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The appalling loss of humanity
By Gideon
Levy
Last Monday, attorney Leah
Tsemel wanted to give some photographs to her client, who was
standing a few meters from her in the military courtroom at the
Ofer base near Ramallah. The photographs were of Quds, the
firstborn son of administrative detainee Abed al-Ahmar, who is
being held in custody without trial. Quds was born two months
ago, while his father was in military custody. Military judge
Major Ronen
Atzmon refused to allow the photos to be passed to al-Ahmar, who
has never seen his child. Atzmon was unwilling to assume the
security responsibility for such a move.
This incident may seem trivial in view of the mutual bloodbath
of the past few days, but it is precisely these minor events
that show the level of cruelty that the Israeli occupation has
reached. The story of our moral deterioration is to be found
here, no less than in the acts of killing.
Al-Ahmar can't see his newborn son because family visits to
security prisoners were banned three years ago and have not been
reinstated. The fact that his wife is a Jewish Israeli is of no
help. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners and detainees have been
totally cut off from their families for three years without a
telephone call or a visit. There are not many regimes in the
world that treat their prisoners this way.
Last week, al-Ahmar's administrative detention was extended for
another six months for the 17th time (not consecutively); he is
one of about 1,000 detainees being held today without trial. It
has to be said again that, if the defense establishment has any
material against al-Ahmar and the other administrative
detainees, it must put them on trial. If not, they must be set
free.
"Instead of apologizing for not letting me see my son, they
won't even let me have the photographs. I never believed things
would come to this," al-Ahmar said on the weekend in a telephone
call from prison. "Do you know what I felt when the judge
refused to let me have the photos? That I am living in the age
of slavery, when children were taken from their fathers as soon
as they were born."
Still, al-Ahmar's fate is better than that of Asmaa Abu al-Haija,
a 37-year-old woman from the Jenin refugee camp. She, too, is
being held in prison without trial; no one, including her lawyer
Tamar Peleg, knows why. Meanwhile, her five children are
abandoned in the refugee camp. Their father and older brother
are also in prison, having been convicted of being Hamas
members.
Al-Haija has a tumor in her head, which gives her headaches and
a partial loss of vision. According to recent testimonies from
Neve Tirza women's prison, she sleeps on the floor because the
blinding headaches make it impossible for her to sleep in the
bunk bed in her cell. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) says the
prison authorities have so far denied her medical treatment of
any kind. An urgent request submitted by the group's Michal
Bar-Or to the head of the Prison Service's health department,
Dr. Alex Adler, to give al-Haija a CT test at the urging of her
Palestinian doctor, went unanswered for weeks, until a
"prisoner's petition" was filed. A Prisons Service
spokeswoman, Hanna Nitzan, said in response that the prisoner
was examined and is receiving medical treatment. Al-Haija's
lawyer said the arrest warrant issued against
her by the military commander of the region referred to the
prisoner as a male: "He is endangering the security of the
region." No one bothered to change the standard text.
But the cruelest aspect of al-Haija's story is that she is not
allowed to phone her five children, the youngest of whom is a
6-year-old girl. Five children remain without a father and a
mother, and it does not even occur to the prison authorities, in
view of the harsh family circumstances, to consider the
possibility to depart from the regulations prohibiting security
prisoners from making phone calls.
The official response: "The security prisoner is denied
telephone calls because of a pr ocedure that applies to all the
security prisoners in Israel." Has no one seen fit to show a
modicum of compassion, at least for the children who have been
left without their parents and without a house, which was
destroyed by missiles in an IDF operation?
A state that prevents a prisoner who has been held in custody
for years without trial from receiving photographs of a son he
has never seen? That prevents a woman who is under detention
without trial from phoning her children, whose father and
brother are also in prison? We are even capable of this. This
has nothing to do with the war against terrorism. The battle
against the murderous terrorist attacks cannot justify such
behavior. Even at a time when Hamas is perpetrating horrific
suicide bombings, Israel is liquidating peopleand everything is
going up in flames, we must not ignore what appear to be
relatively small-scale incidents that reflect such appalling
loss of humanity. |
