The death of Khader Adnan

source: Mehr News (www.mehrnews.com…), licensed under a Creative Commons

So often I have heard people say, “if only the Palestinians would use non-violence as their form of protest, the world would listen.” Khader Adnan, a Palestinian baker, died due to his hunger strike – the same form of non-violent resistance used by Gandhi. Is anyone listening?

An excerpt from:

Khader Adnan, who yearned to live free, dies in Israeli prison

by Tamara Nassar

Palestinian writer Yousef Aljamal recalled speaking to Adnan by phone in 2021 while co-editing with Norma Hashim the book, A Shared Struggle—Stories of Palestinian & Irish Republican Hunger Strikers.

“I remember his voice was very weak and he was barely able to talk due to his illness and the damage his vocal cords suffered from past hunger strikes,” Aljamal wrote in a tribute to Adnan.

But if Israel broke and finally destroyed Adnan physically, it did not do so spiritually.

“Our freedom is the most precious thing we have,” Adnan explained in an essay published in the book.

“Being locked in a dark dungeon, where Israeli soldiers beat my chained body was deeply humiliating and oppressing,” Adnan said. “Their punches and their weapons have left permanent scars on my body. Their barbarism itself stood before me, literally.”

“Freedom beckoned me from the moment I was first imprisoned, it haunted me. My quest for liberty also drove me to bolster the morale of my friends and brothers.”

By waging his hunger strikes, Adnan said he was determined “to teach the occupiers a lesson in dignity and defiance.”

He also recalled how his captors moved his “weak, faint and emaciated body from one prison to another.”

“Their hatred, oppression and brutality still live with me,” he said. “They pretend to act humanely in front of the rest of the world, but they don’t.”

Adnan never lost sight of what motivated him: his devotion to his people, his land and his family.

“During my struggle I occupied my mind by recalling the sun on the distant green lands. I missed most of all the feel of grains of sand, the scent of the almond and lemon trees,” he said.

“I demanded to go home, to my family, to my daughters, who had spent long periods of their childhoods without me since I was jailed.”

read this article in full here.