Jew World Order

Since Israel unleashed its campaign of mass killing against the people of Gaza, it also started an unprecedented repressive onslaught against all other Palestinians under its rule — from the river to the sea. In the West Bank, it includes terrorist attacks by armed settlers and the occupation army and constant army raids on towns and villages, including targeting residents from airplanes. These attacks have already killed more than two hundred Palestinians. 

In 1948-occupied Palestine, hundreds were detained and interrogated, many of them tortured. An unknown number (maybe about one hundred) were indicted and are held for an indefinite period in “security” prisons, as the courts tend to declare any Palestinian opposed to Israel’s barbaric attacks as a “terrorist supporter” and claim that he or she is too dangerous to be released on bail.

Of the many dozens still awaiting trial in harsh conditions in these so-called “security” prisons, there are only two cases of people who consciously went out to protest the war — two activists accused of leading an anti-war demonstration in Umm al-Fahm on October 19, and another two who are accused of spraying anti-war graffiti on Haifa’s walls. All the rest are simply guilty of sharing images or comments on social media and were completely surprised to be dragged from their homes and thrown into prison.

As the interrogation period finished and the two pairs of political activists were indicted, the accusations against them became official and public. It is a case study of the criminalization of non-violent political protest.

The Umm al-Fahm “Stop the War” demo

Umm al-Fahm has a very important political role in ‘48 Palestine. For one, it was not occupied in 1948, but was handed to Israel for free by the Hashemite rulers of Jordan a year later. Umm al-Fahm is located some 20 kilometers northwest of Jenin and 40 kilometers southeast of Haifa. Its “Mount Iskander” is higher than the Carmel, and its densely populated narrow and winding alleys discourage police intervention. The legendary Palestinian caricaturist, Naji al-Ali, once praised its militant tradition by saying, “Umm al-Fahm is the code name for Palestine.”

Umm al-Fahm used to be dominated by the communist party, but in 1989 switched to the Islamic Movement. It was also where Abna’ al-Bald was established in 1969, to become the most leftist Palestinian National Liberation movement within ‘48 Palestine. The mass struggle in the area around “The Roha Lands” in 1998 was one of the rare cases where Palestinians succeeded in forcing Israel to return confiscated lands to their original owners. In the year 2000, with the eruption of the Second Intifada, several demonstrators in Umm al-Fahm and the surrounding townships of “the Little Triangle” were killed by Israeli police snipers.

Fast forward to the present, and Herak Umm al-Fahm (the Umm al-Fahm Movement) has become the most formidable grassroots movement in ‘48 Palestine. Its main cause for protest was against organized crime, especially the wave of indiscriminate murder for which they held the Israeli police and Shabak responsible, succeeding in mobilizing thousands to take part in demonstrations and, on some occasions, managing to shut down main streets.

No wonder Umm al-Fahm was the only place in ‘48 Palestine where there was a proper demonstration in solidarity with Gaza over the last month and a half (it happened on October 19, two days after the bombing of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital). The demonstration, however, was muted relative to local tradition, only two or three hundred strong, with not a Palestinian flag in sight, and moving through the alleyways rather than closing down any main streets. When it was about to disperse quietly, it was attacked by a large force of police and border guards. Twelve people were arrested and beaten during the attack, and two organizers were later indicted. They are still in prison awaiting trial for “supporting terrorism.”

Trying to be on the safe side

The two detainees from Umm al-Fahm are the educator Muhammad Taher Jabarin and the lawyer Ahmad Khalifa. Ahmad specializes in human rights, specifically the right to expression, and was working for a human rights organization defending political prisoners. For transparency’s sake, I must admit that I know Ahmad personally from my political activity. But, even without knowing Ahmad, the political logic of the October 29 Umm al-Fahm demo was obvious. As everybody in the Palestinian public was full of (justified) fear of Israel’s furious oppression after Hamas attacks on October 7, there was no protest of the daily massacres in Gaza. The organizers of the demonstration wanted to prove that you can still have a peaceful demonstration, express solidarity with the people of Gaza without supporting Hamas, and go home safely.

This context is obvious to anybody who wants to know the truth, as the demonstration was filmed live by a local news site named “al-Jarmaq net.” The police used the video as their main piece of evidence, describing its content in detail in the indictment. 

Before the demonstration even began, “defendant number 1” Jabarin, told the participants that Khalifa, as a lawyer, would explain to them what is lawfully permitted in a demonstration. Khalifa insisted that all would repeat only the agreed slogans so there would be no excuse for the police to intervene. At the end of the demonstration, Khalifa took the stage again, thanked everybody for coming, and called on everybody to disperse quietly. He said they proved that one can demonstrate peacefully, and called on Palestinians in other towns not to be afraid to do the same. He could not finish his short speech as the crowd was attacked from all directions by stun grenades and batons.

All these efforts to conduct a peaceful and orderly demonstration did not prevent the police from accusing Jabarin and Khalifa of supporting a terrorist organization, praising terrorist activities, and calling on people to perform terrorist acts. How come? It is all based on a far-fetched misinterpretation of the slogans that used in the demonstration.

What were the criminalized slogans?

The indictment of the “Umm al-Fahm Two” includes more than twenty slogans used in the demonstration. As the indictment claims, they were translated from Arabic to Hebrew “by a policeman that knows Arabic.” Some of the translations are clearly distorted, but, even with these distortions, it is clear that no “terrorist organization” was mentioned, and no violent act was praised or called for.

Here are some of the slogans that the indictment cites (in Arabic, they have a rhythm and rhyme):

• Resist, resist, resist, on your rights do not compromise!
• There is no solution, other than the uprooting of the occupier!
• The unity of your people, oh Palestine, a thorn in the throat of the occupiers!
• Join us, masses, the people of Gaza are dear to us!
• Oh Gaza, stay strong, your land gave birth to lions!
• Hashem’s Gaza* will not bow to the tank and the cannon!
• Shout and raise your voice, death is better than humiliation!
• In Gaza, al-Aqsa, and Sheikh Jarrah, my people call for struggle!

All these slogans are old slogans repeated millions of times in hundreds of demonstrations before, and nobody was ever charged for them. 

The writers of the indictment did not care to write which of the slogans, in their interpretation, constituted an offense. After listing the slogans, they simply conclude:

“In their actions listed above, the defendants together committed an act of identification with a terrorist organization by publishing words of praise, support, and sympathy for the organization, in public, and with the aim of identifying with it, and published a direct call to commit an act of terrorism, and published words of praise, sympathy, and encouragement for acts of terrorism, supporting it and identifying with it, and according to the content of the publication and the circumstances in which it was published, there is a real possibility that it will lead to an act of terrorism.” 

(It is all one long run-on sentence in the original).

For them, any Palestinian call for struggle can only be interpreted as a call to perform terrorist attacks.

* Hashem’s Gaza is an old traditional nickname for the city.

The power of repetition

The prosecution requested Judge Maria Pikus Bogdanov of the Haifa Magistrate Court to extend the detention of Jabarin and Khalifa till the end of their trial. Advocate Hassan Jabarin, the director of Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights, tried to convince the judge that the indictment was out of touch with the reality of the peaceful demonstration. He noticed a strange feature of the indictment document. Instead of listing specific slogans and explaining what was wrong with them, the same slogans are cited again and again over more than a full page.

In the demonstration, which was relatively short — lasting just about half an hour — the organizers wanted to keep stick to what they regarded as “safe slogans,” repeating them to prevent “improvisations.” It would appear that the film was transcribed with all the repetitions and later pasted into the indictment. The sheer weight of the repetitions seemed to the prosecution to create a “threatening” impression. Advocate Jabarin objected that this is not a professional way to write an indictment, and requested that every slogan that is claimed to be offensive be mentioned only once.

The judge did not only ignore the defense lawyer’s request but went further along with the prosecution’s strange habit. In her ruling from November 21, where she explained why she agreed that the accused should be detained until the end of their trial, she essentially “copied and pasted” the entire indictment, including the repetitions. But this was not enough for her. While reasoning her ruling, she cut and pasted again an even longer version of the repetitive slogans from the transcription. Later, she cut and pasted long sections of it into five different sections of her ruling for each article of the law included in the indictment.

Naturally, she avoided any attempt to understand what the slogans might be talking about and satisfied herself by stressing that it was clear that they constituted the claimed offenses.

Finally, she set another hearing for December 28 to consider whether the accused can be transferred to house detention out of Umm al-Fahm.

Indictment for spraying graffiti multiplied by three

I already reported here about the two Palestinian Haifa activists, Assaf and Ran, who were accused of spraying the wall with graffiti in solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza. The two were arrested on November 12. When I last reported about them on November 15, the appeal judge in the district court overruled a decision to release them and extended their detention for two days. Their lawyer, Afnan Khalifa, warned us that the prosecution will try to indict them within this short period, to trap them in a long detention period until the end of their trial.

As feared, on Friday, November 17, the prosecution submitted to the remand judge an indictment against the two, with a request for an unlimited detention. Based on this request, their detention was automatically remanded until the request is set to be heard on Thursday, November 23.

In this case, the prosecution is on shaky legal grounds. Spraying graffiti is defined in the law as “vandalism of real estate,” but this article of the law does not allow prolonged detention before trial. To close the gap, the prosecution added two more offenses based on the same graffiti. They claimed that by their graffiti, the accused also “caused nuisance to the public” and “behaved in a way that could violate public peace.” The extra offenses from the graffiti were caused, according to the indictment, due to the special war situation. Accordingly, the “facts” section of the indictment starts on the morning of October 7, and details all the awful things that happened (only to the Israeli side) since then.

It is strange to see how a “repetition pandemic” is spreading in the Israeli justice system. Though the graffiti indictment (as it related to relatively minor offenses) was prepared by the Haifa police prosecution department, unlike the prosecution in the “Ministry of Justice” that prepared the Umm al-Fahm indictment, they also repeated, again and again, the same slogans — apparently trying to match the number of writings on Haifa’s walls.

They also did not point to any specific writings and did not even try to explain how they constituted the offense in the indictment. They assumed that everybody reading texts like “Children killers, stop the war on Gaza” (written in English), or “Sorry my beloved Gaza, Gaza is annihilated” (in Arabic) would immediately understand that, beyond the damage to the walls, it disturbed the public order.

In this case, we have one strong card for the defense. The Haifa police wanted to accuse the graffiti writers (or suspected writers) of “incitement,” which could convert the whole case into a “security” category and almost automatically entail long detention. But they admitted in the court that they consulted the responsible people in the prosecution and were told that the content did not imply incitement.

In the latest hearing, the judge asked the police how, after the state decided there was no incitement, they still treated the case as if there was. So, in this case, at least, we have some hope of seeing Assaf and Ran released today.

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