By Gareebah and Aneela Shahzad
278 days without food or water! Was it such an unimportant, negligible event, to go totally unnoticed by our media and our intellectuals? Our media has been flooding us with the London marathon in solidarity with the USA, we have been getting coverage of the birthday celebrations of the Queen of England, we all know how many months pregnant the Duchess of Cambridge is; but this man declared several times to be ‘on the verge of death’ by Israeli doctors, does not deserve a single mentioning?!
Was it such a commonplace, everyday thing, for a posing-to-be very-much-humane global society, to remain unheeded? And surely unheeded remains the limit of hopelessness we have dragged a section of humanity into! We, the people to stuff-in three complete meals per day, have been so indifferent to a person not having a single meal, not for a day or two, but for a whole of 278 days! If this tragedy of a dying man, and his determination, resilience and the strength behind his frail body cannot move us, then what will?
The very tiny amount of coverage given to this event by the international media and watch dogs is almost unbelievable. Neither the Human Rights Watch, nor Amnesty International, nor any pro-human rights body of the United Nations ever looked at it with the perspective due to an actual tragedy. International media houses like the BBC have taken the pains to report the case only after it has already been solved.
A tragedy it was; a human tragedy – a young man refusing to take in a morsel of food or a drop of water! But this is not the whole picture. What makes the tragedy even more tragic is what is behind it. What can make a young man – in the prime of his life, with a mother and a father and siblings wishing and praying for his long and prosperous life – do this?
The Palestinian nation – for the months ensuing his hunger strike – have been constantly protesting, hundreds of thousands of countrymen have been holding sit-ins and organizing protests and enduring police brutality for his sake, they have made him a symbol of their resistance – he is a portrait of their ordeal, their desperation and their hope. Is not this oneness in decades-long sharing of a pain what has made this man refuse food and water till he could be on the verge of death? What can make him refuse the most basic human needs, fall on a wheelchair, and almost lose the ability to see or hear or speak or even stand upright or comprehend normal stimuli, but a far greater tragedy than death? A tragedy that he beheld beyond family and friends, a tragedy that encompasses the whole humanity; but no, only those who would just as much as care!
And does such a grave tragedy leave any room for indifferent global silence? Can the cause that makes a man refuse food and water for 8 months be so negligible? Can the people, who stayed quiet while that young man was ready to embrace even a sure and sudden death, still make any claim to humanity? Even more, can the world still be a good place to live, if such an incident goes unheard of by many; because those who knew it deliberately chose to be quiet about it, and those who did not may have had indulged themselves with more pleasurable news they like to hear?
So while SamerIssawi kept on bearing painful starvation for over nine months, who was the one to be pitiful on? A man who has the courage to stand up for the cause of his people, his belief, his God; or ‘us’, the humanity, who could not forsake a spoonful for his sake? Was SamerIssawi dying, or was the dying humanity inside us getting the last blows?
After failing to answer Issawi’s call, can the inhabitants of such a place still apply for humanity or human rights? In the so-called Dark Ages, maybe! But today, in the 21st century, when the World boasts of being civilized, of respecting human rights and valuing them above and beyond anything else, of having set up numerous champions to fight for the rights of all humans even if it requires waging bloodthirsty wars against whole nations; can these claims ever coincide with such tragedies? Or, has Issawi’s case stripped such claims off even the least chance of credibility or validity?
And to top it all, in the almost complete absence of any positive response, the negative ones were many and most cruel. The Israeli military and prison staff resorted to mercilessly beating the hungry man and neglecting his physical condition in the prison hospitals, his family was repeatedly harrassed and their homes were raided, his siblings were arrested and beaten, and the authorities tried to deport him to a foreign country in return for a cancellation of the strike.
But the most insensitive was the offer of the Israeli intellectuals of a symbolic pizza, when they promised that if he stops demanding for the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees, gifts the settlers the lands they wrongfully and cruelly acquired, recognises the formation of another state and consents to his brethren being second-class citizens in their own land; only then would the said intellectuals be kind enough to intervene and advice their government to slightly loosen the shackles around Samer’s corpse.
So, finally, none of the human rights champions came for Issawi’s rescue. Even the Muslim Ummah mostly kept a blind eye, as if Issawi – or the ones he was fighting for – were not of their own. Issawi did it alone; he and his people fought against the tyrant, against the Israeli oppression, till they gained victory on Tuesday, all alone! Issawi’s unbreakable resolve, ended up breaking the vanity of the Israeli camps; and the Israeli authorities finally signed a deal with SamerIssawi, promising to free him on the 23rd of December this year, and allowing him to return to his own beloved homeland – Jerusalem. In return, Issawi has agreed to break his 8-month long fast and take supplements.
It is comforting to know that humanity still remains alive and awake in many – this young man who risked a sure and sudden death for the sake of the rights of his people; and those who stood up for him, and risked their own lives in turn, for the sake of his freedom. Twitter was astorm for more than two months and a half. A group of Palestinian activists, led by Dr. Tariq Shadeed aka Doc Jazz, have conducted these Twitterstorms for around three months, where they trended something in solidarity with SamerIssawi till it topped the worldwide trends lists.
On Tuesday, they trended #IssawiDefeatsIsrael for more than an hour. Twitter users hailed Samer Issawi, not only for his victory in the face of oppression, using no weapons except his own hungry stomach; but also for the sense of pride it brought to all the people fighting for a cause, and the assurance it brought home to all, that the truth cannot be crushed by force. The Twitter users were proud of the Hero who bought the right to stay in Jerusalem through hunger, and some commented that they were celebrating the little amount of flesh remaining on his skeleton and not the right to return to Jerusalem – nobody could ever deny him that; he would definitely have it, dead or alive!
Ghareebah is doing her MA in English, a passionate Indian Muslimah, searching for the higher truths.
Aneela Shahzad is an editor at PKKH.tv and can be contacted viainfo@pakistankakhudahafiz.com, and you can also find her at Aneela Shahzad’s Blog.
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