Israel’s Release of Prisoners Signals No Change in Repressive Policies

by Gerry Foley / September 2008

Israel released 200 Palestinian prisoners on Aug. 25 on the eve of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The longest serving of those released had been imprisoned for 32 years, 50 percent more than the usual life sentence in the United Kingdom, for example. There are a reported 9000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. A large proportion of Palestinians has a friend or relative in an Israeli prison.

The prisoner release was touted by the Israeli authorities as a gesture of good will to the Palestinian Authority President Mamoud Abbas. Supposedly, it was designed to show that Abbas' strategy of negotiations with the Zionist state can pay more dividends than the confrontationist stance of Abbas' rival, the Islamist organization Hamas, which has seized control of Gaza. Hamas is hoping to achieve the release of many prisoners adhering to its organization in return for an Israeli soldier kidnapped by its fighters on the Gaza border three years ago.

Israel takes a harder line toward Hamas than toward Fatah, the organization represented by Abbas, considering the former simply a terrorist organization at war with Israel. The Israeli embrace does offer some advantages for Abbas. But it is also an uncomfortable one for him since it tends to discredit him more and more in the eyes of Palestinians.

In this release of Palestinian prisoners, Abbas made a point of appealing to Israel to release some prominent members of Hamas as well as of Fatah. That had a certain value as a gesture of Palestinian unity after recent clashes between the two rival groups. But a solution to this internecine war seems still far away, and in general can only be exacerbated by Israel's preferential treatment of Fatah prisoners.

The biggest scandal today in the Zionist repression of the Palestinian people is Israel's siege of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Only a few weeks before the prisoner release, it took a more acute form with reports that Israel had been using its control of the border, and thus the only access of Palestinians to sophisticated medical care, to pressure sick Palestinians to spy on their own people for Israel.

The British Guardian newspaper reported Aug. 4: "Physicians for Human Rights says the Shin Bet [the Israeli secret police] began interrogating Palestinian patients seeking permission to travel from Gaza to Israel for crucial medical help after Israel blockaded and then declared the tiny territory an enemy entity more than a year ago.

"Typically, patients are taken to a small, windowless room, underground, beneath the security terminal at Erez, the only passenger crossing that remains open between Gaza and Israel, where they are questioned by Shin Bet agents for hours, the report says.

"Refusal to cooperate often results in the denial of medical treatment. Based on the testimonies of more than 30 Palestinians—11 of which are published—the report says the Shin Bet is using coercion and extortion to force patients to collaborate."

Some of the personal accounts of Palestinians subjected to this treatment are heart rending. The Guardian noted one of them: "'They took me through underground passages and made me sit in another waiting room for almost 45 minutes. A man approached me and called me to another room for interrogation. He asked me to sit down and presented himself as Moshe,' Bassam al-Wahidi, a Fatah-aligned journalist, said in his affidavit to Physicians for Human Rights.

"'After all my responses he said to me: "I want to talk to you openly when you return from Israel so that you will have an acceptable reputation on the Israeli side. Either you make contact with me and agree to my demands, or you will not get any medical treatment which will cause you to be blind and you will become a burden to your family and friends,"’ Wahidi said in his affidavit.

"But he said he refused and was forced to return to Gaza without receiving any treatment. Now the 28-year-old, who married a year and a half ago, is completely blind in his right eye and losing the vision in his overstrained left eye.

"'I might divorce because I can't stand in front of my wife as a disabled person,' Wahidi said."

Israeli officials claimed that they cannot be held responsible for denying medical care to Palestinians living in Gaza because they no longer occupy it. Of course, the fact is that the end of their stationing of troops within the strip only reduced their cost of occupation. They continue to control entrance and egress from the strip and thereby maintain a stranglehold on its economy and society.

The Guardian article cited a statement by an Israeli army officer refuting the claim that Israel has no responsibility for the problems of Gazans: "... in a letter to Physicians for Human Rights in June, Colonel Shlomi Muchtar said: 'The state's obligations are derived, among other things, from the rules of war and from the scope of its control over border crossings between it and the Gaza Strip.'"

As long as the Zionist state maintains such inhuman pressures on a major part of the Palestinian people, the release of a relatively small number of the thousands of prisoners it holds is not going to convince world public opinion or the Palestinians that the Zionist beast is changing its stripes.