Jew World Order

Editor’s Note: Salah Hammouri is a Palestinian-French lawyer and human rights advocate from Jerusalem. Since his adolescence, Hammouri has been the target of multiple arrests and imprisonments by Israeli authorities. Recently, the NGO he works with, Addameer, was designated as a ‘terrorist organization’ by Israel, he was the target of an NSO hack, and the Israeli government announced that it was revoking his Jerusalem residency, paving the way for his forced deportation from his homeland. 

In 2001, Israeli authorities arrested me for the first time and imprisoned me for nearly six months, without evidence. I was 16 years old. I didn’t know at the time that it was only the beginning of a long road of state harassment littered with painful hardships, paved by a military occupation that, by condemning me without proof, brought public scorn upon me. From that moment on, by the simple fact of having been arrested and of expressing myself for our rights, I was deemed suspect, without ever being able to prove my innocence.

In 2004, I was arrested once again. The Ministry of Defense made me the youngest “administrative” detainee from Jerusalem. Administrative detention is an arbitrary procedure taken by military order and without indictment, which can be renewed for years and is used as a large-scale tool of control. More than 40 percent of Palestinian men go through Israeli jails in their lifetimes.

In 2005, I was arrested again, and this time kept in prison. I was 20 years old. Accusing me of having plotted an attack, the military tribunal that ruled against me never provided any evidence that I could have contested. This incarceration marked a decisive turning point in my journey. Prison, which I encountered far too young, made me grow up too quickly and marked me enduringly. Condemned without evidence, I had to make the most difficult choice of my life in 2008: Either be deported to France for 15 years, and risk never being able to return to the land where I was born; or negotiate a deal by pleading guilty. I chose the latter, which imposed on me seven years of imprisonment. Not because I relished being confined between four walls, but because I understood that our struggle is also fought by remaining on our land.

Upon my release from prison in 2011, I decided to study law and become a lawyer, because even if we cannot obtain justice in Israeli courts, I understood that the cause of Palestinian political prisoners must be defended everywhere in the world, first and foremost for my friends still in prison.

The harassment by the state continued. In 2016, Israeli authorities expelled my wife Elsa, a French citizen who was seven months pregnant at the time, and barred her entry. My family is used as an inhumane instrument of pressure. To this day, I am still constrained to living far from my wife and my two young children.

In 2017, I was once again put under administrative detention. Still without any evidence, I was accused of belonging to the PFLP (a far-left political organization deemed terrorist by Israel, the United States, and the European Union). I only got out after 13 months, in 2018.

After becoming a lawyer for Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ rights NGO, I was arrested once again on June 29, 2020, as I was about to get tested for coronavirus.

On October 18, the Ministry of Interior notified me of an expulsion order against me and of the pure and simple withdrawal of my Jerusalemite ID, signifying my possible deportation at any moment – using once again dictatorial methods of criminalization by accusing me of “violating allegiance to the state of Israel”. All of us Palestinians of Jerusalem are considered strangers in our own annexed city, “residents” without citizenship. From the construction of the wall to racist laws that discriminate against non-Jewish populations regarding the right to property and construction, we – my friends on the other side of the wall in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan – are fighting against plans for mass expulsion.

The next day, on October 19, Israeli authorities banned six Palestinian civil society organizations, including Addameer, classifying them as “terrorist groups” after several years of international harassment and defamation campaigns, in vain, against these organizations. When asked for the evidence, the judges retort: “Classified.”

A week earlier, several members of these organizations, myself included, had our phones scanned. They had been hacked by Pegasus spyware, which is developed by Israeli company NSO. The program has been used to spy on political opponents, journalists and human rights activists – sometimes leading to their deaths – as Israel has done every day since always.

The state harassment led today against Palestinian organizations, my fellow human rights defenders and myself is only the continuation of policies by a regime that seeks to quash our people’s will for freedom at all costs, as well as any resistance to the colonial apartheid regime put in place since 1948, which has pushed colonization relentlessly ever since. Whether Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu or Yair Lapid today, there is a consensus about implementing the racist myth created by the Zionist movement: “A land without a people for a people without a land.”

From the apartheid wall to drones, from spyware to facial recognition, the Israeli regime controls our every move. This model of securitarian authoritarianism is tested on us Palestinians on a large scale, and is then exported, including to France, and promoted as avant-garde, instead of a serious danger to any state upholding the rule of law and democratic values. Today, as I am branded suspect, guilty and criminal, deprived of my rights and my capacity to defend myself, I feel surrounded and I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

Meanwhile, the European Union, Arab states, the United Kingdom and France continue to welcome successive Israeli governments with open arms, and sign various agreements on military and technological cooperation.

As long as France and other members of the international community perpetuate Israeli impunity and the myth that Israel shares our values, our lives will keep on being a continual ordeal from which we cannot build a better future.

This original French version of this article first appeared on the Mediapart website.

Translation by Chloé Benoist

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