Hunger Strike on the West Bank
Empty Stomachs, Palestinian Spring
by PATRICK O. STRICKLAND
Ramallah.

Following the examples of Khader Adnan and Hana Shalabi, 1,500 Palestinian prisoners have joined a mass hunger strike campaign inside Israeli military prisons. They are calling for an immediate termination of the policy of administrative detention and the excessive use of solitary confinement, and demanding humane living conditions, family visits, and reasonable access to educational materials.

In short, Palestinian hunger strikers are reclaiming something which they have been systematically denied—their dignity.

It is not Israel alone that stands between Palestinians and their basic human rights: neither the media nor the Western governments have bothered to comment much on the plight of Palestinian prisoners conducting a mass campaign of peaceful resistance.

In the media, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria have been repackaged and price-marked. The highly commercialized depiction of the Arab Spring—large crowds of youngsters overthrowing repressive dictators only with the help of Iphones and Facebook—has increased media profits.

Palestinians, however, continue to be portrayed as nothing more than ragtag bands of stone-throwers, hijackers, and suicide bombers.

The Obama administration’s endorsement of Arab uprisings has been limited to those countries which allowed it to secure its hegemony in the Middle East. Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali were urged to step down and make way for democracy only after it was clear that their ousters were imminent. In Libya, where Gaddafi had a stubborn grasp on the country’s oil, NATO provided its humble services to the rebels seeking regime change.

When Palestinian activists challenge segregation polices and board Jewish-only buses in the West Bank, their arrest goes unreported in the West. When young women from villages near Ramallah peacefully march on a freshwater spring that ideologically-intoxicated settlers had wrangled from them years ago, there was no corporate media coverage. When imprisoned Fatah figure Marwan Barghouti released an appeal to Palestinians to engage in widespread civil resistance to the policies of the occupation, the popular Western understanding remained: Palestinians are still “terrorists.”

(...)

Imagine if Gilad Shalit had announced that he was on hunger strike while he held in captivity by Hamas. Imagine if 1,500 imprisoned Iranians were to stop taking food in protest of their brutal regime. The front pages of every newspaper would be riddled with words of outrage against their jailers.

 http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/09/empty-stomachs-palestinian-spring/