[Ppnews] Separated as prisoners, reunited in Gaza on release

[Political Prisoner News]

Separated as prisoners, reunited in Gaza on release

<http://electronicintifada.net/people/pam-bailey>Pam Bailey
http://electronicintifada.net/content/separated-prisoners-reunited-gaza-release/10693 

<http://electronicintifada.net/location/gaza-strip>Gaza Strip
14 December 2011

On 19 December, the second and last group of 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/political-prisoners>Palestinian 
prisoners to be exchanged for a captured Israeli 
soldier is expected to be released. The 550 men 
slated for release will at long last taste 
freedom after years ­ for some, decades ­ behind 
bars. Their stories will likely be similar to the 
447 <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/prisoner-swap>freed in October.

While imprisoned Israeli authorities did 
virtually everything to obliterate the detainees’ 
moorings to reality and their connections to 
their culture, families and fellow prisoners ­ 
from prohibiting visits for months at a time, to 
forcing repeated moves to disrupt any new-found 
friendships, to imposing solitary confinement, 
sometimes for years at a time. Some prisoners 
crack. One freed prisoner I met during my recent 
trip to Gaza had been isolated for 15 years; he 
seemed unable to sustain a conversation with 
anyone else, instead muttering softly to himself virtually nonstop.

But what also stands out despite these 
unimaginable hardships is prisoners’ tenacity in 
finding small, yet powerful ways to resist and 
hold on to their sense of identity and purpose. 
This is the story of Samer Abu Seir and Loai Odeh 
­ two men who met in prison and have remained 
friends ever since ­ but they speak for so many others.

Abu Seir grew up in East Jerusalem, in the midst 
of the turmoil of the first intifada. The 
enduring symbol of the 1980s uprising is one of 
young men and boys throwing stones at Israeli 
troops advancing in tanks, and Abu Seir was one 
of them. He joined the Marxist 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/pflp>Popular 
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) when he was 16.

“The movement wasn’t very well organized then,” 
Abu Seir recalled on 1 December through an 
interpreter, while sitting in a temporary 
apartment in the Gaza Strip, before moving to his 
new home provided by the 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/hamas>Hamas 
government. “We were grouped into cells, and we 
weren’t as savvy then as people are now about how 
to work ‘invisibly.’ Our names were well-known.”

When he was 22, his PFLP cell killed two Israeli 
soldiers from a unit invading his neighborhood; 
Abu Seir wasn’t personally involved, but he was 
caught up in the dragnet. In the dead of night, 
troops suddenly appeared at his home, breaking in 
and hitting and kicking him before dragging him 
away. His mother ­ who had raised her three sons 
and two daughters alone since her husband died 
when the children were small ­ was away in Jordan 
at the time. When she heard the news of her son’s 
capture, she came rushing home and waited for 
hours outside the interrogation center where Abu Seir was being held.

She never got to see him, however. Abu Seir was 
interrogated for 15 days, and held another three 
months before a trial was held.

“They wanted names of other people I was involved 
with, so the treatment was very harsh,” he 
recalled. “They made me take off all of my 
clothes except my underwear, and then forced me 
to lie on the cold floor, or outside in the snow. It was winter.”


Internal conflict

When it wasn’t naturally freezing outside, the 
Israelis resorted to what Abu Seir called “the 
fridge” ­ a small room with the air-conditioning 
blowing at full blast. When one is left there for 
days, with no clothing or blankets, it is a form 
of torture, he said. The cold seeps into a 
prisoner’s bones and seems to settle in permanently.

“You suffer an internal conflict,” he explained. 
“I was very young, and the interrogators told me 
that some of my best friends, who had been 
imprisoned before me, had already told them 
everything about me 
 So why not say whatever 
they wanted? But I just kept thinking of my 
family. I didn’t want them to be in my place.”

In the end, Abu Seir signed a paper “confessing” 
to the facts of the cell’s actions, sticking to 
what the Israelis had already known. He was 
sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. “Just one 
lifetime,” he said with a slight smile. So many 
of his fellow prisoners received sentences of multiple lifetimes.

In the 24 years that followed, Abu Seir figured 
he was moved to every one of Israel’s prisons. 
The longest time he spent in any one place, he 
said, was three or four years. And at one point, 
he was kept in solitary confinement for three and a half years.

Although family visits were supposed to be 
permitted every three months, that “privilege” 
was often revoked as punishment for any sign of 
disobedience. In one instance, Abu Seir waited 
for ten months before a visit was allowed.

Even when visits were permitted, however, the 
process was humiliating. His mother and siblings 
had to pass through many checkpoints to get to 
the prison, followed by hours of waiting and 
intrusive body searches before they were allowed 
to see their son and brother. (It’s worth a 
reminder: Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva 
Convention prohibits forcible transfers of people 
from an occupied territory. But Israel has been doing just that since 1967.)

None of the prison guards with whom Abu Seir came 
into contact over the years showed any real 
sympathy ­ not surprising, he thinks, since the 
most right-leaning of Israeli citizens are chosen 
for that job. But the worst of the lot seemed to 
always be transplanted Americans, he said with a 
twinkle in his eye as he looked at me.

Despite all their efforts, however, the Israelis 
were ultimately defeated where it counts the 
most: Abu Seir and his fellow prisoners kept resisting.

“The purpose behind Israel’s imprisonment is to 
isolate us from our ethics and morals, to cause 
internal conflict, to make us think about 
surrendering to get better treatment,” he 
explained. “We lived in prison, yes. But the prison didn’t live within us.”

The prisoners ­ usually grouped eight to a 
section ­ elected a leader who found inventive 
ways to network with the other representatives 
throughout the jail. The various leaders made 
decisions for the entire prison population. When 
they chose to take a stand ­ whether it be 
through a petition or hunger strike ­ they did it 
as a group, with no exceptions.

Sometimes, it was over relatively small irritants 
­ like the time when the Israeli guards ordered 
them not to watch TV during official inmate 
counts, a ritual conducted three times a day. It 
was petty, but just one more way for the Israelis 
to exert their domination. The prisoners chose to 
refuse, watching TV anyway. The response was 
swift ­ no family visits or daily exercise 
breaks. But, said Abu Seir, it was even more 
important that the prisoners proved they were 
still willing to stand up as a group.


Finding a new strength

“Life in prison just made us stronger,” he said. 
“When you go on a hunger strike, and go without 
food for days and days, you find abilities and a 
strength you didn’t know you had. When it comes 
to defending our very identity and culture, 
Israel will never be stronger than we are.”

<http://electronicintifada.net/blog/shahd-abusalama/despite-their-release-their-freedom-remains-incomplete>One 
concrete proof of the failure of Israel’s 
attempts to break Palestinians’ bond with each 
other is Loai Odeh, another freed prisoner who 
joined Abu Seir for the interview.

Odeh was “radicalized” when he was arrested for 
the first time when he was just 11, for waving 
the Palestinian flag on the streets of East 
Jerusalem ­ an act declared illegal by the 
occupying forces. He was arrested two more times 
after that before he was imprisoned during the 
second intifada, with a sentence of 28 years. He 
recalls his mother attempting to shield him with 
her body when the Israelis came for him. However, 
she was forced to give him up when the soldiers 
used another relative as a shield.

Odeh met Abu Seir in the early stages of Odeh’s 
ten years of imprisonment, and then they were 
separated for the remainder of their sentences.

“You start feeling weak if you feel abandoned, 
and the Israelis did everything they could to 
make us feel that way,” Odeh said. The time he 
remembered feeling most like he was losing that 
sense of “connection” to the society beyond the 
bars was when he got news via Israeli radio of 
the split in the unity government between Hamas 
and 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/fatah>Fatah 
in 2007. “That made me wonder if everything I had 
struggled for would be lost in internal fighting,” he recalled.

“The biggest challenge is to be able to resist 
yourself, to defeat the longing for freedom and 
your family, which makes you weak and tempted to 
give up,” he said. “I looked for small ways to 
re-assert my own sense of identity and control. 
There is always a way, no matter how 
insignificant. Like, when the guards prohibited 
smoking while waiting for families to arrive on 
visit days, I decided to quit smoking. I quit 
that day, so my enemy would not win.”

Both Odeh and Abu Seir also used education as a 
form of resistance. Although a limited variety of 
books were made available to prisoners by the 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/icrc>International 
Committee of the Red Cross, formal education was banned until 1996.

After that, Palestinian prisoners were allowed to 
pursue self-study in a narrow range of subjects 
through a distance-learning program. Odeh would 
have liked to study psychology, and Abu Seir 
wanted to learn mechanical engineering; however, 
sociology was the only program offered them. When 
an Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinian 
resistance fighters in 2007, that came to a halt as well.

Today, the two men are reunited in the Gaza 
Strip. Although the West Bank is their home, they 
were not allowed to return there under the 
exchange deal negotiated with the Israeli 
government. After a brief visit was allowed for 
their mothers, they are now alone, learning to 
fit into yet another new community.

What their future holds is not certain yet, and 
they acknowledged that it will not be an easy 
adjustment. They were welcomed along with the 
other 131 prisoners “deported” to Gaza, with 
party after party for the “returning heroes.” The 
Hamas administration in Gaza has helped the 
released prisoners by securing and paying for 
housing. But Abu Seir compares this early 
transition stage to a “festival.” Once the 
attention dies down, the hard work will begin.

“I want to finish my bachelor’s degree, find 
work, start a family,” said Abu Seir. “But my 
fellow inmates who remain in prison [of which 
there are still more than 5,000] will always be 
in my mind. I was basically raised by some of 
them, educated by them. We cannot rest until they are free as well.”

Odeh, who is struggling to be reunited with his 
fiancee, a Palestinian living in Haifa, added 
that he can never truly rest until he returns to 
his real home, in Jerusalem. For him and other 
Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and its 
population of fellow Palestinians are so close, 
and yet so far ­ divided by a barrier Israel has 
effectively used to separate brother from brother, wife from husband.

“Jerusalem will always be my ultimate dream,” 
said Odeh. “And I will never stop seeking my return.”

Pam Bailey is a peace activist and communications 
professional from Washington DC. She can be 
contacted at pam.palestine A T gmail D O T com..




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