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JERUSALEM
On March 8, 1984, Israeli soldiers set
up a roadblock at the Ram intersection on the
Jerusalem-Ramallah Road
in the West Bank. Ram is one of the Palestinian towns and
villages that extend
from the suburbs of Jerusalem in a residential chain north to al-Bireh
and Ramallah. The
intersection at the entrance to the town is a familiar checkpoint,
used by
the Israeli Defense
Forces to close off Jerusalem to the rest of the Palestinians living
in the
West Bank.
The task for the
soldiers was extraordinary that day, for it said to order back
Palestinian
women and children. The
Palestinians were on their way to attend festivities held in and
around Jerusalem to
honor International Women's Day. The Israeli military authorities,
holding the West Bank
and Gaza Strip since 1967, knew that International Women's Day
had become a yearly
occasion where the PLO recognized Palestinian women. The
soldiers, however, were
not completely successful for on that day and the next, hundreds of
Palestinian women and
children circumvented the roadblock by using out-of-the-way roads
to get to Jerusalem, and
celebrations were held all over the West Bank. Jerusalem's
Palestinian newspaper
al-Fajr, noting the barring of the women, then proceeded to report
on the festivities in
Jerusalem, Ramallah and al-Bireh cities and in the Dheisheh refugee
camp in Bethlehem.
The celebrations
included the familiar spectrum of Palestinian political festivals,
but it was
also apparent that a
great deal of preparation had gone into the programs. The newspaper
said the audiences heard
speeches about the current political situation and about the
changing roles of women.
Participants listened to commemorations of local martyrs and
messages sent by
political prisoners. The entertainment included folk dancing,
poetry,
songs, and skits.
Bazaars set up for the occasion sold traditional Palestinian
embroidery.
What the soldiers at the
Ram intersection might not have realized was that International
Women's Day also marked
the birth of an unfolding Woman's Committees' Movement that
had begun six years
earlier. It is not often that the birth of a social movement can be
narrowed to a day and
place.
The Women's Committees'
Movement began at an afternoon meeting on March 8, 1978, in
the old library of Ramallah in the West Bank. Some thirty women, all from the urban
middle
class in the Jerusalem
and Ramallah areas, came to discuss how women could be
organized to support the
steadfastness effort. Steadfastness was the Palestinian buzzword
for peaceful resistance
against the Israeli occupation, and by the early '70s it had
replaced
the collapsed armed
struggle movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The women at
the Ramallah library
meeting were familiar faces to one another, as they worked together
in
the community
volunteers' movement that was taking shape in the mid-1970s. To an
outsider, the library
meeting would have been innocuous; the idea of women doing
volunteer work was as
old as their great grandmothers who had started charitable societies
as early as 1902 in Acre
on the Mediterranean coast. A closer look would have revealed
the nucleus of the
Occupied Territories' incoming second and third generations of
women's
leadership. These were
enthusiastic young cadres who were in their 20s and early 30s and
ready to make their mark
for the Palestinian cause.
At the center was
second-generation Democratic Front's Zahira Kamal who, with fellow
partisan Siham
Barghouti, issued the invitation for the meeting and would soon form
the
Women's Action
Committees.
The
first three groups represent the leftist current in the Palestinian
liberation movement
and,
in contrast with the mobilization in the Diaspora of the 1970s when
Fateh dominated,
the leftists led in organizing women in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip.
The
oldest group is the Union of Women's Action Committees, established
in 1978. Its
founder and president is Zahira Kamal, who was the leading figure
in the Democratic Front
in
the Occupied Territories until it split into two; she is now a
leader of the Palestinian
Democratic Union Party (Fida), Yasser Abed Rabbo's group. For most
of its history, the
Women's Action focused its recruitment on housewives, who
constituted 75 percent of the
membership. In 1992, however, the leadership decided to expand its
appeal to include
employed women. The union's membership reached a height of 10,000 in
1990, before
splitting in half in 1991 because of the schism inside its
sponsoring faction, the Democratic
Front, over the peace process.
The
Union of Palestinian Women's Committees, affiliated with the Popular
Front, was
established in 1981; its leader is Maha Nassar. The size of the
union's membership is kept
secret, but it is estimated to have 5,000 to 6,000 members, with a
high proportion of
students.
The
Union of Working Women's Committees was also established in 1981 and
is led by
Amal
Khrieheh. The union, which is sponsored by the Palestine Communist
Party (now the
Palestine People's Party), initially focused on working women and
students; its
membership reached a height of 5,000. After 1990, however, the
union's grassroots
organizing faltered because of lack of funds and the collapse of the
Soviet block.
Consequently, the Union's leading women became more independent from
the Communist
Party and are interested in a variety of women's
rights' issues.
The
last group to form was the Union of Social Work Committees, which
was established in
1982 and is led by Rabiha Diab. The union is affiliated with Fateh
and its membership is
diverse and growing, having reached 8,000 women in
1990.
These four unions represent the tour de force of the second and
third generations of
leaders. These data, from 1990, symbolize the ability of women from
the main PLO
factions to navigate past Israeli suppression of political activity
in the Occupied Territories.
Also, in creating their own organizations, these cadres had made a
declaration of
independence from the charitable work of their
mothers' generation.
The
second- and third-generation women's leadership in the Occupied
Territories, as their
comrades in the Diaspora, were never satisfied with charitable work
and most, especially
those in the third generation, did not partake in it. They were
children of the '60s and '70s
who
believed in social change and thought charitable work elitist,
holding little promise of
changing the oppressive situation of Arab women. They were daughters
of Nasser's Arab
nationalism and the Palestinian National Movement, and at university
were rapidly drawn to
student activism organized by the popular and Democratic fronts, the
Palestine Communist
Party, and Fateh.
The
women were respectful of their mothers' generation. "This is
something one cannot
ignore," said third-generation Nassar, head of the Palestinian
Women's Committees.
"They gave and sacrificed and still do; they are part of the women's
movement.
"
Second-generation Kamal of the Women's Action Commitees and
first-generation
societies leader Khalil were also repotedly good friends, which
might have been due to the
fact that Kamal and at least one of Khalil's sons were leaders in
the Democratic Front.
Kamal agreed, saying:” The question sometimes is not a question of
the woman and the
man.
The woman can be more oppressive than the man- I mean of the woman.
The three
leftist groups were especially keen on making changes in how women
thought of
themselves in relation to the Palestinian movement and their own
status in the society.
It
was all reminiscent of the leftist in the diasporan women’s
leadership in Lebanon, but the
political environment had changed. In place of the whirlwind of the
Lebanese civil war, there
was
a new political order that unfolded in the 1987 uprising, the rise
of Hamas, and the
PLO’s diplomatic maneuvers, culminating in the PLO- Israel accord of
September 1993,
the
Declaration of Principles.
The
hubs of Palestinian politics in the Occupied Territories are located
along the
Jerusalem-Ramallah-Nablus urban nexus of the West Bank, and Gaza
City in the Strip. The
two
centers are separated by a single 100 km two-lane highway through
Israel. The
women’s leadership lived in and around Jerusalem, and that is it
started to organize.
About one-third of all Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip and, of those,
two-fifths are refugees. The bank is home to two-third of the
Palestinians living in the
Occupied Territories and it is also larger and more spread out than
the Strip. The West
Bank is 130 km north to south and 30-40 km east to west, while the
Gaza Strip is only
44km in length and 4-12 km in width. The vast majority of the 495
Palestinian villages in the
Occupied Territories are located in the Bank, which also has twenty
refugee camps. The
camps can be found throughout, but about half of the people in them
live in the Nablus are,
which is 65 km north of Jerusalem. The city also hosted the largest
and most politically
volatile camp, Balata. Altogether, about one-fourth of West Bankers
are refugees. The
many
villages and camps in the Bank reminds one of the reality that the
Occupied
Territories are at once home to those with ancestral roots in the
area and are a place of
exile for the refugees.
The
Gaza Strip is logistically less accessible to the women’s leadership
in the West Bank.
As
the southern tip of Palestine, it is closer to Egypt, which
administered it in the 1948-
1967
period. The population of the Strip is concentrated in three
cities-Gaza, Khan Younis
and Rafah- and in eight refugee camps and a few villages. Both the Bank
and the Strip
have suffered from frequent curfews and telephone cut-off,
disrupting communications
between the two regions. The Strip, however, could also be easily
cordoned off by a single
roadblock at the Eretz checkpoint at the entrance to Gaza.
The
Gaza Strip is also a greatly distressed community. It is
distinguished by having one of
the
highest population densities in the world (an average of 1,800/sq.
km. And as high as
5,000/ sq. km. Around Gaza city). In 1948 the Strip was already one
of Palestine’s poorest
regions when it lost much of its agricultural land to Israel. At the
same time, it was
inundated with the refugees who now constitute two-thirds of its
residents.
The
scarcity of resources and the political situation meant high
unemployment especially
among the refugees, half of whom still live in the Strip’s eight
refugee camps. (It is in the
largest of these camps, Jabalya, on the outskirts of Gaza that the
Intifada began).
Underneath its often curfewed streets, Gaza conveyed an air of
combustion ripe with
nationalist and conservative sentiments. This was Fateh and Hamas
country. There is a
degree of desperation and anger in Gaza, unlike any other place: it
is the greatest reminder
of
the Palestinian tragedy. Consequently, Gazanas have always been
great trouble to the
Israeli occupation administration. Which is why Israel wanted to
unload it fast onto the
PLO’s shoulders.
Gaza’s social economic and political environment presented the
women’s leadership out of
the
West Bank with an ambiguous environment for women’s mobilization.
Gaza is a
society that embraced its children who resisted the occupation,
including the females
among them.
Local Democratic Front leader Ne’meh Helou (unrelated to Juhan and
Shadia), who was
sought by Israel for membership in the Unified Ledaership of the
Uprising (the secret
leadership of the Intifada), was able to go into hiding for years.
Helou was Kamal’s
counterpart in Gaza and a former commando who spent the 70’s in
prison, and upon
release did moblilization work for her faction. (In 1990, shortly
after I met her, she was
arrested and remained in prison until she was released in 1993,
following the Israeli-PLO
accord.) Now she is the top woman in the Palestinian Democratic
Union Party in the Gaza
Strip and in her party’s congress in 1995; she received the most
votes for leadership
among both female and male candidates. Gaza is alos a conservative
society- not very
hospitable to attempts to liberalize women’s roles and that
attitude hindered the
recruitment drive of the Women’s Committees’
Movement.
The
Palestinian social landscape is generally conservative and
economically distresses
throughout the Territories, as it is in the refugee camps of the diaspora, so organizers had
to
address in Gaza and elsewhere the very same constraints of women’s
resources.
Especially stark were women’s low levels of education and economic
dependency. For
example, in 1987, the average housewife had less than nine years of
school. This was
especially a problem in the villages, where advancing above the
elementary level often
meant commuting outside one’s village or town, which produces fears
for their girls’
reputations. In the refugee camps, UNRWA has schools for both boys
and girls and most
of
the camps are located near cities, making education more accessible.
The refugees
also placed a great value on education for both sexes, as the only
way out to poverty. Once
out
of school, however, the vast majority of women tended to marry and
only a small
minority engaged in employment.
As
was the case in the diasporan organizing effort during the Jordanian
and Lebanese
periods, recruits were approached through the usual social rituals,
and organizers found
inroads by providing assistance and friendship. In the words of an
organizer for the Social
Work Committees in Gaza:
We
usually try to reach the woman in her home, right in her place. We
do not burden her to
have to come to us. For example. I have a neighbor whose son was
arrested, I then go to
her
at the house and tell her to give me his name and the number of his
identity card and I
go
to inform the Cross (International Red Cross). I do not wish to give
her the burden of his
work. No, on the contrary, I want to make her feel that her son is
like my brother. For sure,
most of the aware sisters work like this.
For
the three leftist groups, success required turning away from the
Marxist-Leninist secret
cells to the more open structure of volunteer committees. Sometimes
it was also necessary
to
secure the support of the male elder in some of the more tightly
woven village
communities. It was difficult at times to gain the trust of the
people. An organizer for the
Women's Action Committee in Nablus said:
Sometimes the woman becomes afraid. She agrees to join the
committees but she returns
after two to three days or a week and says, "My husband wouldn't let
me" or "I am afraid
because you belong to a certain political current." We try to
convince her that it is her right
to
join a political program, even if her political inclinations are
somewhere else. [We say]
"you
can be an active member in this framework in a very ordinary way and
it is not
necessary that you become obligated."
A
Gazan in charge of the Middle camps for the Women's Action
Committees, have a
step-by-step account of how a women's committee would
be started. She said:
We
go first to the house to visit one who is receptive to be active in
the committees. She
gathers the women around her. She brings them one of us who has a
good idea about the
program We present the program of the committees. We present what
the role of women
is,
how we will develop ourselves and how we will take part in the
national struggle, which
cannot be separated from the social struggle to improve women's
social and economic
conditions… After that, through our discussion-there are many people
who speak and ask
for
explanation-we sense who is enthusiastic of the twenty, thirty, or
thirty-five who attended.
[They ask] " How could one work?"
The
organizers would then take this opportunity to suggest forming a
local women's
committee. She would say, Ï am from outside the neighborhood and
couldn't come to you.
The
one who should work with you should be one, two or a group of you.
So why don't you
choose one or two of you represent you. Afterwards, other meetings
are arranged and a
local committee is born. In the words of the Gazan
organizers.
After that we return and have another meeting, and another, and we
explain to them the
basic structures of the union. We choose from them five or seven,
depending on the number
present- the most enthusiastic group-and we delegate to them the
basic responsibility for
the activities, calling meetings and so on.
Organizers day trips were occasions for interested women from
different areas to meet and
get
away from the daily routines but, occasionally, participants had to
deal with harassment
from
some of the men standing by in the streets. Kamal said these
encounters proved to be
good opportunities for leadership training, and gave the example of
an excursion her group
once organized for women from several West Bank villages. Kamal
said some of the men
in
one village met the tour bus and said none of our women will go. Kamal answered them:
"Okay, we shall drive around in town and we shall take those who
join us." This they did and
the
outcome was a success; they had registered for one and ended filling
up two.
Kamal said:
We knew how to work with
the local society, I mean, instead of leaving at seven we left at
nine because it took us
time to debate. But in the end, the women themselves stood firm
because they wanted to
go on the trips…And now we have in those locations, where we
faced great
difficulties, the strongest of our sites. And they have great
perseverance, they
have high potential,
very big, and they have abilities in persuasion.
Hanan Ashrawi, who lived
in Ramallah, West Bank, was a longtime observer of the
Women’s Committees’
Movement. In her opinion, the entry of the women’s committees into
the villages was a
tremendous breakthrough in the nationalist effort to involve women:
I think they are more
successful than we think they are because they have managed to
reach women in remote
areas, women who were hitherto neglected, who were not part of
the nationalist or
feminist movement movements. And by creating work opportunities, by
getting them involved,
by giving them the channels, the avenues for self-expression and
decision-making, they
have politicized women even beyond their wildest dreams-because
women were ready.
The three leftist
groups, the Women’s Action Committees, the Palestinian Women’s
Committees, and the
Working Women’s Committees, led the way in recruitment, through
they were mainly
successful in the West Bank. After the Intifada, however, the
fortunes of
the fourth group, the
Social Work Committees, began to improve when its sponsor Fateh
increased its funding,
as evidenced by the many kindergartens it opened during the period
1990-1991.
In the best tradition of
Palestinian political factionalism, the four women’s unions competed
along familiar lines.
They organized adult literacy classes for women ( in a region where
three-quarters of women
forty-five years and older had no formal schooling of any kind),
and offered vocational
workshops in sewing, weaving and such; but mostly, they competed
with kindergartens. Each
union had dozens of these one- to three-room kindergartens that
became the most visible
measure of their success.
The kindergartens did
two things, said Abla Abu Elbi, a third-generation member of the
Women’s secretariat, who
works out of the office of the Jordanian People’s Party in
Amman. Abu Elbi was in
close contact with her group (The Democratic Front) across the
border. Kindergartens
served women who were already active and needed child care but
they also provided an
opportunity, she said, “To enter the location in which kindergartens
are set up so as to
enter a relationship with the masses in those locations.”
In the mid-1980s, two of
the unions-the Palestinian Women’s Committees and the Women’s
Action
Committees-experimented with small-scale income-generating projects.
Almost all
involved food
preservation, drawing on Arab women’s traditional knowledge of
homemade
preserves.
The Palestinian Women’s
Committees organized a few profit-sharing cooperatives. Their
two main projects were
located in the villages of Sa’ir (Hebron district) and Beitillo
(Ramallah district).
With about twenty-five to thirty women each, they produced and
marketed preserves,
pickles, jams and fruit drinks. The Norwegian Save the Children Fund
and the Refugee Council
provided the funds and Birzeit University provided the technical
training.
The central leadership
of the Palestinian Women’s Committees initiated the projects and
arranged for technical
assistance, then turned over business decisions regarding
production, accounting,
marketing, and distribution of profits to the participants. It was
an
interesting commentary
on the times for the Marxist-Leninist-oriented leadership to opt for
a semblance of
capitalist thinking and recognize the profit motive. Theirs was a
social
democratic model,
however. Eileen Kuttab was in charge of the development projects of
the
Palestinian Women’s
Committees. She said it was important to teach women that profits
should be in part
directed toward benefiting common interests-and gave the example of
using apportion of the
profit of the cooperative for a daycare center to serve the working
mothers.
In contrast, the Women’s
Action Committees aimed at encouraging local initiative. Their
two main village
projects were the Abasan Biscuit and Milks center, located east of
Khan
Unis in the Gaza Strip,
and the Essawiya Copper Works at the northeast end of Jerusalem.
At Abasan, the local
committee came up with the idea of making biscuits for commercial
use and at first had to
rely on a small conventional oven for the baking.
The central office in
Jerusalem was then asked for commercial equipment, which was
eventually provided
through funds from European development agencies.
The Essawiya Copper
Works was a combined vocational training and income-generating
project of the
leadership of the Women’s Action Committees. Started in early 1984,
it was
an experiment in
nontraditional vocational education for young women, who were taught
copper crafts. The idea
was to teach them how to use hammers, wrenches, electric welders,
and saws. “Men do these
activities in our society,” Kamal explained, “and now it is a new
experience for women.”
Both unions saw their projects as catalysts of social change for the
participating women.
There was a consensus
among the women’s leadership in all the groups that making
decisions at the
workplace enhances a woman’s self-confidence and is bounded to
affect
her private life. It
might mean, for example, simply being able to decide who she
marries,
rather than having to
bend to her family’s choice, as oftentimes happens in the more
conservative families.
The women’s leadership, however, had no illusions that these
isolated pilots would
change social attitudes toward women’s roles in the society. But
they
were small windows that
the women in the villages could use to gain increased personal
autonomy and
self-initiative.
At the very beginning of
the Palestinian National Movement, the hope of the leftist in the
women’s leadership was
that women would become cadres in the factions and participate
in the armed struggle.
Now their goal was to provide models of how women could more
widely be involved in
Palestinian nation-building, however, they had to do so in ways that
they were unobtrusive to
the prevailing social norms, for example, having more flexible work
schedules and part-time
work. (Interestingly, to be sensitive to the Muslim culture, the
Women’s Action Commitees’ magazine, darb al-mar’s (1991), contained a column by a
Muslim scholar, who
advised readers on women’s rights in Islam.) “The work is
enormous
and requires great
patience,” Kamal said, and both the leaders of the Women’s Action
Committees and the
Palestinian Women’s Committees were in it for the long haul.
The Working Women’s
Committees’ struggle was focused on women’s labor rights- at best
a frustrating
enterprise. First, they could not, by law, unionize at sites across
the Green Line
(the 1948 border between
Israel and the Occupied Territories). And it was there that
thousands of female
workers headed to fill low-paid agricultural and services jobs.
Also, some of the women
were difficult to reach because they were transported directly from
their villages to Israel
by special buses provided by the employers. Second, the Palestinian
economy was greatly
depressed because of Israeli policies against autonomous
Palestinian development
and because of high un employment. Labor rights issues also
took second seat to the
national question, especially among the male-dominated labor
unions that were often
preoccupied with national competitions.
The Working Women's
Committees led a couple of campaigns against Palestinian
companies to win equal
wages for women and to have International Women's Day be
considered a paid
holiday. Ashrawi was in the delegation that paid a visit to one of
these
factory owners:
"We formed a delegation
of women across the broad to go and defend Women's rights and
to demand equal wages
and so we sent him word that we were coming. And when he found
out that we were making
an issue of it, immediately he said he changed. He gave in to the
women."
She added, "We waged
this as a feminist struggle rather than as a political group
struggle.
" In the end, these
successes were all symbolic without the mandate of law, but they
were
occasions -admittedly on
a small scale- for the women's leadership to present a unified
front on behalf of
women's interests.
The Social Work
Committees did not have a social-change agenda, which is consistent
with its sponsor Fateh's
purely national liberation purpose. The group had a few seasonal
pickling projects such
as one in the village of Kufr Malik (Ramallah distict), but these
were
propelled by the
Intifada and were meant to symbolize on of its long-term goals for
the
Palestinian to disengage
from the Israeli economy.
In the 1987 Intifada,
known as "the uprising of the stones," Palestinian women were shown
to Western audiences
through television cameras. The images were of traditionally clad
women breaking up
boulders into smaller pieces thrown by the children, or shielding
the
children from Israeli
soldiers. The women stood in the streets alongside boys (and some-
times girls), all
challenging occupation soldiers with stones.
The Intifada lasted
several years and was sustained by a wide infrastructure of the
organizations. Prior to
1987, it was common to have demonstrations and confrontations
with the occupation
forces against arrests, deportations, and other reminders of the
occupation. The Intifada
was different because of the prior development of women's, labor,
and student unions,
health clinics, and new universities, which sprung up in the late
1970s.
The momentum of the
Intifada meant the PLO's nation-building effort in the Occupied
Territories had
succeeded. But the Intifada was as much a statement of defiance and
regained dignity as it
was a message of acceptance that the home of the Palestinian state
was to be limited to the
West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Intifada also brought a greater
visibility to the
women's committees.
The Intifada gave the
third generation their first taste of public exposure; other than
Kamal,
heads of women's
committees were all from that generation. Women leaders were I
demand as speakers at
press conferences and at universities and other assemblies. The
actual day-to-day leader
ship of the uprising, however, was in the hands of the secret
unified
National Leadership of
the Uprising, and it is not known if any women actually served in
that body.
Women participated in
the Intifada's popular Committees that flourished at the outset,
until
they were banned in 1988
by the Israeli military administration. There were home teaching
committees to substitute
for the ordered-closed schools, emergency and health committees
to to help the wounded,
and agricultural committees that experimented with growing food in
neighborhood plots.
However, women were
visible absent from guard duty committees, replacing local police
who had resigned in
support of the Intifada.
Enthusiastic support for
the uprising came from organized and unorganized women alike,
but was ultimately
sustained by widespread networks of Palestinian
institutions-including
women’s committees and
charitable societies. Women’s organizations worked alongside
worker and professional
syndicates, students unions, merchants, and health service
societies. They
participated in distributing the secret communiqués of the United
Leadership, delivered
PLO funds for social relief, visited prisoners and their families,
and
performed other
activities that paralleled their sister’s work during the war in
Lebanon.
Kamal felt extremely
rewarded when she discovered that the women’s committees in some
of the remote villages
remained viable during the weeks of curfews imposed by the military.
She said:
It showed that, indeed,
our members were not waiting for the decision of the executive
office. They were
capable of taking decisions by themselves and of participating in
the
work according to the
basic vision of the program and their understanding of it.
Therefore,
when we were able to
return to see each other it was as if no interruption happened. I
mean,
all the work was
according to the basic rules and this is something we are proud of,
that we
were able to realize it
in spite of their difficult circumstances.
Generally, the different
unions contributed separately except when coordinating the
distribution of PLO
funds given to families of prisoners and martyrs. These funds were
channeled through the
Higher Women’s Council, the top leadership body that the women’s
committees’ leadership
founded in 1988 to provide just such coordination (actually, they
had been meeting
informally for much longer). In the language of Palestinian
nationalism,
the women’s
organizations “ proved themselves” in the Intifada.
The PLO praised the
women’s organizations at the 19th National Council
session in 1988.
Muhammad Melhem, head of
the PLO Department of the Affairs of the Occupied Homeland,
said in his report to
the Council:
The event of the
Intifada confirmed the central role of the population frameworks:
popular
committees, women’s and
students’ professional and workers’ unions, merchants’
committees, societies
and clubs, health committees and agricultural and others in the net
of national institutions
and popular frameworks that formed the arms of the national
movement, its podiums
and channels.
But the cost of women’s
higher visibility was high, as the detention and interrogation of
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