison we are not allowed to study. We aren’t even allowed to read books and it’s hard to get newspapers.
We get tortured during the whole process of our arrest – not just during the interrogation period. You will be beaten at any time by the Special Forces and by the prison guards.
I remember when I was released from prison and I saw the sun for the first time, I fell down on the ground and wept – because I had spent one and a half years underground. We didn’t see the sun. Right up to this day because we couldn’t turn off the lights in the prison I can’t sleep when the light is turned off. So prison changes your relationship with nature.
The reason I say this is because through mass arrests the Israeli state is systematically trying to destroy the Palestinian youth. They are trying to destroy our culture; to destroy our identity; to destroy our relationship with our history.
JB: In your lectures today you also mentioned that Israel is actually profiting from the prison system. Can we also look at the prison system from a commodity angle?
MJ: Thank you for this question. It is important to highlight how the Israelis run the prisons – because of where the prisons are situated the families of the prisoners aren’t allowed to visit their relatives without permission from the Israeli government. And today among the 4600 Palestinian prisoners inside jail more than 2000 are not allowed visits. More than 500 have had no visit since 2006.
Prisoners are banned from receiving anything from their family: clothes, food, books, newspaper, cigarettes – nothing. They have to buy everything from the Israeli company that runs the canteen which is a private company.
The food cooked inside the prison is cooked by Israeli prisoners and we know that they urinate and spit in the food. How can we trust them to cook for us?
So we have to buy everything – toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, shoes and all our food. The prices are more expensive in the canteen than in the Israeli market.
Many items come from the Israeli colonial settlements. So we fight against colonial settlers on our land and they arrest us. And then they make us buy the products from the settlements, so now Palestinian prisoners are trying to boycott these items.
But when you are in prison you can’t boycott everything. That is why it is so important that everyone boycotts all Israeli production. This is very important for the Palestinian resistance – this is to protect Palestinian lives. The people must hold Israel to account by boycotting it as a state and declaring it a racist country with an apartheid system.
JB: Recently when Tunisian revolutionaries were told that they had inspired people around the world, they replied saying that the people of Palestine are our teachers. What was the influence of the Arab youth of Cairo and Tunis on the Palestinian youth and vice versa?
MJ: We think the Arab Spring is the beginning of revolutions across the Arab world and the gulf countries – and also one day against the Palestinian Authority. We have been influenced and inspired by the spring. What we saw on the streets of Cairo and Tunis was the third Palestinian intifada because we compose one identity and we are one people.
I have always said: there is no way to free Palestine while the people of Morocco are illiterate, there is no way to liberate Palestine while people sleep in the streets of Cairo. We cannot be free while the Arab countries still have Israeli embassies. So the dictatorships in the Arab world are just one hand of the imperialist system. The revolution must spread.
JB: There is a widespread acceptance now that while Yasser Arafat was a symbol of resistance, the PLO was politically backward because they focused on Arab capital rather than on the Arab masses. The PA is an even greater expression of this. Could you elaborate?
MJ: Arafat put a lot of emphasis on the Arab leaders. Ultimately he destroyed relationships between Palestinians as a people and the rest of the Arab masses. Because when you support the King of Jordan or the King of Morocco or dictators in Saudi Arabia or Egypt you cannot have a good relationship with the people who they are oppressing, or the organisations who are fighting these oligarchical regimes.
Today Abbas is doing exactly the same thing. Only he is doing it very late. While the Arab people are kicking their dictatorships, the PA are trying to build a dictatorship in Palestine. They benefit from the occupation and we should define them as an oligarchy. Thy have spent 64 years saying they want to do something for Palestine, and for the last twenty years they have tried the peace process. But what have they got? Nothing. But it was a good opportunity for Israel to build more settlements in the West bank; they have had more time to eat Palestine.
JB: Abbas is making a bid for statehood I the UN. You have said that this will not work. What do you think is the way forward for the Palestinians?
MJ: The Palestinian youth today must work together to end the control of all the leaders from different parties, and we must form a new national liberation movement.
We need self determination. From the Israelis of course, but also from the so-called leaders – Abbas and Shafayat. They have the same project which is to reject military resistance against the Israeli state and to say that the peace process is the only way. They have to understand that they will get nothing from Israel, Europe or anybody.
Today it is time for Palestinian society to review everything. The two-state solution is behind us and we have to examine other solutions. It could be the one state solution or it could be something else. But we must accept that the two state solution has been killed by Israel and the world who supports Israel. So if we don’t want to be the New native Americans in the Middle East we must go forward with one strategy.
Khader Adnan showed a very good example of how we can fight. We are not terrorists – we refuse to be terrorists, but we have the right to resist the occupation. This includes armed resistance and military operations. This is said in international law. No one can take this right away from the Palestinians. The future is in the hands of the youth.
From International Socialist Group site
