Right now, there are 6,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Of those, 500 are on rolling administrative orders. For those, it means that they have been arrested without any charge, are being detained without any right to bail, and do not know something very basic that every prisoner needs to know — a release date. Right now, those 500 simply don’t know their release date. And by not knowing, they are enduring a form of psychological torture. As far as the occupation authorities are concerned, it’s administrative detention.
Right now, 1,500 Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strike. Why? To demand their rights now — rights like an end to the never-ending cycle of administrative detentions. They also want other basic rights, such as telephones, to be able to call their families — even if those calls are to be monitored, more regular visits, better health care and an end to the use of arbitrary solitary confinement — another form of psychological torture used by the occupation administration.
The demands are reasonable and just. Were such abuses to be inflicted on an incarcerated prison population anywhere else in the world, there would be a deafening outcry. One would normally expect that bodies such as the United Nations, which are meant to focus on such state-sponsored injustices, would be broadcasting the cause, making statements of condemnation, and doing the utmost to end such travesty of justice and abuses of judicial, custodial, administrative and psychological powers. But it’s the UN — and the silence is indeed deafening.
So why the silence, the lack of condemnation, no words of support for these 500 on rolling holdovers? Why has the UN and all of its human rights’ tentacles lost their collective voice for the 1,500 trying to highlight the injustices for the incarcerated? And why is there no concern for the reason the 6,500 Palestinians are imprisoned — for actively protesting and acting against an illegal occupation of Palestinians lands, repression of rights and the subjugation of a people?
The answer, in a word, to all these questions is this: Israel. And the relationship between Israel and the UN is indeed a cosy one. On Sunday, in New York, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the World Jewish Congress he will stand up to anti-Israeli bias and that Israel must be treated like any other state. No, Mr Guterres, you are wrong. Israel is like no other state. And as long as it commits such injustices, it deserves isolation.
