Selma Dabbagh

The British brought the system of administrative detention to Palestine when they were the mandatory power. The rules also authorised military courts, restriction of movement, censorship, the expropriation and demolition of houses, arbitrary searches and curfews, and were used by the British against both Palestinians and immigrants of Jewish and other religious backgrounds. Despite many of its founders being caught on the wrong side of these laws, Israel adopted them in 1948 and has strenuously resisted attempts to modify their provisions.

On 9 February, two branches of the Muna family’s bookshops in East Jerusalem were ransacked by Israeli police. They entered in civilian clothes, used Google Translate to decipher the titles of the English language books and confiscated box loads, picking out in particular any with a Palestinian flag on the cover. CCTV images show black bin bags being filled with books to be used as evidence against the Munas. The police arrested both Mahmoud (in front of his eleven-year-old daughter, Leila) and his nephew Ahmad, and took them to the notorious Moscobiyya interrogation centre in West Jerusalem.

On the first day of his second term as US president, Donald Trump described Gaza as a ‘phenomenal location on the sea’. Living in a tent close to the beach in southern Gaza, my friend Marwa has had her request for permission to travel to the north, to visit her elderly mother, denied three times for ‘security’ reasons. There has been no news of her cousin, who used to look after her mother, since he was taken by the Israeli army over a month ago.

‘How has this year been for you?’ a musician friend from the West Bank asked me when we met for the first time in several years. ‘For us, we have been through a lot before, but we were never scared,’ he said. ‘Now, we do not know. I could have a chance encounter with an Israeli soldier who does not like the look of my face, or my instrument, and just shoots me. It is like the country is in its death throes.’ I didn’t know how to respond. Attempts to reassure or reframe are an insult to the intelligence.  

Over a million people have protested in London this year and a majority of the British population think the Israeli prime minister should be arrested for war crimes, yet the UK government continues to prostrate itself before Israel.