When Nelson Mandela was freed from his Robben Island prison on 11 February 1991, my family, friends and neighbours followed the event with keen interest as they gathered in the living room of my old home in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip. 
This emotional event took place years before Mandela uttered his famous quote “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. For us Palestinians Mandela did not need to reaffirm the South African people’s solidarity with Palestine by using these words or any other combination of words. We already knew. Emotions ran high on that day; tears were shed; supplications were made to Allah that Palestine, too, would be free soon. “Inshallah”, God willing, everyone in the room murmured with unprecedented optimism. 
Though three decades have passed without that coveted freedom, something is finally changing as far as the Palestine liberation movement is concerned. A whole generation of Palestinian activists, who either grew up or were even born after Mandela’s release, was influenced by that significant moment: Mandela’s release and the start of the official dismantling of the racist, apartheid regime of South Africa. 
Even the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 between Israel and some in the Palestinian leadership of the PLO—which served as a major disruption of the grassroots, people-oriented liberation movement in Palestine—did not completely end what eventually became a decided anti-Israeli apartheid struggle in Palestine. Oslo, the so-called peace process—and the disastrous “security coordination” between the Palestinian leadership, exemplified in the Palestinian Authority (PA), and Israel—resulted in derailed Palestinian energies, wasted time, deepened existing factional divides, and confused Palestinian supporters everywhere. However, it did not—though it tried—occupy every political space available for Palestinian expression and mobilisation. 
With time and, in fact, soon after its formation in 1994, Palestinians began realising that the PA was not a platform for liberation, but a hindrance to it. A new generation of Palestinians is now attempting to articulate, or refashion, a new discourse for liberation that is based on inclusiveness, grassroots, community-based activism that is backed by a growing global solidarity movement. 
The May events of last year—the mass protests throughout occupied Palestine and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza—highlighted the role of Palestine’s youth who, through elaborate coordination, incessant campaigning and utilising of social media platforms, managed to present the Palestinian struggle in a new light—bereft of the archaic language of the PA and its ageing leaders. It also surpassed, in its collective thinking, the stifling and self-defeating emphasis on factions and self-serving ideologies. 
And the world responded in kind. Despite a powerful Israeli propaganda machine, expensive hasbara campaigns and near-total support for Israel by the Western government and mainstream media alike, sympathy for Palestinians has reached an all-time high. For example, a major public opinion poll published by Gallup on 28 May 2021, revealed that “the percentages of Americans viewing (Palestine) favorably and saying they sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis in the conflict inched up to all-time highs this year”.
Moreover, major international human rights organisations, including Israelis, began to finally recognise what their Palestinian colleagues have argued for decades: 
“The Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group—Jews—over another—Palestinians”, said B’tselem in January 2021.
“Laws, policies and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power and land has long guided government policy”, said Human Rights Watch in April 2021.
“This system of apartheid has been built and maintained over decades by successive Israeli governments across all territories they have controlled, regardless of the political party in power at the time”, said Amnesty International on 1 February 2022.
Now that the human rights and legal foundation of recognising Israeli apartheid is finally falling into place, it is a matter of time before a critical mass of popular support for Palestine’s own anti-apartheid movement follows, pushing politicians everywhere, but especially in the West, to pressure Israel into ending its system of racial discrimination.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="Infographic comparing apartheid in South Africa and in Israel" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/10-11%20palestine.jpg" /></div>
However, this is where the South Africa and Palestine models begin to differ. Though Western colonialism has plagued South Africa as early as the seventeenth century, apartheid in that country only became official in 1948, the very year that Israel was established on the ruins of historic Palestine. 
While South African resistance to colonialism and apartheid has gone through numerous and overwhelming challenges, there was an element of unity that made it nearly impossible for the apartheid regime to conquer all political forces in that country, even after the banning, in 1960, of the African National Congress (ANC) and the subsequent imprisonment of Mandela in 1962. While South Africans continued to rally behind the ANC, another front of popular resistance, the United Democratic Front, emerged, in the early 1980s to fulfil several important roles, among them the building of international solidarity around the country’s anti-apartheid struggle. 
The blood of 176 protesters at the Soweto township and thousands more was the fuel that made freedom, the dismantling of apartheid and the freedom of Mandela and his comrades possible. 
For Palestinians, however, the reality is quite different. While Palestinians are embarking on a new stage of their anti-apartheid struggle, it must be said that the PA, which has openly collaborated with Israel, cannot possibly be a vehicle for liberation. Palestinians, especially the youth, who have not been corrupted by the decades-long system of nepotism and favouritism enshrined by the PA, must know this well. 
Rationally, Palestinians cannot stage a sustained anti-apartheid campaign when the PA is allowed to serve the role of being Palestine’s representative, while still benefiting from the perks and financial rewards associated with the Israeli occupation. 
Meanwhile, it is also not possible for Palestinians to mount a popular movement in complete independence from the PA, Palestine’s largest employer, whose US-trained security forces keep watch on every street corner that falls within the PA-administered areas in the West Bank. 
As they move forward, Palestinians must truly study the South African experience, not merely in terms of historical parallels and symbolism, but to deeply probe its successes, shortcomings and fault lines. Most importantly, Palestinians must also reflect on the unavoidable truth—that those who have normalised and profited from the Israeli occupation and apartheid cannot possibly be the ones who will bring freedom and justice to Palestine.
First published at <a href="http://www.ramzybaroud.net/">ramzybaroud.net</a>. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the editor of the Palestine Chronicle. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak

Ramzy Baroud

The next step in Palestine’s anti-apartheid struggle is the most difficult

June 5 marked the 51st anniversary of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
But, unlike the massive popular mobilisation that preceded the anniversary of the Nakba – the catastrophic destruction of Palestine in 1948 – the anniversary of the occupation did not generate equal mobilisation.
The unsurprising death of the “peace process” and the inevitable demise of the “two-state solution” has shifted the focus from ending the occupation per se to the larger, and more encompassing, problem of Israel’s colonialism throughout Palestine.
Grassroots mobilisations in Gaza and the West Bank, and among Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab Desert, are, once more, widening the Palestinian people’s sense of national aspirations. Thanks to the limited vision of the Palestinian leadership those aspirations have, for decades, been confined to Gaza and the West Bank.
In some sense, the “Israeli occupation” is no longer an occupation as per international standards and definitions. It is merely a phase of the Zionist colonisation of historic Palestine, a process that began over 100 years ago and carries on to this day.
“The law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian consideration; it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application”, states the International Committee of the Red Cross website.
It is for practical purposes that we often utilise the term “occupation” with reference to Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land, occupied after 5 June 1967. The term allows for the constant emphasis on humanitarian rules that are meant to govern Israel’s behaviour as the occupying power.
However, Israel has already, and repeatedly, violated most conditions of what constitutes an “occupation” from an international law perspective, as articulated in the 1907 Hague Regulations (articles 42-56) and the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention.
According to these definitions, an “occupation” is a provisional phase, a temporary situation that is meant to end with the implementation of international law regarding that particular situation.
“Military occupation” is not the sovereignty of the occupier over the occupied; it cannot include the transfer of citizens from the territories of the occupying power to occupied land; it cannot include ethnic cleansing; destruction of properties; collective punishment and annexation.
It is often argued that Israel is an occupier that has violated the rules of occupation as stated in international law.
This would have been the case a year, two or five years after the original occupation had taken place, but not 51 years later. Since then, the occupation has turned into long term colonisation.
An obvious proof is Israel’s annexation of occupied land, including the Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian East Jerusalem in 1981. That decision had no regard for international law, humanitarian law or any other law.
Israeli politicians have, for years, openly debated the annexation of the West Bank, especially areas that are populated with illegal Jewish settlements, which are built contrary to international law.
Those hundreds of settlements that Israel has been building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not meant as temporary structures.
Dividing the West Bank into three zones, areas A, B and C, each governed according to different political diktats and military roles, has little precedent in international law.
Israel argues that, contrary to international law, it is no longer an occupying power in Gaza; however, an Israel land, maritime and aerial siege has been imposed on the Strip for over 11 years. From successive Israeli wars that have killed thousands, to a hermetic blockade that has pushed the Palestinian population to the brink of starvation, Gaza subsists in isolation.
Gaza is an “occupied territory” by name only, without any of the humanitarian rules applied. In the last 10 weeks alone, over 120 unarmed protesters, journalists, and medics were killed and 13,000 wounded, yet the international community and law remain inept, unable to face or challenge Israeli leaders or to overpower equally cold-hearted American vetoes.
The Palestinian Occupied Territories have, long ago, crossed the line from being occupied to being colonised. But there are reasons that we are trapped in old definitions, leading among them is American political hegemony over the legal and political discourses pertaining to Palestine.
One of the main political and legal achievements of the Israeli war – which was carried out with full US support – on several Arab countries in June 1967 is the redefining of the legal and political language on Palestine.
Prior to that war, the discussion was mostly dominated by such urgent issues as the right of return for Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes and properties in historic Palestine.
The June war shifted the balance of power completely and cemented America’s role as Israel’s main backer on the international stage.
Several UN Security Council resolutions were passed to delegitimise the Israeli occupation: UNSCR 242, UNSCR 338 and the less talked about but equally significant UNSCR 497.
Resolution 242 of 1967 demanded “withdrawal of Israel armed forces” from the territories it occupied in the June war. Resolution 338, which followed the war of 1973, accentuated and clarified that demand. Resolution 497 of 1981 was a response to Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. It rendered such a move “null and void and without international and legal effect”.
The same applied to the annexation of Jerusalem as to any colonial constructions or any Israeli attempts aimed at changing the legal status of the West Bank.
But Israel is operating with an entirely different mindset.
Considering that anywhere between 600,000 to 750,000 Israeli Jews now live in the “Occupied Territories”, and that the largest settlement of Modi’in Illit houses more than 64,000 Israeli Jews, one has to wonder what form of military occupation blue-print Israel is implementing, anyway?
Israel is a settler colonial project, which began when the Zionist movement aspired to build an exclusive homeland for Jews in Palestine, at the expense of the native inhabitants of that land in the late 19th century.
Nothing has changed since. Only facades, legal definitions and political discourse. The truth is that Palestinians continue to suffer the consequences of Zionist colonialism and they will continue to carry that burden until that original sin is boldly confronted and justly remedied.
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Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. This piece first published at <a href="http://www.ramzybaroud.net">www.ramzybaroud.net</a>.

Palestine is not occupied, it is colonised

Gaza is the world’s largest open air prison. The West Bank is a prison, too, segmented into various wards, known as areas A, B and C. In fact, all Palestinians are subjected to varied degrees of military restrictions. At some level, they are all prisoners.
East Jerusalem is cut off from the West Bank, and those in the West Bank are separated from one another.
Palestinians in Israel are treated slightly better than their brethren in the Occupied Territories, but subsist in degrading conditions compared to the first class status given to Israeli Jews, by virtue of their ethnicity alone.
Palestinians “lucky” enough to escape the handcuffs and shackles are still trapped in different ways.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon’s Ein el-Hilweh, like millions of Palestinian refugees in “shattat” (Diaspora), are prisoners in refugee camps, carrying precarious, meaningless identification, cannot travel and are denied access to work. They languish in refugee camps, waiting for life to move forward, however slightly – as their fathers and grandfathers have done before them for nearly 70 years.
This is why the issue of prisoners is a very sensitive one for Palestinians. It is a real and metaphorical representation of all that Palestinians have in common.
The protests igniting across the Occupied Territories to support 1,500 hunger strikers are not merely an act of solidarity with the incarcerated and abused men and women who are demanding improvements to their conditions.
Sadly, prison is the most obvious fact of Palestinian life. It is the status quo; the everyday reality.
The prisoners held captive in Israeli jails are a depiction of the life of every Palestinian, trapped behind walls, checkpoints, in refugee camps, in Gaza, in cantons in the West Bank, segregated Jerusalem, waiting to be let in, waiting to be let out. Simply waiting.
There are 6,500 prisoners in Israeli jails. This number includes hundreds of children, women, elected officials, journalists and administrative detainees who are held with no charges, no due process. But these numbers hardly convey the reality that has transpired under Israeli occupation since 1967.
According to prisoners’ rights group, Addameer, more than 800,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned under military rule since Israel commenced its occupation of Palestinian territories in June 1967.
That is 40 percent of the entire male population of the Occupied Territories.
Israeli jails are prisons within larger prisons. In times of protests and upheaval, especially during the uprisings of 1987-93 and 2000-05, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were subjected to prolonged military curfews, sometimes lasting weeks, even months.
Under military curfews, people are not allowed to leave their homes, with little or no breaks to even purchase food.
Not a single Palestinian who has lived (or is still living) through such conditions is alien to the experience of imprisonment.
But some Palestinians in that large prison have been granted VIP cards. They are deemed the “moderate Palestinians”, thus granted special permits from the Israeli military to leave the Palestinian prison and return as they please.
While former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was holed up in his office in Ramallah for years, until his death in November 2004, current Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is free to travel. While Israel can, at times, be critical of Abbas, he rarely deviates far from the acceptable limits set by the Israeli government.
This is why Abbas is free and Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, (along with thousands of others) is jailed.
The current prisoners’ hunger strike began on 17 April in commemoration of Prisoner Day in Palestine.
On the 8th day of the strike, as the health of Barghouti deteriorated, Abbas was in Kuwait meeting a group of lavishly dressed Arab singers.
The reports, published in Safa News Agency and elsewhere, generated much attention on social media. The tragedy of the dual Palestinian reality is an inescapable fact.
Barghouti is far more popular among supporters of Fatah, one of the two largest Palestinian political movements. In fact, he is the most popular leader among Palestinians, regardless of their ideological or political stances.
If the PA truly cared about prisoners and the well-being of Fatah’s most popular leader, Abbas would have busied himself forging a strategy to galvanise the energy of the hungry prisoners, and millions of his people who rallied in their support.
But mass mobilisation has always scared Abbas and his Authority. It is too dangerous for him, because popular action often challenges the established status quo, and could hinder his Israeli-sanctioned rule over occupied Palestinians.
While Palestinian media is ignoring the rift within Fatah, Israeli media is exploiting it, placing it within the larger political context.
Abbas met US president Donald Trump on 3 May. He wants to leave a good impression on the impulsive president, especially as Trump is decreasing foreign aid worldwide, but increasing US assistance to the PA. That alone should be enough to understand the US administration’s view of Abbas and its appreciation of the role of his Authority in ensuring Israel’s security and in preserving the status quo.
But not all Fatah supporters are happy with Abbas’ subservience. The youth of the movement want to reassert a strong Palestinian position through mobilising the people; Abbas wants to keep things quiet.
Amos Harel argued in Haaretz that the hunger strike, called for by Barghouti himself, was the latter’s attempt at challenging Abbas and “rain(ing) on Trump’s peace plan”.
However, Trump has no plan. He is giving Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu carte blanche to do as he pleases. His solution is: one state, two states, whichever “both parties like”. But both sides are far from being equal powers. Israel has nuclear capabilities and a massive army, while Abbas needs permission to leave the Occupied West Bank.
In this unequal reality, only Israel decides the fate of Palestinians.
On his recent visit to the US, Netanyahu articulated his future vision. “Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River”, he said.
Writing in the Nation, professor Rashid Khalidi expounded the true meaning of Netanyahu’s statement.
By uttering these words, “Netanyahu proclaimed a permanent regime of occupation and colonisation, ruling out a sovereign independent Palestinian state, whatever fiction of ‘statehood’ or ‘autonomy’ are dreamed up to conceal this brutal reality”, he wrote.
“Trump’s subsequent silence amounts to the blessing of the US government for this grotesque vision of enduring subjugation and dispossession for the Palestinians.”
Why then, should Palestinians be quiet?
Their silence can only contribute to this gross reality, the painful present circumstances, in which Palestinians are perpetually imprisoned under an enduring Occupation, while their “leadership” receives both a nod of approval from Israel and accolades and more funds from Washington.
It is under this backdrop that the hunger strike becomes far more urgent than the need to improve the conditions of incarcerated Palestinians.
It is a revolt within Fatah against the disengaged leadership, and a frantic attempt by all Palestinians to demonstrate their ability to destabilise the Israeli-American-PA matrix of control that has extended for many years.
“Rights are not bestowed by an oppressor”, wrote Marwan Barghouti from his jail on the first day of the hunger strike.
In truth, his message was directed at Abbas and his cronies as much as it was directed at Israel.

The Palestinian prisoners’ revolt

By Friday, 29 January, Palestinian journalist Mohammed al-Qeq had spent 66 days on hunger strike in Israeli jails. Just before he fell into his third coma, a day earlier, he sent a public message through his lawyers, the gist of which was: freedom or death.
Al-Qeq is 33 years of age, married and a father of two. Photos circulating of him online and on Palestinian streets show the face of a bespectacled, handsome man. The reality though is quite different. “He’s in a very bad situation. He fell into his third coma in recent days, and his weight has dropped to 30 kilograms”, Ashraf Abu Sneina, one of al-Qeq’s attorneys, told Al Jazeera. Al-Qeq was arrested under yet another notorious Israeli law called the “administrative detention” law.
Ominous predictions of al-Qeq’s imminent death have been looming for days with no end in sight to his ordeal. Unfortunately for a man who believes that the only tool of defence and protest he has against apartheid Israel is his body, the Red Cross and other international groups took many days to so much as acknowledge the case of this reporter, who had refused food and medical treatment since 24 November.
He is striking on behalf of all political prisoners.
Under the administrative detention law, Israel has held Palestinians and Arab prisoners without offering reasons for their arrests, practically since the state was founded in 1948.
Khader Adnan, 37, from Jenin, was held under administrative detention for years. Israeli intelligence had no evidence to indict him on any particular charge, despite accusations that he was a valued member of the Islamic Jihad organisation.
He was set free on 12 July last year. This occurred only after he too resorted to hunger strikes, and two particularly long ones: early in 2012 a hunger strike lasted for 66 days, and another, in May 2015, lasted for 56 days.
Each time, Adnan reached the point where death, as is the case for al-Qeq, was also becoming a real possibility. When we asked him what compelled him to follow that dangerous path twice, his answer was immediate: “Repeated arrests, the savagery of the way I was arrested, the brutality of the interrogation and finally the prolonged administrative detention” – without trial.
Administrative detentions are legal black holes. They offer no escape routes and no rights for the prisoner whatsoever, but win the interrogators time to break the spirit of the prisoner, forcing him or her to surrender or even admit, under torture, to things that he or she never committed in the first place.
“It is our last and only choice”, says Mohammed Allan, 33, from Nablus, who underwent a hunger strike for so long that it resulted in brain damage, and nearly cost him his life.
“When you feel that all the doors are sealed, and you stand there humiliated and alone, knowing in advance that the court system is a charade, one is left with no other option but a hunger strike”, he says.
“First, I made my intentions clear by refusing three meals in a row, and by sending a written note. Then, the punishment commences. It is like a psychological warfare between the prison authorities, state and legal system apparatuses against a single individual”, which, according to Allan, lasts for 50-60 days.
“Almost instantly, a hunger striker is thrown into solitary confinement, denied access to a mattress and blanket and other basic necessities. Only after six weeks or so do Israeli prison authorities agree to talk to lawyers representing hunger strikers to discuss various proposals.
“But within that period of time, the prisoner is left entirely unaided, separated from the other prisoners and subjected to an uninterrupted campaign of intimidation and threats. Mental torture is far worse than hunger”, says Allan.
“You cannot even go to the bathroom anymore; you cannot stand on your own; you are even too weak to wipe the vomit that involuntarily gushes out of your mouth into your beard and chest.”
Allan almost died in prison, and despite a court order that permitted prison authorities to force-feed him (a practice seen internationally as a form of torture), doctors at Soroka hospital refused to act upon the instructions. In mid-August 2015, Allan was placed on life support when he lost consciousness.
A third freed hunger striker, Ayman Sharawneh, originally from Dura, Hebron, but who has been deported to Gaza, describes hunger strikes as the “last bullet” in a fight for freedom that could possibly end in death. Sharawneh, like Adnan and others we talked to, was bitter about the lack of adequate support he received while dying in jail.
“All organisations, Palestinian or international, usually fall short”, he says. “They spring into action after the prisoner had gone through many days of torture.”
He agrees with Adnan that individual hunger strikes should not be understood as a self-centred act. “Mohammed Al-Qeq is not striking for himself”, says Adnan. “He is striking on behalf of all political prisoners.”

The next step in Palestine’s anti-apartheid struggle is the most difficult

Palestine is not occupied, it is colonised

The Palestinian prisoners’ revolt

The logic of Palestinian hunger strikes

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