When I published my February 22nd interview with Palestinian parliamentarians Ayman Daraghmeh and Mahmoud Musleh here yesterday I failed to note that Daraghmeh was one of the four duly elected Hamas-affiliated legislators who were captured by Israel on March 19. He has since been held in detention someplace, likely in Israel.
Today, one of those legislators, (former) Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Ad-Din Ash-Sha’er was sentenced by a military court in Israel to six months’ “administrative detention”, that is, detention without charge or trial.
Daraghmeh and the other two kidnapped legislators have not yet had any kind of a day in court. There is considerable reason to be worried about what kind of treatment they have been receiving while they have been kept in the post-detention “back hole” of the Israeli prison system.
It is hard to keep track of how many of the Palestinian legislators who were duly elected in the January 2006 election, which was certified by European and US observers as free and fair are currently being held as political prisoners– and also, indeed, as “bargaining chips”– by the Israelis. When I interviewed Daraghmeh and Musleh last month they told me that 41 of the 52 Hamas-affiliated legislators in the west Bank were then in Israeli prisoners. (Musleh had only recently been released from an Israeli prison.)
So I guess now that is 45 Hamas-affiliated legislators being held captive by Israel. That is in addition to a much smaller number of MPs affiliated with Fateh or the PFLP. The PLC has a total of 132 seats.
All democratic forces in the world should strongly protest these detentions.
In a small number of these cases– including those of Fateh’s Marwan Barghouthi and PFLP leader Ahmad Sa’adat– the detainees have been given a formal “trial” in Israel, and received lengthy prison sentences on being found “guilty.” In those two trials, the charges were overtly political, rather than being related to the two men’s actual commission of any violent crime, and both men robustly challenged the right of an Israeli court to have any jurisdiction over them. Hence they mounted no defense; so the state’s “evidence” against them was never tested in any way.
In the case of most of these detentions of duly elected legislators, however, either the men have never had a trial, but simply been consigned to Israel’s draconian system of ever-renewable periods of six months of “administrative” detention, or, when given “trials”, these have been completely political.
For example, MPs Azzam Salhab and Nizar Ramadan from Hebron were both arrested together in late 2005 after they had announced their intention to run for the election on the Hamas-affiliated Change & Reform list. They were “charged” in an Israeli court with membership in a “terrorist” organization– Hamas– but never charged with any specified act of wrongdoing or violence.
(Salhab and Ramadan continued their election campaign from within prison, and won. Sometime this past February, I believe, they were released. But they were picked up again on March 19 and returned to their prison cells in Israel.)
This is all outrageous. The US government and all western governments all strongly supported– indeed pushed for– the holding of the PLC election in January 2006. The election was intended to revive the internal political life of the PA, and it could well have had that effect if the results had been respected by Israel and its western backers.
If there were reasonable grounds to accuse men like Daraghmeh, Salhab, Ramadan, and Ash-Sha’er of actual criminal wrongdoing, that evidence would surely have been produced at that time. It was not– most likely because there was none.
Instead, Israel was simply allowed to “use” the 2006 elections to identify, “flush out”, and detain Hamas’s leading political supporters throughout the West Bank: a perversion of democracy that all true democrats around the world should strongly oppose.
… Ehud Olmert’s last-legs government in Israel apparently decided on last week’s new round-up of Hamas supporters in the West Bank as a way to put added pressure on the Hamas leadership to make further concessions in the negotiation over Israeli POW Gilad Shalit, now held under Hamas’s control somewhere in Gaza. I note that there is a big disparity between the case of Shalit, a young man who was actively engaged in the military when he was captured as a POW, and that of the captured legislators and the many thousands of other Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel.
When Shalit entered the military, whether he did so as a conscript or a volunteer, he knowingly entered the realm of military law, a realm whose participants have the “right” to kill duly identified military targets but who also knowingly undertake the risk that in the course of their duty they might be killed, wounded, or captured. The same is, essentially, true for any Palestinian nationalist who knowingly takes up arms against Israeli targets. But most of the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel– including, I believe, just about all of the imprisoned Hamas legislators– are not “military people” in this sense, at all.
In the case of the legislators, they volunteered to participate peaceably in parliamentary elections, the conduct of which was completely (or almost completely) peaceful. If the west allows Israel to continue claiming that such participation is a “crime”, then the west is in deeper trouble around the world than most westerners realize.
20 thoughts on “MP Daraghmeh arrested March 19”
Comments are closed.
The Hamas does not keep Gilad Shalit as a military prisoner of war. There are no Red Cross visits or packages. His condition, if he is still alive, is unknown. When he joined or was conscripted, he did not sign up to be held on conditions outside the rules of war – the same rules that you think the Israeli should be held to account for supposedly not scrupulously following. So, the contention that his military status makes his holding fair game is specious.
Such goes to the heart of why dealing with Hamas (including its legislators) as if the party were a normal political party is ill-considered and contrary to fact. Rather, they are a reactionary party and major step backwards in the long road to any settlement which protects the legitimate rights of both sides in the dispute.
The fact that the Hamas came to the forefront by means of an election is a specious point, given the refusal of Hamas to behave like a normal political party. Recall that the Nazis also seized power after a legitimate election in which they did quite well. So, winning an election fairly is not the be all and end all of things.
To repeat, both sides, not just the Israeli side, have legitimate claims. But that means both sides, not just the Israeli side, has to be scrutinized closely – even by, in fact especially by, those who advocate for the Arab side.
All democratic forces in the world should strongly protest these detentions.
News of the wars to instill democracy among the heathen:
US will appoint Afghan ‘prime minister’ to bypass Hamid Karzai
The US and its European allies are preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, the Guardian has learned.
Other recommendations include: increasing the number of Afghan troops from 65,000 to 230,000 as well as expanding the 80,000-strong police force; sending more US and European civilians to build up Afghanistan’s infrastructure; and increased aid to Pakistan as part of a policy of trying to persuade it to tackle al-Qaida and Taliban elements.
The risk for the US is that the imposition of a technocrat alongside Karzai would be viewed as colonialism, even though that figure would be an Afghan…
Obama changes tactics in ‘disastrous’ war against Afghanistan’s heroin producers
President Obama is planning an overhaul of the ineffective anti-drugs policy in Afghanistan as Washington prepares to announce the non-military side of its strategy to defeat the Taleban.
Mr Holbrooke said that the US would propose a much larger increase in Afghan police numbers than the planned rise of 78,000 to 82,000. “The Afghan National Police are an inadequate organisation, riddled with corruption,” Mr Holbrooke told the forum, organised by the German Marshall Fund.
“We know they are the weak link in the security chain. So we have to figure out a way to increase the size, and make them better at the same time, in order to create the conditions in which the international military presence will do its own job and not replace the police. This is very difficult. Particularly in a country where literacy is so low.” He said that one suggested figure for police numbers of 400,000 was speculative because Mr Obama had not yet made a decision.
In Afghanistan, US military’s `Help Wanted’ sign
The military buildup in Afghanistan is stoking a surge of private security contractors despite a string of deadly shootings in Iraq in recent years that has called into question the government’s ability to manage the guns for hire.
Now, as President Barack Obama plans to send more U.S. personnel to Afghanistan to boost security and diplomatic efforts, more contractors are preparing to deploy, too… Complicating matters is that the armed guards hired in Afghanistan most likely won’t be U.S. citizens. According to Gates, only nine out of the 3,847 security contractors in Afghanistan have U.S. passports.
Currently, there are 71,700 contractors in Afghanistan, which is more than twice the number of U.S. troops. With more than 3,000 of those contractors carrying weapons, the Defense Department established an office to oversee them.
‘US raid kills civilians’
“Afghan and coalition forces killed five militants and detained four suspected militants early this morning in Kunduz province during an operation targeting a terrorist network in northern Afghanistan,” the US military said.
The operation took place near the border with Tajikistan, it said.
But provincial police chief Abdul Rehman Actash said the five men killed were civilians visiting a district mayor.
“They went into the mayor’s house and killed his driver, two guards, his cook and a guest from Sari Pul province, and confiscated two weapons from the house,” Mr Actash said.
So Obama is going to directly appoint the government in Afghanistan, because he finds the present government incompliant with his wishes. He is going to buy his own Afghan police force to help the American Army subdue the Afghanis. He is going to officially establish an American Foreign Legion to fight his wars in his colonies. And in case you wondered if Obama cares who he kills and where and when… he doesn’t.
When your grandchildren ask you how it was that the utter collapse of democracy and of the USA itself came about under the Obama regime remind them that it wasn’t all financial mismanagement, that is was the simultaneous, lunatic pursuit of empire that hastened the collapse, indeed that made it inevitable. And left impoverished Americans the hated and despised people they are today.
Length, John Francis! Length! (As in, keep it short, as per guidelines.)
N., I would pay your comments more heed if they had more rationality.
N., I would pay your comments more heed if they had more rationality.
I can see that Helena is resorting to the Shirin defence.
I think that there is a great deal of “rationality” in N. Friedman’s remarks, particularly in re. to Gilad Shalit who is not a POW, unless in defining him as such, you admit to Hamas having comitted a variety of war crimes, including:
Failure to provide a “sign of life” for over a year.
Failure to provide him with regular contact with the ICRC or other international organizations.
Failure to provide him with regular contact with his family.
Hamas should allow visits to Gilad Shalit, as mandated by international law. While the legality of the prisoners Israel has taken can be debated, they do have access to the international red cross. Likely that you could visit MP Daragmeh while he is in prison. Let us know if you can visit Gilad Shalit-that would be a true journalistic coup
What, pray tell, Helena, is irrational about pointing out that winding Gilad Shalit into your argument in the manner you have used him makes no sense because he is not a prisoner of war in the normal sense of the word and, as a soldier, simply did not sign up to be held outside the laws of war? What, pray tell, is wrong with pointing out that Hamas is not an ordinary political party but, instead, a party which lives according to its own, self-defined rules of conduct?
What, pray tell, is wrong with pointing out that there are two sides in the dispute, both of which have legitimate causes? If you do not believe the Israelis have a legitimate cause, why do you support a two state solution?
Israel’s apologists, NF included, seem to believe that Hamas can perform the miracle of holding Shalit in quite “normal”, acceptable conditions when the IDF has just more-than-decimated the Gaza police and prison systems and continues to threaten Hamas’s leaders with assassination…
You guys can’t have it both ways! You can’t stand quite silent while Israel kills hundreds of Gaza police officers (who are not combatants under international law and therefore count as civilian casualties) and destroys the Gazan authority’s prisons– and then turn round and accuse Hamas of holding Shalit in inhumane conditions.
Yes, the ICRC should certainly be allowed to see him and I hope the Haniyeh government can find a way to have that happen. My personal guess is that amid all the havoc Gaza has been living through in the past months, Shalit has probably been held very close to wherever Haniyeh is, and been given just as much security as Haniyeh– which is a LOT more security than the average housewife in Gaza and her children have enjoyed over the past months.
But meantime, neither NF nor JES seems ready to say one word against the Israeli government’s practice of rounding up large numbers of political opponents and holding them without charge or trial, which was, after all, the main topic of this post.
Also, in recent days the Israeli government stopped these prisoners’ families from being able to undertake even the very infrequent family visits they were previously allowed. So the comment about me being easily able to visit MP Daraghmeh in jail is in particularly sick taste.
These are ALL people with families who care deeply about them, people against whom no actual criminal act has been alleged, and whose fate is in the hands of distant and sometimes cynical political leaders. In that regard, Shalit is no more “special” than any of the others of them. If you care about him, you should care about them.
Helena,
Basically, your argument is that, due to tough circumstances, Hamas has no obligation to abide by ordinary conventions that apply to all parties at war. That, however, is not an excuse, even if it what you wrote were entirely factually correct. I think that the reason Hamas holds prisoners outside of IRC scrutiny is explained in the Hamas covenant.
In any event, my view is that Hamas created its own difficult circumstances for the Gazans by seizing power in Gaza, by refusing the world’s demand that it accept Israel’s existence as legitimate, by refusing to agree to abide by past agreements and by walking away from the PA’s peace proposals in favor of a truce.
You, for whatever reason, act as if Hamas’s refusals were merely tactical. I think you are wrong. I think Hamas is led by religious fanatics and that one need merely read the Hamas covenant to understand what Hamas intends and does.
Helena,
I can’t believe you are comparing the right for your family to visit you in prison with the right for the Red Cross to visit you. Only a Hamas supporter would say that.
Helena
you should go visit Gilad Shalit and interview him. You could tell him anything you want, like compare him to Hitler, tell him that his parents forgot about him and watch American idol, etc. Then you would become famous
Israel’s apologists, NF included, seem to believe that Hamas can perform the miracle of holding Shalit in quite “normal”, acceptable conditions when the IDF has just more-than-decimated the Gaza police and prison systems….
No Helena. It is you and the organization that you are apparently an appologist for that want to have it both ways!
Hamas has held Shalit under conditions that are quite abnormal according to the Geneva Conventions for POWs ever since they captured him. You have done the unique trick of eliding nearly 1,000 days to make it look like Gilad’s isolation and treatment are Israel’s fault. Haniyeh has had nearly three years to arrange for an ICRC visit. According to the Geneva Convention, if they could not hold him as specified under the conditions required, then they should either have turned him over to a third-party who could or handed him back to Israel.
I agree with you, JES, but with the caveat that Hamas has only been holding Shalit since some time after June 2007; before that, he was held by a smaller and possibly pro-Fateh splinter.
But I agree with your reading of the Geneva Convention on POWs.
So tell us your view of your government’s use of large-scale political imprisonment and the recent even more severe restrictions it has placed on the lives of those prisoners. Not even one word of concern from you, or empathy for their fate or the fate of their families?
(You used to be a lot more politically interesting than you seem to have become recently. You used to routinely pepper your comments with averrals that yes, you thought Israel should withdraw completely from the OPTs, etc. What’s happened to those views? If you still hold them, how do you reconcile them with the totally defensive crouch you now seem to be in?)
Helena,
If you agree with JES’s interpretation of the Geneva Convention, then my position is not irrational, as you previously pretended. At this point, a major chunk of your analysis has been shown to have a big whole in it.
As for the what the Israelis do, they should follow the Geneva Convention regarding the holding of prisoners.
…but with the caveat that Hamas has only been holding Shalit since some time after June 2007….
Get real, Helena! Even if you believe that Hamas held no sway over the Daghmoush clan, they have still held Gilad Shalit for over a year and a half. My argument stands, and I’m afraid that your “caveat” just doesn’t hold water.
In the first place, among the prisoners on the Hamas list are perpetrators of particularly cruel and viscious crimes who have been convicted in Israeli courts. I certainly don’t have any particular sympathy for the unreprentant person who was behind the Park Hotel murders, or his family. In the second place, the “political imprisonment”, as you call it, was only carried out after Hamas made it clear that they were holding Gilad Shalit for human ransom (which is, BTW, another violation of the Geneva Convention). Up until last week, all of these prisoners were treated as well, if not better, than POWs (and they still have all the basic rights that Gilad Shalit should have).
You used to be a lot more politically interesting than you seem to have become recently.
Well, Helena, I’m really sorry that I don’t hold the same interest for you that I once did. Actually I don’t think that I’m in a “defensive crouch”; I think that you are. Why then the use of the term “hasbarista” for anyone who disagrees with you? Why the constant references to Nazis by the use of terms such as “Anschluss” or your completely inapt description of the wall around Bethlehem? Why the hysterical attacks on N. Friedman (who I think is far more civil than am I)? No Helena, I think it is you who has become politically boring and predictable and in a “defensive crouch”.
Agreed, silly and insecure terms like “hasbarista” references to the dread “Lobby,” the funding of your political foes etc. Defensive crouching indeed.
They only tell us that you’re not taking the commentary or the discussions seriously, and that you don’t trust your readership to draw its own conclusions on the basis of facts.
Tell me, Helena, don’t you have the least bit of empathy for the detained and murdered Fatah officials and their families in Gaza?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1074452.html
JES, fwiw, of course I have empathy for the detained and murdered Fateh officials and their families in Gaza. I think I’ve made it clear I have empathy for ALL casualties of the ongoing violent conflict.
However, it was not my government that perpetrated those excesses. (And yes, I do vigorously protest and seek to end the many rights violations my government is responsible for– while also having empathy for the victims of those abuses.)
Your government, by contrast, is directly responsible for the many violations of international law it undertakes against Palestinian political prisoners of ALL political stripes, Fateh included. And for all your expressions of intense concern about Shalit and the horror you express at the acts of his captors, I’ve never heard one peep of comparable concern for the fate of prisoners whose rights are violated by your government.
So yes, perhaps the term ‘defensive crouch’ seems apt.
Talking of which, I have literally no idea what you mean when you say my description of the Wall round Bethlehem was “inapt”. Do you mean “inappropriate”, or “untrue”? If “inappropriate”, why?
As for it being “untrue”, JES, have you been to the wall near Bethlehem any time recently? It is a grotesque and quite inhumane monstrosity; and I believe I described it quite accurately. For the life of me I can’t understand why any Jewish person, seeing person, would NOT immediately have shivers go down her or his back.
As for Anschluss, if you don’t like the term maybe you shouldn’t support the policy. (But I thought that until recently you said you were for a complete withdrawal of Israel from all the areas occupied in 1967… )
However, it was not my government that perpetrated those excesses.
How convenient, Helena. Your concern for humanity stops where your tax money does. And the beauty of it is is that because your tax money goes to Israel, you can feel free to comment and complain about what Israel does as much as you like!
I’ve never heard one peep of comparable concern for the fate of prisoners whose rights are violated by your government.
Well, Helena, I’ve never heard more than lip service and a “he should have expected it” in relation to Gilad Shalit (not to mention Udi Goldwasser, Eldad Regev, Benny Avraham, Omar Sawaid and Adi Avitan).
Now, as for your description of the wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, let me tell you what is inapt about it. You implied that, as Jews, we should be particularly sensitive to the watch towers – bringing in imagery of Nazis and concentration camps. That, dear Helena, is inapt meaning “inappropriate”. Why, you might ask? Well first, because the wall was built – reluctantly and at great expense – to keep murderers out; not to keep people in following a rash of suicide bombings and other deadly attacks emanating from Bethlehem and its environs. (Did you ever see the film “To Die in Jerusalem”, Helena? Do you empathize at all with Avigail Levy?) You apparently don’t see this key difference, and you make a mockery of history by even suggesting the analogy. That’s what’s “inapt” about your discription.
Again, with the term “Anschluss” – as with your earlier use of “Israel Uber Alles” – get real. This is nothing but a cheap shot. (Or, perhaps, an attempt to be cute and clever, neither of which you have achieved.) If you’re not a native German speaker, then kindly use the term “annexation”.
BTW, I thoroughly enjoyed your description of the biometric machines at the crossing into Bethlehem. If you have ever arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, you would have seen the exact same machines for all Israel citizens. But I suppose that, instead of complaining about how you got preferential treatment as an American citizen, you would have found a way of complaining about how you had to wait in line with your US passport while Israelis just walked through!
Oh, and BTW Helena, since you didn’t have a chance to clarify this earlier in the thread on Nir Barkat’s visit to the States:
Yes, as I’ve noted elsewhere that in and after the fighting of 1948, the Jordanian army expelled around 2,000 Jews from east Jerusalem. But the Haganah and Israeli army expelled around 60,000 Palestinians from west Jerusalem in that war (source: Mick Dumper’s Politics of Jerusalem, published by Columbia UP in 1997.) All those expulsions were equally hurtful for those thereby cleansed. But since 1967, Israel has moved nearly 200,000 Jewish settlers into East Jerusalem, including into the locations from which Jews had been expelled in 1948. Not a single one of the 58,000 Palestinians expelled from west Jerusalem has been allowed to return.
This is an interesting figure, because according to records I have seen, on the eve of the war in 1947, the entire population of Jerusalem (both East and West) was 165,000, of which fully two-thirds was Jewish. That would mean that according to you and Dumper (an appropriate name?) every single Arab from both sides of Jerusalem (including an extra 3,000 -5,000) was “expelled”.
Hold Ayman Daraghmeh under the same standards as Schalit: No Red Cross, no family visits, do not release his locations, offer no proof that he is even still alive. Promise to hold him indefinitely until Schalit is returned. Continuing capturing more until Schalit is either returned or you have the entire leadership safely behind bars.