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Israel’s Guantanamo: Force Feeding for “Life.”

By: Brett Redmayne-Titley
Israel's Guantanamo: Force Feeding for “Life.”

 

Israel now has its own Guantanamo prison. Palestinian political prisoners are starving to death while manacled to Tel Aviv prison hospital beds. Will the torture of force feeding be next.

Do not forget; their resistance to this oppression should be the reason for your own.

Two weeks ago a Call to Order came from the prisoners by letter.

Our great beloved Palestinian people, do you accept to have us be an easy bite between the fangs of our merciless jailers?…We are behind bars, spending years of our lives for Palestine, for its liberation and the freedom of its people…

Israel now has its own Guantanamo-esque, grotesque prison system replete with torture, discontinued  human rights, war crimes, and the latest hunger strikes. The realities of American “indefinite detention” have come to Palestinians who languish without charge in Israeli prisons. In Israel, as with American examples of inhumanity, political damage control regarding the terminal health of hunger strikers does not begin with a return to compassion, or international law. Enter, again, American barbarism: “legalized” force feeding. Like America, Israel believes that a barely-alive prisoner causes less world-wide collateral damage than a dead one.

According to Israel Prisons Service (IPS), two-hundred-and-fifty prisoners are refusing food, while seventy-five of those on hunger strike have been hospitalized. 5,271 Palestinians are currently in Israeli jails while one-hundred-ninety-two are currently held in administrative detention.

 

In a letter on behalf of prisoners, on Thursday, May 29, 2014,  detainees Khalil Mousa Zawahra, and  Mousa Yacoub Ma’marjy, screamed for help.

 

We are sending a scream, a shout, from behind the walls of our dark cells… while death stands in front of us, inhabits our cells. Our bodies are collapsing, we can barely move our eyes, our heartbeats slowly fading away, and even writing this letter required  hard work, the detainees wrote.

 

These prisoners are not exaggerating. United Nations Special Reporteur, Richard Falk, wrote this week,

 

The highly respected Israeli human rights NGO, Adalah, has issued an urgent appeal on behalf of a reported 125 Palestinian prisoners who are engaged in a hunger strike protesting their being held in Israeli jails… It is the longest collective hunger strike in Palestinian history.

 

Predictably, Israel’s Health Ministry denied all factual evidence, stating that the health of the  strikers is ”normal” and that ”none of them is in a life-threatening situation as of today.

 

Not True.

 

“They are all in life danger otherwise they wouldn’t be in hospital,” said Jawad Boulos, a lawyer  who visited fourteen hunger strikers in Ichilov and Tel Ha Shomer hospitals in Tel Aviv, this past Sunday. The prisoners are shackled to their beds and denied contact with the outside world. He described the containment of each prisoner.

 

”Every detainee has three guards. They are taking water, salt, sugar and some are taking vitamins at the advice of the doctors. On average they have lost 15 to 16 kilograms [about 35 pounds], they look tired, some have pains in different areas of the body like their head, they have trouble seeing, some are vomiting, some have chest pains.

Publications in Israel suggest that Shin Beth places a high priority on ending the hunger strike. Correctly, they express growing concern that the hunger-strike, or acts of solidarity, will  spread among the thousands of Palestinians currently in Israeli jails. Indeed. This week  four hundred new prisoners commenced their own hunger-strikes, in solidarity with the dying prisoners.

 

Two  previous Palestinian hunger strikes were successful. On December 18, 2011  Khader Adnan went sixty-six days without food, followed by a forty-three day hunger strike by Hana Shalabi until Israel finally offered concessions to induce the prisoner to give up the hunger strike, since prison medical authorities feared death or permanent disability.

 

This frustrated Israel. The empire does not like to lose. It likes even less examples of victorious opposition providing hope to its subjects.

 

Is the world listening, or is the Zionist controlled media terminally controlling the outcome of the hunger striker’s fate?

 

Richard Falk accurately assesses the plight of the Palestinian cause.

 

As has been the Palestinian experience all along, the world media averts its gaze when humanitarian emergencies arise in occupied Palestine…

 

True. Desensitized to the extremes of daily world-wide violence regularly increasing in degrees of horror, for some, Palestine is just  the normal course of the world. Opposition takes courage, conviction, and energy. For many, apathy is the easy, if not, selfish choice. Ignorance can be bliss if you choose to ignore the obvious… until the sorrows of empire arrive on your own door step. Then the lies become reality.

 

Regularly Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) incursions into Palestine snatch up innocent victims for unknown reasons not to be revealed. To increase the effect of IDF terror, night is the predictable time for these nightmares to begin.

 

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) reports weekly from Palestine, providing essential details on Israeli atrocities. If you care about Palestine; theirs is mandatory reading.

 

On June 2, 2014, an example of how Israel’s prisons have become full of innocent Palestinians came to light.

 

 At around 2 am on Sunday night, five Israeli military jeeps, three large military vehicles, and some thirty soldiers on foot arrived in the village of Asira al-Qibliya . In total silence, they started entering Palestinian houses without knocking on their doors first.

 

Next, the soldiers kidnapped (‘arrested’) a young man from every house they visited. Two were released soon after, eight remained detained.

Now, Jihad Hammad Ashier, Mohammed Fouas Saleh, Mohammed Abde Ruhan, Sari Bhassam Asari, Brothers Nehmer Fateh Nijim, Nahsem Fateh Nijim, Khaled Ahmad, and Mhoattasem Mohammed Salehm languish without charge in an unknown Israeli prison. When they might be released is equally unknown.

According to Ma’an News Agency, in a formal letter of June 10, 2014, to the UN Security Council and twenty-eight EU member nations, the PLO’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, called on members to pressure Israel into annulling its policy of administrative detention.

 

The PLO spokeman demanded “immediate intervention.”

 

“The hunger strike… shines a light on one of the most severe injustices of military rule in the occupied State of Palestine,” wrote Erekat. ” Israel denies [them] the right to see the evidence against them, the detention is renewable and has no upper limit, prisoners are not informed of their release date and they do not stand any trial.”

 

These prisoners suffer an almost identical fate as those innocents held at Guantanamo Bay, America.

 

To bring attention to the plight of these prisoners, Palestinians in the West Bank held a partial general strike on June 8. In Gaza, hundreds of citizens held a candlelight vigil. This past Thurs June 12, shopkeepers in East Jerusalem closed their shops in the busy areas of Saladin Street, Bab al-Zahara, Sultan al-Suleiman Street, and parts of the Old City.

Demonstrations in solidarity with the prisoners have also taken place in a number of countries, but they have attracted little notice outside Gaza

 

Ukraine has captured most of the international headlines. Palestine has been focused much more on the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation than on the hunger strike. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who had time to attend the swearing-in of former military dictator, now Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and  then a quick “prayer for peace” with Catholic Pope Francis and Zionist Israeli President Shimon Peres, could not muster a mention of support for the hunger striking Palestinian prisoners.

 

 

The Guantanamo Excuse

 

“As physicians it is a very delicate situation and we can’t participate in torturing the patient. Force feeding is torture,” says Dr. Tami Karni, chair of the Israel Medical Association ethics bureau.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predictably likes the example at Guantanamo Bay. The canons of Zionism and empire value torture. For him, throwing anyone you damn well please into long term incarceration, without charge, and torturing them is just one of those perks. Obama confirmed this by signing into law section 1023 of the National Defense Authorization Act, on Dec 31, 2012, thus further violating the US Constitution and legalizing all manner of new empire building, draconian tools like Guantanamo.

 

Force feeding is not yet legal for Israeli doctor’s willing to forget their oath. The Knesset is moving at full speed. According to the Christian Science Monitor, legislation to also legalize torture passed its first reading in the  Israeli parliament, on Monday and Netanyahu is fast tracking it so that force feeding can start right away.

 

Before a faux constitutional scholar brought “ change” to the US Presidency in 2008, White House Legal Council under G.H.W. Bush,John Yoo, used tricks of language and law to justify the supposed legality of war crimes and torture. Not surprisingly then, the law, similarly to sect.1023 of the NDAA, is obtuse, all encompassing, and self-serving. It declares that,

“… a hunger strike is, in effect, a violation of prison discipline… The situation demands the formalization of appropriate and adequate ways of dealing with these hunger strikes.”

Indeed. Such as force feeding.

Predictably, Netanyahu has justified force-feeding by referring to the barbaric American practice already used at Guantanamo Bay. The “terrorist” suspects there, most of whom have been declared innocent by the US military, have been detained for as much as thirteen years. Most still don’t know the charges against them, and have never had a trial. All the while they are subjected to a daily array of inhuman and degrading practices. For the same evil political reasons Israel  must rationalize their own war crime of stuffing a tube through a hunger striker’s nose, into his stomach, thus injecting baby formula: to keep a protester’s death from embarrassing the fatherland.
As UN Reporteur, Richard Falk, legally connects force-feeding with torture. He references as the most authoritative laws on the international status of force-feeding being contained in the Declaration of Malta, adopted by the World Medical Association (1991, rev. 2006), and the International Convention on Torture (1984). Referring to the former he notes,

 

 In guideline 6 the Declaration states that hunger strikers should be protected from coercion, and more directly guideline 13 asserts that forcible feeding is never acceptable because it constitutes a form of inhuman and degrading treatment.

 

Definitions of torture mean nothing to Kings. Netanyahu assured the press that, even if some doctors refuse to participate in force-feeding, he will “find enough that will.”

 

Two weeks ago a US District Court showed a short-lived humanist concern, when Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in favor of hunger striking Guantanamo inmate Abu Wa’el Dhiab, issuing a Restraining Order preventing the US Government from force feeding him. Dhiab, a Syrian national cleared for release after arriving in 2002 , has been refusing food and water to protest his indefinite imprisonment without charges.

 

The illusion of justice for Mr. Dhiab lasted less than 48 hours.

 

Suddenly, two days later on May 18, 2014, Kessler reversed her ruling, issuing a revised Court Order. In a simultaneous example of American court hypocrisy and coercion, Judge Kessler bemoaned having to now make a “Hobson’s choice” -either allow Mr. Dhiab to die, or inflict on him forever, daily “great pain and suffering,” via continued forced feedings. Of course, for an American judge effecting American-style jurisprudence, great pain and suffering was now her preference. Obviously, someone had found just the right words to whisper in Judge Kessler’s ear.

 

“The court simply cannot let Mr. Dhiab die,” was her stated benevolence.

Enforcing a “life” sentence of increased daily torture for an innocent man? Well, that was the Christian thing to do.

Or, Zionist?

 

Don’t Forget…

 

The fate of the Palestinian hunger strikers is not assured. World outrage would help.

Theirs is not merely their protest. Protests, by the necessities of history, must be all inclusive, or doomed to failure. Sacrifices for the good of all demand, no, obligate all to participate. Today more than ever fate is in the hands of those who must rise.

Guantanamo, the US brand or the Israeli, is not just torture, injustice, and oppression.  It is a  message.  A  message to all who have yet to heal and force feed themselves the new authoritarian definitions of all words pertaining to truth, democracy, and humanity: “Do Not Resist!”

When,“torture,” is successfully explained away as,“feeding,” then “humanity” has also lost forever the weight of the word.

If we accept this message, we must then accept new meanings for all words “human.”

What say you?

 

 

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