#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #France, OCL, CA #327: Supporting #Palestinian prisoners means supporting resistance fighters (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 From January 14 to 24, 2023, at the call of more than 220 organizations from

more than 30 countries, the international week of action for the release of Ahmad
Sa'adat, leader of the Palestinian left as well as 4700 Palestinian prisoners
(1). These numerous solidarity actions around the world have once again sent a
clear message: supporting their release means supporting Palestinians in their
right to resist the occupation. ---- Ahmad Sa'adat, victim of "security
coordination" ---- If we had to define the "security coordination" between the
misnamed Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli occupation set up following
the deadly Oslo Accords (1993), its most emblematic illustration would certainly
be Ahmad Sa'adat, the secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (PFLP). Born in 1953, he is the child of refugees expelled in 1948
from their destroyed village of Dayr Tarif (near Al-Ramleh). Quickly engaged in
the fight against the colonization of his land, he joined the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine in 1969. He was subsequently arrested numerous times
and spent more than ten years in Zionist jails. His growing responsibilities
within the PFLP in the mid-1990s led him again to be imprisoned following the
joint work between the Palestinian security forces and the Israeli army. The
security coordination between the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat and the
occupier produced its first effects. Following the assassination of Abu Ali
Mustapha, secretary general of the PFLP, on August 27, 2001 by an Israeli army
missile fired into his office in Ramallah, Ahmad Sa'adat took up the torch. On
October 17, 2001, an PFLP commando executed the Israeli Minister of Tourism and
notorious fascist Rehavam Zeevi in Jerusalem to avenge the death of their leader.
A few years after the Oslo Accords, this spectacular operation revives the
question of Palestinian armed resistance and sheds light on the PFLP. The
Palestinian Authority condemns this execution and has Ahmad Sa'adat arrested on
January 15, 2002 by the Palestinian special forces. Due to lack of evidence, the
Palestinian High Court of Justice requested his release a few months later. But
under pressure from the occupation and the United States, Ahmad Sa'adat is kept
illegally locked up in Jericho prison located in the Jordan Valley. Until March
14, 2006.

When the Israeli occupation attacks Jericho prison to kidnap Sa'adat
According to an agreement reached between the Israeli occupation and the PA,
Ahmad Sa'adat and the members of the "Zeevi commando" had been under the
surveillance of British and American guards since their arrest in 2002. Four
years later, on March 14 2006, the jailers leave their posts and the Israeli army
attacks the prison. Result: two Palestinians are killed, twenty three are injured
and Ahmad Sa'adat and five political prisoners are kidnapped and taken to
occupation prisons. To justify the desertion of its soldiers, the United States
will accuse the PA of having considered the release of Sa'adat. What the latter
will react by saying that "the Quartet[United States, European Union, Russia and
United Nations]serves as a cover for the occupation. What happened at Jericho
prison made the British and American governments an integral part of the conflict
and forever buried any illusions about their neutrality. ". Ahmad Sa'adat was
finally sentenced on December 25, 2008 by a colonial court whose legitimacy he
denied. For lack of evidence as to his involvement in the execution of Rehavam
Zeevi, his sentence to 30 years in prison follows a logic of relentlessness. This
is also the heaviest sentence handed down by occupation courts for a political
charge. Regularly sentenced to solitary confinement by military courts, Ahmad
Sa'adat has known several prisons and is currently locked up in that of Shata, in
Gilboa.
Ahmad Sa'adat will therefore have been arrested by the Palestinian security
forces, illegally locked up for four years in a Palestinian Authority prison,
kidnapped by the Israeli occupation with the complicity of Western powers and
finally condemned because of his political commitments. . He is one of the 4,700
prisoners currently locked up by the occupation. Since the beginnings of the
Palestinian national liberation movement in the 1920s (2), imprisonment has been
a colonial weapon of control and domination of the indigenous population by
attacking their resistance and repressing activists from their various sectors (
armed struggle, labor movement, student and feminist organizations, etc.).
To better understand the central role that imprisonment plays in the colonial
system in Palestine, here are some figures: since 1967, more than 850,000
Palestinians have been imprisoned, more than a million since 1948. More than one
third of the population of the West Bank has been imprisoned at least once and
almost all Palestinian families have at least one member who has experienced
prison. Today, there are more than 800 people in administrative detention, a
prison regime bequeathed by the British mandate which allows arbitrary detention,
without charge or trial, for a period of up to 6 months and renewable
indefinitely. Children are also affected by the confinement: there are currently
150 of them behind the bars of the occupation.

Imprisonment as a symbol of colonial violence
Israeli occupation prisons are also a large-scale laboratory for policies aimed
at repressing and stifling all forms of individual and collective resistance. 95%
of Palestinian prisoners are subjected to torture and/or ill-treatment. This is a
constant reality of the arrest, detention and interrogation of Palestinians by
the Israeli occupation. This includes beatings, psychological torture, threats of
sexual abuse and violence and threats against family members, but also imposed
painful positions and physical restraints, sleep deprivation and isolation. . In
addition, the prison administration practices a deliberate policy of medical
negligence which has already caused the death of approximately 200 prisoners
since 1967, such as Nasser Abu Hmeid who died last December following poor
treatment of his illness. Today, Palestinian prisoner and writer Walid Daqqa is
battling leukemia and demanding proper treatment. Not to mention a little-known
practice, that of the detention by the Israeli occupation of the bodies of
deceased prisoners, which constitutes a war crime. Today, more than ten bodies of
Palestinian prisoners have not been returned to their families who are suffering
a form of collective punishment.

Prisoners, the heart of the resistance to the occupation
Supporting Palestinian prisoners is not only supporting victims of colonial
repression, but first and foremost supporting resistance fighters against the
occupation. From inside the prisons of the occupation, they develop their
individual and collective struggle: regrouping by political parties, election of
their representatives, political declaration, organization of schools and
training, individual hunger strikes and /or collective, etc. Thus Israeli prisons
are also veritable "schools of the revolution", as the Palestinian fighter Asim
Ka'abi, currently in administrative detention, points out (3). "When we go
through the Zionist prisons, the prisoners refer to it as a passage to the school
of the revolution. Many of us enter prison with no education or cultural
understanding, but the way we organize ourselves gives us a new political culture
to understand the world around us. Some prisoners arrive very young, for example,
or feel lost as soon as they are arrested, but they quickly learn to know the
legal regime and to think politically," he points out.

The release of the approximately 4,700 Palestinians must be the priority of the
movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people. If the Zionist occupation
represses, imprisons and tortures in a systematic way, it is because it is aware
of the danger represented by these thousands of Palestinians who oppose
colonization. Supporting Ahmad Sa'adat and the Palestinian prisoners therefore
means supporting the Palestinian resistance in its anti-colonialist fight. To
demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners is also to fight for that of
prisoners of the Palestinian movement such as Georges Abdallah, Lebanese
communist and Palestinian resistance fighter imprisoned for nearly 39 years in
France or Ghassan Elsashi, Shukri Abu Baker and Mufid Abdulqader who have been
imprisoned in the United States since 2008 for their charitable work for
Palestinians.

The prison as a colonial weapon
This international week of actions was also an opportunity to highlight the issue
of mass imprisonment implemented by the occupation. From New York to Berlin via
Vancouver, Paris and Brussels, the international week of action for the release
of Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners has reminded us of the importance
of this support. Today more than ever, we must develop the collective
mobilization for the release of the 4,700 Palestinian prisoners and consider that
it is a central issue in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine from the
sea to the Jordan. Collectif Palestine Vaincra, member of the international
network Samidoun

Toulouse, January 24, 2023

Ratings
(1) All information on palestinevaincra.com and samidoun.net/fr
(2) The Al-Buraq revolution: the legacy and the ongoing struggle:
https://charleroi-pourlapalestine.be/index.php/2017/06/20/la-revolution-dal-buraq-lheritage
-and-the-fight-that-continues/
(3) "Graduate from the school of revolution": interview with Palestinian fighter
Asim Ka'abi
https://palestinevaincra.com/2021/11/diplome-de-lecole-de-la-revolution-interview-with-the-palestinian-combatant-asim-kaabi/

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article3579
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