By DPA
Abu Dis (West Bank) : Jesus Christ was the first political detainee in Palestine, maintains a new West Bank museum which focuses on Palestinian detainees and is located on the premises of Al Quds University in Abu Dis, east of Jerusalem.
“This is the Via Dolorosa,” says head of trustees Abdelaziz Abdul-Baki, as he points to a miniature stone bridge in the frontcourt, which leads across a field of cacti.
The view of the reconstructed last way of the son of god bangs into high concrete walls over a 100 metre distance: the “wall”, the Israeli safety rampart, which cuts deeply into the West Bank and dissociates Palestinians from Palestinians.
The museum opened in April. It is named after Abu Jihad, a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader who was killed by Israeli agents in exile in Tunis in 1988.
The two-storey white stone construction holds documentary photographs, informative wall charts, detainee’s tools, letters and works of art as well as a library and archives.
The exhibition does not deal with the question of why someone was detained in the first place.
What you do see is a mixture of propaganda and documentation, something between commemoration of misery and worship of resistance heroism. In sum, it represents a significant aspect of Palestinian life under the Israeli occupying forces: daily prison.
Some 800,000 Palestinians have been held as prisoners since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, Abdul-Baki says. Palestinians say that more than 11,000 are currently imprisoned.
This means that one in four Palestinians has jail experience and that practically every Palestinian family has or had a family member in jail.
Israel justifies this with the demands resulting from the combat against terrorism and says it acts in accordance with the rule of law. However, Abdul-Baki, who himself spent two years in jail, says that the Israeli prison system is also a place to “break the will of Palestinians”.
The museum illustrates tenacious attempts to prevent this. One can find letters written on tiny pieces of paper, which are put into homemade capsules of plastic wrapping and passed from mouth to mouth when detainees kiss their wives through the bars.
“Detainees’ imaginations are powerful,” Abdul-Baki says. Their naive paintings show wild animals, tight fists that overcome barbwire and walls. The trustee tells of the essays he wrote in prison, dealing with the political future of his people. He didn’t have access to technical literature, so he had to rely on his own mind.
Hundreds of files containing poems, stories and other prison writings are kept in the library of the museum and are accessible for research.
The Palestinian narrative also includes assassins alongside stone-throwing adolescents, the rebellious teacher or poet in the gallery of heroes. In a way, they are all part of the resistance against the occupation.
As it is displayed, they are subject to 76 ways of torture, including beatings and being held in painful positions. Altogether 223 died in Israeli prisons or while being arrested, either by force or because they were medically neglected, it is claimed.
Seventy-four detainees have been imprisoned for more than 20 years. The museum, which has been built by a contribution of 525,000 euros (over $748,000) from Kuwait, wants to keep the memory of all of them alive.