Forum: Hunger strikes, hunger deaths
The hunger strike of Local 33 at Yale makes me think about a much larger hunger strike going inside the prisons of Israel. A few weeks ago Omar Barghouti’s Gandhi Peace Award acceptance speech in New Haven was dedicated to these Palestinian political prisoners.
In a sign of the changing times, the New York Times printed a statement by hunger strike leader Marwan Barghouti explaining the reasons for the strike of perhaps fifteen hundred prisoners. Barghouti is in prison convicted in the deaths of five people during a very violent phase of the Palestinian struggle a dozen years ago. He said the strike was a protest against “mass arbitrary arrests and ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners.”
The treatment of prisoners is a vital question to Palestinians because the number of Palestinians who wind up in Israeli prisons is staggering. In mid-April the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and several Palestinian prisoner organizations issued a report stating that one million different Palestinians have been jailed by Israel since the country’s establishment in 1948. To give you an idea of the scale of this number the population of Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is six million.
The hunger strikers want Israel to respect minimum conditions for prisoners recommended by the U.N., the so-called Mandela rules. Their specific demands include allowing a second visit a month for relatives, ending the practice of charging prisoners for medical treatment and eliminating solitary confinement. Though a hunger strike is peaceful and only affects the person on strike, the Netanyahu government is treating it as if it were a riot. Marwan Barghouti and a number of other prisoners were placed in solitary confinement. The government is considering bringing in foreign doctors to force-feed the strikers. Why foreign doctors? The Israel Medical Association has refused to allow its members to participate in such actions.
In a bizarre coincidence or cruel imitation both the Palestinian hunger strikers and Yale union effort were mocked by opponents with barbecues. A group of Israelis cooked meat near Ofer prison on April 21. The Yale Republicans offered barbecued food to passers-by about a week later. In an act much worse than a taunt, all 100 members of the U.S. Senate signed the shameful Rubio letter to the United Nations complaining about its supposedly biased reporting on Israeli human rights violations
A different kind of hunger stalks Yemen, one that is not voluntary, and one that affects not hundreds, but millions. In 2015 the kingdom of Saudi Arabia decided that its favored side in the Yemen civil war was losing and so the Saudi royals decided a few weeks of bombing would set things right. It didn’t exactly go as planned. The war, supported to the hilt by Presidents Obama and Trump, has gone on now for two years. A new U.N. report says 65% of Yemenis now are “food insecure” and that the situation is getting worse. The head of the Norwegian Refugee Council said seven million people are on the brink of famine. Despite that, the Saudis are threatening an onslaught on the port of Hudaydah where most food imports and humanitarian aid enters the country.
Saudi Arabia is notorious for its total lack of religious freedom, its beheading punishments and its medieval treatment of women. Yet until recently it had wall to wall support among U.S. politicians. Obama kept the weapons makers happy selling the Saudis $100 billion worth of guns. Trump wants to sell a lot more. His administration is reportedly working a deal to sell a breathtaking $300 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
The rich and powerful may benefit from these policies in the short run, but a destroyed and looted land gives birth to monsters. We’ve seen the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS. What will be next? Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. How many American soldiers and civilians will eventually pay the price for this folly? When will Americans speak out in outrage?
Stanley Heller is administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, www.pepeace.org. He can be reached at stanley.heller@pepeace.org
Read the article online on the New Haven Register Forum site here.
