Prisoner’s Club Fares Delivers First Lecture in Palestinian Prisoner Series

Birzeit University hosted on February 5, 2015 the head of the Palestinian Prisoners club, Qadura Fares. Fares was invited by the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies during discussions of a new course entitled “Prison Notebooks: The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement”. The new course will the Palestinian Prisoners movement, detention, interrogation techniques, the confrontation philosophy, Israeli judicial systems, organizational and social life, prison books and prisoners’ writings, children born to prisoners by the smuggling of sperm, Palestinian and international campaigns to liberate and exchange prisoners, and Palestinian and international prisoners’ institutions and associations. This course will also feature a lecture series inviting a freed prisoner to speak about one of the course topics.

Fares spoke of the Palestinian Prisoners’ movement since its inception until 1994, including the torture and provocation faced by prisoners inside Israeli jails.  Fares said that the Palestinian Prisoners’ movement is not cut off from the Palestinian national movement outside the prison, but is considered its extension.

Fares emphasized the movement’s organization and discipline in resisting the enemy, despite being different from other resistance movements outside the prison.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement was able to reconstitute an internal structure and develop regular and factional frameworks inside the prison, to serve all the prisoners’ goal. The movement established a set of values that provides for teamwork, a high degree of commitment, and discipline, all of which is manifested in unified hunger strikes, the election of the movement’s representative inside the prison, and the national reconciliation document drawn up by prisoners after the Palestinian political division in 2006.