Repression
knows no
frontiers
SINCE 1967, one of the leitmotivs of the radical left in Israel has been that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza - and the consequent maintenance of a Palestinian Arab population, similar in size to that of the Jewish people in the Zionist state, under its direct domination - cannot be carried out without undermining the famous Israeli "democracy", which only Jewish citizens could fully enjoy. SALAH JABER
T HE COMING to power in 1977
of Likud, the right-wing Zionist bloc, was an important new stage in this corrosion. Ten years on, in 1987, a qualitative threshold was reached with the inculpation of our comrade Michel Warshawsky, falsely accused of collaborating with Georges Habache's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In addition, four other Israeli militants (two members of the Zionist left, Mapam, and two members of the Israeli Communist Party) were charged with meeting representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Romania.
The launching of the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza since December 1987 only hastened and accentuated this inexorable degeneration. Recent events confirm this. Last March, Mordechai Vanunu was condemned to 18 years in prison for having divulged open secrets in relation to Israeli nuclear weapons. In May, two women militants from the Derech Hanitzotz group were arrested, submitted to intense psychological torture and then accused of belonging to Nayef Hawatmeh's DFLP before being joined by other members of the group (see box p.10). In June, the four were found guilty of meeting with the PLO and con% this, much harsher sentences can be demned to six months in prison. Given зев
PRINGFIELO (MO) NEWS-LEAVER predicted for others facing trial.
If Zionist repression is no longer afraid of stepping over the red line of "racial" segregation, it goes without saying that it does not make much distinction between the "green line" separating the territories occupied in 1967 from those on which the Israeli state was established in 1948 when it comes to repressing Arab militants.
Israeli citizenship for Palestinians who stayed this side of the "green line" since 1948 consists of an intermediary status between that of residents of the West Bank and Gaza and that of the first class citizens, Israeli Jews.
Since the beginning of the uprising all kinds of repressive measures and harassment against Israeli Arabs have been increasing in intensity. The main target for this growing repression is the Abna Al-Balad (literally: Sons of the Country) movement, the most radical of the political currents implanted within the Arab minority of the Israeli state.
Here, we reprint a communique of this movement, dated June 26, that describes the police harassment it has suffered. Since then, the campaign against Abna Al-Balad stepped up. On July 11, on the front page of a large-circulation Israeli daily, Yediot Ahronot, an article accused the movement of being behind the fires that have multiplied this summer this side of the "green line". It also accused them of being linked to the leadership of the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as to Georges Habache's PFLP.
In response to this campaign, which opens the door to a frontal attack against the movement that could go as far as banning it, a solidarity meeting was held on July 16 in Nazareth with the participation of a number of anti-Zionist organizations including the LCR, the Israeli state section of the Fourth International. *
SINCE THE beginning of the popular insurrection in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip in December 1987, and parallel to the barbaric repression applied by the military authorities to the whole of the Palestinian population in those areas, we have experienced a sharpening of repression against those Arab Palestinians that are Israeli citizens, and against all those who oppose the
On December 25, 1987, administrative detention orders were issued against two our members: Raja Agbariya, editor of the weekly paper El-Raya, published in Nazareth, and Raslan Mahajne, both from Um ElFahem. Those were the first such orders issued by the 1979 Emergency Law (Detentions) inside the green line. The period of detention was defined as three months and seven days, until April 1, 1988. On January 24, another of our members, Kadry AbuWassal from the village of Ara, was detained by a similar order until the same date
On March 17, another member of our movement, Hashem Hamdan from Reine, was detained. In April, Hassan Jabarin from the Al Anssar movement in Um ElFahem was also detained, followed by Mohammed Burgal, a member of our national committee, on June 1. These three detainees will be held for six months each, the longest period allowed by the law.
The first three detention orders were issued as part of the Israeli authorities' response to the general strike by the Arab population on December 21, 1987, a strike held to protest against the daily massacre and brutality against our brothers and sisters in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip. The three-and-a-half month duration of the detention was planned in order to prevent our movement from organizing protest acts, especially on the Land Day of March 30. It failed, however, to prevent another general strike by the Arab masses.
The current wave of arrests can't be "reasoned" as a preventative act toward some such date; it comes clearly as a reprisal for
and submitted to varlous forms of torture during Interrogation.
Specific solidarity and defence actions from democratic and feminist organizations are needed for all these women prisoners, particularly in the Imperialist countries. Such organizations, and public opinion in general, must be alerted
September 19, 1988 • #147 International Viewpoint ordinary political activity. After the district and high courts rejected appeals against the first detentions, and as there were no wide democratic protests against the use of such measures, it seems that administrative detention began to be used routinely, just as town arrest orders were used before.
The State of Emergency Powers Law authorizes the detention of anyone for a period of up to six months, without confronting detainees with the accusations against them, and without giving them any opportunity to deny and contradict those accusations. The order is signed by the minister of defence, but actually the decision is taken by the security service, Shin Bet.
The detention, after its execution, has to be reviewed by the district court, but there also the detainees have no opportunity to defend themselves: the accusations and the evidence that support them are presented to the court as secret materials, and detainees and their lawyers are not allowed to review their contents. Most of this material consists, presumably, of declarations by Shin Bet officers — "the one called 'Yony' ", "the one called 'Abu-Sharif' ", and so on — which declare beyond closed doors that they have information from sources that they are not allowed to expose, and by that information informer "A" and informer "B" have sworn that the detainee has done or said something. The courts, with no exception, choose to believe these testimonies, just as they have believed Shin Bet officers for 16 years who have sworn in court that they do not torture detainees -testimonies that have been officially exposed as perjury by the Landau Committee
Severe treatment of administrative detainees
Conditions in Israeli prisons are hard, for administrative detainees as for most others. The detainees suffer from miserable hygienic conditions, monotonous food with low nutritive value and lack of conditions for study. The regulations that allow administrative detainees access to books and newspapers are viola ed by the prison authorities.
These bad conditions are extremely severe, given that the detainees were not ac-
MIDDLE EAST cused of any offence and have not been sentenced or punished for anything they are accused of doing.
Hashem Hamdan has been held, since the beginning of his detention, in complete isolation in the Shata prison, in a cell of only about two square meters in size. He is allowed to go out of the room for only two hours during the day, and during that time he is still isolated.
Some of the administrative detainees, unlike other detainees and prisoners, are allowed visits only by immediate relatives. Sometimes, the authorities make it harder for the family to visit. Muhamed Burgal from Lod is being held at the Jelamy detention center, three bus rides and many hours away from his family instead of at the nearby Ramle prison....
From the beginning of the popular insurrection in the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987, our movement has filled an important role in all of the democratic struggles against the occupation, including two general strikes by the Arab population, and medical contributions campaign, breaking the hunger siege of the refugee camps and organizing demonstrations, mass meetings and picket lines all over the country.
Arab women in prison
UNTIL RECENTLY, women militants In the
Arab countries gained one tiny benefit from their specific oppression by generally being spared political repression. A sort of orienta machismo and a certain conception of "honour"
resulted in women's relative Immunity on the political scene. Even the Israell authorities took account of this particularity.
But this has changed a lot today, particularly in Syria and in the territories occupied by Israel.
In the Syrian dictatorship's prisons, the number of women detained for suspected membership of the Communist Action Party (PAC) is higher than ever before in the history of the country following a major repressive offensive launched against the PAC since summer 1987. Nearly a quarter of the 1,500 arrested are woren, of whom dozens have been kept in detention.
In the Douma prison, 25 of these women began a hunger strike on May 24 this year to win elementary rights like visits from their families or the right to appear before a tribunal with a lawyer of their choice. Some PAC militants have been imprisoned for more than ten years, and none of these detainees have ever had the "privilege" of being tried.) The hunger strike lasted for several weeks and succeeded in forcing some concessions from the dictatorship, nota bly around visiting rights. There is a non-confirmed rumour that one of the hunger strikers died following ill-treatment.
On the other side of the border in April, the fifth month of the uprising, the occupying authorities decided that they would not longer make an exception for women, who until then had avoided being arrested. Dozens of Palestinian women have since been incarcerated to add to the 5,500 men and boys imprisoned as a result of the continuing uprising. Given the absence of detention centres for women in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian prisoners are put into Israeli prisons in violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention stating that prisoners in an occupied country must be held on their own territory. Moreover, like their Syrian sisters, Palestinian women are detained without charges or trial urgently to their plight. *
Torture used to extract confessions
Our activists are repeatedly detained for "interrogation", in which police and Shin Bet officers try to intimidate them and press us to stop our legal and public political activity. In many cases the interrogators use torture in an attempt to extract confessions to various offences.
Since 1980, central activists of our movement have been victims of town arrest orders that require home detention during the evenings and nights.
It seems that administrative detention has now become the standard weapon of the government, in its attempt to deny us the rights of expression and struggle by democratic means. The use of emergency laws, detention without trial, the secrecy of accusations and evidence all these are the authorities' response to the legitimate political character of our struggle.
Experience proves that the denial of democratic rights knows no borders. Just as the use of administrative detention has recently expanded from the '67 occupied territories to include us, those measures might be used against whoever opposes the occupation and against whoever tries to defend demo-
To confront this danger a wide front should be established, right now, in order to organize the struggle for the immediate release of all administrative detainees. The government should be denied the authority to make such arrests. Let us unite to abolish the anti-democratic emergency prisoners now!
Warschawsky in
The mentality of the torturers
IF TORTURE is accepted currency in the territories occupied by Israel, then the case of Hadas Lahav is symptomatic of the present evolution of Zionist repression. Hadas is an Israeli Jew, a journalist working for the weekly far-left journal, Derech Hanitzotz. After 20 days in detention Hadas was freed on bail on May 25 this year, when she related the ill-treatment she had
"I was interrogated day and night for 72 hours after my arrest on May 5. To destabilize me psychologically, they covered my eyes and made me wear headphones that played deafening noise.... After this I was held incommunicado in a miniscule cell with no window."
The last straw was the blackmailing torture that Hadas suffered in an episode that reveals the mentality of the torturers of Shin Bet, the internal Israeli security service.
Hadas was brought before a Palestinian prisoner who begged her to confess in order to put an end to his
International Viewpoint #147 • September 19, 1988