The Palestinian hunger strike ends

Friday, September 3, 2004

ighteen days after they began a hunger strike demanding improved humanitarian conditions, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails resumed eating last night. The Palestinian Authority, through Hisham Abdel Razak in Gaza, claimed the prisoners had won ‘90 percent’ of their demands. But the Prison Service claimed it ‘broke’ the strike without violence, and there were no negotiations with the prisoners.

There’s nothing surprising in that discrepancy. The Israelis regard the prisoners – numbering about 4,000 -- as criminal terrorist ‘security prisoners’ while the Palestinians regard them as political freedom fighters who should be classified as prisoners of war, so little wonder each side would interpret the strike, its purpose and its outcome, differently.

But both sides know that despite the enormous respect of Palestinian society for the prisoners, and despite the Prison Service’s own uneasy respect for the highly disciplined prisoner associations behind bars, the strike never completely captured the imagination of the Palestinian public, won few sympathetic headlines in the Israeli press, and failed to spark much in the way of international interest that would put pressure on Israel.

The prisoners began with some very basic demands – the right to pay phones in their wards, an end to daily strip searches, removal of the (bulletproof) glass barriers between them and their families during visits, and more frequent visits. The initial Israeli response came from (now suspended) Public Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, who said that there would be no negotiations with the prisoners and that as far as he was concerned they could ‘stave to death.’

Woman Crucified # 13 by Silvia Rosenberg, mixed media on recycled paper, 20x30 cm.

he brutality of Hanegbi’s remark guaranteed a bit more publicity for the strike, but the Prison Service hastened to announce it beefed up the medical staff and was giving daily medical exams to every hunger striking prisoner to make sure their health was not endangered. Still, it was obvious to all that if prisoners began dying of hunger – and considering there are dozens of prisoners captured on their way to suicide bombings, there was little doubt some could be found ready to starve to death for their cause – it could be very inspirational for the Palestinians, their first deliberately non-violent shaheed. So, the Prison Service announced that it if necessary, it would resort to force intravenous feeding. Meanwhile, it set up barbecues in prison yards, trying to tempt prisoners with the smell of cooking meats, and ran a black and white video recording from a security camera showing a bare-chested Marwan Barghouti eating in his cell on the second day of the strike. The ostensibly humiliating images were immediately dubbed disinformation by the Palestinians, and apparently, the only people impressed with the images were the Israeli authorities.

The strike kickoff was accompanied by demonstrations by prisoner families in the West Bank and Gaza, and it seemed, at least for the first few days, that the demonstrations were gathering momentum. But the rallies failed to grow into mass marches that non-violently challenged Israeli military positions on the outskirts of towns, the kind of TV images that might have had a chance to spark interest on the Israeli side, let alone galvanize Palestinians outside the immediate circle of those with relatives inside the prisons.

One explanation for the failure to grab public attention on the Palestinian side was a Lebanese TV channel’s version of ‘the American idol’ program, known in Israel as ‘a star is born,’ and which on the Rafi Hariri-owned TV station built up to a nail-biting final competition between a young Palestinian man and young Libyan. Attention throughout the Arab world was on the song competition, and with the voting for the winners seemingly the most democratic election in the Arab world – using SMS text messaging via cellphones – the assumption was the Palestinian, with a self-effacing personality, sympathies of the Arabs, and intense local patriotism (including fifty percent discounts on the Palestinian cellular company’s fees for SMS messages for the purpose), was the favorite. Thus, while the unhappy families of the prisoners paraded outside Arafat’s office carrying portraits of their loved ones behind bars, in the cafes of Palestine, it was the young man from the village of Sulfit who became the hero of Palestinian society for the last few weeks. Even the Israeli press gave more coverage to the song competition than it did to the prisoner strike. Typically, it might almost seem for the Palestinians, for whom nothing ever seems to go right, he lost. Conspiracy theories abounded, including one that suggested Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi gave away free phone calls to Libyans to cast their votes.

The Palestinian prisoner association is possibly the most democratically organized institution in Palestinian politics, with elections, representative bodies for dealing with the commanders of each individual prison and an overall ‘national’ committee with representatives from all the Palestinian organizations, Fateh, Hamas, etc., which can speak on behalf of all prisoners. And despite Palestinian insistence that they would not stop their strike until all the Prison Service met all their demands – which the Prison Service claimed grew from the initial basic requests to a much longer list – and despite Prison Service insistence it would not negotiate, there was clearly something happening inside each prison. There were almost daily reports of prisoners joining the strike and at the same time, there were reports of prisoners who gave up their strike.

In short, with the strike failing to spark a new round of civil unrest in the territories, and as it receded from the headlines, both sides were able to climb down some of the tall trees they had climbed. There is a long tradition of quiet negotiations between the Prison Service and the prisoners, and that probably is what went into play over the last few days. To save each other face, the prisoners were saying that they were only ‘temporarily’ suspending their strike and Yaacov Granot, the Prison Services Commissioner, was saying that ‘now that the strike is over it will be possible to examine what humanitarian improvements can be made’ in the prisons. The Great Palestinian Prisoner Hunger Strike of 2004, which began with such fanfare, was over.

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