Targeting human rights defenders

EI - Nadia Hijab
I remember the day I first met Jamal Juma'. He was speaking at a United Nations conference in 2003 about the damage being done by Israel's wall....this articulate, handsome Palestinian used facts and visual evidence to show how the wall was expropriating yet more Palestinian land and separating Palestinian communities from each other.

One picture Jamal showed us still breaks my heart: a middle-aged Palestinian farmer with a tear trickling down his cheek. The olive grove he had inherited from his father had just been bulldozed to make way for the wall. He had not only lost his livelihood; he had also been unable to protect his family's trust, the symbol of everything that had gone into making them Palestinian.

Now Jamal is in jail. Israel's occupation army detained him on 16 December. After interrogating him, they brought him back home, handcuffed and searched his house while his wife and three children watched. Then they took him off to prison.

......Jamal is the third anti-wall activist to be arrested in the last few months. Their arrest is an Israeli acknowledgement of their success, at great personal cost.

Civil resistance has spread widely throughout the occupied territories, in spite of Israel's attempts to crush it. On 9 November, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, protesters managed for the first time to topple a few of the wall's massive concrete panels.....

Moreover, the Stop the Wall Campaign made a strategic decision to link to the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The first Stop the Wall activist to be arrested was Mohammad Othman on his return from Norway...

Omar Barghouti, a founder of the academic boycott movement, says that Israeli analysis of the impact of BDS has changed after "academic and commercial organizations started feeling the heat and demanding action."

He sees Israel's latest arrests as a test. "Either we meet this challenge and the world supports our right to civil resistance, or they will intensify their repression of all human rights defenders. If they can get away with arresting civil society leaders that are clearly committed to nonviolence, then everyone's at risk."... Full story