Posts tagged ‘Palestinian Authority’

Jul 30

The Palestinian torturers

Two reports released this week are throwing the spotlight on Palestinians who are detained without charge and tortured by the Hamas and Fatah forces. Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group, has detailed how more than 1,000 have been arrested in the last year, with “an estimated 20%-30% of the detainees” having suffered torture “including severe beatings and being tied up in painful positions”.

Human Rights Watch is today releasing a similarly-focused report which concludes that “the use of torture is dramatically up”. Al-Haq accuses both Hamas’s Executive Force, and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA)’s Preventive Security Force of widespread maltreatment of detainees. Read more

Oct 12

Nonviolent resistance a means, not the end

In a recent article on the openDemocracy website, the rewritten Palestinian Authority policy document that replaced “muqawama” (resistance) with “popular struggle” was hailed as having “the potential to dramatically transform a conflict whose just resolution has continually eluded diplomats and militants.” [1] The writer Maria Stephan may be admired for her optimism about the possibility of large-scale mobilization in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) for a program of nonviolent resistance, but there is a twofold failure of contextualization that compromises her analysis. Read more

Jan 30

Reform as resistance

The word ‘reform’ has rarely been so common a part of the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whether wielded by Israel and the ‘Quartet’ as a stick with which to beat the Palestinian Authority (PA), or the key slogan of the victorious Hamas’ election campaign, everyone is talking about ‘reform’. The fact that it is used in such different contexts and by such diverse actors is enough to warrant an examination of ‘reform’ as it is applied in the Palestinian context.

In the last few years Israel has continued its time-honoured practice of establishing facts on the ground, unhindered in part due to its stalling tactics in the remaining vestiges of a ‘peace process’. The typical argument has been that there can be no progress in negotiations or concessions until the Palestinians, one, ‘reform’ their institutions and purge the corruption from the PA, and two, ‘rein in the militants’. Read more