By Benay Blend
Palestinian prisoners embody the resilience of their people, transforming captivity into a site of resistance, education, and unwavering struggle for liberation.
“A selflessness whose beauty defies description, joy for the relief of others above one’s own safety and freedom”—this quote from the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) encapsulates why Palestinian prisoners, including those released during the historic Toufan al-Ahrar (Flood of the Free) prisoner exchange, serve as a model for the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.
The words of resistance icon Khalida Jarrar serve as a case in point. In a letter to the Palestine Writes Festival in 2020, Jarrar writes:
“Although physically we are held captive behind fences and bars, our souls remain free and are soaring in the skies of Palestine and the world. Regardless of the severity of the Israeli occupation’s practices and imposed punitive measures, our free voice will continue to speak out on behalf of our people who have suffered horrendous catastrophes, displacement, occupation, and arrests. It will also continue to let the world know of the strong Palestinian Will that will relentlessly reject and challenge colonialism in all its forms.”
In the Foreword to These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons, Jarrar, a member of the PFLP who has been held in administrative detention several times, writes that “prison is the art of exploring possibilities; it is a school that trains you to solve daily challenges using the simplest and most creative means” (p. xviii), in other words, the highest form of political education is that which involves collective struggle and sumoud (steadfastness.)
While in prison, Jarrar conducted classes for fellow women inmates, including secondary and post-secondary education programs, while also pursuing research on the relationship between Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian liberation project.
“[While in] prison, I was convinced that a form of resistance inside the prison was education,” Jarrar concludes. “That is why, for example, [while incarcerated], I gave a course on human rights. The papers the female prisoners wrote were very rich, because they tied what the conventions stated with the type of oppression or violation they experienced.”
Recently released from prison under the exchange deal negotiated by Hamas, Jarrar appeared “tired and thin, with white hair and eyes that reflected the oppression of solitary confinement.”
The following day, however, Jarrar had recovered enough to describe the cruelty that she had experienced while in prison. Her story was echoed by other women recently released from detention.
Jarrar’s struggle was not hers alone but rather reflects the fight of many others against the colonial machinery that has sought to erase and subjugate the Palestinian people since the establishment of the state of “Israel” in ’48.
For this reason, fiction provides a useful venue to showcase the stories of many people all rolled into the lives of a few. Thus, in the preface to The Thorn and the Carnation-Part II (2004), Yahya al-Sinwar writes that “this is not [his] personal story nor is it the story of any particular individual, though all its events are real.” Moreover, Sinwar had lived most of what he wrote about himself, or he had heard about it from people who had lived it over decades in the “beloved land of Palestine.”
One of the early founders of Hamas, Sinwar traces its development from 1967 to the early 2000s. Published while Sinwar was in prison, the novel is told from the perspective of Ahmad, a product of refugee camps in Gaza, who traces the movements of his cousin Ibrahim as he develops a strategy that would be important to the resistance.
Countering the idea that Hamas is somehow not connected to the society it represents, Ahmad describes how the resistance “started to transform into a lifestyle, becoming the backbone of the daily Palestinian pattern” (p. 77), a communal effort that is transferred to prison life for those who are interred.
When “Israel” opened the Negev prison, Ahmad’s brother Mohamoud and his cousin Ibrahim were among the first batches of detainees. There they begin to organize in a way that would improve their living conditions and force the “brutish jailers” (p. 86) to show respect for Ahmad’s fellow prisoners.
Despite abuse from those in charge, the detainees transform their surroundings into “an academy teaching the culture and arts of the Intifada” (p. 99). Thus, young men entered the prison unable to read or write, but left with “various skills needed for their cause” (100).
Then as now, families celebrate the release of relatives from these horrible conditions, more shocking now, perhaps, as “Israeli” guards have escalated their cruelty towards the prisoners.
Labeled “graves for the living” by Euro-Med Monitor, prisons have become institutions where detainees are subjected to “severe torture, intentional starvation, and prolonged solitary confinement as part of punitive measures that ramped up brutally after the events in the Gaza Strip in an attempt to punish them for nothing more than the fact that they were Palestinians.”
Much has been written about the crowds welcoming the prisoners on release. But what allowed them to survive their many years in prison under such abhorrent circumstances? As Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solitary Network wrote about Sinwar shortly after his assassination by “Israeli” troops:
“In his strategic approach, his unremitting courage and heroism, his broad national approach and his refusal to abandon or compromise the principles of Palestinian liberation, he represented the promise and the role of the prisoners as leaders of the resistance and of the liberation struggle as a whole.”
While Palestinian prisoners are heroes of their people’s struggle, it is the resistance that “brings liberation, to the prisoners, the land and the people of Palestine, a resistance that stretches from the heart of Gaza, throughout Palestine, to Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, and to the people of the world.”
The relationship between the Prisoners’ Movement and the resistance is reciprocal, reflecting the mutuality practiced by the Palestinian people.
Indeed, this message of “hope and unity” was reflected in the words of prisoners released during the second hostage exchange on January 25.
Among those released, Azmi Nafaa commented that “the feeling of freedom is wonderful,” and he gave credit for his joy to the people of Gaza as well as the resistance.
Others praised the Palestinian people—both civilians and the military wing—for their sumoud (steadfastness) and resilience, both qualities that they felt responsible for their release.
In her foreword to These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (ed. Ramzy Baroud, 2020), Khalida Jarrar explains that “prison is not just a place made of high walls, barbed wire and small, suffocating cells with heavy iron doors.”
“It is also stories of real people,” Jarrar maintains, who, despite “daily suffering,” continue “their struggles against the prison guards and administration.” For the incarcerated, prison is a “moral position,” a stance that is shared by comrades who become like family.
“It is common agony, pain, sadness,” she writes, but “despite everything, also joy at times.”
Jarrar refuses to render prisoners as solely victims of the Zionist regime. While she acknowledges the daily horrors of prison life, Jarrar makes sure to highlight the agency that her comrades employ to challenge prison guards.
“These are not just prison stories,” she concludes, because “the prison is a microcosm of the much larger struggle of a people who refuse to be enslaved on their own land, and who are determined to regain their freedom, with the same will and vigor by all triumphant, once-colonized nations.”
In this vein, journalist/activist Ramzy Baroud writes of the “great march of hope: Gaza’s defiance against erasure,” i.e. the march of hundreds of thousands of displaced individuals back to their (most likely destroyed) homes in the north of Gaza.
For those who do not understand the Palestinian’s fierce determination to secure their “right of return” to their original homes, the question might have been “return to what?”
In answer, Baroud explains that Palestinians “emerged [from “Israel’s genocide] with a sense of victory. They are writing their own history, which, despite immeasurable and unimaginable losses, is also a history of hope and victory.”
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
