Targeting Human Rights Defenders

Yet this articulate, handsome Palestinian used facts and visual evidence to show how the wall was expropriating yet more Palestinian land and separating Palestinian communities from each other. One picture Jamal showed us still breaks my heart: a middle-aged Palestinian farmer with a tear trickling down his cheek. The olive grove he had inherited from his father had just been bulldozed to make way for the wall. He had not only lost his livelihood; he had also been unable to protect his family's trust, the symbol of everything that had gone into making them Palestinian. Now Jamal is in jail. Israel's occupation army detained him on 16 December. After interrogating him, they brought him back home, handcuffed and searched his house while his wife and three children watched. Then they took him off to prison. Jamal has always combined strategic thinking with practical nonviolent action to defend Palestinian rights. He founded the Stop the Wall Campaign, which tirelessly fought the wall's encroachment alongside village-based movements like Bilin and Niilin. The campaign has mobilized activists for justice within Palestine and across the world. Jamal is the third anti-wall activist to be arrested in the last few months. Their arrest is an Israeli acknowledgement of their success, at great personal cost. Civil resistance has spread widely throughout the occupied territories, in spite of Israel's attempts to crush it. On 9 November, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, protesters managed for the first time to topple a few of the wall's massive concrete panels. The movement has also imposed itself on the Palestinian Authority, which recently held a conference bringing together all the village civil resistance committees. Moreover, the Stop the Wall Campaign made a strategic decision to link to the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The first Stop the Wall activist to be arrested was Mohammad Othman on his return from Norway, where his advocacy efforts contributed significantly to the Norwegian Pension Fund decision to divest from the Israeli military giant Elbit Systems. Omar Barghouti, a founder of the academic boycott movement, says that Israeli analysis of the impact of BDS has changed after "academic and commercial organizations started feeling the heat and demanding action." He sees Israel's latest arrests as a test. "Either we meet this challenge and the world supports our right to civil resistance, or they will intensify their repression of all human rights defenders. If they can get away with arresting civil society leaders that are clearly committed to nonviolence, then everyone's at risk." The world appears to be responding. Mohammad Othman's arrest sparked a flurry of protests by European officials and diplomats, including a letter from a British minister demanding that Othman be given the right to due process or released.