In Bad Waters — Palestinian journalist Muhammad al-Qiq is dying in an Israeli Gulag. He is one of many thousands of Palestinians suffering in the Israeli prison system
By Dezeray Lyn
Muhammad al-Qiq is starving to death. He is unconscious. He hasn’t taken a meal in over 60 days. He is 33. He is a journalist. He has been placed on ‘administrative detention’ under secret evidence of incitement against Israel.
No doubt, Israel eyes being a journalist-while-Palestinian as criminal; a part of its efforts to wash away all speech aimed at defining and ending the occupation.
The mastermind tactic is giving Israel fluidity in movement in, through and around international law. Soaking into the cracks it has eroded in the stone-y structures of human rights proclamations, flowing through the fingers of the ‘better angels’ of international consciousness, saturating and destabilizing the soil, in short, Israel is slippery with no sign of gaining traction any time soon.
With an eight to one ratio of revenge killings on Palestinians defending themselves against an illegal occupation since the pulse of chaos quickened on October 1st of 2015, Israel has secured its place on a battleground where they set, rewrite and break the rules to a deafening global silence.
Sword and Shield:
With a rapid pace, Israel darts around the West Bank executing arrests, performing midnight demolitions of the homes and businesses of Palestinians, arbitrarily searching/questioning/detaining Palestinians, and killing at will.
Sword.
Just as rapidly, the state and all of its powerful agents- a settler/soldier internal dynamic with support in the form of silence and cash from powerful world governments recoils behind a veneer of ‘defense’ which wears many disguises. The newest disguise for defense hangs loosely; incitement.
Shield.
Occupation forces raided, destroyed and served orders to cease broadcast to several Palestinian radio stations in recent months in the al-Khalil (Hebron) area. The Tel Rumeida neighborhood in H-2 Area C Hebron has been placed under indefinite closed military zone order and it’s residents forced to register, reminiscent of Nazi era stratagems. And arrests of Palestinians on the basis of ‘secret evidence’ have taken place in IOF operation after operation, all flying under the banner of addressing ‘incitement’ against Israel.
(Photo above: Fayha Shalash (C), the wife of Palestinian journalist Mohammed al-Qiq (portrait) who is on hunger strike, sits with their daughter and her father-in-law (R) at their family home in the West Bank village of Dura on January 12, 2016. Qiq, a 33-year-old reporter for Saudi TV channel Al Majd, was arrested by Israel on November 21 at his home in the West Bank city of Ramallah and in mid-December placed under administrative detention, which allows imprisonment without trial for six-month periods renewable indefinitely. He began a hunger strike on November 25, alleging torture by his captors and is currently in the hospital wing of Ramle prison, in central Israel. / AFP / HAZEM BADER)
Amnesty International has taken issue with Muhammad’s baseless imprisonment, demanding that Israel either release or charge al-Qiq, who the group said has been mistreated and tortured in ways that violate international law.
In HaEmek Hospital in Afula, where al-Qiq is being treated, the terms he set for his hunger strike were totally violated by medical personnel who forcefully treated him intravenously. Even in the dark halls of self-starvation, Palestinians are invasively imposed upon by their occupiers.
Physicians for Human Rights Israel stated that, “Al-Qiq was tied to the bed and forcefully held down by prison wardens while a member of the medical staff made the infusion. For four days al-Qiq remained tied to the bed, hooked up to the IV drip, while pleading for its removal, to no avail,” the group said at the time.”
The Israeli entity, its every dynamic, every facet, every mechanism is pinning al-Qiq to a hunger strike that has him currently on the brink of death. But the fluidity of a state who whitewashes their own criminality and bloodletting, condoning-by-allowing the rabid anti-Arab racism of extremist, ideological settlers; that fluidity has been gifted by a world who has done little to halt it.
If Israel lets Muhammad al-Qiq die. The world let him die.
Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.
Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).
Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.
His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.
Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.
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