Israeli prisons as revolutionary universities

[ProgressiveMuslim]

Khaled al-Azraq writing from Nafha prison, Live from Palestine, 9 December 2009


(snip)

I was first imprisoned in 1982 at the age of 16. In prison I found what I was not expecting to find: I found inside the prison what I could not find outside of it. 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.

In prison, and through a long and arduous struggle, the prisoners' movement has been able to win and maintain the right to a library. Members of the prisoners' movement came up with ingenious ways of smuggling books into Israeli prisons, methods that Israeli prison guards were never able to discover. The movement systematically organized workshops, seminars and courses held inside the prison to educate prisoners on every relevant topic one can imagine. Every day, the prisoner holding the position of "librarian" would pass through the different cells and sections, and prisoners would exchange the book they had just finished for the one they were about to begin. The librarian carried the "library book," a record of the books available in the library, and a list of the books each prisoner had requested.

Talking about this reminds me of one of the most memorable prison library moments. We had found out that the movement had managed to smuggle Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun into the old Nablus prison. We all raced to get our names on the list of people wanting to read the book, and the wait lasted weeks! Several times, we resorted to making copies of sought-after books like this. Of course, copies were done with pen and paper, and I remember copying Naji Aloush's The Palestinian National Movement of which we made five hand-written copies. I remember how we all raced for the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Amado, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Hanna Mina, Nazim Hikmet, and many, many others.

Through the will and perseverance of the prisoners, prison was transformed into a school, a veritable university offering education in literature, languages, politics, philosophy, history and more. The graduates of this university excelled in various fields. I still remember the words of Bader al-Qawasmah, one of my compatriots who I met in the old Nablus prison in 1984, who said to me, "before prison I was a porter who could neither read nor write. Now, after 14 years in prison, I write in Arabic, I teach Hebrew, and I translate from English." I remember the words of Saleh Abu Tayi (a Palestinian refugee in Syria who was a political prisoner in Israeli jails for 17 years before being released in the prisoner exchange of 1985) who told me vivid stories of prisoners' adventures smuggling books, pieces of paper and even the ink-housing tubes of pens.

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[Ken Burch]

1. That's how it worked in South Africa

Robben Island and Poulsmoor Prisons(the places where Nelson Mandela was kept)were called "Mandela U.", IIRC.