Political Prisoner and Leader – On the Anniversary of Ahmad Sa’adat’s Arrest

By Benay Blend

PFLP’s Secretary-General Ahmad Sa’adat. (Image: Palestine Chronicle)

Sa’adat’s long ordeal illustrates several themes inherent in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian prisoners detained in Zionist jails, Benay Blend writes.

On January 15, 2002, Ahmad Sa’adat was abducted by the Palestinian Authority (PA) after being called to a meeting in Ramallah with the organization’s intelligence chief. Sa’adat was held in Jericho Prison under US/British “supervision,” along with Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh, Majdi Rimawi, Hamdi Qur’an, Basil al-Asmar and Fouad Shobaki.

Significantly, the British co-director of the prison’s administration had run the Maze Detention Center for Britain in the occupied North of Ireland, where Irish republican prisoners were held, and another British official there was later credited with constructing the “White Helmets” in Syria.

As has been the annual custom, the anniversary of Sa’adat’s arrest will be commemorated on January 15, followed by a week of action to call for the release of all leadership prisoners, as well as their comrades still incarcerated in Israeli jails.

On March 14, 2006, days before Ismail Haniyeh took office as prime minister after making a promise to free Palestinian prisoners held in PA jails under “security coordination,” Zionist forces stormed the PA prison while the U.S., British and Canadian guards backed off to make way for the assault. Under the title “Operation Bringing Home the Goods,” Israeli occupation forces seized Sa’adat along with five other prisoners and transferred them to the occupation’s military prisons.

The circumstances of Sa’adat’s arrest, in particular the security coordination between the PA and Israeli occupation forces, make this incident “one of the most telling examples of such close cooperation.”

Created through the Oslo Accords in 1993, the PA has civil administrative responsibility, but also shared security obligations with the Zionist military. Since its inception, it has increasingly participated in quelling Palestinian protests against the Israeli occupation; systematic arrest and torture of activists, including students; and targeting of opposition movements for detainment.

“From the outset,” writes Alaa Tartir, “the Palestinian Authority (PA) security establishment has failed to protect Palestinians from the main source of their insecurity: the Israeli military occupation. Nor has it empowered Palestinians to resist that occupation.”

Instead, the PA has endorsed the Israeli designation of “terrorist” to any form of resistance of occupation. While resistance is “a natural response to institutionalised oppression,” Tartir notes, the PA prefers rhetoric “which favors Israeli security at the expense of Palestinians,” thus conceding to a discourse that gets repeated any time a group of people resist Israeli or US authority.

Sa’adat’s long ordeal illustrates several themes inherent in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli jails. Since October 7, 2023, Hamas’s initiation of Al-Aqsa Flood, Israel has escalated its systematic methods of torture, solitary confinement, and psychological abuse.

These tactics drew attention most recently because the Knesset approved a bill in its first of three readings that would make mandatory the death penalty for Palestinians classified as “security prisoners” by the Israeli occupation.

As Abdel Nasser Ferwana notes, the reality is that Israel had never stopped “carr[ying] out assassinations, deliberate killings, and summary executions of Palestinians, individually and collectively, without arrest or due process.”

“If enacted,” Ferwana writes, “the law would effectively provide legal cover for criminal executions. Moreover, the punishment would apply retroactively, which contradicts standard criminal law principles that typically take effect only after official enactment and publication.”

Speaking from experience, Ferwana is a former prisoner and specialist in prisoners’ affairs, member of the Palestinian National Council, head of the Studies and Documentation Unit at the Palestinian Prisoners and Freedmen Affairs Authority, and member of the Administrative Committee of the Prisoners’ Authority in the Gaza Strip. He also runs a website called ‘Palestine Behind Bars’.

Ferwana uses that authority to declare the post-October period as “the deadliest and most dangerous era in the history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement.”

What the Israeli bill seeks is a “long-standing effort to delegitimize the Palestinian prisoners’ movement and reinforce the Israeli narrative internationally, portraying prisoners as criminals and terrorists deserving death rather than as freedom fighters struggling for liberation.”

Just as the US government has long used the designation “terrorist” to justify extrajudicial killings, but now looks to validate future actions by forcing the President under the recently advanced War Powers Resolution to ask for Congressional approval before carrying on, the “Israeli” bill seeks to legalize retroactively what it has done in the past, but with the blessing of the Knesset it will now have a green light to persevere.

“Prisoners form a core component of the Palestinian cause and are central to the struggle of the national liberation movement,” concludes Ferwana. “Therefore, this law does not target them alone; it aims to criminalize the broader collective struggle of the Palestinian people.”

A case in point, Sa’adat has been repeatedly assaulted by occupation jailers as have other members of the Palestinian prisoners’ leadership, all “part and parcel of the policy of ‘slow assassination’” pursued against the prisoners’ movement inside the occupation jails.

Palestinian prisoners, especially those abducted from Gaza who are held in occupation military camps and prisons, are regularly subjected to “physical and psychological torture, sexual assault and rape, starvation, denial of medical care, medical neglect, beatings, denial of access to hygiene and sanitation needs, denial of family and legal visits.”

Leadership prisoners, like Sa’adat, are subjected to even worse abuse. As agents of the Palestinian resistance, they embody the sumud of the Palestinian people in the struggle to achieve liberation by all means at their disposal.

Like many political prisoners, Sa’adat makes good use of his time in jail. By participating in all hunger strikes, protests, and efforts of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, Sa’adat illustrates how prisoners are at the core of struggles for the liberation of Palestine.

In a January 2014 interview conducted by the Journal of Palestine Studies, Sa’adat explained that his time in prison had solidified his political affiliation, but it also “enriched [his] lived experience on the outside.”

In this way, Sa’adat’s commitment to the struggle allows him to move back and forth through the barriers of prison walls, thereby supporting PFLP prisoners on the inside as well as the party leadership on the outside whenever he has the chance.

“The daily struggle of the prisoners’ movement is a part of the broader Palestinian struggle,” Sa’adat contends. “Anyone who has followed popular Palestinian activism over the past three years or so will find that in large part, it has revolved around supporting the battles of the national prisoners’ movement.”

As for privileging one form of resistance over another, Sa’adat recommends “the creative combination and integration of all legitimate methods of struggle enabling us to deploy each type or method of resistance according to the specific conditions warranted by different political junctures.”

Currently, it seems that there must be obligatory denunciation of movements that defy imperialist demands (“Maduro is a brutal dictator, but what Trump did was wrong”; “Hamas is a terrorist organization, but Israeli genocide, too, is wrong”). In this way, commentators and public officials first condemn what is justifiable resistance while at the same time denouncing the injustice that led to the struggle in the first place.

Given this circuitous trajectory, Sa’adat’s position is as relevant today as it was at the time of this interview.

“Calls for nonviolent popular resistance and slogans about the rule of law and confining the use of arms to the PA,” Sa’adat explained, “are mere pretexts to justify targeting the resistance and answering to Israel’s security dictates.”

“The rule of law is meaningless,” he believed, “if it flies in the face of our right to resist the occupation and denies the logic of such resistance. And as for the monopoly on the use of force, it makes no sense if that force is not directed at the enemy.”

Four years later, Sa’adat contributed the forward to a French edition of Huey Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party. Republished by Jadaliyya, it illustrates the PFLP’s desire to globalize the prisoners’ movement beyond Palestine.

“From inside the occupier’s Ramon prison, on behalf of myself, my comrades, and the Palestinian prisoners’ movement,” Sa’adat wrote, “we extend our clenched fists of solidarity and salute and arms of embrace to our Black comrades whose struggle for liberation in the belly of the beast continues today against fierce repression.”

His words ring true today as three Palestine Action activists held on remand in Britain are reaching a critical stage in their hunger strike, calling for various demands, including an end to the nation’s support for companies supplying weapons to Israel.

“Political prisoners are jailed because they fear our actions and they fear our ideas, our power to mobilize our peoples in a revolutionary way against their exploitation and colonization,” Sa’adat concluded. “They know, and deeply fear, that we can truly build an alternative world. For them, this is the terror of defeat, but for us, and for our peoples, this is the hope of freedom and the promise of victory.”

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.