Jerusalem and Ramallah; hunger strike

4th-7th of Oct

I was warned by my hosts that Jerusalem has much different air to it. I presume that this is how they define the air outside of the Tel Aviv bubble: different. Indeed I immediately felt the change which took place in between one street corner and the next one. I had simply cut through to another country: I was in Palestine. There was some shock ascribed to how quickly the landscape gave in to a different look.

It took me some time to get there though. Nobody would cooperate with telling me directions anymore. I was obviously looking as a lost tourist and I was asking around where I can get a bus from that goes to Damascus Gate. Of course it has another name in Hebrew and I was corrected by a mother with her kid a bit abruptly when I asked her about it. “Ask about “Shkhem” , that’s its name”, she said and then perhaps after realizing she had had a bit too harsh tone with the ignorant tourist, covered it all with an almost reconciling smile.

Jerusalem's Old City; worlds meeting

I met my teammate Fred in the Old City. He had had way more trouble getting inside the country this time: after being questioned for hours he was told to sign a form stating that he was not to set a foot in Area A, i.e. Palestinian-controlled territory. Otherwise he would not be allowed into Israel. After this warm welcoming he had signed the form and here we were one day later heading for Ramallah, the heart of area A…

We stayed there for two days to attend a training organized by ISM (International Solidarity Movement). Before leaving Ramallah we stopped by a central square where a hunger strike had just started in a tent few days

ago. Their protest was in solidarity with the one started on the 27th of Sep by imprisoned Palestinians in Ofer Prison, an Israeli incarceration facility located inside the West Bank. The prison holds Palestinians that have been sentenced or held under Israeli administrative detention. Continuous reports of human rights violations have come out of the prison, including reports of imprisoned children. The hunger strike is meant to denounce inmates living conditions such as solitary confinement, visitors ban and the lack of medical attention.These conditions have even worsened upon Palestinian prisoners since June, as a means to pressure Hamas into releasing the Israeli prisoner Gilad Shalit, who was captured just outside the Gaza Strip in 2006.

On one of the tents for the hunger strikers in the center of Rammalah was the portrait of Marwan Barghouti, a beloved Palestinian resistance leader. On 6^th June 2004, following what international observers and attending delegations unanimously described as a political show-trial, he was sentenced to 5 life sentences and 40 years in prison.

I took some pictures of the tents and the many pictures of imprisoned Palestinians hanging above the street and around the place.

There was an old man nearby from the hunger strikers who seemed to want to talk to us. We went and greeted him and right away he started telling us his story with an unseeing look in his eyes. He told us the names of his relatives who were imprisoned, then pointed to his lower jaw that was completely toothless and made the gesture of teeth being pulled out. I was trying to make out what he was saying with the little Arabic that I picked from his words but it didn’t seem to matter so much: he just needed someone to listen and was lost in his world. Whatever he was saying, it was intense with emotion and this needed no words to be conveyed, we clearly felt it. Then tears came out of his eyes. I felt like saying something comforting but couldn’t think of anything so I asked him whether I could take a picture of him, then we shook his hand again and left.

One of our ISM trainers had opened his presentation about legal issues jokingly saying he had been in prison only eight times and that’s why he needed no law studies to be knowledgeable about it all. He participated in a hunger strike in prison that actually managed to accomplish their demands which were better conditions. About thirty people had been kept in the same room before that, he said. One of his arrests happened while he was imprisoned: soldiers went to his house looking for him to arrest him and his family could not but reply: “But he already is in prison!” Here we all cracked up as our mind refused to grasp the absurdity of such a situation and therefore sought refuge in humor.

Well, Marwan Barghoti is certainly not the only one who has such a absurd of a sentence as that of five lifetimes and 40 years on top of it! One cannot but ask themselves how the hell they calculated that. But even this is not as far as the extent of the insanity stretches. If you are sentenced for that long, they --as a matter of fact -- do keep you that long. How? Last week for example there was a ceremony in Nablus commemorating the release of someone who had died in prison already 40 years ago. His body had been frozen all the rest of the time and now forty years later his family was able to retrieve it and bury it. The point is to punish the family by not being let bury their beloved ones. Apart from the bodies being frozen Israel has also the practice of keeping them in what the Palestinians call "cemetery of numbers". Only four of them have been identified to date. A mere metal plate with a number for identification, instead of a name, figures on top of each grave in such a cemetery and only the army is aware of the identity of the bodies in them. I was terrified to read more about it in:

http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=3&id=13373