The Palestinian Feminist Collective
Mondoweiss / September 11, 2024
The Palestinian Feminist Collective demands the immediate and unconditional freedom of Palestinian political prisoner and revolutionary leader Khalida Jarrar, who teaches us that “hope in prison is like a flower that grows out of stone.”
Read and sign this statement here.
Khalida Jarrar has been held in captivity by the settler-state for more than six years over the course of five imprisonments and is currently held captive in zionist dungeons without charge since December 26, 2023. She now faces her greatest challenge: the brutal conditions of solitary confinement. On August 12, 2024, the colonial zionist prison authorities transferred her from Damon Prison in occupied Haifa to Neve Tirza prison in occupied al-Ramlah, where she is enduring inhumane conditions in complete isolation.
Captivity, incarceration, and gender violence are cornerstones of the US-backed zionist colonization of Palestine. The settler zionist state has been weaponizing the violence of prisons and arrests against Palestinians as part of its effort to disappear Palestinians, a practice inherited and intensified as a tool wielded by the British colonial mandate regime more than 100 years ago. The incarceration of Palestinians is directly connected to the fragmentation of our people from their land, separation of families, restriction of movement, and violation of Palestinian life. For decades, the zionist military judicial system has been convicting Palestinians at a rate of 99%, often through forced confessions under unbearable torture, without access to lawyers, and without trial or any semblance of due process.
Like it has done to tens of thousands of Palestinians, the zionist regime imprisoned Jarrar as punishment for fighting for the liberation of Palestine and Palestinian political prisoners. Palestinian prisoners have long been subjected to gendered and sexual violence both in the efforts to undermine Palestinian resistance, and to fracture our communities. At the time of her re-arrest, Jarrar was researching the experience of women prisoners. As a researcher at Birzeit University’s Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, Jarrar investigates the connection between settlers’ use of prisons in Palestine and the global prison industrial complex, highlighting conversations between women prisoners.
Khalida Jarrar says abolition is a fight for all 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.”
Jarrar is a mother, partner, child, sister, mentor, leader, warrior, and member of the Palestine Legislative Assembly. Facing indescribable tragedies, she says we must “fashion hope from despair” as she forges classrooms from prison cells, setting up systems for imprisoned women to teach each other. She says: “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!”
For decades, Palestinian men, women, and children have been arrested en masse. The current genocide relies on a brutal war of incarceration across Palestine. According to the Commission of Detainees’ Affairs and Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, between October 2023 and August 2024, the setter state has arrested more than 10,300 Palestinians in the West Bank, including Jerusalem.
More than 8322 orders of administrative detention, a policy that allows the settler state to hold Palestinians without charge or trial, and indefinitely, have been issued in this same time period. According to Addameer – Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association, the weaponization of administrative detention is methodological and wide-spread, and violates so-called international law. We do not even know the extent of these detentions, as little solid information has been released about Palestinians from Gaza kidnapped during this escalated genocide.
We demand the immediate and unconditional release of Khalida Jarrar and all Palestinian prisoners.
This genocidal war machine that incarcerates, kills, destroys and targets every Palestinian life must be dismantled .
And we stand with international anti-imperialist and feminist movements committed to abolishing prisons, decolonizing Indigenous lands, and ending gender and sexualized violence. Like Khalida, all people imprisoned in the global prison-industrial complex are political prisoners. From Turtle Island to Palestine, the forces of racial capitalism and settler colonialism have depended on containment, torture, genocide, gender violence and ongoing land theft all at once.
The fight for Khalida’s freedom is essential to all of our movements working to uproot colonial and imperialist systems of detention, incarceration and prisons that sustain zionism, U.S. empire, and their global machinery of brutal warfare.
We demand freedom for Khalida Jarrar and all Palestinian prisoners.
Free Khalida
Free Them All
Read Birzeit University’s Union of Teachers and Employees Statement in support of Khalida Jarrar: “In Defense of Life and Breath: Free Khalida Jarrar”| دفاعاً_عن_خالدة_جرار
Read and sign this statement here.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) is a US-based body of Palestinian and Arab women & feminists committed to Palestinian social & political liberation by confronting systemic gendered and colonial violence, oppression and dispossession
