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From The Seminole Wars to White Clay

For generations, Palestinian prisoners, remaining steadfast within a prison system which seeks to eradicate their will and spirit, have maintained a vibrant intellectual culture behind bars, where they become collectively empowered through group study of the theory and practice of revolution. While imprisoned, Palestinian political parties organize themselves into a dense network of committees to manage every aspect of prison life, from security, health, and finance, to politics and culture. The Educational Committee oversees the time - honored tradition of prisoner self-education, whereby older or more politically experienced prisoners distribute texts and hold intensive study groups to teach literature, languages, politics, philosophy, history and more. According to Palestinian professor Esmail Nashif, in his book Palestinian Political P risoners: Ide ntity and Community, “the practice of these actions followed a regular schedule: daily, usually twice daily, study circles, reading sessions, lectures at the level of the cell and the section, lessons on scholastic topics and training in professional skills, literary / intellectual group discussions, oral transmission of the local history during the daily break, and physical exercises. Alongside these organized activities, many of the political captives practised writing and reading as part of their organizational duties (communique´s and articles), and some of them engaged in literary reading and writing activities, using different genres of literature.” Palestinian people. We are a highly educated people, and for this we are proud…the rate of Palestinian people who are educated is 90%, more than any Arab country and many countries in Asia and Africa! This makes us proud for our people.” In the last few months, however, Israeli restrictions on education rights for the 5,000 Palestinians behind bars have grown more severe. In June of this year, the 1,800 Palestinian prisoners slated to complete the life-defining Tawjihi secondary-school exam were inexplicably denied that opportunity. In July, the Israeli Prisons Administration decided to stop the higher education program provided to prisoners. Indeed, just before the October hunger strike the Israeli prisons authority froze all education funds of the 280 Palestinian prisoners enrolled in the Hebrew Open University program. These draconian restrictions, which, in the wake of the May 2010 Knesset-approved ‘Shalit Law’ curtailing prisoners’ rights, resulted from Benjamin Netanyahu’s June 2011 proclamation that Israel would reduce the ‘advantages granted’ to Palestinian prisoners until the release of Gilad Shalit, are still in effect, though Shalit has been freed. Says Issa Amro, Coordinator of the Hebron nonviolent resistance group Youth Against Settlements, “after Shalit’s release all the people thought they would end Shalit’s law, to let the prisoners study, and to let families from Gaza visit their imprisoned family members, and to give other rights back- but so far nothing has changed for the prisoners. The only thing that has changed is the [end of the punishment of] isolation, because of the hunger strike.” The denial of university education is nothing new for Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jail system. Though Article 6 of the UN General Assembly’s 1990 ‘Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners’ clearly states that “all prisoners shall have the right to take part in cultural activities and education aimed at the full development of the human personality”, the Ramallah- based prisoner’s support and human rights organization Addameer reported to the United Nations in 2008 that, due to the thicket of restrictive regulations and requirements blocking the pathway to higher education, “prisoners are convinced of their inability to enroll in university...it is safe to say, that although not explicitly banned from higher education, the IPS creates serious disincentives for prisoners to study and invest in their personal development.” Prisoners, the report goes on to specify, could only study through select Israeli universities, though they often lacked a sufficient grasp of the Hebrew language, and were usually unable to pay the high Israeli tuition fees for which they were fully responsible. In addition, the unavailability of computers, textbooks and other crucial supplies, due to Israeli prison laws, put students at a huge disadvantage. Today, their prospects are even worse- Palestinian prisoners are barred from university education entirely. No amount of Israeli education, however, could compare to the education received behind bars, for, as Abdel-Alim Da’na states with confidence, “the prisoners who enter [Israeli] prisons live and study in a national atmosphere and a resistance atmosphere”. Khaled al- Azraq, a refugee from Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem who has been a political prisoner for the last 20 years, echoes Da’na’s testament- “In prison I found Palestine's political, national, revolutionary university. It was in prison that I realized that knowledge is what paves the road to victory and freedom.” Prison education exposed Badia Dwaik to "different books talking about ideology, like Communism for example, about history like Vietnam, Cuba, Soviet states, poetry, books about languages, French, English, Arabic literature…and also many philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, and modern Western thinkers like Malthuse, and Hegel, Marx, Engels, Faeurbach, Fukuyama, and also Arabic philosophy like Ibn Rushd- we studied all these things, it’s not limited.” Da’na boasts of teaching programs in “political economy, Lenin’s books, and all of the Marxist-Leninist texts. It is a part of our culture…dialectical philosophy.

Das Kapital. Engels- ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’. I explained this book more than ten times, I am very admired of this book, it is very important. Also Gramsci’s 'Prison Notebooks'. And we read Guevara, and many other Marxist Leninist theoreticians.”

1,500 or so Africans who fought alongside Comanches in 1850 in Texas to repel European aggression, nor about the many other documented cases of African- indigenous military alliances. We have been told about indigenous nations (tribes) and bands that enslaved Africans but not about those who gave sanctuary to Africans who escaped slavery. We have been sold a bill of goods in which “buffalo soldiers” and “Indian” scouts, both traitors to the cause of liberation, are portrayed as heroic and patriotic. This was and is not insignificant. This was and is a kind of mental seasoning or breaking by which we become inclined to fight on behalf of a U.S. government, run by Europeans, against people who look like us, more or less, and who struggle against fundamentally the same oppression that we have struggled against. Africans and indigenous people in this country have sacrificed and taken lives in Korea, in Vietnam, and in other wars of U.S. aggression against people who were of color were and not our enemies. What possible honor and / or heroism is there in killing and dying for the interests of those who systematically abuse you? Africans and the people indigenous to this land - kindred peoples? Indigenous people who are cultural traditionalist have a holistic outlook on the natural world and their roles in it, have respect for Mother Earth and the creatures sustained by her, place the clan or village ahead of any individual. These are values that are part of the African legacy, lost values, values programmed out of African people in this country. But when my foreparents were brought to these shores in bondage, when they were still African in mind and spirit, they had these values. And it was the possession of them that facilitated the formation of friendships and alliances between my foreparents and Leonard Peltier’s, between Ernie’s and Frank LaMere’s. Stripped of the alien clothing of European influence, African people and indigenous people in this land are both people of the drum, people who can live in tempo with the heart-beat of Mother Earth. But too many of us have taken the paths of the “buffalo soldier” or “Indian” scout. Following these paths, we cannot speak for ourselves, cannot speak for our people, because we love George Washington and George Custer too much. We speak too loudly and say too much of nothing. Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa #27 768P.O. Box 22500 Lincoln, NE 68542-2500

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PFLP leader Abdel-Alim Da’na, who was imprisoned for a total of 17 years between 1970 and 2004, spearheaded PFLP educational programs behind bars to spread the philosophy of resistance to less experienced prisoners. He explains the foundation of prison pedagogy- “everyone, when they enter the prison, must learn to read and to study. Some people, when they enter the prison, cannot read or write, and we put an end to their illiteracy. Some of them are very famous journalists now , some are poets, som e are writing in the newspapers and doing research in the universities, some are men in the Palestinian Authority, some are activists!” In the face of the systematic abuse and oppression freely practiced by the Israeli prison guards, the right to assembly and self-education is won by the prisoners themselves through civil disobedience. Amer Ahmad Al-Qwasmah was one of the PFLP prisoners released in the October Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. Now 45 years old, he has returned to his native Hebron after 24 years in prison. “In the beginning [of my jail term],” he says, “it was forbidden for the prisoners to read books, or newspapers, or watch TV and have meetings – but [in keeping with] the history of our resistance, the hunger strikes were a strategic weapon that we used to resist and to survive in Israeli jail. Even paper used to be forbidden– prisoners would write on toilet paper!” After a successful hunger strike won prisoners access to television, newspapers, books and the right to assembly, Al-Qwasmah says, “we used to have political meetings and discussions. We had official political meetings around twice a week and we often discussed some books or some poets…the Prisoner’s Committee was very strong. There were schools and universities inside the jail.” Badia Dwaik, Deputy Coordinator of Youth Against Settlements, a grassroots nonviolent resistance movement that wages ideological warfare against Israel’s illegal settlements in Hebron, testifies to the success of hunger strikes in protecting the right to education for prisoners. Badia was imprisoned during the Oslo agreements in 1993 for membership in the PFLP and for participation in the First Intifada, and was released in 1995. “In Hebron prison, there was a library for us, with 4,000 books”, Badia says, “but it started with a very complicated hunger strike, before we were allowed to read books. This was one of our demands, to allow us to receive books from outside, from our parents, from our visitors and from the radicals...everything we got in jail, we did not get in a golden platter! We had to resist, and to deal with the resistance until we achieved these things.” Tusem Al Zawya, released to Jerusalem as part of the Shalit deal after 10 years in prison, echoes this sentiment. “When it comes to studying, they always waited for the right moment to prevent us from studying, [which was] another reason why we had to go on hunger strikes,” she remembers. “But although there was bad treatment, we managed to study in universities and to turn the prison into a university. Palestinian prisoners are known to be well educated.” Indeed, Abdel-Alim Da’na, who is now a professor of democracy, human rights, Palestinian history and the Hebrew language at Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron, is the first to insist that “the education rate inside the prisons is very high. This is true for all the