Ha'aretz, August 18, 2004
Let 'em starve to death
By Yitzhak Laor
Israel equating the Palestinian prisoner strike with a security risk
is part of a pattern that does not necessarily have anything to do with
such a risk or with terror. The existence of the Palestinians is
the problem in that equation. It is enough to see the attitude in the
news reports toward the strike to understand that the only problem,
as far as the Israeli establishment is concerned, is how to break the
strike. As far as they are concerned, the Palestinians can "starve
to death," said the public security minister, who immediately orders
his lackey, Chief Warden Yaakov Ganot, to confiscate cigarettes. After
all, the hunger strikers will break immediately if the cigarettes are
taken away. There is no more colonial an image than that. They are not
fighting for their freedom, they are fighting to destroy us, even inside
their cells, in their chains.
Only someone who does not understand that a fight for freedom stems
from a despair of life at its lowest level can ascribe to hunger-striking
prisoners - many of whom have been languishing for years in prison despite
Israeli promises to free them 11 years ago - the charges of which Ganot
and the police minister have accused the Palestinians.
There is no need to mix basic humanitarian demands and the demand to free the prisoners, but nevertheless most of the media lines up with the security authorities and identifies the humanitarian demands with our security. "Their existence is our non-security" has been the message since the strike began.
Those who want more evidence of the moral depths to which Israel has sunk can find them in the utter silence that met Tzachi Hanegbi's response: let them starve to death. That answer will yet go down in the history books regarding the last colonialist struggle in the world. Only a demagogue can bring into the discussion the nature of the crimes of the striking prisoners. They are in prison for those crimes, and the conditions in the prisons are horrifying, but the punishment that the court imposed does not include daily strip searches, and lengthy denials of visits from children, elderly parents, and wives.
Sometimes it seems that the great tribunal of Israel - as in the case of Mordechai Vanunu, and the comments made by MK Yuval Steinitz about Vanunu - works overtime, and makes every effort it can to turn the legal system into a small part of a larger punitive system. It seems as if the sentence was only the begining of the punishment, and the court has nothing to do with what happens next: a kind of "good riddance it's gone," as they are handed over to Hanegbi and Ganot.
Those who do not understand the connection
between the death that the public security minister is offering them
and the daily newspaper reports about assassination warnings that are
no longer "exact" - but still kill dozens of Palestinians
who are all "on their way to terror attacks inside Israel"
- does not understand that the Israeli world
view really only has room for one solution for the Palestinian people:
that they disappear. It is not terror that is the problem from that
perspective, nor borders, but the very existence of that people. That
problem has no other solution and so the those people must be fenced
in, walled in, put in cells - all in the name of "security, because
there is no other solution."
Against this background the strike takes
place, like some metaphor for our lives. Inside the closed cells, under
terrible conditions, strike the Palestinian prisoners - those punished
for murder and those not punished for murder - and outside, in the yard,
the Israelis barbecue meat. The great depth to which we have fallen
evidenced by our reaction to the hunger strike, is the same distance
that the public security minister has traveled since 1979. That's when
Tzachi Hanegbi popped up on the Jerusalem campus equipped with iron
chains, together with today's agriculture minister Yisrael Katz, at
the head of Likud pogromists to beat strikers and Arab students.
He has gone far in our lives. "Let `em die" is his answer
nowadays, and nobody opens a mouth, and nobody booes.