Shathas story celebrated abroad brutalised in her homeland

By Samah Sabawi August 1, 2021 â€" 5.00am

On July 10 I awoke to a tweet that triggered a new kind of rage in me.

A friend I love and admire in Palestine had been detained by brutal and merciless men, cramped into a reception room at security headquarters with other female detainees and made to watch unspeakable acts of torture against their male colleagues.

Shatha Safi speaks at the Black-Palestinian Solidarity Conference held at Melbourne University in November 2019.

What made this outrage different was that the torturers, the merciless brutal thugs, were Palestinians. The security headquarters was in Ramallah, a city controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

My friend’s name is Shatha Safi. Some people in Australia will remember her as one of the most inspiring speakers at the Black-Palestinian Solidarity conference at Melbourne University in 2019. On the same visit, Safi was a guest speaker at the Sydney Architecture Festival. In 2020, she featured in a CEO Magazine piece on inspirational women leaders.

This softly spoken, articulate young mother, world-class architect and director of Riwaq, an organisation powered by women that literally turns rubble into homes and historically neglected or destroyed sites into community-friendly spaces, was herded with female doctors, lawyers, architects, mothers, sisters and wives â€" the best of Palestinian society â€" into a torture site and made to watch.

“I could not stop the tears as I watched the enormous violence and savagery, seeing the faces and eyes of police and security forces (supposed to be members and protectors of our community) herd the young men, beating them madly. I felt like a piece of my heart has been pulled out and is being stamped on by feet of the men quarrelling in the reception room we were cramped in,” Safi wrote on Facebook just hours after her ordeal.

When Safi visited Australia, she spoke to us about the work of Riwaq and the importance of being forward-looking. Restoring historic sites needs to be done in a way that allows us to fit them into the present and imagine them in the future. A heritage home turned into a playground, a historic site becoming a community centre. That dedication to the social ties that bind us together left a huge impact on me. I was overcome with hope.

In her July 10 tweets, Safi posted two pictures: the first was her eyewitness testimony. The second was a drawing of the room where the torture took place.

The protest Safi and her colleagues were being punished for was triggered by last month’s assassination of a Palestinian activist, Nizar Banat, at the hands of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces.

On June 24, Palestinian Security Forces had dragged Banat from his bedroom in the middle of the night, beaten him up and detained him. He died hours later in their custody. An autopsy revealed he was “beaten on the head, chest, neck, legs and hands, with less than an hour elapsing between his arrest and his death”. Banat’s family accused the authority of assassinating him and covering it up.

For Palestinians in Palestine and across the globe, it was a slap in the face at a time when they were finding a new unity of purpose in resisting Israel’s war on Gaza and its evictions in the Jerusalem suburbs of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan.

Israel itself could not have done a better job of deflating that spirit of unity. Instead of holding to account those responsible for Banat’s brutal killing, the Palestinian Authority responded to the rising tide of protest with more brutality.

After mounting internal and international pressure, the Palestinian Authority’s Justice Minister Mohammed al-Shalaldeh conceded on July 1 that Banat was subjected to physical violence and his death was “unnatural”, but insisted this was an “exceptional case”. Then Civil Affairs Minister Hussein al-Sheikh issued an apology for the killing, calling it a “mistake”. The apology did not set out any measures to hold the perpetrators to account, only some rhetoric about learning from what happened and moving on.

Protests against the authority have been a long time coming. A byproduct of the Oslo Accords, the authority was meant to be a governmental structure, not a liberation movement. Its appointments of ministers and ambassadors did not stop Israeli bulldozers from destroying Palestinian homes, or Israeli settlements from expanding, or bombs from falling on people in Gaza.

After 20 years of the authority’s failed rule, Palestinians have come to understand that what is needed is not a governmental structure under occupation, a powerless facade of democracy. What the Palestinians desperately need is resistance to all forms of oppression, including oppression from within.

Anyone who thinks that sole responsibility for this decline into authoritarianism rests with the Palestine Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, is delusional. The real issue is the existence of such an authority under a settler-colonialist Israeli occupation and a security apparatus subservient to that occupation.

The authority lacks control over basic life, its democratically elected legislative council cannot hold meetings, address labour rights or make decisions over its budget and infrastructure because all of these fall under Israeli control. The only control the Palestine Authority has is over Palestinian people. Tasked with policing the occupation and safeguarding Israeli interests through security collaboration, the authority has been trained to turn its weapons on its own people.

With the Washington Monument in the background, supporters of Palestinian rights gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on May 29.Credit:AP

Perhaps the most damning of its failures is to harness the power of Palestinians inside and outside the homeland. We’ve seen this power. It was made manifest in the streets of Sheikh Jarrah and sparked an outpouring of support worldwide. In May, we saw 200,000 people march for Palestinian rights in London, tens of thousands across the US, and even here in Australia at the other end of the world, 15,000 marched in Melbourne on May 22.

I remind myself of this power as I reread Shatha Safi’s tweet. Palestinians are mobilising against all forms of oppression. And the absence of the Palestinian Authority from view at these rallies tells me that the days of their oppression are numbered, too.

Samah Sabawi is a Palestinian-Australian playwright, commentator and poet.

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