As Will posted earlier, Israeli arrested/kidnapped more than 10 Palestinians across the West Bank last night, including members of the Palestinian parliament.

The reason this isn’t really news is well, because it isn’t. Israel kidnaps tens of Palestinians every single day in the West Bank, taking them to Israeli military bases where they are interrogated without access to a lawyer or family, and are tried in military courts without being able to dispute any evidence held against them, and sentenced to draconian prison terms in the ‘security’ prisons inside Israel proper-a direct contravention of international law which states that an occupying state may not hold members of the occupied territory outside that territory.

There are approximately 11,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons, and the figure will always be approximate because the numbers increase on a daily basis, and many are held without charge for an infinitely renewable cycle of 8-month administrative detention periods.
It is estimated that a quarter of a million Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been arrested by Israel since it occupied those territories in 1967. The nature of living under a military occupation means that one could get arrested for laws he simply had no idea existed, or for breaking inhumane rules imposed by the Zionist state on its occupied subjects. For example, during the periods in the first intifada when Israel shut down Palestinian educational institutions from kindergarten through university, it became illegal to teach classes in your own home. Many Palestinian teachers and volunteers were imprisoned and ill-treated after getting caught carrying out the heinous crime of…teaching.

The issue of Palestinian political prisoners (those engaging in both violent and non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation) is a deeply immersive topic and one that I cannot hope to adequately cover here. However I started with that general bit of background information to juxtapose the plight of these prisoners with that of the Israeli soldier held by Palestinian fighters in Gaza. The very fact that the soldier’s name is known across the world and mentioned endlessly in the media clearly demonstrates the total disregard for the lives and rights of thousands of Palestinians, who always remain nameless and are hardly ever described as anything other than militants or terrorists.

No word is ever given to the fact that none of these prisoners has ever gotten a fair trial; none of the actions they are accused of perpetrating is ever viewed within the context of fighting against the occupation. The Israeli soldier, meanwhile, is always ‘kidnapped in a cross-border raid’. Will already went over the stupidity of describing that operation as a ‘cross-border raid’ when Israel refuses to identify its borders.

I also take umbrage with the way the stories always leave out what the Israeli soldier was doing when he was captured; he wasn’t strolling in the stolen fields from which many of Gaza’s refugees were forced out from. He was a tank gunner, taken from his tank at a time when Israel was pounding Gaza with upward of 50 tank shells a day. He may well have been responsible for the destruction of Palestinian lives; at the very least he was certainly responsible for the destruction of Palestinian property and terrorizing of a refugee population.

He wasn’t captured, however, to pay for his crimes. He was captured to be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. In these situations Israel always follows the same set script: it usually begins by making grandiose statements about not negotiating with terrorists, and bombs the hell out of the civilian population (in this case destroying Gaza’s only power plant), before settling down and negotiating with ‘terrorists’ and usually giving in to their demands.

The clearest example was the Lebanon war of 2006: After ruling out negotiating with Hezbollah over a prisoner swap, bombing Lebanon incessantly, killing 1,000 Lebanese, losing the ground war and almost bringing his own government down, Ehud Olmert and his cabinet agreed to a prisoner exchange-exactly on Hezbollah’s turn.

The Israeli soldier was captured in Gaza just days before the Lebanon war, and after more than two years of stalled negotiations mediated by Egypt, a deal seemed imminent a few weeks ago until Olmert again needlessly tried to play hardball and surprised just about everyone by vetoing the deal at the last minute and tying it to the completely unrelated issue of a case-fire in Gaza. Olmert’s recklessness prompted a public outburst from his chief negotiator, Amos Gilad, who told the press that the prime minister’s last-minute change of heart did nothing more than embarrass Egypt. Just weeks later, Olmert dropped that requirement, and on Tuesday another deal seemed imminent.

Again the talks stalled, and Hamas has called off the negotiations for the time being. Olmert’s insistence on deporting some of the Palestinians that are to be freed was the obstacle this time. One senses that Olmert doesn’t seem too serious about concluding a deal. He will be remembered as one of Israel’s most incompetent leaders, but he knows that the incoming right-wing prime minister, Netenyahu, will find it even harder to sell a deal to Israelis. It seems as though Olmert is simply trying to set-up Netenyahu for a major embarrassment.

Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of women and children, languish in Israeli jails, their fate tied to that of a soldier whose capture made him world famous-but nobody seems to care enough to even learn their names.

Related posts:

1. Gaza: Land of a thousand martyrs
2. Annapolis results in…goodwill gestures
3. Carter on Palestinian Prisoners
4. The most moral army in the world
5. Crackdowns and collaborators