[News] Walid Daqqah, Inside Israeli Prison, Sets the Future Free

Wed Aug 2 19:00:11 EDT 2023

*WALID DAQQAH, INSIDE ISRAELI PRISON, SETS THE FUTURE FREE*
[image: image.png]
Walid Daqqah (right), his daughter Milad (center), and his wife, Sanaa -
photo courtesy Free Walid Daqqah Campaign

            In his young adult novel, *The Oil’s Secret Tale*, Walid Daqqah
describes a wall – a vast wall that darkens the sky, divides the Earth,
separates animals and plants and people from each other – a wall that stops
children from visiting their parents in prison. Daqqah’s story is about a
12-year-old Palestinian boy, born because the sperm of his imprisoned
father was smuggled to his mother, outside. Since this act was blatantly
illegal, the boy and his father have never been allowed to meet. So one
day, the boy assembles his friends – a rabbit, a cat, a dog, a donkey – and
together, they begin to strategize how they can get past the wall to visit
the boy’s father…

            Walid Daqqah has lived inside the walls of Israeli prisons for
37 years. During this time, he has written essays, plays, novels, columns,
poems. His work depicts the realities of Palestinians under Israeli rule,
materially, politically, psychologically. But *The Oil’s Secret Tale* is
special: three years ago, Daqqah’s own daughter, Milad, was born to his
wife, Sanaa Salameh, via his own sperm, smuggled out of prison. Although,
unlike the boy in the story, 3-year-old Milad occasionally, with her
mother, has been allowed to visit her father, Walid Daqqah’s own story does
not end here.

*A Life in Prison*

            Daqqah’s story begins in 1986 when, at the age of 25, he was
arrested with three other members of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, and convicted of killing Moshe Tamam, a soldier in the Israel
Defense Forces. He was given a life sentence, which remained unchanged long
after the 1990s, when the Oslo Accords mandated the release of Palestinian
prisoners convicted before the Accords were signed. Over his decades
inside, Daqqah earned a BA, then an MA in political science. He developed
as a writer and intellectual, married Salameh in 1999, and became one of
the foremost spokespeople of the Palestinian prisoners movement. In 2012,
his sentence was commuted to 37 years.

Prison is never good for anyone’s health and, over the years, Daqqah’s body
weakened. In 2015, he was diagnosed with leukemia, necessitating regular
blood tests.In 2018, around the time he won the Etisalat Award for Arabic
Children’s Literature for *The Oil’s Secret Tale*, Daqqah was also
convicted of helping a Palestinian Knesset member smuggle cellphones in to
prisoners, for which he received an additional two-year sentence.

Along with this conviction, Israeli authorities prohibited Daqqah’s blood
tests, meant to monitor the status of his leukemia and guide its treatment.
This led to his diagnosis, last December, of myelofibrosis, a rare, usually
terminal, bone marrow cancer. Since then, he has suffered a stroke, renal
failure, and pneumonia, for which treatment – when given at all – was
seriously delayed. Daqqah’s family and supporters call out this medical
neglect as deliberate, a regular policy of the Israeli Prison Service (IPS)
to control and ultimately eliminate the political prison population.

Though Daqqah has occasionally seen the inside of a functioning hospital,
he is now thought to spend most of his time inside the Ramleh Prison
clinic, an unsanitary structure that, over the years, has come to be called
“the slaughterhouse” by Palestinian prisoners. Several people have died
there, including, this May, Khader Adnan, on hunger strike in protest of
the Israeli government’s use of administrative detention.

In Palestine, Walid Daqqah is widely respected and loved; in Israel, he is
widely feared and hated. Doctors estimate that he has another year and a
half to live – two years, at most. He could have walked out of prison on
March 24 of this year, when his 37-year sentence was up; he could have
begun to receive responsible medical care. But the IPS insists on Daqqah
serving out his extra two-year sentence. Daqqah’s legal team appealed,
based on his dire medical condition, and requested early release. Late this
May, however, an Israeli commission denied him parole. During his parole
hearing, Israeli settlers attacked Daqqah’s supporters outside the Ramleh
Prison court, chanting, “Death to Walid Daqqah,” while Israeli police stood
by. Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has declared,
“Daqqah is human scum and should end his life in prison.”

*Prison Authorities Go Insane*

An urgent international campaign has launched to free Walid Daqqah, or at
the very least, get him the medical care he needs. The campaign also
demands that regular visits be reinstated between Daqqah and his wife and
daughter, who – while enduring government harassment, including an Israeli
police raid on their home last February – have been barred from seeing him
during these months of medical and legal crisis. The International
Association of Democratic Lawyers has issued a resolution for Daqqah’s
release. The Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council has appealed to
the United Nations Special Procedures. And in the United States, the UK,
and Canada, the Palestinian Youth Movement
<https://linktr.ee/palestinianyouthmovement> (PYM) is mobilizing support.

In New York City, the PYM has staged a rally and press conference outside
the UN; in Toronto, PYM protesters showed up at the Israeli Consulate;
across country and state borders, they’ve promoted letter-writing campaigns
and issued petitions. Kaleem Hawa, a PYM member in the New York area,
describes the Palestinian Youth Movement as grassroots, made up of diaspora
Palestinian and Arab young people, “fighting for the total liberation of
their homeland in Palestine.” Because the PYM is in touch with Daqqah’s
family and his international campaign, I ask Kaleem how Daqqah’s wife and
daughter are.

“Walid’s family doesn't fully know what’s been happening to him behind
bars,” he tells me. “My understanding is that he was placed in intensive
care then transferred multiple times, which led to a further deterioration
of his health. That’s why we decided, following a call from Walid’s family
and the Palestinian political prisoners movement, to take on our own
campaign to amplify his cause.”

            It’s through the Palestinian Youth Movement that I’m able to
make tenuous contact with Sanaa Salameh, Daqqah’s wife, in Palestine. From
New York, I send Sanaa a few questions in English; they’re translated into
Arabic; Sanaa’s answers are then translated back into English and sent to
me, to edit a bit and condense. I asked her about her husband’s life in
prison. She writes that, over the years, her husband has regularly
challenged Israeli prison administrations – which has sometimes produced
victories:

  The most important of these is our daughter Milad, whose birth made the
prison authorities go insane. Milad’s light shined on Palestine and the
world when she was born on the 3rd of February 2020.  Of course the
situation and its pressures are not easy on us. Milad remains my first
priority; nothing is more important than Milad’s schooling and her life.
She attends a nursery but insists on calling it a school because she is
eager to grow up. She has always known that her father is in prison, and we
want to make sure we engage with her in the utmost honesty regarding her
father’s condition.

  Our lives are full of anxiety and vigilance, trying to assess Walid’s
condition with little information. His heart muscles have been severely
weakened. We hired a lung specialist to monitor the situation, in hopes of
getting a medical opinion from outside the Israeli prison establishment.
Unfortunately, our doctor has been unable to see him even once, as the
prison authorities constantly move Walid from one medical facility to
another. We have just submitted a request for a heart surgeon to see Walid.
We are hoping that we do not experience the worst of the racist prison
bureaucracy. The possibilities are not great, but this is a battle we
intend to fight. I want the world to know what Walid is going through and I
am willing to speak to anyone that will listen.

*Study the Life of the Prisoner*

Sanaa also tells me how proud she is of her husband’s writing. She lists a
few pieces: “The Geography of Resistance: The Battle of Jenin Camp 2002 (an
essay about Israeli incursions into Jenin and Jenin refugee camp
resistance); *Parallel Time* (a letter that morphed into a play about the
separate realities of those in and outside prison); two short novels, *The
Oil’s Secret Tale* and its sequel, *The Sword’s Secret Tale* (the first
stores about Palestinian prison for young people). Daqqah is also working
on a book tentatively titled *The Martyrs Return to Ramallah*, which he
hopes to finish if his health ever permits. And there are Daqqah’s
unpublished manuscripts, paintings, poetry, lyrics, an autobiography. “I
also recommend ‘Milad’s Advocacy,’” Sanaa adds, “which is a fictional story
of Milad prosecuting an Israeli judge for denying her the right to be born
for so many years.”

>From all of Walid Daqqah’s works, I have only been able to find one that’s
been fully translated into English. Daqqah’s “Consciousness Molded or the
Re-Identification of Torture,” published in a 2011 book
<https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745330204/threat/> on Palestinian political
prisoners, is stunningly perceptive in its portrayal of the traumatized
mental states shared by Palestinians in prison as well as outside,
surviving in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank.

“Israeli prisons are the laboratory where policies targeting the
Palestinian moral and social situations are tested,” Daqqah writes in this
essay. Outside the walls, he notes, Israeli tanks, helicopter gunships,
F-16 planes that enter and destroy life on every street and alleyway in
Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah are not meant to target AK-47-toting “terrorists” –
their purpose is to render Palestinians into a deep state of shock.

[T]he state of losing the ability to interpret reality, the feeling of
impotence and the loss of initiative are not only the fate of prisoners,
this description applies to *all* Palestinians…. The essential similarity
relates to the purpose of the jailer; to remold them according to an
Israeli vision, by means of molding their consciousness and especially by
molding the consciousness of that fighting elite locked in prison.
Therefore, in order to understand the general picture of Palestinian
reality, it is worthwhile to study the life of the Palestinian prisoner, as
a parable of the lives of civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Daqqah’s words also help me understand something that Kaleem Hawa told me:
*“*It's very important that prisoners are not seen as victims of an Israeli
colonial system. They’re revolutionary political educators for Palestinian
people, leaders of our resistance movement.”

One of the PYM’s projects to support Walid Daqqah is to promote his
writings and make them available in the West, largely through the Popular
University, a vital committee of the PYM that leads its political education
work, translating Arabic literature and teaching courses in Palestinian
revolutionary history. Kaleem tells me, “We hope to disseminate more of
Walid’s thinking through the Popular University so it’s not understood in
isolation, but as part of a larger system of political imprisonment. Part
of our goal is to do political education for the communities we live and
work in, and to escalate Walid’s case as one of many that people should
care about – not just in Palestine, but everywhere.”

*Return to the Wall*

            *The Oil’s Secret Tale* has been made into an opera and
performed by Palestine’s Amwaj Choir, young singers who toured Italy
earlier this year. In this version, the young boy and his friends find an
olive tree. The tree tells them that, though she has lived almost 2,000
years, she has never seen a wall like this one. But, she says, “I heard
your story. I saw your tears. I will help you. The oil of my fruit is
magic; rub yourselves with it. It will make you invisible and let you sneak
into the prison to meet your father. Then together, you will free
Injustice’s Oldest Prisoner.”

The boy wants to know who the Oldest Prisoner is. But the tree answers
only, “You’ll have to find out.”

The plan works and the little crew is able to pass through the wall. They
enter the prison and find the boy’s father, whom they joyfully suppose they
will now set free, since *he* must be the Oldest Prisoner.

But his father is not the Oldest Prisoner. Ultimately, the Oldest Prisoner
of Injustice, they learn, is the future. Together, they will set the future
free.

# # #

–susie day, 2023

*SOURCES:*

Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature:

http://www.tamerinst.org/en/pages/news/59

OSLO Accords and Palestinian prisoners; Addameer:  “according to the Oslo
II Accords of 1994, all Palestinian prisoners taken into captivity prior to
the agreement are required to have been released by now.”

https://www.addameer.org/news/5039

Phone smuggling –“Long-time Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqa moved into
solitary confinement”; Samidoun:

https://samidoun.net/2017/01/long-time-palestinian-prisoner-walid-daqqa-moved-into-solitary-confinement/

Addameer, Deliberate medical neglect of prisoners:

https://www.addameer.org/news/5039

Ramleh Prison, slaughterhouse: “Hearing delayed, returned to Ramleh prison:
Occupation targets Walid Daqqah’s life and health”; Samidoun:

https://samidoun.net/2023/05/hearing-delayed-returned-to-ramleh-prison-occupation-targets-walid-daqqahs-life-and-health/

Khader Adnan:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/05/israel-opt-death-of-khader-adnan-highlights-israels-cruel-treatment-of-palestinian-prisoners/

Samidoun: “Occupation regime again denies release of Walid Daqqah; delays
amount to a policy of assassination”:

https://samidoun.net/2023/05/occupation-regime-again-denies-release-of-walid-daqqah-delays-amount-to-a-policy-of-assassination/

Two additional years for phone smuggling; Jerusalem Post:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-744731

Walid Daqqah, human scum, Ben-Gvir; Jerusalem Post:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-744117

IADL: International Association of Democratic Lawyers statement (
https://iadllaw.org/)

IADL Resolution: Free Walid Daqqah:

https://iadllaw.org/2023/07/iadl-resolution-free-walid-daqqah

Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC); Al Haq:

https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/21426.html

Raid on Sanaa’s, Milad’s home, February 2023:

https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-police-raid-home-palestinian-prisoners-wife

“Parallel Time,” play at Al-Midan Theater:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/world/play-set-in-israeli-prison-imperils-arab-theater.html

*Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel* (containing Daqqah’s
“Consciousness Molded or the Re-Identification of Torture”):

London, UK, Pluto Press, 2011, pp 234-253

Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) linktree:

https://linktr.ee/palestinianyouthmovement

Insta:

https://www.instagram.com/palestinianyouthmovement/?hl=en

site:

https://palestinianyouthmovement.com/

Popular University:

https://palestinianyouthmovement.com/reading-list

*The Oil’s Secret Tale, *performed as an opera – “The Amwaj Choir:
Palestine tours Italy”:

https://mondoweiss.net/2023/06/the-amwaj-choir-palestine-tours-italy/

Amwaj Choir:

http://amwajchoir.org/
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