By Budour Youssef Hassan
HUNGER STRIKES don’t get any easier with experience.
So says the family of Palestinian prisoner Majd Ziada, who has participated in multiple collective strikes since his arrest by Israeli occupation forces in 2002.
“It is as if you are carrying the weight of 15 years of imprisonment on your shoulders,” Hurriyah Ziada, Majd’s youngest sister, told The Electronic Intifada. “It is like running the last kilometers of a marathon: at the start you have a lot of energy but you eventually become drained.”
Majd, whose family hails from the village of Al-Faluja northeast of Gaza City, ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948, was 19 when he was swept up during a wave of mass arrests at the height of the second intifada.
He spent 50 days in incommunicado detention, during which he was subjected to physical and psychological torture, his father and lawyer say. The abuse exacerbated preexisting ear inflammation, resulting in a complete loss of hearing in Majd’s right ear.
During a hearing in an Israeli military court the year of his arrest, Majd proclaimed that he did not recognize the court’s legitimacy and that it was Israeli soldiers who should be put on trial.
Majd was convicted of carrying out armed attacks and organizing a resistance cell, receiving a 30-year prison sentence.
Majd’s attorneys requested a retrial, arguing that his conviction was rife with grave procedural errors. An Israeli military court issued a rare commutation last month, reducing Majd’s sentence to 20 years.
Majd, who was arrested in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, has most recently been held in Hadarim prison, in central Israel. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power such as Israel from transferring detainees from the territory it occupies, such as the West Bank, into its own territory. Majd’s imprisonment in Israel is thus a war crime.
In her most recent visit to Hadarim, on April 12, Hurriyah was told by Majd that he was planning to join the open-ended hunger strike set to begin five days later.
One of the main demands of the hunger strike is to end medical negligence of prisoners.
“[Majd] requires surgery to his ear and he is at risk of losing his hearing completely if it’s not performed,” Hurriyah said. “But the Israel Prison Service has refused to allow it and the only treatment he has received has come in the form of painkillers.”
A dangerous tactic of last resort, the first known hunger strike in the history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement was in 1968, one year into Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Inmates at a prison in Nablus waged a three-day hunger strike protesting physical abuse and humiliating treatment by Israeli soldiers.
The first Palestinian prisoner to lose his life during a hunger strike was Abd Al-Qader Abu Al-Fahm, who died after being force-fed during a mass strike in Ashkelon prison in 1970.
Ferwana said that the current hunger strike is not an isolated event and is part of a long history of struggle.
“We need to remind people that Palestinian prisoners improved their conditions in jails and attained some of their rights thanks to their sacrifices, rather than Israeli generosity,” Ferwana said. “Some have lost their lives to secure those rights but this has been the most effective form of resisting and confronting the Israeli prison system.”
According to the Palestinian rights group Addameer, Israel currently holds 6,300 Palestinian political prisoners, 500 of whom are held without charge or trial under indefinitely renewable administrative detention orders issued by a military court.
Administrative detention has been the impetus for some of the more high-profile hunger strikes in recent years, such as those undertaken by Khader Adnan — a baker from the northern West Bank who has embarked on two lengthy strikes, becoming an icon of the prisoner movement — as well as journalist Muhammad Al-Qiq, lawyer Muhammad Allan, and Bilal Kayed, who won his release after 15 years of imprisonment following a 71-day strike.
Hunger strikes waged by individual prisoners have been more prevalent than mass hunger strikes in recent years.
Esmat Mansour, who was imprisoned by Israel between 1993 and 2013, said this is a direct result of the fragmentation of the prisoners’ movement – a spillover of the bitter impasse between the two main Palestinian political parties, Fatah and Hamas, that has prevailed over the past decade.
Mansour pointed to the August 2004 mass hunger strike – which lasted up to 19 days, depending on the prison, yielding little improvement in prisoners’ conditions – as a turning point.
Several factors contributed to the failure of that strike, according to Mansour: the harsh repression of the Israel Prison Service, then headed by Yaacov Ganot. Mansour described Ganot as a “fascist,” adding that he reintroduced the practice of strip-searching and ordered the separation of prisoners from their visiting family members with glass instead of a net that allowed for physical contact.
The second intifada was still going on and Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister at the time, was not willing to compromise. This was the first hunger strike for many of the prisoners, and they lacked experience to deal with the inevitable Israeli retribution.
Five years on, Palestinian prisoners are having to resort to their empty stomachs again to fight for their rights.
“Prisoners have been preparing for this hunger strike for almost two months and my husband confirmed to me on 4 April that he was taking part,” said Khalida Hamdan, whose husband, Muhammad Mesleh, is sentenced to nine life sentences plus 50 years for his involvement in the killing of nine Israelis.
“I initially questioned his decision but he explained to me how the increasing crackdown by Israeli prison authorities had left them with no other option,” Hamdan told The Electronic Intifada.
Mesleh, a leading figure in Fatah’s armed wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was arrested by Israeli occupation forces on Feb. 17, 2001, leaving Hamdan to raise their months-old child on her own. For almost a decade, Hamdan was banned from visiting her husband on security grounds. In 2012, she went on hunger strike for seven days in solidarity with her striking husband.
Mesleh is a close companion of Marwan Barghouti, the high-profile Fatah leader serving multiple life sentences after his arrest in 2002, and the face of the current hunger strike.
“He pleaded with me to not go on a solidarity hunger strike this time around but since 17 April, I have been unable to cook, unable to sleep properly or think about anything else,” Hamdan said.
“I only hear about him in the media. Is he in solitary confinement? How is he handling pain and fatigue? How is he surviving the revenge of the prison guards? You cannot exorcise those thoughts when a loved one is on hunger strike.”
The current hunger strike, estimated by Addameer to include 1,500 prisoners, is being led by Fatah, but prisoners from all the major Palestinian factions are participating.
The unity and resilience of the prisoners’ movement in the face of Israeli repression, intimidation and attempts to delegitimize the strike are being put to the test. Moreover, it is a test of the capacity of Palestinian society to mobilize in support of the prisoners, to build sustained pressure on Israel, and overcome their divisions to stand behind the prisoners.
If there is one cause that has managed to bring Palestinians together in recent years, it has proven to be the prisoners’ struggle.
— The Electronic Intifada
