BBC falls for Israeli propaganda again.

Wednesday evening’s program on Israeli jails was a saddening example of senseless propaganda. As someone who has lived and worked in Palestine and Israel I have met on several occasions with representatives and employees of organisations such as B’tselem and ‘Physicians for Human Right’ who operate within the Israeli jails and continue to testify to the harsh conditions in operation there.

If it was not proof in itself, that Israeli organisations denounce Israeli abuse of power in jails, torture and clear contraventions of human rights, Palestinian prisoners went on hunger strike this year in a protest at their living conditions. None of these points seemed addressed by the program, all 60 minutes of it.

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The response of the Israeli government was itself indicative of the tensions which dominate the Israeli Penal systems treatment of Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli Minister of Public Security, Tzachi Hanegbi, told reporters at a press conference in Jerusalem on August 13th that the prisoners "can strike for a day, a month, even starve to death, we will not respond to their demands". (www.palestinemonitor.org)

The protest saw around 4,000 Palestinian prisoners clearly engage in a mass form of non-violent protest so widely acclaimed by Western commentators yet so completely ignored by the so-called supporters of a non-violent intifada. For what greater act of self-denial and proof of conviction for one’s beliefs could be found than self imposed starvation - in fact, this was one of the methods advocated by Mahatma Gandhi himself.

The open-ended hunger strike began on August 15th to protest the Israeli government’s violations of international human rights and humanitarian law with demands for an end to interrogation practices like beatings, torture, and the use of degrading treatment including strip searches. Other demands included visitation rights, provision of adequate health care and sanitation, and ending the policy of solitary confinement. It ended with no concessions of those demands.

Since Israel has not signed the Geneva convention, something the program conveniently chose to ignore, the issue of Human rights violations also appeared to have been over-looked, N. Read (Director) preferring to focus on seemingly amicable relations between guards and prisoners. No mention of the fact that since the beginning of the second Intifada, 40% of Palestinians men, or 20% of the total Palestinian population have been imprisoned in Palestinian jails. Women are systematically raped, an accepted fact amongst political prisoners and torture is so widespread that the term widespread actually minimises the extent of its occurrence.

During the hunger strike, prisoners were repeatedly denied medical care (Ha'aretz and the Palestine monitor, amongst others reported frequently on this) and coerced into abandoning the strike through both physical and psychological methods of torture.

“The treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel violates both international and Israeli laws, as well as rules governing the administration of Israeli”

How the program failed to address any of these issues simply highlights the extent to which the agenda was not to inform but in fact to mis-inform us and/or, to attempt to pacify those shreds of humanity which cry out at the injustices being perpetrated against Palestinians, within and outside Israeli jails.

Children as young as 12 can be imprisoned in Israeli jails for periods up to 9 months for throwing a stone! You can be taken and jailed from a checkpoint for looking at a soldier the ‘wrong way’ (pray tell us the ‘right’ way…)

You can be jailed in Israel for supporting Hamas-that’s the equivalent of us jailing all BNP supporters (no matter what your opinion might be of their views.) Without mentioning that Hamas is a political party within Palestine, as is Fatah or the PLO or PLF. Although their military wings ‘Hamas’ military wing’ or ‘Al Aqsa martyrs Brigade’ (Fatah’s military wing) are not legitimate political parties, the difference must be stressed, as we do between the IRA and Sinn Fein. You can be jailed in Israel for your political views. Democracy - I think not.

The program seemed to imply that no homosexual contact occurred within the jails, with prisoners enforcing their own rules amongst themselves. B’tselem and other Human Rights organisations have dealt with many cases of young boys being raped whilst in adult prisons.

Despite torture being considered legal until very recently, in actual fact until Human Rights groups and pressure groups had lobbied so much it was no longer a justifiable position, the use of torture within Israeli jails remains a widespread and widely documented practise. The fact none of the prisoners were keen to discuss this should be obvious but in case it isn’t: They have to spend the next however many years (if not life) living under the authority of these individuals, do you see ANY sense at all in them discussing compromising evidence about them on National Television? I think not.

“Experience indicates that any law allowing the GSS to use any degree of physical force, even in exceptional cases, is equivalent to legalizing torture.(…) In addition, any statute allowing the GSS to use physical force or intentionally inflict mental suffering during interrogations - even if limited to instances necessary to save lives, and even if the force is not severe enough to constitute torture - contravenes one of the most basic principles of international law: the absolute prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” (B’tselem, the Israeli Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, www.btselem.org)

Furthermore, the problem of laws is actually irrelevant in many cases, since many Israeli jails holding Palestinian prisoners are military bases, where the law that dominates is controlled by military tribunals. Military tribunals can justify just about any action within the context of ‘war’ and many human rights lawyers have had difficulties prosecuting Israeli soldiers due to their apparent immunity from the law in these “war conditions.”

What would have been interesting would have been to talk to anonymous released prisoners who COULD have discussed the torture they suffer and testified to, a story such as I heard, of doctors withholding medical treatment from people on the basis of their non-cooperation or non-collaboration with the Israeli officials. Perhaps then women would have talked about how they are raped with bottles, beaten, burnt and abused. How men are kept in dim rooms with no windows for weeks if not months sometimes, on end, interrogated in shifts by three soldiers at a time and abused all the way through.

One method is famous and involves having one’s hands tied behind ones back and then hanging  from a hook placed high on the wall. How Palestinians regularly die in jail, how they are told aspirin is a miracle cure to every ailment and how inmates watch their cell mates have a heart-attack but not get taken to hospital because the jailers didn’t have an ambulance equipped with adequate ‘security’ to take him there.

Israel even has ‘snitch jails’, where those tough prisoners get sent after ‘refusing’ to confess and where Palestinian collaborators from the different factions share comfortable cells with them, pretending to be fellow freedom fighters, they lure the new inmates into making compromising statements before reporting them.

Prime Minister Barak stated in a Knesset debate on 14 March 2000 that he supports legislation allowing the use of physical force in interrogations in "ticking bomb" cases, i.e., "when it is necessary to immediately save life from a concrete danger of a serious attack, and no other reasonable course exists to achieve this result." To believe this term has not been severely abused, much like the detainees it refers to, is to be incredibly naïve. I think these points would have been far more interesting than a poor attempt at reading the possibilities of negotiations of peace through prisoner/ jailer relations. Perhaps next time the BBC would like to choose to discuss Prime Minister Barak’s interesting use of terminology, which covers just about everything or anything as long as you are Palestinian of course, rather than a half hearted attempted at convincing us Israel actually is democratic. The point is lost on us; we already know it is not.

I did find it interesting how after more than six years in jail, without any right to communicate with his family, the Israeli jail service so conveniently allowed a prisoner to call home -  while the cameras were rolling of course.

That a young woman could be given 14 days in solitary confinement for not standing inline without even a comment.

That Mr Read never bothered to develop important issues such as the fact that Israeli prison wardens have served in the Territories - necessarily and that this also, necessarily, impacts on both the psyche of the prisoners AND the guards. Abu Ghraib seems evidence enough that letting soldiers who are fighting one group then become the wardens of that group is almost inevitably open to abuse.

Mr Read failed to explain why many Palestinian prisoners had not seen their families in months, so I will. Jails are located in “Israel”. Most Palestinians, except those living in East Jerusalem or within the 1948 borders do not have an ID to enter “Israel”, nor East Jerusalem and therefore can never see their family members.

One story I heard was about a man jailed three weeks after his weeding day for supposed membership of a forbidden political group. His wife was pregnant and they were from the West Bank, so he never got to see his wife again and never saw his child. Sixteen years later, the son was jailed in the same prison as his father, for his participation in the same activities as his father, whom he had never met. It was a joyful reunion indeed.

The only positive aspect I can see about the show is the symbolism. Palestinians are controlled in every aspect of their daily activities by the Israeli Forces. Yes. Palestinians are prisoners, whether in jail or out. Yes. They are controlled, beaten abused and yes, sometimes angry about it too.

“It’s the story of a man who falls off a high building and on his way down he keeps repeating to himself, ‘until now everything is fine, until now everything is fine.’ But what’s important is not the fall, it’s the landing.”- La Haine.

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