PALESTINE: A Palestinian state in the creativity borders

Z is a Palestinian Muslim young boy, 25 years old, who lives in Bethlehem. 3 fingers are missing from one of his hands because during the Second Intifada a hand grenade exploded in his hand. By then, Z and his friends were engaged in going out in the evenings to play football or anything else just to defy the curfew imposed by Israel. It was their way of saying: "You are not going to control our lives". A soldier must have felt upset about this idea and hided an explosive inside a tennis ball the kids had been playing with. When Z and a friend went to look for a ball they lost, they found the tennis ball. "Look how lucky we are, and you thought you had lost it!" His friend told him. Z took it, started to shake it and when he was still saying "this is not my ball, it weighs too much”, the explosion occurred.

Far from frightening him, the event made Z look forward to continue participating in the resistance against Israel. He joined demonstrations and confrontations with soldiers throwing stones, but he did it without his parents knowing it: they never stopped warning and even threatening him against any kind of activism, like any father, "for his good." Z kept swearing he was not involved in anything. Until one day, in the middle of the second intifada, Z to find his father throwing stones at tanks in the same demonstration. The two looked at each other, surprised, and the father, feeling guilty, said: "Well, enough, let's go home." An awkward silence accompanied the two to the door, broken only when his father told him: "Don´t say a word about this to your mother!"

The fact of having been wounded during the Second Intifada makes almost impossible for Z to get a permit to cross the wall and visit Jerusalem. Even when he had jobs that guaranteed a permit for the rest of his teammates, he was denied it. The official reason: "Z is a threat to the state of Israel."

However, Z does not care and he finds the means to do what he wants, and if he doesn´t get a permit, he does it without it. He recently spent three days "holidays" in Jaffa (in 1948 the largest Palestinian city, now an Arab neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv). He put on shorts, a modern hat, an earring and he went to the bush at night. Already in the morning, he reached a settlers road across the wall and started to hitchhike (not uncommon in Israel). A farmer picked him up and took him to Jerusalem. "I said I was a Canadian who grew up in Italy, and the guy went all the way instructing me on how terrorist the Palestinians are and how little they deserved to live in “their "land," he says. From there, he took a bus to Tel Aviv, and once there, he found accommodation in a friend's home in Jaffa. "I spent three great days on the beach," he says.

During Ramadan, Z wanted to go to Jerusalem to pray at the Al Aqsa compound, the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. He hid overnight in the bush, but this time it was more complicated. "There were many military jeeps around the area with lights and I had to hide under a pile of excrement to avoid police dogs tracking me." After a while, he decided to aim at the nearest settlement, Gilo, and when he was about to arrive, he found several boars. "It is not the natural place for these animals to live, someone must have put them there to protect the colony," he assumes. Once in Gilo, he picked up the Israeli line bus and got to the center of Jerusalem.

The Z imaginative forays have taken him to sneak in a kibbutz (Israeli commune) and get to sing and play guitar with the settlers, pretending to be Italian, or trying to cross to the Israeli side by swimming in the Dead Sea; the Police stopped him and he apologized by saying "I didn´t notice, it must have been the tide". His technique is polished: "When I'm on the Israeli side, I always carry maps and books with me, and if a cop looks at me and I see that he suspects, I approach him, I speak in English with a funny accent and unfold the map in his face. I tell him I'm lost and I ask him to show me the way. The cop quickly loses interest. "

Z does not cross the wall with the intention of harming anyone or "pose a threat to the state of Israel." Just as he says, "If you deny me my rights, I provide them to me myself."

Khader Adnan ends hunger strike protesting against his administrative detention. What is an administrative detention?

The hunger strike of Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan from December 17 to denounce his detention without trial by Israel ended today with an agreement between the parties: Adnan left his hunger strike in exchange for his administrative detention not being renewed on April 17.

The media has not spread very much Khader Adnan´s case, but his action has brought back to the forefront (at least locally) the famous "administrative Israeli detentions". These arrests are based on secret evidence and can be extended an undefined number of times, skipping all international laws.

That's how they work:

One hundred soldiers arrive, usually at night, at the home of the suspect with dogs and throwing sound bombs. They force him out, handcuff and blindfold him and then push him into the military jeep. Neither he nor his family are informed about of what´s his crime or where they are taking him to. The suspect is transferred to an interrogation center where, through threats, verbal abuse and even torture, always without the presence of his lawyer, he is forced to confess about anything. According to Israeli military orders, a Palestinian can be held in detention without trial up to 90 days. Sometimes a written confession in Hebrew is given to the prisoner, which he usually is forced to sign, not knowing what he is signing because he doesn´t understand. Nevertheless, the document is used as the main evidence in the military court.

Otherwise, there´s the "administrative detention". That means holding a prisoner up to six months in jail based on "secret evidence". The lawyer, who founds himself looking for his client through all prisons and detention centers, does not know what he has to defend the detainee from, and often he cannot even talk to the detainee (as well as his family) because the prison is located on the Israeli side of the wall (in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits transferring detainees from the occupied territory to the occupier side.) Permits for lawyer or family to gain access to the prisoner are often dismissed for "security reasons".

After 6 months, the order may be renewed, and so on, indefinetly.

Khader Adnan has gone through 6 administrative detentions and he was remained in prison for a cumulative period of 5 years. This last time, he spent 3 weeks in an interrogation center before the official start of his administrative detention. Israel accuses him of being part of Islamic Jihad, violent and very unpopular in Israel, the West Bank and the West. However, they Israel hasn´t shown any clear evidence or charges against him so far and, as a Palestinian activist who once suffered 2 administrative detentions told me today: "If he did something wrong, nothing prevents him from having a trial as any other suspect and be condemned for it. What we don´t accept is people being imprisoned for no reason.”

Children. Under Israeli law, an Israeli adult is sombeody over 18 years old. According to military orders ruling the Palestinian occupied territory, a Palestinian adult is somebody over 16 years old. Until the army put into force a new military order in July 2009, children as young as 12 were judged in military courts and received the same punishment as adults. Regarding the rest (the treatment in prison, interrogation and administrative detentions) there are few changes.

When the boy finally comes to court, he´s judged according to the age he is when he gets his sentence, not the age he was when he committed the crime. That means that if a kid is 15 years old when he´s arrested but turns 16 during arrest, before trial, he´s tried as an adult.

Only a prison provides education to children, but it only teaches mathematics and arts; all other subjects are banned because of "security reasons".

Women. Let us add to all this sexual harassment during interrogations, indistinct treatment and lack of care for pregnant women, who sometimes give birth while chained to a bed "for security reasons" and we´ll get the treatment given to some of the women. Four of these cases occurred between 2004 and 2008.

There are currently 307 Palestinian prisoners in "administrative detention" and 280 Israeli Palestinian children in Israeli prisons (2012).

(Data from Addameer for Palestinian political prisoners and Defense Children International Palestine)

Some Israelis are happy that several nursery and primary school palestinian children died in a bus accident

On Thursday, February -16, a bus carrying Palestinian children from a primary school and a nursery from Shufat refugee camp (Jerusalem) hit an Israeli truck near the Qalandia checkpoint, at the entrance to Ramallah. As a result, 5 children and one teacher were killed and 40 others were injured, although at first it was believed that the number of victims had been higher.

Condolences ensued: embassies, organizations, governments and individuals, including many Israelis who sent solidarity messages in Palestinian news websites. Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed "sorrow" for what happened and said they would provide "the Palestinian Authority with any help required." But all these acts of good will were blurred by the comments that some Israelis posted on various websites. For example, on the Facebook page of the Israeli news website Walla News, these comments appeared:

And one can think, "Well, there are radicals everywhere, if it was the other way around, perhaps some radical Palestinian would have done the same." And it's true but, in my view, there is a difference: many of these comments, such as "Death to the Arabs, why do we help them?" "Can we send another truck?" Or "I would send a double trailer to get rid of all these shit" appeared on the Facebook page of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And his advisors (or himself) did not even bother to remove them. Now imagine the opposite case, with the page of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's full of comments against Israeli children killed in a traffic accident. Netanyahu would give a press conference to "show the world how terrorists the Palestinians are, who are allied with Iran and they want to provoke a new holocaust in Israel", and the whole world would condemn anti-Semitism.

And the difference is accepted as something normal. If the news on TV talk about a "Palestinian terrorist", nobody questions he WAS a terrorist (and maybe he was, but anyway we do not even doubt about it). But when a media outlet dares to step aside from the mainstream speech and accuses an Israeli soldier of being a terrorist, then we think, "Wait, wait, why do they call him a terrorist? What has he done exactly?”

I condemn anyone who uses terror and death to achieve his aims, here or in Honolulu, wherever he comes from. But precisely because of that, let's call things by their name, regardless of the background of the agresssor.

Recently, a journalism student asked me: "And how do you manage to interview terrorists?" And I decide to make a sociological experiment. I replied:

"You find the way, you swallow whatever he says so he speaks freely and then you can write it and show the public how he thinks.  Once I asked one if he believed that violence was necessary to achieve his purposes, and he said: "Yes, we need to use the language of weapons so that they can get the message clearly, that this is our land." I then asked: Is it necessary to kill children, women and innocent civilians? "And he said," Yes, they have to pay a high price to see that we are serious."

The student listened with disgust, and I said: "Appalling, isn´t it? A terrorist 100%." She nodded. Then I said, "Well, he was not a Hamas terrorist; he was an Israeli general in command of a tank division that participated in the 2006 Lebanon war and the masacre of Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002." She was then really surprised. Then I admited that some members of Hamas who I interviewed also expressed similar views (although I have to say that at least they tried to soften the message and give more arguments) But what matters is not who does it but what he does. And whoever does it, let's call things by their name and let's treat everyone the same way!