West Bank Dispatch: The prison inside of us

Key Developments (April 13-April 17)

• The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers this year reached 100 last week — more than double the number of Palestinians killed in the same time period last year. This signals an escalation of not only violence but an expansion of the threshold of impunity afforded to Israeli forces, armed settlers, and the Israeli judicial fabric that facilitates it.
• On April 15, Israeli forces violently obstructed the parade for the Sabbath of Light (the lighting of the Holy Fire), an Eastern Orthodox Christian ritual the day before Easter Sunday. Israeli forces beat and assaulted the worshipers who were attempting to make their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The city had been reportedly transformed “into a military barracks,” according to the head of the Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs, Ramzi Khoury. This comes just a week after Israeli forces invaded the Al-Aqsa compound and attacked worshippers as they practiced Itikaf prayer during the holy month of Ramadan. The two attacks signal the rise of Jewish supremacy in the Old City of Jerusalem and its imposition in the Old City’s Muslim and Christian quarters.

• Sheikh Khader Adnan entered his 71st day of hunger strike in protest of his administrative detention by Israel. The Palestinian Prisoners Society has warned that due to his rapidly deteriorating health, the 44-year-old is risking death. This is not the first time Adnan has been detained arbitrarily by Israel, now a veteran of several exhaustive hunger strikes as a form of protest in the past. Those attempts at his freedom also left his physical health in an already deteriorating condition. 
• The health condition of the Palestinian political detainee, author, and activist Walid Daqqah, who has been detained by Israel since 1986, continues to deteriorate. This constitutes intentional medical negligence for Daqqah and comes after the death of cancer-stricken 40-year-old Ihab Kilani, 68-year-old Sa’diya Matar Farajallah, 40-year-old Moussa Abu Mohammad, and 50-year-old Nasser Abu Hmeid last year, all of them due to medical negligence from Israeli authorities. 
• Israeli settler violence and forcible annexation of Palestinian lands, resources, and properties persist in the West Bank. On Sunday, April 16, Israeli settlers stole property and bulldozed Palestinian lands in Hebron, while the day before, Israeli settlers also carried out an attack against villagers in the Hebron area and injured at least one Palestinian in a separate attack on Palestinians in Bethlehem on the same day. In Jerusalem, Israeli forces continued the crackdown on Palestinians and arrested at least three children in the occupied town of Silwan in East Jerusalem.
• On Thursday, April 13, the Israeli district court of Jerusalem ruled that the “Interior Minister does not have the authority to revoke the citizenship or residency status of terrorists’ relatives based on general deterrence considerations,” in reference to the family members of Fadi Kunbar, a Palestinian who ran over and killed four Israeli soldiers in 2017 in Jerusalem. Last year, the Minister of Interior, Ayalet Shaked, known for her racist comments against Palestinians, led the campaign against Kunbar’s relatives as a punitive measure of collective punishment and a form of “quiet deportation.”

In-depth

Walid Daqqah once said that one of the reasons for writing his acclaimed young adult novel, The Tale of the Oil’s Secret, was to write until he is freed from prison and “in the hopes of freeing the prison from within me.” In his nearly four decades of imprisonment, having witnessed the rise and fall of the Palestinian struggle from within the confines of his prison cell, he has become a prolific writer and an astute commenter on the contemporary Palestinian condition.

Just about the best analysis we have from the past twenty years of the period of Palestinian defeat and capitulation following the Second Intifada can be found in Walid Daqqah’s Dissolving Consciousness, or: Redefining Torture.

In it, he explains:

“Repression and torture [in prisons] have become complex and modern, proceeding in tandem with human rights discourse, where the latter now requires a concerted effort to prove violations that will in all likelihood be presented by the judiciary or the Israeli media as being exceptions to the rule of respect for human rights and prisoners’ rights…Repression is a collection of hundreds of small and individual measures, of thousands of details that cannot on their own be proof of being instruments of torture, not unless we realize the total logic and framework that stands behind this system. It is precisely the same as the exploitations of free market economics in light of globalization, which advertises itself as necessary for the purposes of economic growth. Repression becomes like exploitation — without a face, address, or country of origin that you can assign to your exploiter.”

Walid Daqqah isn’t only telling us that this is how power, torture, and repression are constituted in prison, but that this is how it is beyond the prison’s walls as well — in other words, he is describing the contemporary Palestinian condition, the reality of Palestinian defeat and collaborationism, and the attempts of the colonial state to hide who the real enemy is. The brilliance of Daqqah’s work was not in his particularly unconventional employment of Foucault’s Panopticon or his engagement with Naomi Klein’s concept of the “shock doctrine,” but rather in becoming one of the leading Palestinian voices to point out what is wrong in our world when he only ever read and heard of that world from within his prison cell. He discovered and recognized that the problems and challenges faced by prisoners within Israeli prisons were just a microcosm of Palestinian society at large, containing all its contradictions, political (and apolitical) tendencies, and social affiliations. 

As Daqqah now barely clings to life, suffering from a rare cancer for which the Israeli Prison authorities are not providing timely and proper treatment, this moment of Palestinian capitulationism and defeat has begun to unravel. The modern repression Daqqah described is no longer working as a new generation of Palestinians has taken up armed struggle again, and this has led the colonial state to do away with its pretensions of exercising soft power. Likewise, the Israeli prison administration’s recent crackdown on the Palestinian prisoners’ movement has not reached this level of repression in years and only further validates Daqqah’s point that the prison he lives in is not so different from the larger one we inhabit. The way to break those chains would be to get rid of the prison inside of us.

Palestinian Prisoners Day, April 17, 2023

Key Figures

• More than 81 Palestinians from occupied Jerusalem have had their residency revoked in 2022, according to a new report by HaMoked. This is almost three times the number of residencies revoked in the year before.