02/17/16 – Charlotte Silver – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
First up today is Charlotte Silver, writing at Electronic Intifada, electronicintifada.net.
That is, this one is titled Israeli Court Refuses to Let Dying Hunger Striker Go.
Welcome back to the show, Charlotte.
How are you?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm real good.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
Please tell us all about Mohamed al, is it Kik?
Al Kik.
Al Kik.
Yeah.
Right.
So Mohamed is a 33-year-old journalist from the West Bank.
He's from the Hebron area, but he's been living in Ramallah, and he is the father of two children.
And he was arrested last November in the middle of the night from his home.
And Israeli soldiers sort of immediately started interrogating him and, according to his lawyers, interrogating him and torturing him, holding him in stress positions for full days, up to 18 hours a day, threatening him.
And they were, according to his wife and his lawyer, asking him, trying to get him to confess to participating in media incitement, which he refused to do.
After about four days of this treatment, he began his hunger strike.
It wasn't until three weeks later that he was placed under administrative detention.
And administrative detention, as you probably know, is Israel's widespread practice that's been used increasingly over the last few months since violence escalated in October.
It's a practice of detaining Palestinians with no charge, no trial, and based on secret evidence.
And so often it's used supposedly to prevent crimes.
So Israeli security forces will allege that the person that they're detaining hasn't committed a crime, but is about to commit a crime.
But frequently these crimes that they allege are really based on such flimsy evidence that they wouldn't even stand up in a military court, which has far lower standards than civilian courts.
And in the case of Mohammed al-Kiq, the military court itself refused to allow charges to go forward against him.
And that's why he was placed under administrative detention.
Eighty-five days later, he's been on hunger strike.
He's consumed nothing but water for eighty-five days, and he could die at any moment.
And they've said that for at least two weeks now.
So it's quite serious.
And Israel's Supreme Court has continued to refuse to meet his demand, which is to be released to a hospital in the West Bank.
And, you know, it's telling that the Supreme Court has, in its latest ruling, which again refused to meet his demand to release him to the West Bank, they said that there is evidence, again, this is secret evidence, but that they are sort of relaying to the press that is sufficient to prove that he is undeniably involved in some sort of terror activities with Hamas.
But this is the Supreme Court saying that even after the military court said that there wasn't sufficient evidence to charge him, to try him.
So it seems like the Supreme Court is sort of the last bastion of Israel's military security establishment to maintain its practice of administrative detention, which has been roundly condemned by, you know, not just human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
But, you know, even the State Department has indicated that administrative detention denies due process and it should be curbed.
Right.
Of course, you know, it goes without saying, although it shouldn't, we need to be reminded of this all the time.
The constitution that created our government forbids our government from doing anything like this.
The closest they can get away with is calling someone a witness that they need to protect.
But even that can last for only a very short time.
And we saw that abused right after September 11th.
But then the courts put a pretty quick end to it, I think.
Well, I don't know.
I don't want to overstate that.
But at least the Justice Department backed off their chargeless rounding up of Muslims before it got too bad out of control.
I'm not trying to spin for Bush Jr. here, but just compared to Israel, where this is the law of the land, this is what they get to do.
They can just the cops can grab and arrest people.
And you're saying in this case, the military court said we don't see enough evidence to hold him, let him go.
So they said, OK, well, forget military jurisdiction or the court's jurisdiction.
We'll just do administrative detention.
So does that mean that it's it's the Shin Bet cops separate from the IDF that are holding him?
Is that how that works?
Well, well, this is my news.
I'm sorry.
It's not really important.
No, well, the military court actually is the one that ordered him to be placed under administrative detention.
OK, the military court.
But the military court said we wouldn't we don't want to prosecute him and try him.
And they were the same ones that said, but go ahead and hold him anyway.
Exactly.
I mean, the military court isn't upholding any kind of higher rule of law than the Shin Bet.
But it's just important to emphasize that the hunger strikes in Palestine are almost always conducted by people being held under administrative detention because it is literally the only recourse for someone to take against their detention.
I mean, the the Israeli military court system doesn't provide much judicial process for Palestinian defendants.
And the majority are plea cases and and very the standards of evidence are to to conduct are very low.
However, they at least present evidence against a defendant and the defendant has a chance if they wish to fight it to contest that evidence with administrative detention.
There is there is no evidence presented.
Sometimes there's vague references to the nature of the the concern about the defendant.
And in this case, there has been unusual, rare sort of references to why the so-called security establishment wants to keep wants to keep Mohammed Al-Kiq detained.
But but for the most part, people, you know, it's it's truly it is if you think about it, you're being arrested and you're being held and you're not being told what evidence is against you and why you're being held.
There's nothing you can do to fight it.
And that's why you see time and again, Palestinians hunger taking up a hunger strike to protest it, because what else can they do?
Right.
Well, you know, the thing of it is just have to think about this story for a minute, and we'll get back into more of the details on the other side of this break.
But for the audience, just think for a moment, if this was how the Chinese were treating the Uyghurs, right, or if this was what Iran was doing to the Iranian Kurds or the Iranian Azeris or or some minority in their country, this would be absolutely condemned.
It would be that our State Department would be putting out press releases all day long.
And you probably find a good part of the defense establishment in D.C. trying to figure out how we could get a regime change based on this kind of lawlessness or, you know, ramping up of sanctions or some kind of punishment.
Our government would be I'm not saying it's because they care.
I'm just saying if if they have a country that they're an adversary of, if Vladimir Putin was doing this, there would be you know, they would never stop screaming.
There'd be absolute hell to pay.
This is the definition of tyranny, being arrested on secret evidence and held indefinitely for pre crimes where even your accusers accuse you of thinking about doing something, not even necessarily conspiring to do something.
But they say planning, but they never have to prove it.
And this is absolutely crazy.
And then, you know, when we get back, we'll talk a little bit more, as you do in the article, Charlotte, about, you know, coming for people in the middle of the night, just like the scare stories, the true scare stories about the Nazis and the Soviet communists back in the days of 20th century totalitarianism.
And that's how the people of the West Bank live.
And the Americans need to know right back.
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All right, Joe, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Charlotte Silver about, I guess, you know, as far as we know, he's still alive.
This guy, Muhammad Al-Kiq, 85 days into a hunger strike here.
And the article, read the article at Electronic Intifada dot net.
Israeli Israeli court refuses to let dying hunger striker go.
And Charlotte, you say in here that on the 4th, they suspended his administrative detention.
But so now the question is just which hospital he can go in.
They're still controlling his every move and say he can only go to the hospital that they say, even though he is officially been released.
Is that right?
Not quite.
He hasn't been officially released.
The order on the on February 4th, which suspended his administrative detention, it suspended his his administrative detention on the basis that he was so weak, he no longer posed a threat.
So the idea was that once he recovered to some extent, he could be placed under administrative detention again.
And that's exactly why they don't want they then.
And the article I wrote a couple of days ago, they said they they ruled again that they refused to release him to a West Bank hospital because they didn't want to have to deploy military force to arrest him again.
They want to keep him in in their hospital so that once he recovers, they can rearrest him there without a problem.
Right.
And in these phantom borders that Israel supposedly have and, you know, the the Al-Muqasid Hospital in East Jerusalem, the it's a Palestinian hospital.
And that's where the Supreme Court said he would be allowed to go to has been raided multiple times, is extremely vulnerable to Israeli police raids and patients are vulnerable to arrest.
So it makes perfect sense that Al-Qaeda wouldn't feel like he was under any less risk of arrest being moved there, transferred there and East Jerusalem versus where he's being held now in the north of Israel.
But it's also important to note that West Bank hospitals are also routinely raided.
They aren't protected from Israeli militarism either.
Yeah, man, this is just crazy.
And so we hardly ever hear about this.
But is this a thing that happens very often that Palestinian prisoners do these hunger strikes?
Well, it is actually very common.
There are about four Palestinians currently hunger striking.
Al-Qaeda has gotten the most attention.
And it's hard to say why, why he has gotten the most attention.
He's definitely conducting an absolute strike.
And that this is a multiple sources close to him in the hospital and his family that he has not consumed anything but water and he has also refused all treatment.
And so his actual condition is, is mostly what reports on his condition are mostly speculation because the hot Israeli, he's refused any doctors, Israeli doctors from conducting any kind of examinations other than just observing him.
And so most recently, it was suspected that he may have had a heart attack.
And because of the fact that he was in severe pain, but also different parts of his body had sort of changed color.
But they can't verify that.
And so, you know, what you what we know about his health is that he may even at this point, even if the Supreme Court were to rule in his favor, and the Supreme Court is the last option for him, even if it were to reverse its previous ruling, the chances of his recovery are very small.
And he may not survive, even once treatment were to begin.
Now, I guess just to help us understand, you know, why this level of desperation, obviously, you know, you explain there with being arrested with, you know, on secret evidence and no charges and held in this administrative detention in a way that we never tolerate in America, except for, you know, Padilla and Omari.
But otherwise, we'd never tolerate that kind of thing around here.
But if someone is abducted by the Israelis and held in administrative detention like this, how long does that captivity typically last?
Is it all over the place?
Or is it typically a very long time or short time?
Each order, each the maximum administrative detention order is six months.
So Palestinians can be placed under administrative detention for anywhere between, you know, one to six months, but that can be renewed indefinitely.
And so there are Palestinian prisoners who've been held under administrative detention for years, and then some aren't.
So it is all over the place.
And for someone like Mohamed Al-Kiq, there's no reason to think that they wouldn't be renewed after six months.
I mean, and all the language around administrative detention is really, it sort of reveals how meaningless it really is.
Okay, so you're saying that right now, the Supreme Court is asserting that without a doubt, Mohamed is involved in terrorism activities with Hamas.
But they're also saying he can be released May 1st.
About two weeks ago, they tried to get him to agree to end his hunger strike if they promised to release him on May 1st.
So what happens on May 1st?
He just magically stops being a threat.
Even though they're saying that there's evidence that he was involved in planning activities with Hamas.
It doesn't really make sense.
And this is always in these cases, it never makes sense.
Security never really is a reasonable justification for this practice, which is used.
Right now, there's 660 Palestinians being held, approximately 660 Palestinians being held under administrative detention.
And even Israel's former public security minister in 2012, after a mass hunger strike in Israeli prisons among Palestinian prisoners.
He, the former public security minister said himself, we use this more than we need to, and we probably shouldn't.
And self-licking ice cream cone, just like any other government program, right?
Well, we have our administrative detention procedures really fine tuned now, we'd hate to stop using them so much.
But yeah, I would just try to ask the listeners again, try to imagine what kind of situation you would have to be in where you decide you're going to certainly risk suicide by starvation.
What kind of position would you have to be in to say, you know what, this is the only thing I can do to try to get anybody to pay enough attention, to care at all, to do anything about it.
With your one life that you got on this earth, that's what you're going to do, is starve yourself to death.
You know, that's the position the Israelis have put these people in.
That's the point.
Right.
But I also think it's important to place the responsibility of his death on the Israel Supreme Court, on Israel's military, on Israel's Attorney General, who's fighting to keep him under administrative detention.
I mean, these are the people who are holding this practice.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Yeah, no, no, no, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to deflect from their responsibility.
I'm just saying that that's, you know, that's when people hunger strike, it's because it's that bad.
That's why.
And even the Israel Supreme Court has placed the blame on Al-Qaeda if he dies.
They've said you've brought this on yourself, you know, in those exact words.
And I think that, you know, Israel's Supreme Court is bolstered by the fact that for the last several months, Israel's killed around 130 Palestinians, most of which haven't, you know, most of which are suspected of wanting to commit an attack.
You know, Israel's security establishment has completely legalized and paved the road to kill Palestinians to prevent crime in the future.
And that's essentially what the Supreme Court is participating in with its rulings against Mohammed Al-Qaeda.
And now you're saying that they've they've ruled that it's OK to kill Palestinians, not in immediate proportional self-defense out in the field, but it's OK to kill them for pre-crimes just as the same as it is to abduct them for pre-crimes like this?
No, I'm not saying the Supreme Court has ruled that.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood you.
No, I'm not.
I'm just referring to the over 130 Palestinians who've been shot dead since October.
Oh, but in those cases, they always at least claim, oh, but she had a knife or that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Whether they really did or not is mostly besides the point, I guess.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming back on the show.
It's very important work that you do covering these stories, Charlotte.
Thank you so much, Scott.
All right.
So that is Charlotte Silver.
She's at Electronic Intifada with this one.
Israeli court refuses to let dying hunger striker go.
We'll be right back.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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