The demands of the prisoners are basic, like most Palestinian demands, and include access to telephone landlines, increased and longer family visits, better medical care, an end to administrative detention, access to the Hebrew Open University, and the right for imprisoned high schoolers to take end-of-year exams. Family visits are a particularly difficult issue: the fact that Palestinian prisoners are jailed inside Israel, in contravention of international law, which forbids the transfer of members of an occupied people outside of their country, makes it necessary for Palestinian family members to apply for permits to visit their imprisoned relatives in Israel.  These permits are regularly denied, and when granted, make for difficult, costly, and long journeys for the visitors, who are then only allowed minutes with their loved ones

But “rights are not bestowed by the oppressor,” as strike leader Marwan Barghouti said in his eloquent OpEd, echoing American abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ “Power concedes nothing without a demand. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”