Ahmad Manasra’s plight continues, as Israeli authorities ruled on 16 August to further extend his time in solitary confinement by another six months. The United Nations declares a period of longer than 15 days in solitary confinement to be torture. Manasra has already been in solitary confinement since November last year.

The 21-year-old man was sentenced as a 14-year-old boy, for being witness to an alleged attack against illegal Israeli settlers. While Manasra did not take part in the attack, he was brutally beaten by a group of Israelis and run over by an Israeli driver, suffering fractures to his skull and internal bleeding. That was just the start of his torture. Manasra was further brutalised by Israeli authorities when he was arrested and interrogated in horrific circumstances. Israeli police coaxed and coerced the boy into an admission of guilt under severe duress.

Since then, he has been subjected to continuous punishment and abuse. He has been severely tortured on multiple occasions, suffering from physical, psychological, and social abuses at the hands of Israeli prison authorities. He has been deprived from family connectivity, visits and communication with his parents and brothers. This has manifested in severe mental illness as Manasra has recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

As punishment for his illness, Israel has placed Manasra in solitary confinement. Besides for court hearings and occasional family visits, Ahmad Manasra has been in forced isolation since November 2021. Over this period, his mental health has deteriorated drastically. Manasra’s uncle described Israel’s treatment of Ahmad as a manner of “slow execution."

Headed by the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, the global solidarity community has united in the call for Israel to immediately #FreeAhmadManasra. This call has been further echoed by the UN, EU, and several international human rights organisations. Unsurprisingly, Israel has not heeded these calls, and continues to blame the victim for the punishment that they ruthlessly inflict.

It is of vital importance that Israel’s heedlessness to international law be put to an end. The pariah Apartheid state, which oppresses Palestinians without a shred of concern, must be held to account. This can be done, as it was done to Apartheid South Africa, through material boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. We urge all members of society and all government institutions in South Africa, to exert this pressure on Apartheid Israel. Without active material support, Palestinians like Ahmad Manasra will continue to suffer from conditions of extreme injustice and dehumanisation.

Gaza under attack!

Between 5-7 August, Israel launched 147 airstrikes in Gaza, killing 49 Palestinians, including 17 children. This unprovoked attack was labeled, “Operation Breaking Dawn.” and wreaked tremendous devastation upon the area. The worlds “largest open air prison,” which crams 2.1 million people into an area the size of Cape Town, suffers from persistent humanitarian crises. Decades of occupation, siege, and military assault has left Gaza without any significant infrastructure or economy to speak of. Israel must be held to account for its brutal and illegal onslaught of Gazan people and their conditions of life, which can best be described as genocidal.

Since officially withdrawing from its occupation of Gaza in 2005, Israel has rapmaged several military offensives against the territory. Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed, maimed, and injured. Children growing up in the area have been subject to severe trauma, with 80% of children exhibiting severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, or PTSD. Gaza’s public infrastructure has been obliterated to smithereens, as Israel frequently targets energy plants, factories, schools, and hospitals during its air-raids. Nowhere is safe in Gaza, not least your own home.

According to a Gazan representative from the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, Israel’s latest round of airstrikes completely destroyed  eighteen housing units. A further 71 units were left severely uninhabitable, and 1,675 units were partially damaged. Thousands more still need to be rebuilt from previous Israeli incursions, but the blockade limits Gaza’s access to the building materials, aid, and resources necessary to do so.

This is why, as per a 2012 UN warning, Gaza is now essentially uninhabitable. Of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents, 1.4 million are refugees, and 1 million of them depend on the United Nations for food assistance. 97% of water in Gaza is considered unsuitable for human consumption. At 50.2%, the unemployment rate in Gaza is among the highest in the world. It is worse for women, of whom over 68% are unemployed. 

International law defines Genocide as a list of specific acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Israel commits all of these acts against Palestinians - including mass killings, bodily harm, mental harm, forced transfers, and imposing conditions of life to bring about Palestine’s physical destruction. As members of  the international community, we are duty bound to take action against Israel’s genocidal practices.

While the world’s major powers rush to Israel’s defence whenever it commits another massacre in Gaza, the world’s people are not so easily fooled. History has proven that power can be challenged through mass grassroots mobilisation and sustained solidarity amongst the downtrodden and oppressed. May we continue to be steadfast in such struggle, just as the people of Palestine are.

Phenomenal woman: Dr Angela Davis

Angela Davis is a renowned political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author, based in the United States. Davis’ activism and scholarship has spanned several decades, weaving movements for race, class, and gender justice, and highlighting their indivisibility. She is an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and a major figure in the prison abolition movement.

Davis’ critique of the United States’ military and prison industrial complexes exposes the lies peddled by hegemonic institutions of power. While US prisons purport to ensure peace and security, they are actually corporatised, racist institutions that have not affected crime rates nor made communities safer. The criminal justice system in America has lined the pockets of multibillion-dollar companies, while at the same time devastating black and hispanic communities throughout the US. 

Across the world, prisons are built and maintained at the taxpayer’s expense; prisoners are employed as near-slave labourers; and hefty profits are handed out to weapons and security companies to keep the system running. The injustice of these systems is especially brazen in Palestine, where people in incarceration are subject to the extremely vile treatment. Prisoners under administrative detention are held captive without charge or trial, and are not informed of any evidence or suspicion against them. Psychological torture and solitary confinement inside Israeli prisons is widely documented. Palestinians are imprisoned by the Israeli military system, are sentenced by military courts, and judged according to military law.

The nexus between Israel’s military and its economy is well-known. As one of the world’s most powerful militaries, propped up by $3,8 billion USD in annual aid, Israeli weapons, prisons, and security systems are central to the state’s functioning.

In her book, “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement,” Davis notes how “Imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.” Nowhere is this more visible than in Palestine, where imprisonment is a tool of punishment and repression for the crime of being Palestinian. Palestinians are criminalised and demonised for standing up for their rights, deflecting from Apartheid Israel’s extensive list of oppressive policies and brutal violence.

Angela Davis has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli military state and its persecution of Palestinians for decades. When she herself was imprisoned for a year in 1971, Palestinian prisoners smuggled a letter to her from inside an Israeli prison. This display of internationalist solidarity amongst prisoners is a heartwarming story which she holds onto today.

As the PSA, we salute her efforts, take inspiration from her insights, and draw courage from her optimism. We recall the global collective fight for her freedom from unjust incarceration. We note how she reflects those values in various prisoner-rights movements, and in her calls for Palestinian liberation. Long may it continue.

Aluta continua.

Jenin and Nablus - Signs of a new axis of resistance

Apartheid Israel has long relied on the tools of fragmentation, division, and dislocation to subjugate the people of Palestine and stymie efforts at resistance. Using its physical apartheid infrastructure, deep intelligence networks, and policies of cooption and collaboration - Israel has had a violent stranglehold over the Palestinian population and made it nearly impossible for resistance networks to operate from the river to the sea. Palestinians, however, appear to be overcoming these obstacles. Not since 2002, during the Second Intifada, has resistance appeared so widespread and coordinated. Israel’s extensive use of violence and assassinations to repress these networks is evidence of the situation. Nevertheless, the resistance movement remains strong and Israel’s attempts to silence Palestinians with weapons is a strategy that seems bound to blow up in their face.

While we mourn the martyrdom of Ibrahim Nabulsi, Salah Sawafta, and over eighty others who were killed in the West Bank or East Jerusalem this year, we remain cognisant that this signals a turning point in the fight for a free Palestine. For every resistance fighter that Israel puts down, dozens more emerge to take up the battle against the colonial regime. Israel’s latest massacre in Gaza was not aimed at Hamas, but rather at the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, whose operatives are embedded all across Palestine.

How wide and how deep this network is, is anyone’s guess. What is clear is that the emergence of widespread resistance signals growing dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority’s role as representatives of the Palestinian liberation movement. The PA do not have the legitimacy to contain resistance, especially in cities like Nablus and Jenin. The people of Palestine are increasingly dissatisfied with their regime, which seems more and more to resemble that of the Bantustan collaborators who facilitated Apartheid South Africa’s indirect rule.

Now, across Palestine, from Occupied Jerusalem to Nablus to Gaza city, space is growing for more direct dissent against Apartheid Israel to be expressed. Israel’s fear of this is reflected by the growing numbers of illegal military incursions into Palestinian territory. At the time of writing, Israel has killed over thirty Palestinians in Jenin, and over nineteen in Nablus. With every incursion, comes a battle. And while many battles - and many lives - are being sadly lost, the spirit of resistance continues to grow across Palestine.

Khalil Awawdeh is a Palestinian political prisoner, husband, and father of four. He has just ended a 172-day hunger strike against Israel’s inhumane carceral system. Awawdeh was imprisoned under administrative detention, meaning he has not been charged, faces no trial, and has no access to any supposed evidence against him. Despite this, it took 172 days of self-starvation, leaving him at the brink of death, until Israeli authorities decided to grant him his right to freedom. 

Awawdeh is being treated at the Assaf Harofeh hospital near Jaffa (Tel-Aviv) with his health condition in tormentous peril. He weighs less than thirty-eight kilograms and is suffering with an irregular heartbeat, blindness, and nerve damage, and severe neurological damage. Many of these effects could be permanent. Doctors and prisoners’ rights groups have warned that Awawdeh could die at any moment. Up until the 31st of August, Israel had repeatedly refused to let him free. Awawdeh was almost forced to die for his freedom.

Awawdeh was promised freedom by Israeli authorities on two occasions. First, after 111 days of hunger-strike, prison authorities had agreed to free him, only to renege on that promise a week later. Second, as part of the truce agreement following Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad negotiated for his release. It took a third promise for Awawdeh’s release from administrative detention to be signed in writing.

Israel’s widely derided system of administrative detention is frequently cited as one which arbitrarily targets and suppresses Palestinians. Awawdeh’s hunger strike comes amid a coordinated prisoners’ boycott against the system. Detainees and their lawyers have refused to attend Israeli military court proceedings since the start of this year. Israel’s military judicial system has been condemned by the likes of Amnesty International as a key component of Israel’s apartheid apparatus over the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Israel’s military courts have a conviction rate of over 97%, where both judges and prosecutors are soldiers in Israeli military uniform.

The system of administrative detention resembles the 1967 Terrorism Act of the South African Apartheid regime, which allowed people to be detained as security risks for up to sixty days without trial or charge. Under administrative detention, Palestinians are frequently detained in intervals between three and six months, which can be renewed indefinitely. Administrative detainees are imprisoned based on undisclosed evidence that even their lawyers are barred from viewing. Khalil Awawdeh has cumulatively spent five years of his life as an administrative detainee.He embarked on his hunger strike on 3 March 2022, against his arbitrary detention and calling for the abolition of administrative detention in Israel. 

As a taxi driver, Awawdeh’s family rely on his support to put food on the table, and are desperate for his release. Awawdeh has four daughters, all under the age of ten, who have seen their father lose nearly all of his weight. They have issued international pleas for his release, remembering the ordeals of his previous long term  imprisonments They know from his previous experience that their father could be taken from them for several years under administrative detention.

A few days before Khalil Awawdeh’s release, his wife Dalal, remained hopeful that he would be victorious.“There are many [Palestinian] prisoners who have been through this experience and were victorious. Khalil, with his will and determination, will be victorious.”

United Nations’ experts have criticised Israel’s use of administrative detention as a violation of international humanitarian law. The state drives prisoners to take drastic measures to defend themselves against arbitrary arrests and detention without trial. Khalil Awawdeh is not the first prisoner to be pushed to such extremes. His plight, and that of his family, exemplifies the excruciating costs of resistance against a well-established occupation force. We draw courage from his victory.

Numerous misconceptions regarding the manner in which Israeli forces govern over the people of Palestine – which oftentimes promote the notion of a provisional Israeli rule that functions as an egalitarian democracy while allowing Palestinians to maintain significant governance over their lives – have distorted global perceptions of Israeli occupation, thus allowing Israel to covertly sustain its oppressive rule of Palestinian people. Israeli government policies have, for decades, been guided by the intention of promoting and preserving the Zionist agenda as Israeli authorities use laws and policies as a means to systematically discriminate against Palestinian civilians. Unlawful mass incarceration is a fundamental mechanism utilized by Israeli forces as a means to suppress the political resistance of the Palestinian people.

In 1978, the United Nations issued a resolution declaring that it “Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle.” Furthermore, the UN “strongly condemns all Governments which do not recognize the right to self-determination and independence of peoples under the colonial and foreign domination and Shehk 5 alien subjugation, notably the peoples of Africa and the Palestinian people” (UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of 29 November 1978). However, despite the UN’s recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation, Israeli forces have criminalised most forms of political activism and protest – categorising them as acts of terrorism. In doing so, the Israeli government has developed a means of using the carceral system to forcibly restrict their opposition, thus ensuring the continuance of the Zionist agenda. 

Since 1967, Israeli authorities have imprisoned over 800 000 Palestinian people – constituting approximately 20% of the population within the occupied territories. Palestinians are commonly placed in administrative detentions without having undergone a fair trial. While Israeli settlers in the West Bank are tried in civilian courts, Palestinians are forced to appear in Israeli military courts which have a conviction rate of 99.7%. Many of the amendments issued by the Israeli government place the burden of acquiring evidence onto the suspect by requiring them to prove that they are not affiliated with illegal activities, contradicting commonly-sanctioned legal principles (i.e. onus of proof lies with the plaintiff). Furthermore, the Israeli military and government do not nullify confessions of crimes that have been acquired through methods of torture and oftentimes will use them as evidence within trials. Notably, as per International Humanitarian Law and the Rome Statute, failure to provide fair trials to suspects is considered to be a war crime for which the occupying power should be held accountable.

Israel’s judicial and carceral systems have been methodologically developed to discriminate against the Palestinian people. The Israeli government uses unlawful methods of conviction to maintain dominance over Palestinian citizens and hinder the Palestinian's ability to fight against them, thus allowing Israeli forces to sustain their illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

Republished from the SA BDS Coalition - End Water Apartheid Campaign:

Apartheid Israeli water tech is not the solution to South Africa’s water crisis!

The End Water Apartheid campaign strongly condemns Jewish National Fund (JNF) sponsored meetings last Thursday and Friday and arrangements between elected municipal officers, officials and an Israeli delegation of so-called ‘water experts.’  The DA Mayor of Tshwane, Randall Williams, MMC Sun of City of Joburg and their colleagues must be denounced for complicity with an apartheid state promulgating the myth that buying Israeli water technology will ‘solve’ our water crisis.

The JNF, established with the sole purpose of acquiring land for Jewish settlers, is notorious for greenwashing – planting trees to erase all trace of Palestinian villages.  Through its subsidiaries, the JNF is currently evicting Palestinians from their land in the Naqab, the West Bank and Jerusalem to expand illegal Israeli settlements.

Israel and its water corporations weaponise water in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. As they battle for water on the ground, Palestinians have repeatedly called on the world to stop financing this water apartheid, to boycott Israel’s water companies and refuse to greenwash Israeli crimes.  Already in 2009, Amnesty International published a report that examined how Israel has stolen Palestinian water sources and restricts access to water for Palestinians while the JNF boasts of building dams and reservoirs that only serve Jewish Israelis, including their military bases. 

Israel’s water apartheid is by definition opposed to any policy and vision that promotes justice, equality and water as a human right.  Its occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights gives Israel control over a major water source.  In Gaza, under siege by Israel for 15 years, 97% of the water is undrinkable.  The 2.048 million people living in this open air prison were this month bombed yet again by Israel, killing 49 people including 17 children and further damaging water, sanitation and other infrastructure.  In the occupied West Bank the Jordan River is being drained dry – it is estimated that the over 600,000 illegal Israeli settlers consume three to eight times more water than the 2.8 million Palestinians living under violent occupation.

NMB Water Crisis Committee member, Siyabulela Mama, commented: “We are not fooled by Israeli propaganda – we know that Israel is not a world water leader – it depends on water stolen from the Palestinian people, driving them off their own land to expand its colonial project. This is water apartheid, part of the global politics of water privatization and water theft where water is for the few and for profit.”

Every cent that goes to Israel’s water corporations, such as Watergen, active in Nelson Mandela Bay, fuels Israeli apartheid in Palestine and destroys our water security.  Watergen, in its glossy PR brochures, claims that its technology produces water from the atmosphere but is known to many in the industry for providing nothing more than an over-priced air conditioner on a truck.

According to an Africa Water Commons Collective activist “The principle of atmospheric water generation (AWG) is not an Israeli invention. It has been known to indigenous communities since time immemorial.  We should rather be funding local tech development and production that is cost effective and creates jobs, not buying capital intensive Israeli tech that can’t address the right to water for all in our country”.

Water should be provided in a sustainable way and in quantities that people can live on.  For a start, South African municipalities must address the mismanagement, corruption and years of degradation of our existing water infrastructure that wastes hundreds of gallons of water a day through leaks and breakdowns.

The End Water Apartheid campaign:

Calls on local, provincial and national governments as well as trade unions and community organisations to heed the Palestinian call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against apartheid Israel.

Demands that the DA ends its complicity with apartheid Israel and that ANC municipalities, MMCs, local councilors and officials act on ANC statements of support for the Palestinian struggle by exposing and rejecting Israel’s water apartheid as a solution to our water crisis.

Calls on all communities in South Africa to stand up together for a water commons, against profits flowing towards Israel’s colonial and apartheid regime based on oppression and resource theft and against the corporate scramble for South Africa and our continent’s water resources.

For more information please contact:
Faeza Meyer, Africa Water Commons Collective: +27 79 252 9266
Roshan Dadoo, SA BDS Coalition: +27 82 816 2799

The existence of the state of Israel itself has inflicted horrors upon the lives of so many Palestinians. Within prisons, the torture that political prisoners are subjected to is almost beyond comprehension.  Physical abuse, long isolation periods, revolting sanitation and severe humiliation are all tactics used by Israeli officials against Palestinian prisoners. As of April 2022, there were 4450 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. 

Israel is the only “country” in the world that tries minors in military courts. Since 2000, over 12 000 Palestinian children have been arrested by the Israeli army and, currently, many Palestinian children in Israeli prisons have not yet been convicted of anything. Israel also makes use of administrative detention as a repressive strategy. Administrative detention is an Israeli policy that allows Israel to indefinitely hold people (including women and children) prisoner without charge or trial, based on “secret” evidence that neither the detainee or their lawyer is allowed to see.

The administrative detention policy means that, even if not imprisoned, Palestinians live in fear of being imprisoned and detained, even if there is no charge. This is reminiscent of Michel Foucault's critique of Jeremy Bentham's concept of the panopticon: the Panopticon is a guard tower that stands within the centre of a circle of prison cells. Unable to see exactly when the guard’s are watching them, the prisoners begin to regulate their own behaviour. By not knowing when they are being surveilled and when they are not, the prisoners have the constant fear that someone may be watching. In Palestinian society, knowing that they can be detained without charge enforces the same idea of constant surveillance. In this way, the state of Israel regulates Palestinians not only physically but forces them to regulate themselves.

In spite of the seemingly all-pervasive power of the Israeli state, Palestinians continue to resist. Whether from the open-air prison of Gaza, or the within the walls of a solitary cell, Palestinians' thirst for justice still pervades. Hunger strikes have been used as a tool by prisoners for many years to protest against unfair and inhumane prison conditions. In South Africa, hunger strikes were used by prisoners to protest their detentions and place increased pressure on the Apartheid regime. Currently, Palestinian prisoner Khalil Awawdeh just ended a gruellinng six-month hunger strike. Palestinian detainees often use hunger strikes to protest their detentions and, like Khalil, many suffer from physical and neurological damage and continue to suffer from health problems even after their release.

Imagine how dire the conditions in those prisons are, and how unjust the system is, to drive prisoners to embark on a hunger strike, which often has life-long health impacts.

The concept of prisons itself has been questioned by many scholars: is it ethical? Is it really necessary? And, while the question of punishment vs rehabilitation could spark a long discussion, there is no doubt that the cruelty inflicted in Israeli prisons onto the Palestinian prisoners is not only unnecessary, it is inhumane. Since the creation of Israel in 1948 and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Apartheid Israel has been illegally occupying land, violating human rights and enforcing terror upon the lives of Palestinians. If the state of Israel insists that, in order to exist, these violations should be inflicted, it is not unreasonable to claim that Israel should, then, not exist at all.

#BoycottG4S

G4S is one of the largest private security companies in the world. It has a long history of complicity with Israeli apartheid, having run prisons, checkpoints, and border posts across Palestine. G4S also supplied surveillance equipment, electronic security systems, and security personnel to Israel for several years. After successful BDS campaigning, G4S scaled down its operations and sold its Israeli subsidiary in December 2016. However, G4S still has a large footprint in Israeli repression today.

G4S owns 50% of the company in charge of Israel’s National Police Academy. They work directly with Israeli police, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Public Security to operate the academy. G4S trains Israeli police, and are categorically culpable in the severe repression of Palestinians under Israel’s Apartheid regime.
 

G4S’s human rights record in South Africa is also apalling. It is contracted by the government to operate the Mangaung Correctional Centre, which where over three-thousand people are held captive.There has been evidence of G4S staff using electric shocks and forcibly injecting inmates with antipsychotic drugs at prison. G4S has also been found guilty of numerous labour-rights violations and currently owes its workers over R20 million in shares, which it had used to claim B-BBEE status in 2005.

We urge all people of conscience, and all supporters of Palestinian rights, to boycott G4S and lobby businesses to divest in all dealings with them. G4S is the largest private employer in South Africa, with over a hundred and twenty thousand employees in a notoriously precarious and underpaid sector. Taking a stand against G4S includes calling for them to respect their workers, pay dignified salaries, and ending all complicity with Apartheid Israel.

#StopG4S