Like a Bag Trying to Empty
On the Palestinian prisoner and martyr Walid Daqqa
Kaleem Hawa
Sketch by Walid Daqqa. Group 7, Asqalan Prison, as reproduced in Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh’s “Parallel Place: Drawing Time in Walid Daqqa’s Thought,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya 135 (Summer 2023).
During the British Mandate, the colonial authorities in Palestine established a police fortress in the Palestinian town of al-Majdal, which would become a local headquarters for the army and then a prison. The effort was part of a program envisioned by Charles Tegart to build permanent police stations for suppressing uprisings by the colonized Palestinian population, in part a response to the British embarrassment during the Arab revolution of 1936–39 and drawn from Tegart’s experience as commissioner of the colonial police in then-Calcutta. In all, the British constructed 54 fortresses and fortified police stations across Palestine from 1940–41, with some of the construction contracted out to the Zionist para-state authorities in Solel Boneh, the civil engineering arm of the Histadrut trade union. In al-Majdal specifically, the British were responsible for three sites: one, a regional station that is the current-day Asqalan prison,[1] the second a coastal guard station by the Mediterranean, and the third, a now-defunct municipal station adjacent to the pedestrian mall on Herzl Street.
Situated on a flat patch of the coastal plain and agricultural lands, al-Majdal held a geographically significant location between Egypt and central Palestine; it was a commercial center with a long history of textile manufacturing and had been integrated into the transportation networks of the Palestinian railway system. The town had a population of 11,496 before 1948, with Majdalawis owning more than 43,000 dunums of land in the surrounding areas. As part of the southern operations of the Zionist forces during the nakba (led by General Yigal Allon and dubbed Operation Yo’av, or Operation Ten Plagues), much of al-Majdal was sacked and forcibly depopulated over the course of three weeks in 1948. The Zionist forces shelled the town until the Egyptian army headquartered there fled and Allon’s men occupied it. In the process, they ethnically cleansed the inhabitants and those of the neighboring villages and towns of Ni’ilya (population of 1,310), now destroyed; al-Khisas (population of 150), now an industrial area to the south of Ashkelon; al-Jura (population of 2,420), now a part of “Ashkelon National Park”; and Hamama (population of 5,070), now home to apartments, a beauty salon, and a preschool in Ashkelon.[2]
Some 1,000 Palestinians remained in al-Majdal after the initial depopulations, their numbers growing to around 2,500 as others from the surrounding regions sought shelter. General Moshe Dayan, the new head of the southern command set out on the next phase, and with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s blessing, the Zionist forces enacted a stepwise course of forced transfer[3] from 1949–1951 of al-Majdal’s remaining Arab population, who were steadily replaced with Jewish settlers from Europe and South Africa. Hundreds fled south on foot, the shops hollowed out, the concrete poured in. Slowly, the town became the garrison, and the prison became the engine of the land’s transformation, a small prison overlooking the larger one, which is to say Gaza, where the land’s inhabitants were deposited. [4] Today, just a few blocks down from the town center in Gaza’s Beit Lahiya, there is an al-Majdal street, following the practice of residents naming neighborhood spots to mark their future return.
All across Palestine, the prisons spread as monuments to Zionism, way stations for the wretched uprooted on the march to an Arab-free state. The dragnet that blanketed the region ensnared hundreds of thousands, whom it promptly dropped in new holding pens: the camps of Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, the camps for internally-displaced people in the occupied territories, and Gaza. Through this, the prison became its own process, offering cells to be filled and labor to be employed. Men who had once worked the soil in the 1930s found themselves imprisoned by the British colonial authorities, forced to dig up their own fields in the name of building a nation. Palestinians were withdrawn from stewardship of the land and contorted into its altering force.
“Slowly, the town became the garrison, and the prison became the engine of the land’s transformation, the small one overlooking the large, which is to say Gaza.”
Thus, the prisons were not just a tool of expansion for the Western project, but also became sites for the forced labor of the colonized population, as shown in the Palestinian scholar Samar al-Saleh’s research of this period. In prison labor camps, like Nur Shams and Atlit, Palestinian penal servitude was used to extract from quarries, lay railway tracks, or build defensive borders for the colonial authorities.[5] These same camps were described by Ghassan Kanafani as having been used to target organized cadre and popular masses during the 1936–39 Arab revolution, a period in which more than 5,000 Palestinians were detained or imprisoned.[6] Because of this, Palestinian resistance forces attacked the camps and their surrounding areas, most notably during the eruptions of 1936, three months after the assassination of leader ʿIzz al-Din al-Qassam, when road barricades were used to rob and kill Zionist settlers outside Nur Shams.[7] In this maelstrom, the prison became a transduction plate between colonial displacement and anticolonial resistance, its walls a crucible for the distillation of a national struggle predicated on the exploitation of the prisoner.[8]
What remains of al-Majdal is a purely Jewish place, a town emptied of its Arabs, as General Allon had demanded.[9] Its police station, inaugurated as Asqalan prison and granted an in-house interrogation center after 1967, became a site for the torture of Gaza’s fighters—men who had been raised by families displaced from the area returned home in a cage. Three years later, in July 1970, strikes and riots erupted in the prison, in protest of its notoriously inhumane conditions, and specifically around access to clothes and stationery for communicating with family. Having first promised to meet the prisoners’ demands, the Zionist authorities reneged, precipitating additional strikes in 1973 and 1976, the latter becoming the then-longest Palestinian hunger strike, at 45 days. Prison authorities tried force feeding and humiliation, but the prisoners stood firm until their objectives were collectively secured. With their victory and sacrifice now legend, Asqalan prison was inscribed into the history of the captives’ movement, and the story of al-Majdal was confirmed anew, this time by the letters that poured out of its walls.
Ψ
Walid Daqqa was nine years old at the time of those first prison riots. Born in 1961, he was raised in Baqa al-Gharbiyye, in the center of occupied Palestine. He took jobs in Tel Aviv and Tulkarm, and was hoping to study at university. He had no plans to become a revolutionary; he would have preferred to have a small life, to paint walls or work at the gas station, as he had once done. But Sabra and Shatila changed him, shook him to the core. The Phalangist-led, Zionist-directed massacre of Palestinians in the camps of Beirut in 1982 was a consciousness-searing experience for the Arab people, a reprisal so hideous it scarred a generation: children with their throats slit, pregnant women gutted from the abdomen up, a carnival of horrors that renders naive any contemporary proclamations of a Zionism “unmasked.”
The next year, Daqqa joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a left party in the Palestinian liberation struggle. He decided to fight for a cause; he trained in Syria, visited Yarmouk camp. In 1984, he was alleged to have participated in the planning of an operation which killed the soldier Moshe Tamam. Two years later, Daqqa was captured and held at al-Jalameh interrogation center, after which he received a life sentence, and was sent to prison in al-Ramleh. At the moment of his arrest, he was about to eat a labneh wrap his mother had made. “One can associate that memory with occupation or with something else,” he recalled decades later. “I chose to associate it with my mother.”[10]
In the coming years, the prisoners’ struggle transformed, though some of its strategies remained consistent: prisoners leading strikes, resisting forced labor, holding elections, engaging in militant planning, teaching history, political theory, and literature. While in prison, Daqqa became part of this movement, a son of its fathers, a struggler, and emerged as one of Palestine’s leading prison intellectuals. He read, wrote, and taught, authoring dozens of letters, articles, stories, and studies, among them Yawmiyat al-Muqawama fi Mukhayyam Jenin 2002 (The Chronicles of Resistance in Jenin Camp 2002, 2004). Three decades into his imprisonment, he would author his seminal work, Sahr al-Wa’i (Searing Consciousness: Or on Redefining Torture, 2010),[11] in which he traced the advancements in Zionist carceral control and its role in sclerotizing the prisoners’ movement.
Daqqa made three primary interventions in the work, the first being an analysis of the shift in Zionist tactics away from targeting the prisoner’s body towards the prisoner’s mind, to turn the mind into the cell. “Control in the prisons of the Israeli Occupation is no longer direct, through wardens who are physically present, in the prison’s courtyard, opening and closing doors,” Daqqa wrote. “The warden is absent, and it is only his shadow that is present, by means of modern appliances and new technologies.” He continued:
“There are cameras everywhere; doors and locks are controlled electronically. Thus, one warden is enough for controlling a ward with 120 prisoners. Now this makes it appear as if prisoners control their own lives without interruption—they even close their cell doors themselves; yet in fact, the contrary is the case. . . . Prisoners’ individual skills and their social agility are useless and devoid of practical value. Dehumanization of the prisoners is easier, because the distance created by the technology of surveillance turns prisoners from subjects to objects on the screens.”[12]
In the past, the prisoners’ movement had employed various tactics for coordinating between cells, sections, and prisons, mediated through clandestine communications delivered by visitors, through meal delivery, or on smuggled phones. To each, the Zionist regime had adapted its response, lagging behind the prisoners’ ingenuity: visitations were banned during the Intifada years;[13] food distribution was centralized and standardized; signal jammers were increasingly deployed.[14] Many of these alterations had been well underway prior to the period of Daqqa’s analysis but had been concretized at the height of the Second Intifada, when Ariel Sharon’s administration (2001–6) had taken up a mandate to crush the spirit of the prisoners’ movement. Sharon appointed Ya’acov Ganot as the head of the Shabas, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), and Ganot restructured its bureaucracy, developing more systematized procedures and equipping it with updated technologies of surveillance and control. The “new” IPS accelerated the process of unitizing the prisoners’ time, modeling and modifying it. This was coupled with the steady removal of negotiated or human elements in the social lives of prisoners, and counter-intuitively, with a program of comfort—the “sunny courtyard” and “relative material abundance,” as Daqqa put it—that pushed the prisoner inward and away from revolutionary sociality.
The prison, then, got quieter, its violence more concentrated. Abundance became torture, as did its withdrawal. The promotion of its value in the schema of prison meaning-making achieved its intended effect of exacerbating the cost of refusal and resistance, the prisoner of the inside encouraged to behave using a variation of the incentives of the outside. Where resistance took hold through a sociopolitical fabric—a resilience born of shared work and leisure, built tools, and furtive meetings—the Zionist prison resolutely attempted dismantlement.
Daqqa had borrowed the notion of “remolding consciousness” from the war minister Moshe Ya’alon, who set forth its key principles as part of the Zionist military strategy throughout the occupied lands, in effect a policy of counterinsurgency. Such a policy imagines a system of political organization and self-defense and its constituent parts: the development of productive forces, the construction of wells and mills for agricultural self-sustenance, the sale of products, weapons innovations, networks of education, and the building of popular organizations and syndicates. The goal of counterinsurgency is to destabilize each part of this reinforcing continuum, to decapitate Palestinian national political articulation and its base of support within the popular cradle. This, of course, necessitates imprisonment; criminalization is the mechanism for the regime of extraction and dispossession that blankets Arab land and life. The prison conceptually follows each perceived threat to the ordering logic of imperial violence; it is Palestine’s lunar shadow.
“The prison, then, got quieter, its violence more concentrated. Abundance became torture, as did its withdrawal.”
Daqqa’s objective in writing this was to counter the romanticization of the prisoner struggle, not to efface its contributions or innovations, but to assess the changing conditions of social and political formation in actually-existing relation to the settler colonial project, and to update them for a period of post-Oslo neo-imperial hegemony. His second contribution followed from this: he situated these developments as part of a larger strategy of politicide, the prison a laboratory for updated theories of “human engineering and social psychology,” that paralleled and occasionally presaged those employed in the outside world. These innovations were thus in dialectical relation to the broader liberation struggle; each complementing and negating the other in complex ways, the overall objective being to undermine the political and psychic infrastructures of the resistance and the connection the prisoners felt to one another and to a national project.
Here, Daqqa describes the use of several tactics to foment this alienation: the frequent transfer of prisoners between prisons and groups and cells to weaken collective fraternity; the encouragement of alternative representative forms to undermine the democratic and national organizations within the prisons; the destruction of internal codes of conduct for resolving disputes in order to sow chaos and violence; and the punishment of prisoners for the possession of resistance iconography or martyr commemoratives. Perhaps most significantly, he noted the segregation of the prisoners on the basis of village or geography rather than factional or other attachments, in order to encourage the local to replace the national as the primary site of political association.
This resembles the imperial strategy across the rest of occupied Palestine, which employs fragmentation as a tool for depoliticization, in effect the creation of islets of geographic particularity governed by military and economic forces that dip in and out of focus as required of them by a given conjuncture. In a 2009 speech delivered at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the U.S. Security Coordinator for the Israel-Palestinian Authority Lt. General Keith Dayton described the development of post-Oslo security sector coordination with the Palestinian Authority as a process of generating what he deemed “new men of Palestine,” plucked from systems of communal accountability, trained in Jordan, and returned to the occupied lands as partners for Zionist peace, programmed and paid to administer surveillance, repression, and incarceration.[15] These men served as operational nodes in the policy throughout the occupied lands, which, as in the prisons, sought to turn Palestinian society into a living cemetery, unitized as family or as individual and suspended in space through debt; the refugee camp or the town encircled by settlements and checkpoints; and the journey from home to construction site made crushing—each space of life or labor its own denervated circuit.
Through the holistic counterinsurgency program, the interests of the Palestinian comprador bourgeoisie and Oslo capitalists had been brought into tentative alignment with those of the Zionists: taxidermied fedayeen draped atop the shoulders of aging spokesmen, now disarmed and bought off; the camp pulverized and immiserated, its young boys offered the prison or the grave. These external developments in the struggle deepened the isolation of the prisoners, who were confronted by the moves towards normalization, capitulation, and security coordination from inside their cells. This, in turn, prefigured an individualization of the struggle, the partitions of the land bleeding into the partitions of national identity, whose historic networks of organization increasingly abandoned the prisoner to their own devices.
Walid Daqqa and Sana’ Daqqa, married August 11, 1999, in Asqalan Prison.
Ψ
Last spring, Daqqa’s health condition deteriorated to new lows, his body wracked with pneumonia and renal failure brought about by myelofibrosis that had invaded his bone marrow.[16] We held a little protest for him, outside the United Nations in New York. Once every few months, we would get word of another development in his health and our hearts would sink. Last summer, he underwent a lung resection and cardiac catheterization, and was said to be on his deathbed. Like the cancer, the jailor’s control had spread, a stinging radius with a social amplitude mediated by the body’s immune capacities; an unevenly distributed sarcoma, little aches of recognition in the people whose own families are or once were imprisoned, which at certain points has been estimated to be more than a quarter of Palestine’s population.
Throughout his imprisonment, Daqqa was shepherded from prison to prison across occupied Palestine, the names stacking like playing cards: Asqalan, Ramon, al-Naqab, Gilboa, Hadarim, and Nafha. But it was his first site of imprisonment in al-Ramleh that would become his last, having been forced to spend the final days of his life inside of its prison clinic, colloquially known as “the slaughterhouse.” Partially depopulated during the nakba, al-Ramleh now hosts four carceral sites for Palestinians: Ayalon prison, Neve Tirza women’s prison, Nitzan prison, and the prison clinic.[17] Most of the prisoners who are facing chronic or serious illnesses in Zionist prisons will pass through its doors, the prison’s “scent resembling the smell of death, [a] death which has the scent of death, and nothing but death,” as Daqqa put it. There, they receive scant medical care, sometimes contingent on collaboration with the occupation, and experience the various tactics of slow killing that are intended at once to torture them and their families.
On April 7 of this year, Daqqa became a martyr. He was murdered by the Zionist regime through a yearslong campaign of medical neglect, a story made even more bitter by its profligate cruelty. In 2018, the Zionist courts had charged him for smuggling phones to help other prisoners communicate with their families, adding two years to his false sentence of 37 years and two weeks. Daqqa would have been released this March; those two years were intended to kill him, and they did. Through capriciousness or revenge, whichever term best applies, the effects of these decisions are crushing for families and prisoners alike. They are one example out of many—isolation, solitary confinement, burning, hanging, sleep deprivation, auditory torture, starvation, alteration of living space, medical violence, religious recrimination—of the networked systems of torture that are tested and refined in each of the Zionist clearinghouses for population management.
Daqqa’s third contribution in Sahr al-Wa’i was to describe the structural function of these forms of torture, as a means of targeting al-nafs al-kamil, the full self, in its psychic and spiritual totality. In this process, torture serves to shock the Palestinian mind into submission, to fracture it from a Palestinian national consciousness that relentlessly reproduces resistance and refusal, and to fashion from it a receptive object, able to be remolded according to Zionist design.
Solitary confinement is in some ways the maximal distillation of the function of psychological torture Daqqa described. One of its axiomatic cases is Ahmad Manasrah. In 2015 during Intifadat al-sakakin (“Intifada of Knives”), Ahmad and his cousin Hassan attacked Israelis with knives after the murder of one of their classmates. Hassan, aged 15, was martyred and Ahmad was imprisoned at the age of 13. He has been brutally interrogated and tortured in the years since and is still only 22 years old. He has been placed in solitary confinement several times, in one instance for more than twenty months, an experience that exceeds description. Often, he sits in darkness, surrounded by the sound of concrete, the smell of urine. He has developed mutism on occasions, become antisocial and shut in. Last July, it was publicized that he had refused to see his family or his legal team. The brutality of his treatment has left him inalterably transformed by this severe psychological damage, with some positing on his behalf a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Many have theorized the relationship between schizophrenia and imprisonment; it is one export of the prison, the scission between self and body. In The Divided Self (1960), R. D. Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist and writer of the New Left, describes the concentration camp as a setting in which a prisoner who is offered no possibility of spatial escape undergoes a “psychical withdrawal ‘into’ one’s self and ‘out’ of the body.” This is, in effect, a process of derealization, what Daqqa defined as “the state of losing the ability to interpret reality,” and as:
“[a] shapeless oppression, indefinable by a single picture . . . composed of hundreds of small, isolated actions and thousands of details, none of which appears a tool of torture, unless the whole picture . . . is understood . . . comparable to exploitation in free market economies under globalization.”[18]
Colloquially, Laing described this as a dream-like, out-of-body experience of ongoing trauma, which he annotated as “(self/body) < > other” becoming “self < > (body-other).” In this formula, the paranoid-schizoid subject develops an unembodied self, and “seeks by being unembodied to transcend the world and hence to be safe,” afraid “of losing himself in any experience . . . because he will be depleted, exhausted, emptied, robbed, sucked dry.” Laing saw the resultant “unreality of experience” as shrinking the world around the subject, which rhymes with Daqqa’s description of prison conditions as “a madness under a deranged reality . . . the culmination of cognition, where the imaginative mind creates another reality that bypasses the prison walls.”
When the world becomes “unreal” to the self, Palestine, too, becomes unreal; the struggle is withheld in the interest of self-preservation, of maintaining the state of transcendence that provides protective qualities to the besieged. Thus, a Palestinian national project becomes not just distant, not just unrealistic or hopeless, but a threat to the preservation of the conscious self, which suffers “no half-way stage between radical isolation: in self-absorption or complete absorption into all there was.”[19] In effect, the Zionist system of enclosure produces a situation of psychic sterility and of death.
“The Zionist system of enclosure produces a situation of psychic sterility and of death.”
The Zionist objective is to enact these processes at scale, to sever the linkages between the three reinforcing spheres of the Palestinian body, described by the Palestinian scholar Esmail al-Nashif as the land, the individual, and the collective body.[20] This domination is never without its rejoinder, however, and Palestinian prisoners enact consistent challenges to the colonial field of the prison, their resistance is itself part of a course of the individual body becoming a Palestinian body.[21] In this sense, the struggle within the prisons re-affirms the agency and life of the prisoner, who sets out to re-assert control over their conditions. Daqqa recalls the day of his arrest, he saw himself from above, bound, and he felt free; this, its own response to the colonial diagnosis, is Palestinian resistance as an assertion of psychological health.[22],[23]
Among the prisoner literature texts to address this question is Falsafat al-Muwajaha Wara’ al-Qudban (The Philosophy of Confrontation Behind Bars, 1978), a handbook of sorts for resisting torture during interrogation and maintaining collective sumud (steadfastness) in the face of attacks on the social self while in prison. Drafted in al-Khalil prison by Mahmood Fanoon, yet unattributed and circulated by the PFLP, the text posited a level of political organization that would assist in the maintenance of individual resilience and protective social relations, vulgarizing and synthesizing existing social understandings of sumud,[24] which it proposed not as a philosophy, but as a political practice to counteract systems of organized racism, strengthening resilience through a suture of singularity and collectivity.
The prison clarifies the site of contestation as the linkage between this Palestinian psychic and social self,[25] of which both sumud and torture under imprisonment effect a re-organization. This connection is occasionally misrepresented as a static thing, stoic almost, rather than a product of relations with community, attacked through bans on family visitation, reduced visitation times, and—among the greatest indignities recounted by the prisoners—the installation of glass dividers in visitation booths to prevent them from holding the hands of their loved ones. Daqqa summarized the strategy as targeting not primarily the political being within the prisoner, but chiefly, “the social being, the human within you . . . any relationship you can have outside of yourself, with other people, with nature.” In effect, he meant love, which he described as his “humble and only victory over his jailor,” naming in the same breath his mother Farida, his brother Hosni, and his wife Sana’.
Walid met Sana’ Salameh in 1996 while she was working for a newspaper. She often wrote about the prisoner struggle and had chosen to visit him for an interview because of his intellectual and political contributions to the struggle.[26] With time, they fell in love, Walid writing to her from Asqalan prison in April 1997 that “few are those who understood the cause / and fewer those who carried the cause and never wavered / and you are one of those few in our hard times.”[27] These letters are among the most intimate and sacred recitations for those within the prison walls, and for Walid it was a promise. With great difficulty he lobbied for his right to hold a wedding ceremony, and in 1999 they married—nine other prisoners in attendance—with a photographer and musicians. The nuptial celebrations in Asqalan became myth in the prisoners’ movement; it would be the first and last time Sana’ and Walid met without a barrier between them.
In the following years, the Zionist regime refused to let the two of them have a child. Undeterred, Daqqa entered into another lineage of the captives’ struggle; his sperm was smuggled out of prison and through artificial insemination his daughter Milad was conceived. Here was a filiation that broke their formula; they punished him with solitary confinement, but it did not matter. This was one of his victories over them; Milad—birth, in Arabic—inaugurating a total potentiality, as he wrote in a 2011 letter to her, nine years before she would be born,[28] the most beautiful escape and his message to the future.
In a different letter, turned into a short story, Daqqa debated whether to teach Milad the word “prison,” which she had pre-conceptually come to understand as a “place without a door.”[29] She had been prevented from attending visitations and had remained unrecognized by the Zionist regime until a DNA test could be conducted. She never got the chance to truly know her father; for almost two years, they did not let Sana’ bring her to him. Theirs was a dual plane of torment, the women who bore the vicissitudes, obliged as a pair into care and advocacy. We listened carefully to Sana’ take one such call from her car, Milad in the back seat. The poise is what I remember, the matter-of-factness. Two years later, on the night of Walid’s martyrdom, a video circulated online of Milad in that same car, four years old, chanting for the prisoners.
Ψ
On September 3, 1982, four fighters from the al-Jarmaq student battalion of Fateh approached a Zionist military outpost in Bhamdoun, Lebanon. There, they ambushed eight Israeli soldiers, whom they captured without firing a single bullet. In November of 1983, six of these prisoners were exchanged for 4,765 Palestinian and Lebanese captives, the majority of whom had been held at the Ansar I camp in Nabatieh. The remaining two Zionist prisoners were handed off to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), a Syria-backed splinter from the PFLP, who had assisted in the operation. Led by Ahmad Jibril, the PFLP-GC was a fighting unit, part of a “rejectionist front,” named after its position against normalization and the PLO’s 1974 “phased plan,” a proposal for stepwise liberation that in effect withdrew the demand for total national struggle in favor of a more limited state-building project in the occupied 1967 lands (dafeh)—a progenitor of what would be soon known as Oslo. The PFLP-GC, too, proposed the exchange of their soldiers, and on May 20, 1985, secured the release of an additional 1,150 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners, in what was named the Jibril Agreement.
The 1983 and 1985 prisoner swaps are among the great victories in the history of Palestinian resistance. Their result was thousands of Arab strugglers returning home in a period of three years. Nothing quite like it has been seen since; many of the freed prisoners would go on to leadership roles in different pillars of the resistance, among them Ziyad al-Nakhaleh, the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founding theological leader of Hamas. These prisoners returned to occupied Palestine in the resistance formations and popular committees of the intifada. This infused the Palestinian struggle with tactical knowledge and expertise in the development of cadres ready to train and lead during the revolutionary period. Taken as their sum, the exchanges display the strategic logics of an armed resistance that is motivated not by nihilism or vengeful pathology,[30] but by careful study and military planning.
Daqqa was a year away from being imprisoned when the Jibril Agreement was ratified. As a Palestinian of the dakhil (the 1948 lands, making him an “Arab citizen of Israel,” in colonial parlance) holding an Israeli identification card, however, he would have been omitted from the lists submitted to the prisoner exchange negotiations regardless. In his essay, “The Parallel Human,” the Palestinian scholar Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh historicizes the experiences of dakhil Palestinians like Daqqa, who remained in the historic lands after the nakba, and who now live under a Jewish supremacist citizenship regime. An element of the logics of partition is the distinct regimes of control and incarceration, with the Shabak and Shabas operating what is effectively a military system for Arabs and a civilian system for Jews in the dakhil.[31] Released prisoners often comment on the difficulties of the situation there; in particular, Daqqa directed his critique at the Palestinian political class, whose reflexive exclusion of the dakhil and shatat (diaspora) Palestinians from anything other than romantic lip service had left them to the wills of the Zionist and reactionary Arab regimes that govern the lands on which they live.
The 1983 and 1985 prisoner exchanges would be followed by the six years of the First Intifada (1987–93), in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were arrested as part of a concerted effort by the Zionist forces to demoralize the resistance and destroy the fabric of Palestinian society that was engaged in popular uprising. Administrative detention—a strategy whereby Palestinians are indefinitely held without charge, renewable in increments—blossomed during those years, with more than 14,000 Palestinians ensnared under its auspices. But the mass arrests only strengthened the cause; it was a period of total struggle for the prisoners’ movement, and all around Daqqa, men and women made preparations. Disciplined political practices were developed around political education, elections, communication, ideological formation; so advanced was the state of the prisoners’ movement, that it helped model the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) in which it, too, would participate. By dint of the mass in- and out-flows, the small prison became more porous with the large, and more heterogenous: the growing leadership of the Islamic blocs in the collective processes modeled a syncretism that inspires the present-day “unity of the fields,” and strengthened the existing trans-factional nature of prisoner direction. In 1988, many of the UNLU’s leadership were arrested, but coordination continued apace from within the prisons; the thousands of Palestinians entering the walls were met with many of the struggle’s national leadership, who helped to guide them; in Esmail al-Nashif’s analysis, the dynamic interplays between this “inside” and “outside” constituted the character of the period, and were in fact a mode of Palestinian citizenship.[32]
Their regional ambitions unsated and the prisons bloated by the mass character of the popular resistance, the Zionist regime established or expanded several prisons across the Arab world: Ansar I (est. 1982), the concentration camp in south Lebanon built after the Zionist invasion and occupation; Ansar II (est. 1987) in Gaza; and Ansar III (est. 1987; also known as Ktzi’iot Prison or al-Naqab Prison), first a camp of tents inside a desert military zone, and soon the largest detention center in the world.[33] Finally and perhaps most notoriously was Khiam Prison, the torture site in south Lebanon administered by the Lahadists of the South Lebanon Army (SLA) on behalf of the Zionist occupation of the country. Khiam was a camp of unrestrained cruelty, mostly used to target Shi’a Lebanese fighting in the Islamic Resistance, but also Palestinians born in camps in Lebanon—the children of Sabra and Shatila—who fought and were imprisoned by the same enemy that had displaced their parents and grandparents.
As the strategies of repression metastasized across the Arab world, they were met with innovations and accelerations in the tactics of prisoner resistance, chief among them the hunger strike. In 1989, the prisoners of Khiam led a two-day hunger strike, winning small improvements in living conditions. In Ansar III, at least three hunger strikes were led by the prisoners, over the delivery of family packages and to protest the deaths of two captives.[34] This period from 1988–94 saw a re-politicization of the hunger strike, drawing from the lessons of the pioneering strikes of the late sixties and early seventies, which began in 1968 with three days in Nablus prison over humiliation and mistreatment; eleven days in al-Ramleh prison, over food portions and the requirement of addressing Zionist soldiers as “sir,” conjoint with eight days in Beit Lyd, over the introduction of plastic sleeping sheets and use of stationery; nine days in Neve Tirza women’s prison, over outdoor time and access to sanitary materials; and the seven days in Asqalan prison that begin this essay, in which Abdul Qadir Abu al-Fahem became the first hunger strike martyr.[35]
The strikes flip that normal script on its head, of docility as the sentence, hunger as the jury. They are a snapping of the colonists’ tools, a reminder that dignity persists within the colonized subject, and a reconfiguration of the colonial order, both within the prison and beyond it. The Palestinian scholar Lena Meari describes these histories of the hunger strike as, “messy, nonlinear, and made up of various acts of singular and collective suffering, sacrifices, gains, and retreats,” but also provides a loose periodization: from spontaneity to deeper organization and mass support, to the present-day primacy of the individual strike, idrab fardi—a product of the Palestinian national leadership’s growing weakness and estrangement from the prisoners’ struggle.[36],[37]
“The strikes flip that normal script on its head, of docility as the sentence, hunger as the jury. They are a snapping of the colonists’ tools”
This post-Oslo reality is the primary site of Daqqa’s analysis. He studied the refinement of Zionist tactics used to break the hunger strike, among them: force feeding, loudspeakers, the manipulation of light to disorient, the withholding of salted food needed for water retention, the removal of comfort items like pillows and cigarettes, the spreading of rumors, the use of cattle prods. In the wake of wholesale prisoner rejections of the administrative detention and legal system, the Zionist strategy has been to turn the hunger strike into a tool for the internalization of torture; they have been met by a renegotiation of their eliminationist logic, both by the prisoners’ willingness to sacrifice that which the Zionists had assumed was theirs to control, and by Islamic commitments to a life that continues after bodily expiration.
Before and throughout, there was Sheikh Khader Adnan, a baker and father of nine. As a member of PIJ, Adnan became one of the most recognizable figures behind the individual hunger strike, enacting the then-longest strike of 66 days from December 2011 to February 2012, until he won a court ruling for his release. Over the course of his life, he was arrested twelve times, almost always without charge, and went on strike six times. This past May, after 87 days on hunger strike, he succumbed to his brutal conditions and was martyred, his body held hostage from his family. Adnan inspired an entire generation of captive strugglers, among them the thirty political prisoners who declared a hunger strike in September 2022 in protest of administrative detention, claiming that, between them, the Zionist authorities had stolen over 200 years of collective life.[38] So the refrain goes, the hunger striker does not run away from life, but towards freedom; their acts rejoin the body-in-stasis and self-in-isolation towards a politically-committed whole; the former a liberated zone, the latter insisting upon the right to narrate its own captivity.
The valorization of the strikers is not meant to ignore their occasional desperation, or the indignities faced by their families. Each strike has its own particularities and character; some achieve victories and concessions, while others exacerbate Zionist repression or end in failure. The martyr and critic of the Palestinian Authority Nizar Banat suggested that the normalization of long durations in the contemporary hunger strike was proof of the growing individuation of the struggle and the fault of a Palestinian national leadership who would not and could not provide support to the prisoners during the darkest moments. This rhymes with Daqqa’s assessment of the PLO’s failures to support the more than 4,000 prisoners who participated in the 2004 hunger strikes, an effort which faced extreme repression and ended in chaos and disorganization.
This is not least a reflection of the terrain of struggle that congealed after Oslo. Zionism’s gates encircled; the Accords imploded the Palestine movement, announcing an open season for capital, the sublimated neoliberal relation generating zombified half-autonomies out of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Adnan offered a vision of the skeletal frames in those cells as burning and alive in ways we’d forgotten were possible. There, they exchange looks of recognition, learn from one another, and cobble together a synchronous front of bodily denial to the governing bio-political order. They withhold their labor; refuse participation in the show-pony juridical process. They do all this under unbearable conditions, their bodies consecrating a demand for Palestinians to be liberated from systems of domination and control. Ultimately, this enacts a reversal of liberal appeal—to the jailor, to the courts, to the international community—offering instead one end to a political ellipsis. Were the outside to take the prisoners into consideration on the basis of these desires,[39] if the world were to fully answer them, the outcome might resemble a reckoning.
Rawda Abu Ajmia, released among the first batch of prisoners, November 24, 2023—AFP photos
Ψ
The engineers of October’s great flood were prisoners. Among them, Saleh al-Arouri, one of the founders of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades and its leader in the dafeh, who had been imprisoned for more than eighteen years before his exile to Lebanon; and Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, released after twenty-two years alongside 1,026 prisoners in the 2011 Wafa al-Ahrar prisoner exchange, which returned the occupation army soldier Gilad Shalit.[40] Those men had come to know the prison intimately. Like Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, Sinwar is from al-Majdal—the town which opens this essay—and had been displaced to a refugee camp in Khan Younis, where he was born; allegedly, and perhaps apocryphally, at one point during his interrogations, the Zionist soldiers played audio of a family member being tortured in an attempt to break him. One cannot emerge from experiences like these unchanged; the leaders of the Palestinian resistance are not just military strategists, they are, fundamentally, prisoners who have seen their lives and their people’s lives torn apart by colonial violence.
The release of Palestinian prisoners was one of the twinned centripetal objectives of what was declared the al-Aqsa Flood operation (Tufan al-Aqsa), the other being the status of Jerusalem. This was not just intended to be achieved through the strategy of prisoner exchange, but through a true prison break; reportedly, small groups of Hamas fighters set out north to Asqalan prison after breaching the wall that encircles Gaza with the intention of liberating the people held there. The events of October forever transformed the balance of power in Palestine, and we now find ourselves in their wake. After the capture of about 250 Zionist soldiers and prisoners and the initiation of the destruction of Gaza, the resistance’s objectives were qualitatively amended from the limited prisoner swaps of the past to everyone. As the military spokesperson for the al-Qassam Brigades Abu Ubaida recounted the day after the operation began: “the large number of captives we are holding will be the price for emptying [Israeli] prisons of all our prisoners.”
Soon after, they began to make good on their promise. Across seven batches from November 24–30, 240 Palestinians were released as part of a first prisoner exchange: 71 women and 169 children, three-quarters of whom had never been convicted of a crime, the youngest of whom had been imprisoned at the age of 14. It is unclear whether observers in the West fully grasped the implications—that Hamas had freed most every woman and child in Zionist prisons, and that the majority of those who were released had been imprisoned without trial as children or young people, a small selection of the approximately 12,000 young men and boys that had been arrested by the Zionist regime since the year 2000. For all of them, return was the maximal demand, not just for the overflowing prisons to buckle under the weight of refusal, but to receive the full and dignified life that had been stolen from them by a century of catastrophe.
This fall, we watched unimaginable videos. A prisoner rushes to kiss their mother’s hands, another praises the armed resistance, speaking to the cameras flanked by a green flag. Some emerged by the busload into clamoring crowds, who hoisted them onto their shoulders; others were left to more intimate scenes, stepping through the great evening, and met by family at their homes. Most of the freed men described being beaten or starved before their release; the freed women described being pepper sprayed in their cells. All were released into a changed world, with its widened avenues and smoldering trees, confronted by the reality of martyred loved ones or houses demolished as collective punishment.
I watched them one after the other. Maysoon Musa al-Jabali, the oldest Palestinian woman prisoner, running the length of a street into the arms of her family; Rawda Abu Ajmia chanting for Mohammed Deif, the leader of al-Qassam; Nourhan Awad supplicating at the grave of her cousin Hadeel Awad—martyred on the same day as Nourhan’s capture—having refused to return home before making good on an eight-year promise.
But the one I can’t shake is Marah Bakir, imprisoned at the age of 16. She had spent the last eight years in Zionist prisons and had been elected as a representative of the women prisoners, before her release from Ofer Prison on November 24. Her mother, Sawsan, embraces her sobbing, and Marah gently hushes her, then more firmly when she doesn’t stop. Sawsan had raised a little girl, watched her become a woman, watched her study, struggle in the face of injustice, and end up in a cage. Asked earlier that day how she felt, she replied:
“I want to be able to smell her and be sure that she is healthy and well. . . . There is no joy at all. Even in this joyous moment . . . we are unable to feel joy due to the dire situation in Gaza. In Marah’s release, there is still pain. . . . But also, yesterday was the last night Marah will not sleep with us. . . . I feel my heart is going to stop.”
These images are as much a legacy of the past six months as the ones of death. For them, I had no reference; I had been too young during the 2011 exchanges. For some time, it appeared that what we were witnessing was unprecedented, though of course it was not, and stood in a long historical lineage. Certainly, the formal logic of the images—their digital production, their circulation through social media and messenger apps like Telegram and Signal—was unique. But something else felt different.
Most of the discourses in English on image-making during the ongoing genocidal war adopt a fatalistic framing; they are convenient and comfortable in their depiction of the Palestinians as victims. One such example is a well-meaning essay in the Boston Review by the Israeli scholar Ariella Azoulay, who writes of the images in Palestine and in Gaza in particular, situating the history of photography and the Palestinian image within the structures of genocide. She rightfully identifies the imposition of technologies for surveillance and control as having rendered Gaza one of the most photographed places in the world. In her assessment, the imagistic legacy of this period oscillates between “witness” and the registration of exterminatory violence across historic Palestine, hearing within them “the tears, the groans, the moans.”[41] But in her more than 5,000 words, Azoulay does not engage with the other sets of images produced in this period, ones that are born of a different political logic, and which break from the well-trodden affective course.
One might describe them as the aesthetics of resistance: a convoy of Zionist soldiers ambushed; Merkava tanks hit by RPGs; Zionist prisoners inside the tunnels; and Palestinians freed. These images are responses to the anemic image, which extracts suffering and destruction after the waging of suffering and destruction. They are part of a strategy, whether to galvanize the strugglers or to put pressure on the Zionist war cabinet. They are revolutionary in this respect, though like all images, they risk chauvinistic manipulation. It remains that their exclusion from the analysis of spectacle and representation is proof of something that cannot or will not be admitted: that, ultimately, the Palestinian resistance had secured what no one else could. Decades of imprisonment and torture, of men and women taken from their homes and families, kept in cells and left to die; no human rights agency, no Western government, no NGO, no peace activist, no one had been able to secure the release of these prisoners except an armed resistance project.
The Zionist regime understood this. They intimately understood the power of those videos, the electric potential of the congregations. Itamar Ben-Gvir announced the criminalization of any public celebrations of the release in the occupied lands. On the first day of the swap, the Security Ministry gave orders that any freed prisoner who participated in demonstrations would risk arrest or worse. They fired tear gas canisters at the greeting committees waiting for the captives outside Ofer Prison; they arrested the families of freed prisoners to inflict maximum psychological pain. This was not a new strategy, nor had it been contained to prisoner releases, but rather to most all types of Palestinian social convocation, be it marriage, graduation, or funeral. The day after Walid’s martyrdom, the attendees at the commemoration for his life at Baqa al-Gharbiyye were brutalized by the police, the echoing shouts captured in those videos an attempt to deflate the force of people gathering to grieve and recommit.
In response to the al-Aqsa Flood, the Zionist regime has rounded up and imprisoned more than 10,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. These arrests include freed prisoners, journalists, political and social leaders. The aforementioned Rawda Abu Ajmia was re-arrested on March 18, in the Zionist raid of Dheisheh camp. In Gaza, healthcare workers were among those kidnapped in the al-Shifa massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinians were murdered and buried in mass graves. The day of Walid’s martyrdom, the occupation army withdrew from Khan Younis and another mass grave was discovered, this time outside of Nasser Hospital. Hundreds of day laborers stranded in the dakhil were taken to dark sites for interrogation, among them Majed Zaqoul, who was martyred on November 6 in Ofer Prison; and they have been joined by thousands more taken to concentration camps around the border with Gaza. In Sde Teiman, one such torture center set up for Gazan men, the Zionist soldiers have beaten the prisoners, electrocuted and burned them with lighters, and played music until their ears bled. Elsewhere, Palestinians have been tortured to death, among them the Hamas leader Omar Daraghmeh from Tubas, who was martyred on October 23 in Megiddo prison, and Arafat Hamdan from Ramallah, on October 24 in Ofer prison.
The pace of the violence is breakneck: a doubling of the prisoner population, a tripling—anything to brace themselves for the inevitability of their release. This, too, was accompanied by an escalation of repressive tactics in the prisons, including preventing access to prison yards, closing windows, limiting canteen access, restricting access to clean clothes, banning family and lawyer visits, overcrowding. Thus, the settler colony retreads the Gramscian logic, the re-amplification of force in moments of heightened contradiction to re-assert a hegemony otherwise secured through ideological means. The processes set in motion after October 7 have proposed an amendment of sorts, the sadism and arrogance their own racial circuitry. What the Zionists were unable to achieve in their military campaign, they have taken out on those least able to protect themselves. The cruelest physical tactics for the torture of prisoners have been re-prioritized and accelerated, Israeli civilians invited to film and watch Palestinians being stripped naked and sodomized with hot metal rods.
“It is unclear whether the Western left fully grasped the implications—that Hamas had freed most every woman and child in Zionist prisons and that the majority of those who were released had been imprisoned without trial as children.”
Their overconfidence had long bred decadence and the al-Aqsa Flood had punctured it where it hovered. “It seems that a historical watershed took place on October 7,” the PFLP leader Khalida Jarrar wrote this year.[42] After 64 months behind bars in Damon Prison, she had been released in September 2021,[43] and was re-imprisoned this past year. To her, “emptying the prisons” had been “transformed from an imaginary possibility . . . to a reality.” It had never seemed thinkable, but through the resistance it now was. Her words suggest that the Oslo period is now over. What replaces it may be better or worse, but it is over. One of its lessons, then, is of profligacy and impunity and the only logics Zionists have ever understood. The erect picture of apocalypse bends only to the dynamism of the oppressed; every lifeless image that circulated the globe, of Palestinian corpses riddled with shrapnel or leaking red blood, must now reckon with another truth: that by the end of this cowardly aggression on the people of Gaza, we are able to imagine a world where every Palestinian political prisoner will return home. This is not glib, not “hopeful,” this is simply where a resistance project has led us, articulated by one of the prisoners upon their release:
“OUR FREEDOM WAS PAID FOR BY THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS OF GAZA; WE OWE THEM A DEBT THAT CAN NEVER BE REPAID.”[44]
Ψ
“Our time is different from yours,” Daqqa wrote in a 2005 letter from prison; “time here does not move along the axis of past, present, and future. Our time, which flows while space rests, dropped the concepts of conventional time and space from our language.” He continues:
“If Time is the moving dimension of matter, and space is its constant, then we in Parallel Time represent units of time. We are the time that is in a struggle with space, in internal contradiction with it. We have become the units of our time, the points on its axis: the point when so-and-so was arrested, the point when they were imprisoned, the point of their release. These are the temporal coordinates that matter in our parallel-time lives. We know how to set the hour, day, and date by your standards, but we do not. Instead, we use ‘the day he entered prison’ or ‘the day before (or after) he was liberated.’”[45]
This letter became known as “Parallel Time.”[46] It is a text on the temporality of occupation and imprisonment, but it is also a personal document, an articulation of Daqqa’s frustrations and observations as the days of his captivity grew longer. Daqqa’s mother Farida was one of its preoccupations, her aging face holding the key to understanding the strange transformations of the land around him. She died this July and had not been able to see her son’s body. In his letter, Daqqa remarked that she had had two ages, “her chronological age, which is unknown to me, and her detention age. You can say her age in parallel time is nineteen years.” Sawsan Bakir mirrored this language in her assessment of Marah’s captivity, her words offering up the complementary subjectivity: “She was 16 when they snatched her from me, she is 24 now. . . . Time stopped for me.”
In these passages, there is a skeletal rubric: for the prisoners of the inside, a new accounting begins upon entry into the prison; time stretches out and out, the memory of pre-captivity linearized, while the experience of their current predicament is both periodized by material developments—such as the transfer of prisoners—and annotated by action. For the aggregate “outside,” time is meant to continue uninterrupted, but proportionate to one’s proximity to the captive, there are experiences of stoppage and stasis and re-invention upon stimulus. The result is the time of the captives’ movement separating from the social time of the national movement, becoming parallel, aware of the movement’s awareness of its struggle, as Daqqa’s comrade and interlocutor Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh wrote in a definitive essay on Daqqa’s life and thought.[47]
Many of Palestine’s prisoners have taken on the intellectual project of representing prison. The spatialization of time is one historic analytic; it is the experience of bars that will not bend and a time stretching out into timelessness. But the thesis around the temporalization of space is what is remarkable in Daqqa’s work: the prisoners are a unit of time that writes the prison itself; the changes they enact produce a geography—the prison as a text. That text is “not necessarily a written text, but rather a collection of daily behaviors and actions through which prisoners reproduce the national and moral values that bind them,” Daqqa wrote, “in so doing [the prisoners] expand the boundaries of their identity, turning the prisoner into a living ‘text’ and become open books, each educating the other.”[48]
The hunger strike is one such example of this, it enacts a compression of prison time facing endless expansion. The inscription of its text both re-materializes the prisoner’s body and brings “the other” back into relation with “the self.” This is the narrative function of the prison text, which, according to Daqqa, counters the alienating or schizophrenic effects of Zionist imprisonment: it is “the tunnel that I dug under their walls that moors me to life outside, to what concerns my people in Palestine and the Arab world,” not a dissociation, but much the contrary, “a methodological tool to deconstruct and make sense of my reality as a prisoner.”[49]
In response to that reality, Daqqa wrote his letters, essays, and a trilogy of children’s novels,[50] some of them smuggled out of prison through clandestine means, like the cabsuleh, bundles of small handwriting on wrapping paper, rolled tightly in plastic, and swallowed. Men and women labor to circulate these transmissions, to decode the handwriting,[51] to employ pockets of amplification in newspapers and masjids and social media to popularize their messages. While initiated by the acts of the prisoner, the whole circulatory process is a collective effort, a collective which in turn sustains the prisoner, a response to a prison that attempts to isolate and empty the prisoner of life through scarcity and deprivation. In this sense, the text is as much a part of the prisoner as their corporeal existence; it is them, they “live the prison as a text, whilst exceeding its narratives of valor or suffering and by transcending self-identifications as merely ‘prisoners’ [who] wander through the sources of our identities and causes,”[52] wrote Layan Kayed, a Birzeit University student imprisoned in 2020, one of at least 140 students from the campus currently detained in Zionist prisons as part of a strategy by the occupation to sever the intellectual linkages between the student and prisoner struggles.
On April 7 of this year, the same day as Daqqa’s martyrdom, the occupation arrested Kayed for a third time, alongside her Birzeit comrade Layan Nasser. Kayed’s source essay, titled “Prison as a Text,” treads many of the same themes that appear in Daqqa’s late writing; no doubt the two influenced each other. Both she and Daqqa depicted the prison as exerting its own force on the outside world, calling into question the flow of colonial time, Daqqa describing time as “the chisel on the canvas of place, reflecting the self and collective consciousness.” Through the ensuing re-arrangements, “the text and the prison exchange roles,” Kayed responded, the text “a document which encloses the prison, and the prison a document ripped by the text.”
Reading these words, it is difficult not to think of these last ten months. The al-Aqsa Flood is one of Gaza’s prison texts, the two million people who had been removed from their lands, starved, imprisoned, and killed from the sky issuing a reply to their wardens. October 7 has resulted in a total social collapse among Zionists, an implosion of the settler myth, the displacement of thousands from the north, and the flight of hundreds of billions of dollars. It has engendered a psychic collapse, too; besotted with hysteria and denialism, the Zionists have lost touch with the reality they have imposed. The jailed sapped the will of their jailor, who has been changed by the violence they have delivered: “In the jailer’s quest for control, he looks into the prisoner’s mirror to see his hideous self,” Daqqa wrote, “he is afraid of what he has done, and what the reflections of this mirror may do to his self-perception, and so he seeks to destroy it.”[53]
The national movement, too, was implicated by the actions of the prisoner this year; the chain broke the conveyor belt, which it promptly deposited onto the ground in a tangled bundle. Saturated with meaning, language had turned into ash and Daqqa remained in his cell. “When our bodies are not released from prison, we free them with a text and a painting,” he wrote in a 2019 letter to Al-Shaikh from Hadarim prison.[54] In the third decade of his imprisonment, as the disease took deeper hold and the medicines’ efficacy waned, Daqqa had found himself less able to write and to think, and in the letter, he recounted a turn to drawing time to keep his “soul from collapsing,” the result being dozens of paintings of visceral beauty and abjection:
“The paintings are the images of my writing. I am by nature an embodimentary being. All my life and cultural experience were drawn from a photographic memory. I think originally in my head are images, not words and letters. I believe in the image more than the word, specifically in this age.”[55]
This was Daqqa’s response to the “wasted speech” of the outside world, the renewed appeals to nostalgia, the use of exuberant and boosterish language fixated on the return to memories of a struggle that had long since transformed, the swelling of an affect of longing and surety directly proportional to the inability to free anyone. Daqqa rejected this form of linguistic romanticism that replaced “return with the story of return”; he wanted nothing to do with a utopian return, but for a return to a Palestine that “matched the geography of the entire homeland.”[56]
This poses its own set of questions for those of us who imagine ourselves part of this struggle: asserting that the prisoners are our compass means nothing if we remain lost in the prison-maze of abstractions. We list the names, collect them, turn them over in our palms: Zakaria Zubeidi, Nael Barghouti, Suha Bechara. What would it mean to love them, and by what right is that love given? In the diaspora, as in the West, the impulse is understandable. It is a reaction to imperial liberalism, which fashions its static victims to pulverize with hollow concern, offering no recognition of Palestinian resistance as the engine of historical motion. But in the wrong hands, the prisoners become fetish object, the distance breeding its own form of control, the prisoner presented as ascetic, resilient, a locus for all our anxieties about praxis and ideology. The mannequins are what we are left with, the detritus of social time, not parallel but dead: the same poster of Daqqa brought out for prisoners’ day commemorations, now martyrs’ commemorations; the same stories, even as we fail them.
And fail him we did, most of us at least. It is bitter to contemplate for too long, the limit zone of possibility given weakness. In a post two weeks after Walid’s martyrdom, his wife Sana’ wrote:
“Women tried, Walid, believe me, they tried their hardest, but none of them managed to produce a real man to solve this problem, bring you back to normal times. . . . We are ashamed from the moment the rooster crows because we were hopeful that the morning would not come. We are embarrassed to watch things move when they must stop. Every word is more an obscenity than a lamentation. How can one belong to a community of two billion human beings and die in prison?”[57]
It is ultimately a form of bourgeois extraction that Sana’ is decrying. Understanding this, diagnosing it, and reckoning with its political dimensions is the key to honoring our prisoners. Sana’ asserted that those who exist in relation to the prisoner or the martyr understand intimately the implications of the choice and non-choice of the resistance project, which transcend questions of “support” and non-support, instead proposing them to be a classed product of a historical totality in Palestine, a fractal network of social relations and commitments, access to tools and ideological guidance. For those Palestinians, resistance is a necessity; in the aggregate, it is inevitable. As she put it, Walid is an idea now, one who will never die so long as we remain steadfast in our struggle.[58]
“The prisoners are a unit of time that writes the prison itself; the changes they enact produce a geography—the prison as a text.”
I, for one, am scared of those implications and confronted by them. I did not allow myself to imagine Walid emerging from prison into the arms of his family. Instead, I considered his four decades. He lived through victories and defeats. He saw his people rise up in beautiful revolution, saw the young men and women of the Intifada grow into parents; saw some brush aside their commitments, others take up the struggle. Outside his walls, the nation shuddered into action, union strikes, knife attacks, a new generation of the camp youth putting into motion a dialectical theory of resistance. Before that, death came. He had lived to see Gaza’s walls broken open.
Near the end, Walid longed to be at a remote beach, silhouetted by shoreline, and speaking to the sea. “With the sea I can confess everything and not be shy,” he said, “I will regain my balance once I talk about all the terrible things that have happened to me.” He entered prison as a young man of 24, exited it at 62. His body is currently in postmortem detention, a refrigerator. It will remain there until his false sentence is completed, in eight months’ time. This is the price Abu Milad and his family paid in service to liberation. You can call it a generational curse, a blight on some of Palestine’s men, women, and children, condemned at birth to a great temporal siphoning, what he described as “an inheritance, passed down from ancestors to descendants.” But concluding there would be a mistake: Daqqa refused to think of captivity as a tragedy, but rather “an experience, site, and a perspective of the overall Arab situation and struggle.” Beneath this grand sweep, the usurping ideology and its prisons were fleeting; time was his and it was infinite.
[TITLE] Walid Daqqa, “I Write to a Child Who is Not Yet Born,” Arab48, 2011. Phrase taken from Walid Daqqa’s letter to his daughter Milad, written in 2011, before she was born. Full quote: “The days have engulfed each other, with each day I spent in prison flipping through the pages of my life, like a bag trying to empty what remains of my memory. The prison, like fire, feeds on the wreckage of memory . . . and my memory . . . you are my message to the future, after prison months sucked the nectar of the life months, and prison years equated with the life years” (tr. Lylla Younes).
[1] Also referred to as Shikma prison.
[2] Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (1992).
[3] Using a combinatory strategy of denied family reunification, forced unemployment, intimidation and propaganda, denial of passage, relinquishment of property, and supply rationing.
[4] Most of the expelled Palestinians from this area were forced to Gaza, though some also went to al-Lydd and al-Khalil.
[5] Samar al-Saleh, “Britain’s Prison Labor Camps: Imperial-Zionist Class War Against Palestinian Men” (2022) (MA, New York: NYU).
[6] Saleh Bouyissir, Palestinian Struggle Over Half a Century (Beirut: al-Fatah House, 1971), pg. 247; as cited in Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (1972; ed., 2023) (tr. Hazem Jamjoum), pg. 59.
[7] Mark Sanagan, Lightning Through The Clouds: ʿIzz al-Din al-Qassam And The Making Of The Modern Middle East (2020), pg. 125–126.
[8] Samar al-Saleh, “Britain’s Prison Labor Camps: Imperial-Zionist Class War Against Palestinian Men” (2022) (MA, New York: NYU).
[9] Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and The Palestinians (1990; ed., 1994), pg. 324.
[10] “An Interview with the Prisoner Walid Daqqa,” al-Hadath (2019) [audio].
[11] This is the preferred title of the study, based on the rationale articulated in Ghina Abi-Ghannam, “Naming Israel’s Psychological War on the Palestinians,” Liberated Texts (2024).
[12] Walid Daqqa, “Consciousness Molded or the Re-identification of Torture” (2010); in Abeer Baker and Anat Matar, (eds), Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel (2011), pg. 234–254.
[13] In all prisons during the Intifadat al-hajjar (1987–1993) (“Intifada of Stones” or “First Intifada” in English) and from a period of 2000–2003 during the Intifadat al-Aqsa (2000–2005) (“al-Aqsa Intifada” or “Second Intifada” in English). Other periods of concerted resistance would follow, including Intifadat al-sakakin (2015–2016) (“Intifada of Knives” in English), Seif al-Quds (2021) (“Sword of al-Quds” in English), and Tufan al-Aqsa (2023–2024) (“Al-Aqsa Flood” in English).
[14] Stéphanie Latte Abdallah, “The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement: A History,” excerpted from A History of Confinement in Palestine: The Prison Web (2022).
[15] See also: Basel Abbas, Ruanne Aboue-Rahme, and Raouf Hajyihya, The Stories of Uncle Dayton (2012).
[16] In 2021, the Palestinian political prisoner Zakaria Zubeidi offered to donate his bone marrow to Daqqa.
[17] There are additional sites, mostly for settlers: Giv’on prison and Maasiyahu prison.
[18] Walid Daqqa, “Consciousness Molded or the Re-identification of Torture” (2010); in Abeer Baker and Anat Matar, (eds), Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel (2011), pg. 234–254.
[19] R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (1960; ed., 1990), pg. 91. This text was first introduced to me by Hardy Hill.
[20] Al-Nashif periodizes the Palestinian body across history, first experiencing a loss of land during the nakba and the ensuing fragmentation of the collective; a re-materialization of the Palestinian body through the collective liberation struggle around and during the First Intifada; and then a holistic re-arrangement after Oslo, in which the weakening of the collective displaced the struggle onto the individual, who became the most immediate target of colonization.
[21] Esmail al-Nashif, “Attempts at Liberation: Materializing the Body and Building Community Among Palestinian Political Captives,” The Arab Studies Journal (2005), pg. 47. [Emphasis his.]
[22] Elaborated on at great length in Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (2022).
[23] Some, then, may critique Laing and others’ schemas for their implicit assumption of psychological normativity—colonial normativity, in this case. The diagnosis of a paranoid-schizoid position in the Palestinian is controversial, not least culturally taboo, but also, per the Sheehis, a form of colonial pathologization, which becomes a means of justifying the exertion of control and dismissal of Palestinian resistance as unregenerate barbarism borne of the experience of violence (pg. 140, 143). Nevertheless, an analysis of the material and psychic effects of torture—as described by Daqqa and absent normative claims—is valuable to understand the counterinsurgency logics of Zionism: only as dehumanizing as its use within or outside the systems of colonial domination.
[24] Lena Meari, “Sumud: A Palestinian Philosophy of Confrontation in Colonial Prisons,” The South Atlantic Quarterly (2014).
[25] Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (2022).
[26] Statement, “Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees” (April 2024).
[27] Walid Daqqa, “Letter to Sana’ Salameh,” Asqalan Prison (1997). Thank you Saba Salah.
[28] Walid Daqqa, “I Write to a Child Who is Not Yet Born,” Arab48 (2011).
[29] Walid Daqqa, “A Place Without a Door,” Middle East Research and Information Project (2023) (tr. Dalia Taha).
[30] Adam Shatz, “Vengeful Pathologies,” London Review of Books (2023).
[31] Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, “The Parallel Human: Walid Daqqah on the 1948 Palestinian Political Prisoners,” Confluences Méditerranée (2021).
[32] Esmail al-Nashif, Palestinian Political Prisoners: Identity and Community (2008).
[33] In a letter written on tissue paper and smuggled out in 1988, the prisoners of al-Naqab detail some of the conditions: “A physical and mental war is being conducted against us by starvation, thirst, humiliation, and physical and psychological torture. . . . We are forced to keep our tents open from 5:00 am to midnight, exposed to the searing heat of the sun and the sandstorms of the desert. Two or three times a day we are made to sit outside, under the scorching sun, for periods of up to half an hour, under the muzzles of our captors’ guns. No consideration is given to the sick and the elderly,” as cited in “Towards a State of Independence: The Palestinian Uprising, December 1987-August 1988,” Jerusalem: FACTS Information Committee (1988). Thank you to Miriam Osman.
[34] June, July, and September 1988.
[35] Ashraf Bader, “Ben-Gvir’s Policies Directed Against Prisoners and the Transformation that Occurred After October 7,” Institute for Palestine Studies (2024).
[36] Lena Meari, Samera Esmeir, and Ramsey McGlazer, “‘You’re Not Defeated as Long as You’re Resisting’: Palestinian Hunger Strikes between the Singular and the Collective,” Critical Times (2022).
[37] In an interview with captives held at Ashkelon Prison, Daqqa offers his own periodization: a first stage of organizational formation (from the early 1970s to mid-1980s), a second stage of doctrinal and ideological formation (from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s), and a third stage of the post-Oslo period. Per “Dialogue with the Prisoners of Ashkelon Prison,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya (2003).
[38] Before those strikers, Khalil Awadeh went on hunger strike for 172 days in the summer of 2022. Before them, in 2021, Miqdad al-Qawasmeh, Kayed al-Fasfous, Alaa al-Araj, Hisham abu Hawash, Ayyad al-Hraimi, Rateb Harebat, and Loay al-Ashqar, for 533 days cumulatively.
[39] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952; ed., 2008).
[40] Sinwar, too, authored a semi-autobiographical prison novel, Al-Shawk wa’l Qurunful (Thorns and Carnations, 2004).
[41] Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “Seeing Genocide,” Boston Review (2023).
[42] Khalida Jarrar, “Impending Freedom: Destroying Enslavement Emptying Prisons,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya (2024); Khalida Jarrar, “Freedom is Coming: Shattering Slavery and Emptying Prisons,” Jadaliyya (2024) (tr. Jadaliyya).
[43] Non-consecutively; across four (now five) periods of imprisonment, the longest of which lasted 2 years, during which she was denied the right to attend the funeral for her daughter Suha. Khalida was re-imprisoned on December 26, 2023.
[44] This is transcribed as such in my notes from that autumn period. I do not know which prisoner said it or to whom, though it resembles statements made by the freed prisoner Yasmine Shaaban and the father of another freed prisoner. Perhaps this is fitting, and I will leave the citation as such.
[45] Walid Daqqa, “Parallel Time” (2005) [prison letter]; Walid Daqqa, “Parallel Time,” The Public Source (2024) (tr. Julia Choucair Vizoso).
[46] Three different texts are often described using this name: “Parallel Time” (2005), a letter; The Story of the Forgotten in the Parallel Time (2011), a play; and The Story of Parallel Time (2014), the staging of the play by al-Maidan Theatre in Haifa. These statements are drawn from Daqqa’s letter.
[47] Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, “Parallel Place: Drawing Time in Walid Daqqa’s Thought,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya (2023).
[48] Walid Daqqa, “Free Yourself,” al-Hadath (2020) (tr. Marwa Farag).
[49] “An Interview with the Prisoner Walid Daqqa,” al-Hadath (2019) [audio], as cited in Ghina Abi-Ghannam, “Naming Israel’s Psychological War on the Palestinians,” Liberated Texts (2024).
[50] The Oil’s Secret Tale (2017); The Sword’s Secret Tale (2021); and The Spirit’s Secret Tale (2024). This last story was considered unfinished until its posthumous publication in Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya.
[51] If written in msamsam handwriting.
[52] Layan Kayed, “Prison as a Text,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya (2021); Layan Kayed, “The Prison As a Text,” Wasafiri (2024) (tr. Roba Alsalibi).
[53] Walid Daqqa, “Control in Time,” Awan (2021) (tr. Marwa Farag).
[54] Walid Daqqa, “A Comrade’s Message to Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh,” Hadarim Prison (June 17, 2019), as cited in Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, “Parallel Place: Drawing Time in Walid Daqqa’s Thought,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya (2023).
[55] ibid.
[56] Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, “Parallel Place: Drawing Time in Walid Daqqa’s Thought,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya (2023).
[57] Sana’ Daqqa, “On Walid’s Martyrdom,” Instagram (April 24, 2024).
[58] Sana’ Daqqa, “The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement & the Struggle for Liberation,” The People’s Conference for Palestine, Detroit, MI (2024) [video].