<html>
<body>
<h1><font size=4><b>Separated as prisoners, reunited in Gaza on
release</b></font></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/people/pam-bailey">Pam Bailey</a>
<br>
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/separated-prisoners-reunited-gaza-release/10693" eudora="autourl">
http://electronicintifada.net/content/separated-prisoners-reunited-gaza-release/10693</a>
<br>
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/location/gaza-strip">Gaza
Strip</a> <br>
14 December 2011 <br><br>
On 19 December, the second and last group of
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/political-prisoners">
Palestinian prisoners</a> 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
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/prisoner-swap">freed in
October</a>.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/pflp">Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine</a> (PFLP) when he was 16.<br><br>
“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
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/hamas">Hamas</a> 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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
She never got to see him, however. Abu Seir was interrogated for 15 days,
and held another three months before a trial was held.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
</font><h2><b>Internal conflict</b></h2><font size=3>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.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Despite all their efforts, however, the Israelis were ultimately defeated
where it counts the most: Abu Seir and his fellow prisoners kept
resisting.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><h2><b>Finding a new strength</b></h2><font size=3>“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.”<br><br>
<a href="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</a>, another freed
prisoner who joined Abu Seir for the interview.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/fatah">Fatah</a> in 2007.
“That made me wonder if everything I had struggled for would be lost in
internal fighting,” he recalled.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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 <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/icrc">International
Committee of the Red Cross</a>, formal education was banned until
1996.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“Jerusalem will always be my ultimate dream,” said Odeh. “And I will
never stop seeking my return.”<br><br>
<i>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.</i>.<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#0000FF">
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.Freedomarchives.org</a></font><font size=3> </font></body>
</html>