Activism

On seeing photos of my son Mahmoud standing up to Israeli guns with a cigarette clamped in his lips

When I saw photos of my son Mahmoud by chance on the page of a journalist, taken last Friday in Hebron, it was not surprising to me that I saw the Israeli Zionist occupation soldiers trying to humiliate and abuse a Palestinian child. How many children were martyred, their mothers and families traumatized. How many children were arrested and imprisoned, and forfeited years of life despite their soft bodies, despite their childhood, which was stolen by the occupation before their births.

When I saw my 16-year-old son, I did not hit him as some might have expected because I caught him smoking in the picture. I rebuked him because there were those who were able to take pictures of him so easily. If a journalist was able to take such pictures of Mahmoud during a protest, it means that the soldiers also took pictures of him. It does not matter that my son wasn’t throwing stones, the Israeli soldiers can keep the pictures at a military checkpoint. Then Mahmoud could become a target to be humiliated by them.

I do not want my child to be a cheap and easy target. I am from a school that believes that if the Israelis are fishing for us, we should not be small fish, easy for them to catch. As the Palestinian writer and comrade Ghassan Kanafani said, “Don’t die before you become an adversary.” And today is the 48th anniversary of Kanafani’s assassination.

But when I saw the picture, I thanked God for his mercy that they did not beat him in the place where he’d had an operation in his abdomen. Where his appendix had burst in his body, and he underwent two operations and spent a month and a half in the hospital for treatment, because toxins had spread in his body.

Once again, I praised God that the cigarette remained in his mouth and did not fall to the ground, so that one of the soldiers would call on him in his innocent childhood to pick it up from the ground so that he might shoot and kill him on the pretext of him attempting to stab a soldier– or any other lie and story that could be fabricated.

Then, in another contradiction, I was pleased that there are people who document how childhood is assassinated in Palestine.

Mahmoud Dwaik, detained by Israeli soldiers, Hebron, July 2, 2020. Image (c) Amer Shallodi.

Many of the feelings that parents feel concerning their sons are mixed with misery, and the misery of this national life for children and the lack of a decent life for them, as for children in the rest of the world. There are some families who cooperate with the Israelis. They are keen to steal the loaf of bread from the poor. They call themselves builders, but they have given nothing to the homeland. They were brought up only to take, while we fight every day for the sake of the homeland and on the other hand for the sake of a loaf of bread that turned into a dream because of those who stole our dreams. This difference is embodied by another Khanafani saying, of the two tents. There is a tent for those for those who were raised to give to their homeland  and sacrifice, and a separate tent for those who were raised to plunder the homeland  and use it as slogans for personal  interest-only.

This transforms the scene with its contrasts and manifestations, into a violent challenge, into a black comedy embodying the mosaic of our lives. All of us, as parents, hope that our children will live in peace and happiness, and have a comfortable future. None of us wishes imprisonment or death for his children.

Ghassan Kanafani
Ghassan Kanafani, 1936-1972

I come back and look at the picture until all the images, fantasies and fears fade away from it, and only one image remains stuck in my mind. That is the image of my son Mahmoud, who stood tall before the Israeli soldiers, armed with the latest weapons, without batting an eyelid and without his cigarette falling from his mouth, like the glory of the Hebron Mountains and the mountains of Galilee. The glory of the Palestinian people throughout history in front of all invaders.

Mahmoud Dwaik, detained by Israeli soldiers, Hebron, July 2, 2020. Image (c) Amer Shallodi.

The coming generations of Palestine are our hope and hope for the future of Palestine. Hope is renewed in them, like the Palestinian phoenix. Whenever some say that Palestine died and ceased to emerge again, the phoenix rises from among the ashes announcing the revolution of life again.

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Checkpoint culture: https://www.972mag.com/israel-checkpoint-container-abu-dis/

“The Container is what’s known as an “internal checkpoint”: a way of keeping a boot on the Palestinians’ neck, and an ever-present reminder that no matter how far you are away from Israel, Israel is constantly watching, always involved in every aspect of your daily life.”

Related:

https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g4386/rr-2
BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal)
Re: “Israeli doctors continue to enable Israeli intelligence agency’s torture” industry” Feb. 11/2020 Dear Editor,

“As a follow-up to previous BMJ correspondence on this subject, I wish to add that the active complicity of Israeli doctors with torture in Israel continues. This is not only doctors attached to the intelligence agency Shin Bet or working in the Israel Prison Service, but also doctors in emergency rooms across Israel who write false medical reports. I write as a doctor and as founder of Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), whose detailed case studies ‘Ticking Bombs’ (2007) and ‘Doctoring the evidence, abandoning the victim’ (2011), assembled irrefutable evidence for these practices. 

“These abuses go back many years. In June 1993 I organized an international conference in Tel Aviv on behalf of PHRI regarding torture in Israel. At the conference, I highlighted a Shin Bet medical eligibility form discovered by chance by an Israeli journalist. The Shin Bet doctor was asked to certify whether the prisoner could be kept in isolation, whether they could be tied up, could be hooded, and whether he could be made to stand for prolonged periods of time. This was in effect a ‘fitness for torture’ form to be signed by the doctor. Four years later, a second form, suspiciously similar to the first, came to light, yet Shin Bet always denied that it had ever existed. At the time PHRI asked the Israel Medical Association (IMA) to take action, as they are mandated to do as a member of the World Medical Association (WMA) – the WMA’s Declaration of Tokyo forbids any doctor to collaborate with torture, and directs them to speak out and protect the patient when torture is suspected. The IMA would not act.(cont’d)

.

(cont’d)
“Our findings were published in the book ‘Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics & the case of Israel’ (1995) whose sale in Israel appears to be banned.
“26 years later, in late 2019, we witness the same course of events in the case of a 44 year old Palestinian man Samer Arbeed whose interrogation left him hospitalized in a life-threatening state, in coma on a respirator & in kidney failure. No doctor who saw him, nor the Israeli Medical Association, protested about his torture.
“…doctors in emergency rooms across Israel write false medical opinions in accordance with the demands of Shin Bet, & have done so for years. PHRI documented such cases in ‘Doctoring the evidence, abandoning the victim’ (2011).
“The Shin Bet medical eligibility form allows for: sleep prevention; exposure of prisoners to extreme temperatures; beatings; being tied for long periods in ‘stress’ positions; being forced to stand for long periods; being hooded for prolonged periods; sexual humiliation; solitary confinement; no contact with family or lawyer. This kind of ‘eligibility’ leads the prisoner directly into the torture chamber & the doctor knows this. Moreover his presence in the unit confers on the interrogators the moral authority of the medical profession & gives them confidence. In this role he has always been shielded by the IMA. But a doctor who cooperates with Israel’s torture industry is complicit in that very industry. If a prisoner dies during interrogation, the doctor is an accomplice to his or her murder. A recent report by Adameer, the Palestinian Prisoner Support & Human Rights Association, gives a graphic account of the kinds of torture & ill-treatment that continue…” 

Dr. Ruchama Marton, doctor, Tel Aviv
See footnotes at bottom of British Medical Journal article.

A brave and dear boy.

Who wouldn’t be proud.?

Humilitation and abuse?

I must have missed something, because those Israeli soldiers look bored, and uninterested.

Mahmoud’s father is projecting.