These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons

All books featured in this new section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the ­Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2020, pp. 70-71

Book Talks

By Ramzy Baroud

Middle East Books and More launched its first coronavirus-era zoom book talk on April 16, inviting Dr. Ramzy Baroud to discuss his latest book, These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons. The U.S.-Palestinian internationally syndicated columnist explained why he wrote the book and then introduced YouTube viewers to some of the men, women and children who stood up for their rights, or just happened to be in the wrong place and ended up spending months or decades awaiting justice in Israeli prisons.

Baroud said about one million Palestinians have been arrested since 1967, but in some way all Palestinians are prisoners of Israel. “The 5,000 prisoners or so [in Israel today] are actually a microcosm of a much larger collective and protracted experience of imprisonment by Israel over the last 50 plus years,” he said.

In this book, as with his others, Baroud challenges the historical narrative found in mainstream media, not by offering a defensive reaction to claims that Palestinians are violent terrorists, etc. “Our defensive narrative hasn’t really worked for us. If anything, it has further validated the Israeli narrative...and put Israel behind the wheel driving the historical narrative,” Baroud acknowledged. Baroud and other Palestinian new historians seek not just to be the middleman, conveying their people’s stories, but to create a platform for others to tell their stories with a minimal amount of intervention. They spent nearly a year training prisoners in how to tell their own stories.

Baroud told prisoners to forget about politics and to tell the most compelling experience of their story as if they were in their own living room telling their children. He asked them, “What story is relevant to you as a human being?” No one is arguing about Zionism, Hamas or Fatah, one-state or two states, Baroud observed. Instead, the prisoners share their stories about hanging onto their own core of humanity that we can all relate to—whether we live in Gaza, Washington or Paris, Baroud noted. We would all react in the same way to the kind of oppression that Palestinians are living through.

Readers will agree with Baroud that, “the outcome is really astounding.” Israeli prison guards try to isolate and break down Palestinian prisoners, but instead “a whole new chapter of their resistance starts in prison” and continues as they serve society after their release.

In the webinar Baroud also described the sham trials of Israeli military courts, where due process is denied and “military testimony is the one that matters, the armed settlers are the only witnesses that are taken seriously and Palestinian eyewitnesses are never brought to court to testify.”

Baroud describes some of the unforgettable prisoners, or reads excerpts from their stories. One is a leading Palestinian intellectual, a lawyer community activist, Khalida Jarrar, who wrote the introduction to Baroud’s book and shared her story. She has been in and out of Israeli jails, held without trial or rights in administrative detention just to keep her off the streets in hopes of curtailing her impact. She was rearrested right after completing her work for the book. A quote from Jarrar sums up, to my mind, another message from this book: “Hope in prison is like a flower that grows out of a stone. For us Palestinians, education is our greatest weapon. With it, we will always be victorious.”

Watch this interview with Baroud, or better yet read his important book. This reader was moved and uplifted by nearly every chapter.

—Delinda C. Hanley