Commemoration: Nakba Day on 15 May in Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative capital, marking the day mass displacement of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian life and homeland took place in 1948. Photo: Heinrich Böll Foundation Palestine & Jordan
Nakba Day invites all of us to think about belonging, about how we treat those who we think do not belong and about the importance of rules in the negotiation of spaces of belonging.
Every 15 May the world marks Nakba Day, when mass displacement of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian life and homeland took place in 1948.
This year the commemoration comes just weeks after Israeli naval forces seized 180 civilians and activists, including Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila, from a civilian aid flotilla in international waters, in what has been described as a violation of international law and detained them under conditions reported as including torture.
It also occurs as Marwan Barghouti, widely regarded as Palestine’s most popular political leader, enters his 24th year of imprisonment.
Making do: After the exodus (Nakba), the first school classes in Jericho were held out in the open. Photo: 1948 UN Archive
“Nakba” means, in English, “catastrophe”.
For most Palestinians it is a description not only of a past event but also of their present reality.
Humanity finds itself far beyond a realm of right and wrong — the world seems to operate in a reality defined by impunity and the normalisation of brutality.
The fragile line that once separated power from morality has grown increasingly indistinct. At a moment when the soul of our collective humanity feels undone, standing for justice must not be mistaken for an act of charity. It is, instead, an ethical responsibility from which we turn away at our peril.
This is the context and continuum of oppression that the recent detention of activists Thiago Ávila and Saif Abukeshek, after their participation in the Global Sumud Flotilla, must be understood.
Their detention has once again drawn international attention to the treatment of Palestinians and solidarity activists held in Israeli custody and to the wider machinery of control, exclusion and degradation which has come to define Israeli occupations.
Ávila and Abukeshek’s detention are not isolated incidents. They are merely manifestations of an apparatus of power. They form part of a broader and increasingly documented pattern of incarceration and abuse directed at Palestinians on a mass scale.
Devastating accounts continue to emerge which describe, among other things, prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, starvation, rape, waterboarding and electrocution. Survivors, lawyers and medical practitioners tell the story of a system rooted in routine torture.
More than 9 000 Palestinians remain in Israeli detention, including women and children, with thousands held under administrative detention without charge or trial.
Many are reportedly confined in remote military facilities and improvised detention sites where conditions have been described by UN experts and medical rights investigators as amounting to institutionalised torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
The echoes of apartheid South African realities are loud.
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report, Torture and Genocide, situates the treatment of Palestinian detainees within the broader architecture of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
The report argues that torture has become “an integral and structural component” of the project, warning that practices are increasingly normalised, bureaucratised and openly defended within political discourse.
The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the Mandela Rules, adopted in 2015, affirms a global commitment to the belief that no political circumstance can justify torture, humiliation or the stripping away of human dignity.
The rules demand that detention must remain bound by legality, due process and humane treatment and that all detainees, regardless of nationality, political status, religion, or circumstance, are entitled to equal protection under international law.
These are the rules which should inform any analysis of what’s happening in Israeli prisons and detention centres. These are the same rules which should inform analysis of how Hamas and other formations treat those they have incarcerated.
The Free Marwan campaign resonates with the Free Mandela campaign of the anti-apartheid era.
Its invocation of Madiba speaks to a truth that extends beyond any single context, namely, that prisons have repeatedly stood at the centre of struggles against racial domination, colonial violence and systems of dehumanisation.
South Africa’s experience reminds us that those once dismissed as security threats or terrorists might later emerge as indispensable interlocutors in the pursuit of justice and peace.
And deeper questions trouble us: What is the role of prisons in democratic societies?
Can humanity find a way to free itself of a reliance on prison systems?
What does belonging mean in the contexts of incarceration?
Do nation states enable human belonging? Given the horrors unfolding in so many parts of the world, does humanity belong on earth any longer?
Professor Verne Harris is Nelson Mandela’s former archivist and an executive consultant at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Samantha Mashapa is the dialogue and advocacy analyst at the Nelson Mandela Foundation.