2 good things; three bad things & a bitter/sweet one.

6).  Ramallah:  Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, and the Popular Arts Centre.

From the museum we went to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, where we learned from a brilliant presentation about the work that Addameer does to try to mitigate the desperate plight of those Palestinians who are taken prisoner.  The Association was founded by lawyers in 1992 after the first intifada, and provides free legal aid to prisoners, since Israeli lawyer costs are very high.  They document violations of human rights.  There are many forms of detention but they are all arbitrary, done without a warrant, by the army, from check-points or from people’s homes, this usually in the night time at around 2.00 a.m., when the family are in bed, a practice designed to maximise the fear and humiliation inflicted, particularly the humiliation of parents in the household.  The first difficult job is to find where the person has been taken, to inform the family.  Prisoners are denied access to a lawyer for a period lasting from six days to several weeks, and they are not told the reason for their detention nor about any charges.  Israeli imprisonment of Palestinians usually involves the use of physical and psychological torture, but this is often so expected by the prisoners that they do not realise that they are being tortured - examples include threats to family members, deprivation of sleep, denial of access to a toilet or washing facilities, long hours of interrogation, and being tied to a chair in various uncomfortable and painful positions.  Prisoners with Jerusalem ID are tried in civil courts, from the West Bank in military ones - which have a 99.7% sentencing rate, the sentence having three components - a period in prison, a suspended sentence, and a fine amounting to between £500 and £2000.  Alternatively they may be subjected to administrative detention, which is often used against community or political leaders.  In this case, there are never any charges, but secret information is given only to the judge;  administrative detention is for three months, and subsequently for six months, and can be renewed indefinitely. 

The 8 Addameer lawyers are Palestinians but they have to have Jerusalem or Israeli ID, they have to have done bar exams in Israel as well as in Palestine, and to speak Hebrew, the language of the courts which is not translated for the benefit of the prisoners or their families.  The director of Addameer is currently in administrative detention himself.  There have been 800,000 arrests since 1967, so nearly every Palestinian family is affected.  Currently there are 5500 prisoners, of whom 48 are women and 200 children ( that is, under 18 years old).  500 of these prisoners are in administrative detention.  Of the 17 prisons in which they are held all except one are in Israel, which is itself a war crime, as international law holds that prisoners cannot be removed from the territory in which they are arrested.  There are also 4 interrogation centres.  Judges usually continue extending detention, up to 60 days at a time, until interrogations are deemed finished, a process that can take up to 18 months before charges are brought.  Every effort is made to make the prisoner not only to confess but to implicate other people - for example young people may be shown their mother in the next room, with the pretence that she too has been arrested, or they may be taken out on an army raid to watch their friends being arrested.  They may be put in a room with several other people, one or more of whom are informers, and there be accused of being collaborators themselves.  All these practices are deemed legal as ‘moderate psychological pressure’, and more severe forms of physical and psychological torture are also allowed by the Israeli courts, in a situation of “imminent threat” to the security of Israel, a definition which has been shown by the courts to be absurdly plastic - for example an imminent threat was deemed when a gun was found under the bed in a house where the occupant had already been in prison for several years, justifying his torture.

Child perpetrators of attempted stabbings of Israeli soldiers, policemen or settlers are nearly always killed at the scene, however pathetic their attempt has been.  Sentences for throwing stones are 10 years in prison if thrown at a vehicle or 20 years if thrown at a person.  People can be sentenced for belonging to a political party, for ‘illegal activity within a university’, or for Facebook posts that are deemed incitement to resistance - all forms of ‘disturbing public order’. Very few of the prisoners held are charged with any classic criminal offence. Other categories are illegal entry into a zone without the necessary permit, and traffic offences.  As the conviction rate is so high, nearly everyone pleads guilty and then tries to get their lawyer to negotiate.  Sentences for children over the age of 12 are meant to be only for six months, and 14-16 year olds only a year, but in practice they are held without charges until old enough when sentenced to have the full sentence imposed.

Administrative detention can be renewed 3 days before a prisoner is due for release, sometimes just hours or minutes before, which itself is another form of torture.  

We were told about the forthcoming prisoners’ hunger strike, in protest about the loss of small rights that the prisoners have won through struggle over many years, such as the toleration of a small number of mobile phones in the prisons, the right to read books, the right for prisoners’ wing representatives to meet one another,  and the right to play chess.  Last October 2000 books were confiscated.  Also the prisoners’ protest is about the poor quality and quantity of food, and the lack of water.  Conditions in the women’s prison are particularly bad.  

After that we went on a short bus ride to the Popular Arts Centre, which was opened in 1987 to try to save Palestinian culture, in the sphere of music and dance, and to build bridges with other cultures.  A young man with the obvious physical grace of a trained dancer gave us a presentation.   The Centre runs a dance school with 500 students of all ages, learning Palestinian folk dance but also ballet and salsa, in the belief that art, which is always communicative, and always a powerful tool for social change, is resistance, and that lack of resistance is equivalent to collusion with the oppressor.  The Centre organises an international festival every year, and also every year there is a Heritage Festival in which dance groups come together from around Palestine.  These groups have been set up through outreach work from the Centre, and the site of the Festival rotates annually through six different cities.  There is also a library of folk music which is used as a resource for new compositions, as well as a cultural inventory.  The Centre is committed to BDS, and to resisting normalisation - striving never to put the occupier and the occupied on the same level.  We were able to go and watch several children’s Palestinian dance classes, which were a delightful and a hope-engendering spectacle.

The central part of Ramallah seemed to contain many large buildings, shiny banks and other offices, out of step in terms of development from all the other places we visited in the West Bank, and somehow vulgar and brash, like Arafat’s tomb, and equally in denial.  On the way back we managed to get past the Qalandia camp, but there was a pall of tear gas, and children at the side of the road were preparing stuffed tyres to set alight and roll down the road in the dusk, apparently pointlessly risking prolonged imprisonment in the grief and rage of bereavement after Mohammad Edwan’s funeral.  I have to qualify ‘pointlessly’, because it fails, in focussing on the individual child protagonist, to acknowledge the collective nature of the resistance, which has to find expression in whatever ways are available.  ‘Beautiful resistance’ has to be complemented by absurd, sacrificial resistance; the intolerability of the domination practiced against the collective has to be enacted, which is why the victims of such self-sacrifice, even if they act out of blind rage and defiance, even if they act unwisely and cause great harm and grief to their families, are celebrated, and should be celebrated.  This was an important lesson for me - it is too easily done to add ones own voice to that of the oppressor in stigmatising certain kinds of resistance that seem futile snd self-damaging.