Electronic Intifada: Palestinian lawmaker resists banishment, tells occupiers they must go

Adri Nieuwhof at the Electronic Intifada published an overview of the Khalida Jarrar case, including Samidoun and the campaign in solidarity:

Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar is resisting an Israeli occupation order to banish her from her home in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank to the district of Jericho for six months.

Jarrar has set up a protest camp at the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) — the Palestinian Authority legislature — in Ramallah where she will remain until the order is lifted. “It is the occupation who must leave our homeland,” she has said.

Jarrar refused to sign the military order “to put her under special monitoring” that was handed to her by an Israeli occupation officer at her home in the early hours of 20 August.

The article connects the expulsion order against Khalida Jarrar with other occupation repression of Palestinian political forces:

We have also seen in the past week raids and roundups of dozens of PFLP members, cadres and leaders in the West Bank, Kates wrote in an email. These arrest raids come not only at the same time as the expulsion order against Jarrar, but on the occasion of the thirteenth anniversary of the Israeli extrajudicial execution of PFLP General Secretary Abu Ali Mustafa in his Ramallah office on 27 August 2001.

The Israeli occupation regularly targets political groups on major dates and anniversaries in an attempt to thwart organizing and mobilization.

The entire system of political imprisonment is based on suppressing Palestinian organizing, Kates added. It works hand in hand with the Israeli assassination policy in an attempt to deprive the Palestinian people of their leaders, their organizers, their community and national voices.

And so the expulsion order against Khalida Jarrar is not an individual act, but part of a coordinated campaign to disrupt and suppress the PFLP as a Palestinian progressive, leftist, resistance party and the Palestinian resistance and liberation struggle as a whole, Kates noted.

Click here to read the full article.

Take action and learn more: Visit samidoun.ca/khalidajarrar for all updates and news on the Campaign in Solidarity with Khalida Jarrar, and action items you can take.