We Will Not Forget

The following was written by an American (non-Arab) visitor to the Occupied West Bank of Palestine in 1992. Mustapha was one of thousands of Palestinians who have died in the struggle to be free. He had just graduated from college in Jordan and was returning to Palestine to marry his fiancé. When he passed through the border station the Israeli border guards told him to report to the IDF off ice near his home the next morning, where he his life was brutally taken by the Occupier’s Secret Police.

Tuesday, February 4, 1992, 36 year-old Palestinian “Administrative Detainee” Mustapha Abdullah al-Akawi died in the torture chambers of an Israeli prison in Occupied Hebron just hours after telling a military judge that he was being tortured by the Prime Minister’s secret police.

Mustapha was not a criminal, he had not committed or been charged with a crime, but he was arrested and methodically denied all legal and human rights.

Mustapha’s “crime” was that he was a Palestinian. He lived on the land the Israelis are stealing from his people. He was one of the 6 million voiceless, de-humanized and de-faced Palestinians their occupiers have branded world-wide as “sub-humans,” grasshoppers,” “lizards,” and “insects” to be stomped out, driven out of Palestine, or confined like “drugged roaches in a bottle” in prison-like camps in isolated cantons.

Mustapha was one of 6 million Palestinians called “terrorists” by a terrorist regime that force-evacuated and then obliterated hundreds of their villages; drove the dispossessed populations into the sea, the mountains and foreign lands; and herded survivors into squalid refugee camps on their own land and in neighboring countries.

The dispossessors and occupiers have responded to Palestinian rights to Freedom, Justice, Human and Legal Rights with increased dispossession, impoverishment, oppression, military and “settler” terror and brutality, beatings, killings, gassing, mass arrests, torture, death squads, expulsions, and home “sealings” and demolitions.

Mustapha was one of thousands of “detained” Palestinian adult and child political prisoners tortured by a nationalist military regime that is constantly devising more insidious ways to terrorize, traumatize, oppress and kill his people: men and women, the elderly and children, the sick….those already wounded or maimed…even the unborn.

Mustapha was killed by a military regime that has made virtually every act of living a “security crime;” that gives license to its citizens, military personnel, and racist “religious settlers” to vandalize, invade, seize and occupy Palestinian properties; to terrorize, beat and shoot the defenseless and powerless population without guilt or remorse.

Mustapha was a victim of a Holocaust mentality and amoral U.S. Foreign Policy. He was killed because he existed. He was killed because he yearned for Freedom and Human Rights, to live in “Peace With Dignity and Equality,” and to raise his small son and unborn child in his ancestral homeland.

Mustapha died because two giant military powers conspire to deny his people their Right to Exist and Legal Rights to their Homeland. They portray their victims as “victimizers” and use mis-and-myth- information, lies, demonization, censorship, and intimidation to silence truth and hid their venal goals and cruel deeds.

Mustapha died because racist politicians and a co-opted media create and sustain contempt for Palestinians, “Arabs” and “Muslims” to build public support for the injustices, inhumanity and crimes committed against them.

Mustapha died because Christian and Jewish Zionists ignore his people’s torture, rationalize their suffering, and remain piously mute at their deaths, claiming that it is the will of “their” God. 

Mustapha, we will not forget!

February 1992. Unsigned

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