ISSUES
April 17, 2007
FPA: Palestinian Prisoners Day – Resilience of Land and People
April 17 is Palestinian Prisoners Day. This year it comes at a particularly critical time. While nearly 10,000 political prisoners languish in Zionist bastilles under fascistic conditions, collective imprisonments and exclusionary practices are being packaged by Arab regimes into “final status” in the form of a quasi “state”. Absent from this would-be Bantustan is the very liberation for which those imprisoned have struggled.
How ironic that in lieu of hard-earned liberty, the Palestinians are offered concrete walls, barbed wires and wretched exile. Freedom for the imprisoned is being bartered by monarchs and despots for securing what is antithetical to decolonization. Palestine is being reduced to not even one fifth of its size; with the remaining sliver truncated by walls, fences and Zionist command posts. The 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs within 1948 borders are written off as Israelis, and the more than 5.5 million refugees are forced to sell their right to return for not even a fist full of dollars. Then, this outcome of segregation is hailed as the only viable solution to a settler conquest, and is politically laundered to the world through the very Arab League.
Yet, contrary to the hopes of despots and jailers, nations languishing under the grip of colonial rule have always broken their chains of confinement, and those withering away in prison camps have emerged to lead nations into the future. The examples are many. After all, until very recently South Africa was under Apartheid and Zimbabwe was colonial Rhodesia. The French colonists mistook Algeria for a playground and US imperialists attempted the same in Vietnam. Throughout, and without a doubt, those who bet on colonial regimes and the sustenance of segregation felt the humiliation of defeat, irrespective of elapsed time.
Racism and segregation are never an option. Forced into false political viability as that may be, racism will always crumble under the enormity of justice. And Zionism is no different!
Here is an ideological formation that has thus far robbed the freedom of nearly 800,000 Palestinians by placing them in prison dungeons. It erased from existence more than 500 villages, denied the return of more then 5.5 millions, and has erected walls around those remaining steadfast imprisoning the totality of a denied land. How, by any measure, such a colossal carriage of injustice could ever be normalized into statehood?
Yet, the transparent façade of this presumably democratic state could not be maintained despite all the political acrobatics Zionism could muster. The Israeli polity remains unapologetic as it unabashedly unleashes its wrath against the indigenous people of the land as it attempts to cleanse it in favor of a theocratic Jewish purity – a practice of ideological and programmatic exclusion akin to the despicable pogroms of last century.
But it is those who are imprisoned that hold the key to the future. As illustrated through the literature of the prison movement (Al-Haraka Al-Aseera), a whole discourse of defiance and resistance has always emerged on wrinkled prison notebooks, passed to the world with breathtaking creativity. From behind prison walls and barbed wires, the beauty of freedom is best painted and sung, and despite the same dungeons the political tapestry of revolutionary change are often woven for generations to come.
Thus, the Palestinian Arab people have news for their colonists: The attempted confinement of our own, from Azmi Bishara to Ahmed Saadat to Mohammed Kana’neh, will only serve to cement the notion that the most free of spaces are prison camps. After all, it is there that all the limits of confinement end and the impetus of freedom rises.
Make no mistake about it, on this April 17, the Palestinian people well recognize the challenges facing us. We are determined to remain one people, belonging in total to the Arab Nation, with full freedom on the land of our ancestors, and with the oneness that constitutes our singular unit. We warn against those spreading falsehood that Palestine was occupied 40 years ago. This is at best an underhanded attempt to diminish our land and truncate our people. To be sure, Palestine was colonized 59 years ago, in 1948. To those daring to falsify history, we say: cease and desist, for your antics are only too transparent.
Regimes and organizations presumably Arab in nature are now trumpeting “the 40th Anniversary of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine”, bartering for mere crumbs over 78% of the land and the vast majority of its people. These Karazai-wanna-be’s deserve the indignation of our people.
April 17 is a day that celebrates the making of those chiseled into defiance by the beating of a merciless sun and the whipping of wicked colonists. They are the ones who have transformed Zionist prison dungeons into schools of honor and dignity.
The Free Palestine Alliance – USA
April 17, 2007
