Khalida Jarrar’s fight represents the struggle of all Palestinians

On August 12 Israeli forces transferred Palestinian legislator and activist Khalida Jarrar from Damon prison in Haifa, where she had been held in administrative detention since December 26 2023, to NeveTirza, Israel's only women-only prison, in Ramla. There, she is being held in solitary confinement in a cell that is 2 by 1 ½ meters, with no window and no ventilation.

According to Addameer, the Israeli prison administration has even sealed off the small openings in the bathroom window, the only source of air for Jarrar’s cell, and she needs to crawl to the tiny crack under her cell door for air. She is being suffocated alive. The temperature in her cell is extremely high, due to the lack of ventilation, and she receives very little water as well as insufficient food.

Her colleagues at Birzeit University issued a statement calling for her release, and the diaspora-based Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) is circulating a letter which has garnered over 1000 signatures so far, calling not only for Jarrar’s immediate release, but also for freedom for all Palestinian prisoners. The PFC’s statement explains that, in her current research project at Birzeit University, Jarrar was investigating ‘the connection between settlers’ use of prisons in Palestine and the global prison industrial complex, highlighting conversations between women prisoners.’

Political targeting

Most Palestinians rightly look up to Jarrar as one of our organic intellectuals with the highest moral integrity. She is a politician who never compromised her commitment to liberation in order to achieve greater international recognition or respectability. She is also an abolitionist who has repeatedly been imprisoned in Israeli dungeons, often in solitary confinement, only to come out more defiant, ever more determined to end Israel’s global immunity.

Jarrar has made it her life’s work to expose Israeli war crimes to international institutions, and was instrumental in securing Palestinian membership in the International Criminal Court in 2015. Earlier this year, the ICC ruled that Israel must take action to prevent the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Nablus-born legislator has paid a very high price for her activism. She was first arrested and imprisoned in 1989, for participating in an International Women’s Day protest. This incarceration, when she had just turned 26, was the beginning of numerous attempts by Israel to intimidate her, shut her away, and neutralise her. She was undeterred. As she wrote in These Chains Will Be Broken: “They want to silence our voices, but we shall remain! Our voices shall continue to scream out to end the occupation! I represent my people and my people shall continue to nobly fight against the occupation!”

Education to empower

After graduating with a Master’s Degree in Democracy and Human Rights from Birzeit University, where she is currently a researcher at the Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights , Jarrar served as a Director of Addameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association from 1994 to 2006. In 2006, she was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), where she now chairs the Prisoners Commission. 

Khalida Jarrar was arrested for the second time in 2015. All of the charges against her were political: giving speeches, attending vigils for prisoners, and expressing support for prisoners and their families. She was sent to HaSharon prison, where she spent fifteen months “fashioning hope out of despair,” as she put it.

She knew most Palestinian female prisoners did not have a university education, and that a few had not even completed high school, and she set out to educate them herself.  On this she wrote:

“I decided to make it my mission to focus on the issue of education for women who were denied the opportunity to finish school, whether as children or those who were denied such a right due to difficult social conditions. The idea quickly occupied my mind: if I could only help a few women achieve their high school diplomas, I would have made good use of my time in detention. These diplomas would allow them to pursue university degrees as soon as they were able to and, eventually, achieve a level of economic independence. More importantly, armed with a strong education, these women could contribute even more to the empowerment of Palestinian communities.”

As she herself had a master’s degree, she applied for and qualified to be a teacher giving these young women the opportunity to take the official “tawjihi” test to graduate high school. Two of the five students who took the test that year passed.

Shortly after her release, she was arrested again, in 2017, and sent to HaSharon again. Immediately, she set upon resuming the female prisoners’ schooling, and this time, all nine students who took the test passed it.

Jarrar spent close to twenty months in HaSharon prison between 2017 and 2019. She was released in February 2019, only to be arrested yet again in October of that year.

Prison abolition

Khalida Jarrar suffers from chronic health problems, which are not tended to during her incarceration. She needs a special diet, which she is denied. Furthermore, while in HaSharon, her daughter Suha passed away, at the age of 31. The Israeli government rejected all appeals to let her attend her daughter’s funeral. She had also earlier been denied the right to attend her father’s funeral in 2015, and that of her mother, in 2018.

Despite horrific personal suffering, Jarrar always kept the larger picture in mind: the Palestinian people, and all prisoners all around the globe. Prison abolition, for her, is a fight for humanity: “Dismantling colonial and settler servitude is a crucial stage for humanity, for those who have suffered from its effects for decades and for those who continue to reject and resist it.”

This is why Khalida Jarrar’s case is important, not just because of who she is, and what she has endured, but because of her role as a prison abolitionist, linking the global prison industrial complex beyond and outside Zionist prisons. 

Ultimately, Khalida Jarrar represents all Palestinians, all political prisoners, all mothers, partners, and everyone deemed undesirable or a threat to an unjust system. Khalida Jarrar’s cause is our collective cause. Her unbroken spirit, her defiance, her sumoud is the sumoud of all prisoners, everywhere, who continue to educate and advocate for themselves under the harshest of conditions, who fashion hope out of despair. And that is why it is imperative that we call not just for her release from Israel’s inhumane dungeons, but for the end of “administrative detention,” and ultimately, for the freedom of all prisoners.

Nada Elia is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington University, and author of Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine.

Follow her on Twitter: @nadaelia48

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