COMMENTARY: By Mark Nagalazas
Kudos to the returning Australian pro-Palestinian flotilla activists for not simply focusing on their mistreatment at the hands of the Israeli Defense Force but for acknowledging the suffering of Palestinian prisoners.
“What got me through is thinking about coming home, and now I’m home I can’t stop thinking about my brothers and sisters that we left behind, still in the clutches of the Israeli military, police and prison guards, who take so much pleasure in inflicting pain and suffering,” said environmental activist Violet Coco as she stepped off the plane at Melbourne Airport.
“There are still almost 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held hostage in Israel’s prison system, hundreds of whom are children, some as young as two.
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“Israel wants to shame us but we are not ashamed, the shame is Israel’s, that they would tarnish their souls with such calculated cruelty.”
Fellow activist Gemma O’Toole also said the mistreatment of the protestors should not distract from the suffering of Palestinian prisoners.
“I gather there’s a lot of attention being paid to the Ben-Gvir video, which is just so insane to me,” she said, referring to a video posted by Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir showing the detained activists with their hands tied and foreheads on the ground.
‘Heart broken for Palestinians’
“What you saw in that video is this [infinitesimal] amount of what we actually went through. And then to think that’s what they do to predominantly white people when they’re being held relatively to account, there’s so much attention being paid to that,” O’Toole said.
“My heart is just broken for the Palestinian people.”
Meanwhile, the global pro-Israel community is apoplectic about The New York Times for Nicholas Kristof’s expose of the shocking brutality being endured by imprisoned Palestinians (Israel is even suing the newspaper).
But, as the returning activists are pointing out, if this is how Israel treats privileged white people protesting you can imagine what they are doing to the brown people languishing in their prisons.
Hard to cry innocent when their national security minister is boasting about Israeli brutality and posting it on his website.
Mark Naglazas is a West Australian journalist specialising in Perth culture and the arts.
