[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:

Here we have an article written by a Palestinian in an Israeli prison
published on the Hamas website in which he makes absolutely no bones about
his position: anything done against Israelis is OK and anyone who does
something to Israelis should be immediately released. He slams the PA for
criticizing some attacks.

Why run the article?

Because it is worthwhile to comprehend what we are facing.

Have the patience to make your way through the rhetoric and understand the
immoral monsters that our enemies are.]

Internationalizing the Palestinian Prisoners Question
22-01-2012,11:01
By: Ameer Makhoul
http://www.qassam.ps/opinion-5313-Internationalizing_the_Palestinian_Prisoners_Question.html

The success of internationalization can be gauged by the extent to which the
issue or question concerned becomes a global concern. This means creating a
situation on the ground which makes it impossible for the international
system to continue shirking responsibility, or colluding with a dominant or
powerful party in usurping the rights of a weaker victim. International
mechanisms can then be brought into play to support the restoration of the
victim’s rights and enforce compliance on the violator.

In such cases, justice is the victim’s most potent weapon to offset the
power and repressive force of the dominant party – in this case, the racist
colonial regime of Israel.

But there is a basic rule that has been proven and reaffirmed by every
popular revolution and liberation movement: it is not sufficient for a group
or people to be victims of injustice to earn the world’s solidarity. For the
world to support them, these victims must not only be conscious of and
committed to their rights but more importantly, they must resist their
oppression and oppressors. The victims’ own steadfastness, defiance and
struggle is key to transforming international sympathy into solidarity, in
the sense of effective political action with a strategic horizon.

Internationalization lies essentially and primarily in activating and
sustaining global popular solidarity, as well as acting to encourage
official international bodies to assume their responsibilities.

A mobilized, energized and expanded worldwide solidarity movement can do
much to influence governments, legislatures and media in countries and
societies throughout the world. It can put pressure on international and
official bodies to promote policy changes on two fronts: to support and
strengthen the victims of injustice and their hopes of attaining their
rights via a combination of their liberation struggle and international
legality, and to weaken and isolate the oppressive and racist colonizer,
subject it to sanctions and deny it legitimacy, with the ultimate goal being
the dismantling of its repressive structures.

Defining goals

Yet the official Palestinian position on the release of Palestinian
prisoners in Israeli jails serves to undermine their cause, which is a
central component of our people’s liberation struggle.

The official stance, essentially, is that no final peace agreement with
Israel will be signed until all prisoners are released from Israeli jails.
In practice, this is a recipe for delaying and deferring the liberation of
the prisoners indefinitely, and marginalizing the issue within the overall
Palestinian agenda. Liberating the prisoners should mean liberating them
now.

Israel went to great lengths to turn the case of one of its occupation
troops who fell into Palestinian captivity into an international
humanitarian concern, while demanding that the world view and treat its
7,000 Palestinian prisoners of freedom as “terrorists.”

Yet why does Palestinian official discourse defer to this twisted logic? Why
does the party with justice on its side, the victim, need to make excuses
for Palestinians defending their rights? Why employ apologetic language?
When was the last time an official Palestinian voice was raised at the UN or
EU – or even the Arab League – to defend the Palestinians’ right, and duty,
to resist occupation, colonization and displacement employing all means of
struggle?

This same mentality recently prompted a senior Palestinian Authority (PA)
official to raise the issue of “mutual incitement” and demand that Israel
reactivate the joint committee supposedly dealing with this issue. How can a
supposed representative of a people who are subject in their entirety to
colonization, displacement and confinement accept any equivalence in this
regard between the aggressive occupying oppressor and its victims?

This is directly relevant to the issue of the prisoners. The official
Palestinian position on the international stage is to “condemn violence” and
thus denounce acts of resistance against the occupation, while committing to
close cooperation with the Israeli security establishment. What message does
that send to prisoners incarcerated in Israeli jails for tens of years, who
took part in the liberation struggle and are paying the price for doing so?
Doesn’t the official Palestinian stance negate their status as prisoners of
freedom, national liberation, conscience and justice?

If a message is ever to gain international popularity or official traction,
it must be clear and coherent. This is absolutely crucial for
internationalization. The words and actions of Palestinian officialdom must
be in harmony with those at the popular level, civil society, grassroots
movements, and also with the international solidarity and support movement.

That is vital in order to avoid any repetition of the painful experience of
the campaign in the UK to boycott Israeli universities as part of a wider
academic and cultural boycott of Israel. This constituted an unprecedented
and strategic escalation in the role and effectiveness of solidarity
movements. Yet within weeks of the launch of the campaign, the PA’s Al-Quds
University at Abu-Dis concluded a cooperation agreement with the Israeli
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. That dealt a blatant stab in the back to the
worldwide movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people.

One must also question how much importance the PA and PLO really accord to
the prisoners issue – in their international diplomacy and at the UN, in
their meetings with the Israelis, and as a Palestinian national priority. It
is impossible to justify their failure to press it as a central issue in
political talks over the years, one that cannot be ignored and must be
resolved as a condition of further progress.

Prisoner exchange deals cannot in themselves address the question as a
whole. Awaiting a promised peace deal as the magic solution is an exercise
in futility. Nor can the release of the prisoners be treated as subject to
the Israeli legal system. The Israeli judicial establishment is an intrinsic
part of the system that sustains and legitimizes the occupation and the
racist state and whitewashes their crimes.

Yet the issue of the prisoners remains a core element of the conflict, and
its outcome is determined by balances of power. The Arab revolutions are
sure to have a decisive effect both on the regional power-balance and on the
management of the conflict. In this context, internationalization provides a
way of changing the rules of the game that have prevailed so far, and
breaking free of their control.

Alternatively, the official leadership’s retreat from its role, and the
accompanying decline in popular struggle, leaves the prisoners with few
options other than to go on hunger strike. Yet this does not necessarily
achieve even short-term or minor gains, let alone advance the cause of their
liberation. There is a need for new forms of struggle to be devised within
the prisons, and linked more effectively to the wider struggle and its
strategic objectives.

Civil society

There is a wide array of Palestinian, Arab and international human rights
and civil society organizations that are credible, competent and have a long
and rich record of defending Palestinian rights, obviously including the
prisoners’ issue. Palestinian organizations can collaborate with their
counterparts around the world to press for policy changes in favor of
Palestinian rights and establish networks of relationships.

Official Palestinian representative offices must also do more to facilitate
such work, encourage grassroots input and engagement, and provide it with
official support it. Decentralization and complementarity are required.
Regrettably, official policy and behavior has all too often obstructed and
conflicted with unofficial campaigning work. This was most apparent in the
case of the Palestinian and international Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment
(BSD) campaign against Israel. Palestinian officialdom opposed it, citing
the negotiations underway with the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert.

The task of internationalization should be entrusted to a National
Coordinating Committee, including representatives of popular organizations
and civil society along with officials, both from within historic Palestine
and the Diaspora. The roles of all groups should be coordinated with the
appreciation that the Palestinian cause is an indivisible whole, and that
Israel too is one and the same. In other words, the occupation in the West
Bank and Gaza, the racist regime within the Green Line, and the uprooting
and ethnic cleansing of the refugees and displaced, are all products of the
Israeli state’s colonial and racist nature.

The pitfalls of priorities

In the process of managing the conflict, there are essential issues which
must not be shelved or deferred. No Palestinian official or negotiator is
entitled to sideline them in favour of other issues, even if results cannot
be reached on all simultaneously.

A wholesale Palestinian and Arab re-evaluation is required of the chosen
strategy of negotiating on the basis of achieving interim solutions, and the
effect this has had on the Palestinians’ rights and their struggle to
achieve them. The disastrous effect of the Oslo accords in this regard has
become clear over the past two decades. By sub-dividing basic Palestinian
rights into separate components, they were turned into hostages to each
other and bargaining chips – the attainment of one package of rights made
contingent on conceding another.

On the international level, it may sometimes appear that diplomatic gains
can be made by prioritizing one set of fundamental rights – or one issue,
such as the colonial settlement in the West Bank and Jerusalem – over the
others. But there is a risk of this seeming, both at home and abroad, to
abandon those rights which, for whatever reasons, the current Palestinian
leadership does not deem a priority. For example, the Palestinian official
campaign to focus worldwide attention on the settlements carries the
implicit message, inadvertently or not, that freeing the prisoners is not
such a high priority.

No Palestinian official negotiator has ever been heard to threaten to halt
talks with Israel unless the prisoners are freed, or even that a timetable
for their liberation be discussed, or to raise the issue at the Security
Council. This is due to a Palestinian political decision, or reluctance to
take a stand given the prevailing regional and international balance of
power. It reaffirms the disastrous legacy of the Oslo accords, in terms of
both substance and implementation. All issues related to Palestinian rights
that were deferred under Oslo remain deferred, and look like remaining so
indefinitely. This applies to the issue of refugees and the displaced, and
to Jerusalem. And that’s not to mention the Palestinian leadership’s tacit
acceptance that the 1948 Palestinians are a domestic Israeli affair – a
notion which they themselves, needless to say, utterly reject and resist by
all means available.

With regard to the prisoners, experience shows that Israel does not adhere
to its declared principle of refusing to release prisoners who were involved
in actions in which Israelis were killed. The same applies to its refusal to
negotiate the release of residents of Jerusalem and the 1948 territories. It
is the balance of power that counts, and this is not a constant. It can
change, largely in accordance with the level of Palestinian popular
struggle, official Palestinian policy, and the Palestinian will as a whole.

The cause of liberating the prisoners requires the struggle to be waged on
two complementary fronts, within and outside the prison walls.

[IMRA: He is labeled here as a "political prisoner"]

Ameer Makhoul (a Palestinian civil society leader and political prisoner at
Gilboa Prison)