PNN - Palestine News Network

Op Ed: Internationalizing the Palestinian Prisoners Question

By: Ameer Makhoul

(a Palestinian civil society leader and political

prisoner at Gilboa Prison)

The success of internationalization can be gauged by the extent to

which the issue or question concerned becomes a global concern. This

means creating a situation on the ground which makes it impossible for

the international system to continue shirking responsibility, or

colluding with a dominant or powerful party in usurping the rights of

a weaker victim. International mechanisms can then be brought into

play to support the restoration of the victim's rights and enforce

compliance on the violator.

In such cases, justice is the victim's most potent weapon to offset

the power and repressive force of the dominant party – in this case,

the racist colonial regime of Israel.

But there is a basic rule that has been proven and reaffirmed by every

popular revolution and liberation movement: it is not sufficient for a

group or people to be victims of injustice to earn the world's

solidarity. For the world to support them, these victims must not only

be conscious of and committed to their rights but more importantly,

they must resist their oppression and oppressors. The victims' own

steadfastness, defiance and struggle is key to transforming

international sympathy into solidarity, in the sense of effective

political action with a strategic horizon.

Internationalization lies essentially and primarily in activating and

sustaining global popular solidarity, as well as acting to encourage

official international bodies to assume their responsibilities.

A mobilized, energized and expanded worldwide solidarity movement can

do much to influence governments, legislatures and media in countries

and societies throughout the world. It can put pressure on

international and official bodies to promote policy changes on two

fronts: to support and strengthen the victims of injustice and their

hopes of attaining their rights via a combination of their liberation

struggle and international legality, and to weaken and isolate the

oppressive and racist colonizer, subject it to sanctions and deny it

legitimacy, with the ultimate goal being the dismantling of its

repressive structures.

Defining goals

Yet the official Palestinian position on the release of Palestinian

prisoners in Israeli jails serves to undermine their cause, which is a

central component of our people's liberation struggle.

The official stance, essentially, is that no final peace agreement

with Israel will be signed until all prisoners are released from

Israeli jails. In practice, this is a recipe for delaying and

deferring the liberation of the prisoners indefinitely, and

marginalizing the issue within the overall Palestinian agenda.

Liberating the prisoners should mean liberating them now.

Israel went to great lengths to turn the case of one of its occupation

troops who fell into Palestinian captivity into an international

humanitarian concern, while demanding that the world view and treat

its 7,000 Palestinian prisoners of freedom as "terrorists."

Yet why does Palestinian official discourse defer to this twisted

logic? Why does the party with justice on its side, the victim, need

to make excuses for Palestinians defending their rights? Why employ

apologetic language? When was the last time an official Palestinian

voice was raised at the UN or EU – or even the Arab League – to

defend the Palestinians' right, and duty, to resist occupation,

colonization and displacement employing all means of struggle?

This same mentality recently prompted a senior Palestinian Authority

(PA) official to raise the issue of "mutual incitement" and demand

that Israel reactivate the joint committee supposedly dealing with

this issue. How can a supposed representative of a people who are

subject in their entirety to colonization, displacement and

confinement accept any equivalence in this regard between the

aggressive occupying oppressor and its victims?

This is directly relevant to the issue of the prisoners. The official

Palestinian position on the international stage is to "condemn

violence" and thus denounce acts of resistance against the

occupation, while committing to close cooperation with the Israeli

security establishment. What message does that send to prisoners

incarcerated in Israeli jails for tens of years, who took part in the

liberation struggle and are paying the price for doing so? Doesn't

the official Palestinian stance negate their status as prisoners of

freedom, national liberation, conscience and justice?

If a message is ever to gain international popularity or official

traction, it must be clear and coherent. This is absolutely crucial

for internationalization. The words and actions of Palestinian

officialdom must be in harmony with those at the popular level, civil

society, grassroots movements, and also with the international

solidarity and support movement.

That is vital in order to avoid any repetition of the painful

experience of the campaign in the UK to boycott Israeli universities

as part of a wider academic and cultural boycott of Israel. This

constituted an unprecedented and strategic escalation in the role and

effectiveness of solidarity movements. Yet within weeks of the launch

of the campaign, the PA's Al-Quds University at Abu-Dis concluded a

cooperation agreement with the Israeli Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

That dealt a blatant stab in the back to the worldwide movement of

solidarity with the Palestinian people.

One must also question how much importance the PA and PLO really

accord to the prisoners issue – in their international diplomacy and

at the UN, in their meetings with the Israelis, and as a Palestinian

national priority. It is impossible to justify their failure to press

it as a central issue in political talks over the years, one that

cannot be ignored and must be resolved as a condition of further

progress.

Prisoner exchange deals cannot in themselves address the question as a

whole. Awaiting a promised peace deal as the magic solution is an

exercise in futility. Nor can the release of the prisoners be treated

as subject to the Israeli legal system. The Israeli judicial

establishment is an intrinsic part of the system that sustains and

legitimizes the occupation and the racist state and whitewashes their

crimes.

Yet the issue of the prisoners remains a core element of the conflict,

and its outcome is determined by balances of power. The Arab

revolutions are sure to have a decisive effect both on the regional

power-balance and on the management of the conflict. In this context,

internationalization provides a way of changing the rules of the game

that have prevailed so far, and breaking free of their control.

Alternatively, the official leadership's retreat from its role, and

the accompanying decline in popular struggle, leaves the prisoners

with few options other than to go on hunger strike. Yet this does not

necessarily achieve even short-term or minor gains, let alone advance

the cause of their liberation. There is a need for new forms of

struggle to be devised within the prisons, and linked more effectively

to the wider struggle and its strategic objectives.

Civil society

There is a wide array of Palestinian, Arab and international human

rights and civil society organizations that are credible, competent

and have a long and rich record of defending Palestinian rights,

obviously including the prisoners' issue. Palestinian organizations

can collaborate with their counterparts around the world to press for

policy changes in favor of Palestinian rights and establish networks

of relationships.

Official Palestinian representative offices must also do more to

facilitate such work, encourage grassroots input and engagement, and

provide it with official support it. Decentralization and

complementarity are required. Regrettably, official policy and

behavior has all too often obstructed and conflicted with unofficial

campaigning work. This was most apparent in the case of the

Palestinian and international Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BSD)

campaign against Israel. Palestinian officialdom opposed it, citing

the negotiations underway with the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert.

The task of internationalization should be entrusted to a National

Coordinating Committee, including representatives of popular

organizations and civil society along with officials, both from within

historic Palestine and the Diaspora. The roles of all groups should be

coordinated with the appreciation that the Palestinian cause is an

indivisible whole, and that Israel too is one and the same. In other

words, the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, the racist regime

within the Green Line, and the uprooting and ethnic cleansing of the

refugees and displaced, are all products of the Israeli state's

colonial and racist nature.

The pitfalls of priorities

In the process of managing the conflict, there are essential issues

which must not be shelved or deferred. No Palestinian official or

negotiator is entitled to sideline them in favour of other issues,

even if results cannot be reached on all simultaneously.

A wholesale Palestinian and Arab re-evaluation is required of the

chosen strategy of negotiating on the basis of achieving interim

solutions, and the effect this has had on the Palestinians' rights

and their struggle to achieve them. The disastrous effect of the Oslo

accords in this regard has become clear over the past two decades. By

sub-dividing basic Palestinian rights into separate components, they

were turned into hostages to each other and bargaining chips – the

attainment of one package of rights made contingent on conceding

another.

On the international level, it may sometimes appear that diplomatic

gains can be made by prioritizing one set of fundamental rights – or

one issue, such as the colonial settlement in the West Bank and

Jerusalem – over the others. But there is a risk of this seeming,

both at home and abroad, to abandon those rights which, for whatever

reasons, the current Palestinian leadership does not deem a priority.

For example, the Palestinian official campaign to focus worldwide

attention on the settlements carries the implicit message,

inadvertently or not, that freeing the prisoners is not such a high

priority.

No Palestinian official negotiator has ever been heard to threaten to

halt talks with Israel unless the prisoners are freed, or even that a

timetable for their liberation be discussed, or to raise the issue at

the Security Council. This is due to a Palestinian political decision,

or reluctance to take a stand given the prevailing regional and

international balance of power. It reaffirms the disastrous legacy of

the Oslo accords, in terms of both substance and implementation. All

issues related to Palestinian rights that were deferred under Oslo

remain deferred, and look like remaining so indefinitely. This applies

to the issue of refugees and the displaced, and to Jerusalem. And

that's not to mention the Palestinian leadership's tacit

acceptance that the 1948 Palestinians are a domestic Israeli affair

– a notion which they themselves, needless to say, utterly reject

and resist by all means available.

With regard to the prisoners, experience shows that Israel does not

adhere to its declared principle of refusing to release prisoners who

were involved in actions in which Israelis were killed. The same

applies to its refusal to negotiate the release of residents of

Jerusalem and the 1948 territories. It is the balance of power that

counts, and this is not a constant. It can change, largely in

accordance with the level of Palestinian popular struggle, official

Palestinian policy, and the Palestinian will as a whole.

The cause of liberating the prisoners requires the struggle to be

waged on two complementary fronts, within and outside the prison

walls.