AMIRA Hass : Palestinian public apathetic toward hunger strike
The main issues: Not all the detainees supported the decision to strike, and its participants have failed to persuade others to join them. The Palestinian public is less sympathetic to their cause than expected, in part due to “compassion fatigue” in the wake of several lengthy hunger strikes by individual administrative detainees in the past two years. In addition, the Palestinian Authority is disinterested and has not exerted diplomatic influence to support the strikers’ demands.
On Wednesday it was reported that the PA finally asked members of the UN Security Council to take action to put an end to Israel’s use of administrative detention. The request can be seen as a partial success for the hunger strike: The PA has been accused of treating Israel’s policy of holding Palestinians for long periods without trial as if it were a force of nature.
But the PA’s failure to challenge the administrative detention policy is in accord with its policy of cooperating with the Shin Bet and the Israel Defense Forces on security. Just three weeks ago, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told a group of visiting Israelis that security cooperation with Israel is sacred. A few of the administrative detainees being held in Israeli prisons, members of Islamic organizations, were previously held in PA jails — also without trial, albeit for shorter periods. Similarly, sometimes the PA arrests detainees almost immediately upon their release by Israel. Detainees have told their lawyers that investigators on both sides asked them similar or even identical questions, and testified to the exchange of intelligence between the Israeli and Palestinian intelligence agencies. The detainees believe both sides want to silence them politically. In other words, even if the PA does not arrest most of the Palestinians that Israel holds in administrative detention, it’s a good guess that their incarceration is convenient for both it and Israel.
This week, PA security forces in the West Bank arrested 16 Islamic Movement activists. Hamas claims the arrests were politically motivated, and members of the Islamic Movement demonstrated against them in Ramallah Wednesday. Uniformed PA security personnel used force to disperse the gathering, and colleagues in plainclothes assaulted reporters on the scene. Unity government or not, the PA security forces is still running the same old program.
Most of the administrative detainees in Israeli prisons today are from Hamas, as are many of the Palestinians who are on trial or serving sentences, and they have not joined the hunger strikers in large numbers. The Hamas source told Haaretz he believes this is largely the result of power struggles over the decision-making process.
The hunger strike was in its 50th day on Thursday, setting a record not seen since the 1970s, when Palestinian prisoners and detainees began refusing food to protest the harsh and humiliating conditions in which they were held.
The hunger strikers’ demands are based entirely on the dictates of international law. The detainees and the human rights organizations that support them argue that the Shin Bet uses administrative detention in an arbitrary manner, holding large numbers of people almost indefinitely, in violation of the restricted use of this mechanism that is permitted by the Geneva conventions: in order to thwart an imminent danger.
A recent press release from a Palestinian organization, the Prisoners Center for Studies, urging media outlets to play up the hunger strike, demonstrates the general apathy among Palestinians toward the issue. This week, the Palestinian public and media focused their attention on the wage crisis in the Gaza Strip, which threatened to undermine the foundations of the brand-new unity government. Banks in the Strip were closed for a week after government workers there realized that they were not getting paid. On Wednesday, they began to open, in stages, after negotiations between the PA and Hamas. The Gaza police force, which together with the Hamas-affiliated security forces there had used force to bar thousands of civil servants from the banks, claimed that it was only trying to protect the citizens. With this kind of tension still simmering between Hamas and the PA, the hunger strike is viewed as a side issue.
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