Amid the relentless brutality unleashed upon the Palestinian collective in Israel’s ongoing genocide, Omar al-Khatib, a dear friend and IDS research partner, has been arrested by Israeli forces, and is now being held in ‘administrative detention’ – incarceration without charge or trial.
Empathic, passionate, intelligent, critical, and brilliant, Omar was seized by Israeli forces at Ben Gurion airport on 1 March 2024, as they were returning home from personal travel. As is all-too-common for those hoping for information on loved ones incarcerated by Israel, subsequent information is piecemeal. After interrogation – an acutely dangerous time, which can last up to 180 days, and in which intimidation, beatings, torture and sexual assault of Palestinian detainees by Israeli interrogators is systematic and widespread – Omar was given access to a lawyer five days following arrest, and informed that they will be held in administrative detention for four months.
Devastatingly, this timeline is arbitrary, subject to the whim of the colonial power. Administrative detention – in which a detainee is held without charges, trial, or fair judicial review on the basis of ‘secret information’ – can be renewed indefinitely, with the incarcerated “held on the presumption that they might commit an offense […] in the future”.
All Palestinians held in Israeli prisons in this way are political prisoners, a reality occluded by the cold bureaucracy of the term ‘administrative detention’. Since 1948, Israel has created laws that make it not only very easy to detain Palestinians, but also to allow for the systematic use of torture with impunity – isolating the incarcerated, while imposing “conditions of violence intended to degrade, humiliate, and eventually kill them“.
One among thousands
Before telling Omar’s story, it is paramount that we place it in context. Omar is one of many thousands of Palestinians incarcerated by Israel – in a penal system “ripe for abuse and maltreatment“. At the time of writing, over 9,100 Palestinians are being held captive in Israeli prisons, including 3,558 in administrative detention. At least 27 Palestinian detainees from Gaza have died in Israeli military facilities since 7 October 2023.
Read more from the IDS MENA Initiative
Through Israel’s colonial occupation, all of Palestine has been transformed into a “constantly surveilled open-air prison” states UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese – positioning the Palestinian population as a “collective incarcerable security threat”, “ultimately de-civilianising them [and] eroding their status as protected persons”. Let us not forget that the wholesale dehumanisation of the Palestinian collective forms the discursive backdrop to Israel’s genocide, making possible and imaginable their murder through (re)establishing their status as ‘less than human’ – or, “human animals”.
These devastating realities form a broader pattern that points to the Zionist bid to ‘cleanse’ the land of Palestinians, through mass incarceration, expulsion and genocide – irrespective of the machinations of the international legal system. Who gets to count as human in this system? Not, it seems, colonised Palestinians.
A prominent feminist and queer Palestinian activist
For the last six months, Omar – broken-hearted, grieving and rightfully angry – has lamented their relative ‘safety’ in West Bank and Jerusalem, as Israeli bombs rain down on the besieged and starved Gaza strip. Yet, any notion of ‘safety’ anywhere in Palestine is an illusion. As South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice has evidenced, Israel’s “intent to destroy” the people of Palestine in whole is laid bare through both genocidal actions, and the hundreds of genocidal statements made by those who command authority.
In this context, we do not seek to render Omar’s story distinctive or special – they would hate that. Omar joins the thousands of Palestinian people – including political activists, human rights defenders, and even children – whom Israel has unjustly incarcerated. We tell it instead as one story of that which is consistently inflicted upon Palestinians – destructive, degrading and dehumanising violation. Behind each incarcerated Palestinian – and every murdered Palestinian – lies a story that must be told.
Read more: Contextualising Gaza: Colonial violence and occupation
Omar is a prominent feminist, queer and anti-colonial activist. Outspoken against Israeli pink-washing – the cynical exploitation of LGBTQ+ rights to falsely project a ‘progressive’ image of the Israeli state and conceal the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people – Omar has long fought alongside peers and comrades to connect the struggles for feminist and queer liberation with the fight against colonisation. As for all Palestinians, they will not make their erasure easy for Israel.
Reflecting upon the indivisibility of struggles, Omar explains in Walaa Alqaisiya’s book, Decolonial Queering in Palestine, “our coloniser […] tell[s] queer Palestinians that we must hate our society because it will slaughter us. In doing so, we are left with more fragmentation and no hope or prospect for societal change, because our only protector is supposedly the criminal colonial entity named Israel. This is why we cannot conceive of any Palestinian uprising where forms of struggle are separated from one another. We must be honest with ourselves and see the indivisibility of our liberation”.
Such messaging is ‘dangerous’ for Israel, which weaponises gender and sexuality to fatal effect, mobilising racist and gendered caricatures to manufacture consent for colonisation, occupation and genocide. Through this framework, queer Palestinians are either completely invisible or hyper-visible, depicted “within a limited range of spurious and racist archetypes“.
Queer Palestinian movements potently counter such narratives, loudly resisting their erasure – and Omar has long been active within these movements. This is the basis upon which Omar came to work on an IDS project, which explores queer struggles across Palestine and Lebanon – seeking now to amplify queer experiences of this brutal genocide.
A few days after Omar was arrested, they were potentially traveling to Geneva, on the invitation of the Sexual Rights Initiative, to present to the Human Rights Council. Conflicted, they were understandably dubious, entirely disillusioned, as all Palestinians are, with an international system that permits their systematic annihilation. Yet – as for millions of Palestinians, whose voices and lives are severed, silenced and brutally extinguished by the machinations of colonial domination – Omar’s chance to speak as a powerful feminist and queer Palestinian voice on an international platform has now been violently quashed by Israel. It is acutely painful to imagine what Omar could be being subjected to instead.
Demanding Omar’s release
In light of the horrors of administrative detention, the term rings like a hollow euphemism. Omar is held captive, alongside all Palestinian detainees, as a political prisoner, incarcerated by a colonial entity with the full force of Western hegemony and hypocrisy behind it.
As millions scream for their immediate release, we mourn the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel, the thousands maimed, the thousands incarcerated, and remember that behind every number is a name. And behind every name is a story, a family, hopes, dreams of liberation.
And today, we speak Omar al-Khatib’s name, offering a brief glimpse into their story. A story being lived right now amid the colonial terror of Israel’s carceral system.
To change this story, solidarity is urgent; we must fight for their freedom, and for the liberation of all incarcerated Palestinians – in Israeli prisons and under Israeli occupation. We must push in every space we can, for a ceasefire, for decolonisation, the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid regime, and for the liberation of Palestine.
Baed tahrir, بعد التحرير, after liberation, Omar once said, we could gather together with all of those on our project – divided across Palestine by bombs, imprisonment, besiegement and military occupation – in queer solidarity. Simply to cry, laugh, rage, grieve and ‘be’ together, to share some food and some stories.
Baed tahrir, بعد التحرير, after liberation. We must continue to fight for this day. We hope that Omar holds this image in their heart, even in this terrifying and brutalising time.
