[ Khader Adnan died in prison on May 2, aged 45, after an 87-day
hunger strike. He had been repeatedly held in administrative detention
since 1999. Despite vilifying him as a terrorist, Israel never charged
him with involvement in military activities.]
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KHADER ADNAN’S LAST HUNGER STRIKE  
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Mouin Rabbani
May 8, 2023
London Review of Books
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_ Khader Adnan died in prison on May 2, aged 45, after an 87-day
hunger strike. He had been repeatedly held in administrative detention
since 1999. Despite vilifying him as a terrorist, Israel never charged
him with involvement in military activities. _

Palestinians walk by a mural of hunger-striking prisoner Khader Adnan
in Gaza City on May 2, 2023—the day he died., Photo: Mohammed
Abed/AFP // Common Dreams

 

According to a 2001 US Department of Justice report
[[link removed]], the percentage of
adult male African-Americans who had ever served time in a state or
federal prison rose from 8.7 to 16.6 per cent between 1974 and 2001.
A study
[[link removed]] published last
December found that ‘non-Hispanic Black males’ lifetime risk of
imprisonment remained very high’ at more than 16 per cent.

Although similarly reliable statistics for Palestinians are
unavailable, it has been estimated that 40 per cent
[[link removed]] of
adult male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have seen the
inside of an Israeli prison since 1967. During the 1987-93 popular
uprising, the occupied territories boasted the world’s highest per
capita incarceration rate. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has
employed mass detention as a method of control over the Arab
populations under its rule, often on the basis of the 1945 Defence
(Emergency) Regulations introduced by the British during the Palestine
Mandate and subsequently incorporated into Israeli law.

It’s hard to find a Palestinian family in which no one has been
arrested. Many are held for interrogation by the security forces and
then released without charge; their detention often includes various
forms of torture, outlawed by international law and convention but
endorsed by Israel’s supreme judicial authorities and political
leadership. Many others are charged, tried and sentenced by the
military court system, a farcical apparatus with a 95 per cent
conviction rate. It routinely resorts to secret ‘evidence’, denies
access to lawyers, prosecutes minors as adults, and convicts on the
basis of coerced confessions. These abuses, too, have been repeatedly
legitimised by Israel’s supreme court and government.

Administrative detention is another British practice that Israel has
adopted, imposing indefinitely renewable terms of imprisonment without
charge or trial. Khader Adnan died in prison on 2 May, aged 45, after
an 87-day hunger strike. A former spokesman for the Palestinian
Islamic Jihad movement from the town of Arraba in the northern West
Bank, Adnan had been repeatedly held in administrative detention since
1999. Despite vilifying him as a terrorist, Israel never charged him
with involvement in military activities.

A 28-day hunger strike in 2003 led to his release from prolonged
solitary confinement. In administrative detention in 2011-12, he went
on hunger strike for 66 days. Confronted with growing Palestinian
protests and international scrutiny as Adnan neared death while
shackled to a hospital bed, Israel agreed to his early release. Other
Palestinian administrative detainees followed his example. In 2015 the
Israeli minister of public security, Gilad Erdan (now the permanent
representative to the United Nations), denounced the non-violent
tactic as ‘a new kind of suicide attack’. Adnan went on hunger
strike several more times, once for 56 days, during further detentions
in 2014, 2015 and 2021.

His latest arrest, on 5 February, was accompanied by a charge sheet
rather than administrative detention order. The first count was
membership in a banned organisation, which by Israeli standards most
Palestinians have been guilty of at some point in their lives, though
Adnan’s wife, Randa, insists it no longer applied to her husband.
The second count was incitement, on the strength of such activities as
paying solidarity visits to the families of political prisoners and
expressing public support for those on hunger strike. Anticipating
indefinite pre-trial detention culminating at best in conviction by a
kangaroo court, Adnan resorted once again to hunger strike.

In the past, Israel tended to offer an eleventh-hour deal rather than
face the potentially explosive consequences of allowing a hunger
striker to die. But an apocalyptic eruption is just what is wanted by
key members of the current Israeli government, such as the finance
minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a self-styled ‘fascist homophobe’
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and the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a devotee of Meir
Kahane who was in 2007 convicted by an Israeli court of incitement to
racism and support for a terrorist organisation. Ben-Gvir is a
resident of the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba, one of the most
fanatical population centres on the planet. Previous residents include
Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the massacre at the Ibrahimi
Mosque in Hebron in 1994, whose portrait hung in Ben-Gvir’s living
room until 2020
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Under these circumstances negotiations with Adnan were never an
option. Worse still, and in contrast to past practice, he was not
transferred to a hospital equipped for emergency resuscitation, and
the Israel Prison Service rejected repeated requests by Adnan’s wife
and children to visit him. Israel’s courts washed their hands of the
situation. It is now a week since he died and the Israeli authorities
are still refusing to release his body to his family for burial.

Khader Adnan carried out his struggles against Israel’s carceral
regime on his own initiative. He wasn’t following directives from a
political leadership or participating in a broader campaign organised
by the prisoner movement. His actions exposed the impotence and
failure of the Palestinian Authority, which had itself arrested him on
several occasions over the years. Islamic Jihad and the other factions
offered only rhetorical support. Randa Adnan has said that those who
forsook her husband during his final days have forfeited the right to
avenge his death.

All the same, it is difficult to overstate the political and emotive
significance of the prisoner question for Palestinians, given that
incarceration has played such a prominent role in ordinary lives as
well as the development of the national movement. In the short term,
Adnan’s death has once again put the plight of Palestinian prisoners
– especially the old, sick and long-term – high on the political
agenda. It also adds more oil to an already flammable reality.

_[MOUIN RABBANI is co-editor of Jadaliyya
[[link removed]] and a non-resident fellow at the Centre
for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.]_

* Khader Adnan
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* Palestinians
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* Palestine
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* Israel
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* Torture
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* Occupied Territories
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* West Bank
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* Gaza
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* Israeli prisons
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* apartheid
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* hunger strike
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* Palestinian prisoners
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