These Chains Will Be Broken is a collection of narratives by some of the many Palestinians, men, women and children who have been held in Israeli prisons.
John Pilger tells us , “With each story, there is a roll-call of the best of humanity: courage, struggle, determination, generosity, passion , humility and above all defiance of injustice.”
He adds that, “everyone, especially those of us on the West, subjected to unerring propganda, should read this searing and beautiful book”
The Foreword is by Khalida Jarrar, human rights actvist, feminist, elected Palestinian parliamentarian who has been imprisoned many times.
Well-educated herself, she tells of her struggle while in prison, to obtain formal educational opportunities for all prisoners, especially women.
Two of the stories that particularly moved me are that of the Galilean poet Dareen Tatour, arrested for her poem Resist My People, Resist Them and that of the youngest prisoner, Dima Ismail Al-Wawi, of the Occupied West Bank. Dima was 12 when she was ‘arrested’ by an armed illegal Jewish settler who claimed that she was trying to stab him. Her pleas, ‘I didn’t do anything’ were ignored by the military court. Female prisoners protected Duma, taking on the role of mother and older sister. Released after 2½ months, Dina shared this message with the world. “Please keep Palestine in your heart. Think of the children who are oppressed and will continue to be oppressed until this unjust occupation ends.”
I hope more people will read These Chains will be Broken. Personally I find it empowering , an insight into understanding that Palestinians will be free..free to live in a democratic one-State with equal rights for all, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.
Several years ago, Martin and I met Claudette Habesch of Jerusalem Caritas, who said to us “Whatever they do to us, we will maintain our dignity.”
Rephrasing Dareen Tatour’s Resist My People, Resist Them, a well-known Palestinian phrase is the determination to “Stay Human.”
The prisoners’ narratives show us that even under horrific conditions, the Palestinians will ‘maintain their dignity’ and ‘stay human’.
We here in New Zealand should take up their cause.
Lois Griffiths is a Human Rights Activist.
This Intelligence Squared debate on the proposition “Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy” demonstrates very clearly the paucity of Zionist argument. Speaking against the proposition, Dani Dayan and Caroline Glick rage impotently, channelling tired and utterly false emotional triggers (“they want to murder all Jews”, “they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” – rather like a certain poster here) and manage to inspire a largely undecided audience to vote overwhelmingly for the affirmative 517 – 99. Caroline Glick in particular seems to be in desperate need of a rabies shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rk60vNUJ9Y
Ramzy Baroud’s website: ramzybaroud.net
‘These Chains Will Be Broken’ and others of his books are available there.
He is also on twitter, and just a few hours ago he posted this tweet
“Israeli forces arrest five Palestinian Children aged 7 to 11 near Hebron”
More at the link.
Courageous, “most moral” IDF arrest children picking flowers:
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/03/at-behest-of-settlers-israeli-forces-arrest-palestinian-children-picking-wild-flowers/
The Truth is a Joke Zionism Can’t Accept:
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/03/11/the-truth-is-a-joke-zionism-cant-accept/
OK. Let’s deconstruct Gaby’s “excellent article” on the “war crimes” by the Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina who favours arming 3 year olds with guns.
Quote: “Hamas terrorists were continuing their attack on the Israeli border, using firebombs tied to kites (with Nazi swastikas on them), Molotov cocktails and other explosive devices. These attacks, including tunnels, murderous kidnappings and the knifing of American tourist Taylor Force”.
Now the first thing that strikes me is that this is almost entirely untrue. There were no tunnels, no kidnappings and the tourist, Taylor Force, was knifed in Jaffa in 2016 – over 40 miles from Gaza, two years before the Gaza protests began.
The business of the kites is easy to understand. People in Gaza own the land contiguous with Gaza by absolute right guaranteed in International Law. They were driven off it and are now penned up behind a fence in Gaza where they can watch Israeli squatters growing crops on it. The kites have an oily rag attached (not a “firebomb”) in the hopes that it will set fire to squatter’s crops.
The protests were not organised by Hamas and they lasted from 30 March 2018 to 27 December 2019 when Hamas stepped and called a halt.
Here are the Palestinian casualty figures from that period:
Live ammunition fatalities 183
live ammunition injuries 6106
Shrapnel injuries 1576
rubber-coated bullet injuries 438
Tear-gas canister injuries 1084
One baby was killed by tear gas.
The Israelis suffered 1 shrapnel and 4 stone throwing injuries.
Israel’s use of deadly force was condemned on 13 June 2018 in a United Nations General Assembly resolution. Condemnations also came from human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and Amnesty International. In late February 2019, a United Nations Human Rights Council’s independent commission found that of 489 cases of Palestinian deaths or injuries analyzed only two were possibly justified as responses to danger by Israeli security forces, deeming the rest illegal, and concluded with a recommendation calling on Israel to examine whether war crimes or crimes against humanity had been committed, and if so, to bring those responsible to trial.
War crimes indeed Gaby. Your article’s author just got the perpetrators wrong.
Iran’s supposed threat to the U.S. is a scam Israel and its lobby promote to change the subject from Palestine
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/03/irans-supposed-threat-to-the-u-s-is-a-scam-israel-and-its-lobby-promote-to-change-the-subject-from-palestine/
Hey, thanks for all the info. The best part about having a couple of idiot idealogues supporting the Israeli apartheid state is to observe the ease with which their propaganda and hatred is exposed. I’ve learned a lot from following all your rebuttals so once again, thanks!
Well what a turn-up Gaby – you are now relying on a report by HRW that is headed by Ken Roth who has been labeled an anti-semite because of his reports on Israel’s human rights abuses. Good one!
If you had read the report carefully then followed the supplementary supportive link, you would have seen this, “The fact that Israel systematically violates Palestinians’ most basic rights is no reason to remain silent in the face of the systematic repression of dissent and the torture Palestinian security forces are perpetrating,” said Shawan Jabarin, executive director of the Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq and a member of the Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Advisory Committee.”
Just to make it perfectly clear, unlike yourself, I am no apologist for any state or organisation adopting the measures that HRW has accused Fatah and Hamas of, or worse!
The likes of Gaby cherry-pick instances of loony outliers (which exist in all political movements) to smear Hamas and all Palestinians. Quite simply, this is racism of a most pernicious kind. They rely on a propaganda machine which leverages off the fact that few in the Western World speak Arabic therefore rarely hear the other side of the story. Here is a rare instance of a Hamas leader making it into the Guardian – back in the days when it was a reasonably reliable news source:
“The day Hamas won the Palestinian democratic elections the world’s leading democracies failed the test of democracy. Rather than recognise the legitimacy of Hamas as a freely elected representative of the Palestinian people, seize the opportunity created by the result to support the development of good governance in Palestine and search for a means of ending the bloodshed, the US and EU threatened the Palestinian people with collective punishment for exercising their right to choose their parliamentary representatives.
We are being punished simply for resisting oppression and striving for justice. Those who threaten to impose sanctions on our people are the same powers that initiated our suffering and continue to support our oppressors almost unconditionally. We, the victims, are being penalised while our oppressors are pampered. The US and EU could have used the success of Hamas to open a new chapter in their relations with the Palestinians, the Arabs and the Muslims and to understand better a movement that has so far been seen largely through the eyes of the Zionist occupiers of our land.
Our message to the US and EU governments is this: your attempt to force us to give up our principles or our struggle is in vain. Our people who gave thousands of martyrs, the millions of refugees who have waited for nearly 60 years to return home and our 9,000 political and war prisoners in Israeli jails have not made those sacrifices in order to settle for close to nothing.
Hamas has been elected mainly because of its immovable faith in the inevitability of victory; and Hamas is immune to bribery, intimidation and blackmail. While we are keen on having friendly relations with all nations we shall not seek friendships at the expense of our legitimate rights. We have seen how other nations, including the peoples of Vietnam and South Africa, persisted in their struggle until their quest for freedom and justice was accomplished. We are no different, our cause is no less worthy, our determination is no less profound and our patience is no less abundant.
Our message to the Muslim and Arab nations is this: you have a responsibility to stand by your Palestinian brothers and sisters whose sacrifices are made on behalf of all of you. Our people in Palestine should not need to wait for any aid from countries that attach humiliating conditions to every dollar or euro they pay despite their historical and moral responsibility for our plight. We expect you to step in and compensate the Palestinian people for any loss of aid and we demand you lift all restrictions on civil society institutions that wish to fundraise for the Palestinian cause.
Our message to the Palestinians is this: our people are not only those who live under siege in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the millions languishing in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and the millions spread around the world unable to return home. We promise you that nothing in the world will deter us from pursuing our goal of liberation and return. We shall spare no effort to work with all factions and institutions in order to put our Palestinian house in order. Having won the parliamentary elections, our medium-term objective is to reform the PLO in order to revive its role as a true representative of all the Palestinian people, without exception or discrimination.
Our message to the Israelis is this: we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us – our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.
We shall never recognise the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognise the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else’s sins or solve somebody else’s problem. But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms. Hamas is extending a hand of peace to those who are truly interested in a peace based on justice.”
– · Khalid Mish’al was head of the political bureau of Hamas. On 25 September 1997, Mossad agents acting under orders from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered Jordan on fake Canadian passports and, disguised as tourists came up from behind and transmitted a fast-acting poison into his ear.
Palestinian culture is conservative as should be obvious from the fact that any overt displays of sexuality, no matter the orientation, are regarded as perverse – rather like the New Zealand I grew up in during the 40s and 50s. Nevertheless, Gay organisations such as AlQaws exist – and Israel takes advantage:
“alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, a civil society organization founded in grassroots activism, is at the forefront of vibrant Palestinian cultural and social change, building LGBTQ communities and promoting new ideas about the role of gender and sexual diversity in political activism, civil society institutions, media, and everyday life.
Embracing the diversity of our society, while challenging the political forces that divide us, we run community centers and events in cities and rural areas across Palestine, operate a national support hotline accessible via phone and online, build partnerships and alliances in established cultural institutions and civil society organizations, create innovative media campaigns, work to transform public discourse, and much more. Israel has sold itself internationally as a gay Mecca. (Here, here, and here, for instance.) This freedom is regularly cited by advocates for Israel in the west, making stark comparisons to Muslim societies that repress gays. Well here’s a new spin on that claim: reports that Israeli intelligence pried into Palestinians’ phone calls and internet activity so as to identify and blackmail Palestinian gays and turn them into informants against other Palestinians.”
http://www.alqaws.org/about-us
“Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence
This analysis paper explores a paradigm shift that alQaws has been exploring over the past decade of its grassroots community organizing, which centers the experiences of queer Palestinians…….
Pinkwashing is the symptom, settler-colonialism is the root sickness. Recognizing pinkwashing as colonial violence can help us understand how Israel divides, oppresses, and erases Palestinians on the basis of gender and sexuality.
http://www.alqaws.org/articles/Beyond-Propaganda-Pinkwashing-as-Colonial-Violence?category_id=0
“Haaretz has a story up on 43 reservists in Israeli intelligence who are refusing to serve because of the “political persecution” of Palestinians. The reservists write that while surveillance of Israeli citizens is strictly limited, “the Palestinians are not afforded this protection.” They declare in a letter to the Israeli P.M.: “we refuse to take part in actions against Palestinians and refuse to continue serving as tools in deepening the military control over the Occupied Territories.”
An unsigned piece in the Guardian details testimonies from intelligence veterans and exposes practices reminiscent of totalitarian countries: “Any Palestinian is exposed to monitoring by the Israeli Big Brother.” Here are selections where the recovering spooks describe using Palestinians’ sexual practices to turn them into informants, or exploit the Palestinians’ need for medical care in Israel.
https://mondoweiss.net/2014/09/blackmails-palestinian-informants/
Comments are closed.