Seeds of Misery

1Portrayed either optimistically as an unimaginative leap towards peace by the PLO and Israel, or pessimistically as a “Palestinian Versailles,” [1] the Oslo Accords of 1993 has been a nightmare for the Palestinian people. Since then, the inter-national rhetoric of peace, democratic transition, and the superimposed grammar of humanizing history, have all collapsed into the gloomy reality of the besieged enclaves of the West Bank and Gaza. While Palestinians witnessed the attempt to construct a new national political body in the form of Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994, and how the role of the PLO of 1968, after amending the Palestinian National Charter in 1996, became less clear and more controversial: from the one-State, to two, to none. While Palestinian political discourse incarnated in the PLO was based on the idea of liberation, the PA rendered this discourse dormant, and Palestine itself became a metaphor.

2In this disconsolate scene, the Nakba of 1948 seemed to have lost some of its ‘meaning, ’ while the National Charter of 1968 seems to have lost its entire meaning. Post-Oslo, PA politics reinforced the perception of the Nakba as a singular historic event that occurred once and faded away, not as an ‘ongoing’ form of dispossession within the national collective memory. [2] Preserving the ‘taste’ of defeat inflicted on all Palestinians ceased to be the ruling principle re-minding the Palestinians of the grand classics of Palestinian identity: geography, demography and historiography. In other words, Edward Said’s early diagnosis of the Nakba - as a dialectical means of fixation and negation of the Palestinian self through two projects that are at once contradictory and complementary: the project of the triumph of Zionist ‘interpretation’ and the project of defeat over the Palestinian ‘presence’ [3] - became an outmoded narration. Simultaneously, the mainstream discourse of the political elite and the cultural gauche caviar, contributed to eclipsing Palestine and dismantling Palestinian heroes. [4] Due to the abandonment of the collective meanings of its identity and cause by the PA, Palestine is no longer Palestine, but rather a never-Palestine kind of parody which, to be deciphered, requires each group of Palestinians to acquire special hermeneutical traits.

Palestine dis-membered

3The political process, misleadingly described as ‘peace process, ’ led to de-Palestinianizing the cause creating a unique postcolony in Palestine. It is not pre-colonial, colonial, or even post-colonial, but rather a ‘tunnel condition’ that seems to have acquired the evils of all three [5] and through which we witnessed five devastating consequences thereof: first, the transformation of the national movement from an inclusive liberation movement into a deviant nationalism with a pseudo-authority serving as a proxy for Israel; second, the reshaping of the Palestinian imagined community by excluding three groups from the demographic make-up of Palestine: Palestinian Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinian refugees; third, turning nascent Palestinian civil society from an anticolonial national movement into a decolonization factory of comprador-mediators in a quasi-State condition; fourth, converting Palestinian collective memory into a collective amnesia, and fifth, leaving the door wide open to political initiatives for solving the question of Palestine, such as ‘the State for all its citizens’, ‘the one State solution’, and ‘the National Conciliation Document of the Prisoners.’

4Based on original prison notebooks of Walid Daqqah [6] unveiling his thoughts and positionality this article interrogates the Palestinian condition regarding four issues: the politics of the PLO towards the Palestinians of 1948; the PA’s assumed failure of revolutionary violence as a strategy of liberation; the Palestinian prisoners’ movement; and the emancipatory role of playwriting and creating a counter-subjectivity by, and for, younger Palestinian generations.

5In his commentary on the battle for Jenin refugee camp (April 3^rd to 11^th, 2002), [7] Daqqah conceptualizes Palestinian political ill-time maneuvering between the historical event and its historiographical value as a political force for change. Reflecting on his political affiliation between PFLP and BALAD, [8] Daqqah investigates the ‘case’ of the 1948 Palestinians, and the absence of a strategic vision within the Palestinian establishment, both in the PA and in the PLO. Searching for national salvation, Daqqah maintains that armed struggle was not a ‘wrong’ strategy, but a ‘wronged’ one throughout the history of the PLO.

6Taking al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000 as a point of departure, Daqqah addresses the dilemma of the 1948 Palestinians, now the Arab ‘citizens’ within the settler-colonial-State of Israel. To illustrate their positionality between Israel’s ‘Jewishness’ and its ‘democracy’ that was intensified by the ‘Jewish Nation-State Law’ of 2018, he underscores: “The lasting paradox is between our affiliation with the Palestinian people bearing Arab national identity and holding Israeli citizenship which allows us legally to ‘stay’ in our homeland, as citizens in a state that defines itself as Jewish. Facing this paradox, we dared to choose our Palestinianism by joining resistance factions in a time when we lacked any theoretical, political or even legal stature that could enable us to solve the paradox between our [Palestinian] nationalism (wataniyyah) and our [Israeli] citizenship (muwatanah). Our decision, however, was a possible individual solution, but never a collective solution for the two million Arab citizens in Israel. Things were confusing and we couldn’t reconcile nationalism and citizenship. None of the Arab political parties or forces provided a framework that allows an adequate venue of struggle in which, on the one hand, we maintain our national identity, and carry on our national duty, while, on the other hand, we preserve our existence, cultivate our land, and cogently demand our full citizenship.” [9]

7Post-Oslo, the 1948 Palestinians, found themselves before yet another challenge. [10] The choice between Palestinian nationalism and Israeli citizenship was no longer available, hence there was an urgency to let go of one of the two. However, omitting one entailed omitting both, for letting go of Palestinian nationalism entailed, legally and culturally, letting go of the indigenous rights of the 1948 Palestinians. The ‘new’ challenge, then, is dis-membering the Palestinians of 1948 from the geographic, demographic, and historiographic Palestinian national body, and forcing them to the periphery of the settlers’ State. 1948 Palestinians became officially part of the mandate of the ‘Palestinian Committee for Interaction with Israeli Society, ’ a body created in 2012 and affiliated with Fatah and the PLO - no more, no less.

8This challenge was a heavy blow not only to the political enterprise of the indigenous 1948 Palestinians, but also to the ‘enterprise of hope’ of ‘their’ political prisoners. While Israel designated former freedom fighters as outlaws, the PA transformed them into social outcasts in dire need of rehabilitation, if they were ever released. They found themselves abandoned by the PA, with no political, legal, or even moral guardian - hence their ‘problem’ became an internal Israeli issue, too. Such a reality triggered a political incentive within this aggrieved subgroup to join the nascent National Democratic Assembly (BALAD) established in 1995. In comparison to the PLO, BALAD came up with a seemingly radical political program aimed at transforming Israel from a Jewish State to a ‘State for all of its citizens, ’ irrespective of national or ethnic identity. In addition, Daqqah and his comrades played an active role fortifying the national movement through the highly celebrated ‘Prisoners’ Document, ’ [11] officially known as ‘the National Conciliation Document’ of 2006.

Palestinians de-membered

9Focusing on the impact of the PLO melting into the PA, Daqqah went a step further in investigating its consequences of on Palestinian prisoners. Given that “the most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” [12] Daqqah explores carceral technologies utilized by Israel Prison Service (IPS or Shabas in Hebrew) to sear prisoners’ consciousness molding it anew to tame their morale. [13] He explores Israeli colonial mechanisms applied on Palestinian prisoners seeking to reach the point of politicide, or degradation without annihilation. Towards the end of al-Aqsa Intifada, especially after the appointment of Ya’acov Ganot as Shabas Commissioner in 2003, Daqqah explained that “Israel created a strict system, based on the most updated theories of human engineering and social psychology, in order to mold Palestinian consciousness by shattering its collective values.” [14] Hence, carceral mechanisms made prisons a replica of the segregated and thoroughly controlled Palestine, taming them on the narrow borderline between life and death.

10Negating the pretense of being a scholar, Daqqah describes the metamorphosis of prisoner’s positionality in captivity, [15] declaring that his “principal purpose is to explain that what happens in the smaller prisons is not just detention and isolation of people considered to be a security risk for Israel, but is part of a general, scientifically planned and calculated scheme to re-mold Palestinian consciousness.” [16] Israeli prisons do not resemble prisons in the West or in the rest of the world, [17] for the aim is not the body of the prisoner, but rather his soul, senses and consciousness, for the enemy aspires “to re-mold humans according to an Israeli vision… especially the fighting avantgarde locked in prison.” [18]

11‘Molding consciousness’ - a term coined by Moshe Ya’alon, former Israeli war minister during al-Aqsa Intifada - refers to a master plan Israel crafted to devour Palestinians by attaining absolute control over them. What Israel failed to achieve through material means and policies inspired by the apartheid South African regime, is now underway in Palestine, where racism ceases to be a mere “popular, spontaneous and illogical phenomenon” [19] and becomes organized racism, initiated by the entire Israeli establishment, with its logic, legal and moral justification.

12Through ‘daily life needs, ’ Israel targeted the moral infrastructure of Palestinians, after hitting their material infrastructure through its draconian policies. Hence, Palestinians seemed to turn their positive steadfastness into passive steadfastness, fostered by the new Palestinian political leadership after eclipsing Yasir Arafat in 2004. According to Daqqah, Israel devised a modern geno-politicidal system through new modalities of power to defeat Palestinians. In big-brother Orwellian fashion, Israel developed a surveillance system to observe, control, and segregate Palestinians towards the ‘final solution’ (in the sense of ‘Endlösung’) whose “target is not the body, not collective extermination, but rather the soul, the extermination of culture and civilization.” [20]

13This operational schema, confusing and contradictory in its components, aims at a trifecta of an ‘organized-chaos’, that is: “Dismantling, partially, Palestinian economic, cultural and civil society structures and organizations, not to the level of their collapsing, but remaining below full-organization, yet above total chaos; Engaging ongoing political negotiations to create an illusion that a solution is within reach, right around the corner, while creating facts on the ground through settlements, so that the situation always remains unsolved but not in a stalemate; and Dismantling the infrastructure supporting the notion of the ‘people’ by destroying Palestinian collective values. The targets are the factions and forces that foster these values, such as the prisoners, the avant-garde of the struggle. The Palestinian people, therefore, becomes less than a nation, yet remains above material annihilation.” [21]

14Throughout a multifaceted process of partitioning, engulfment, and co-optation, Shabas tried to reconstruct political, social, and cultural relations between prisoners. This aimed at silencing, or at least, undermining their political action via re-forming and de-forming their individual and collective subjectivity, [22] through: (1) Fostering pre-and sub-national modes of identification based on geographical filiations whereby fragmenting the collective national affiliation into bantustans; (2) ‘Bettering’ prison conditions compared to the ‘drought’ period of 1993-2003, to make the prisoners’ situation ‘materially high, and morally low’ - a trap of an auto-enslaving machine held by prisoners against their collective self; (3) Intervening in internal politics of the prisoners via: interrupting democratic organization of the political factions, promoting alternative modes of representations that eclipsed the supreme leadership structures such as the Representative Committee and the Dialogue Committee, and fostering self-functionary representation for each and every ward, division, cellblock, or even room; [23] (4) Banning collective activities of celebration, mourning, socialization related to prisoners inside or outside prison walls, while fostering futile modes of leisure time management through controlling books, TV channels, and modes of communication; and (5) Punishing prisoners for any national activity, untamed behavior, no matter how symbolic, aimed at further destruction of their culture of resistance.

15Given this dark reality, Daqqah states that occupation, colonialism, or even trendy settler-colonialism frameworks, all fall short in describing the conditions inflicted upon Palestinians. Therefore, Daqqah engages with a threefold theoretical framework to analyze the molding of Palestinian consciousness, based on the notion of the shock doctrine, practices of discipline and punishment, and the idea of a liquid modernity.

16Utilizing Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, Daqqah demonstrates not only how the ‘process’ of the hunger strike becomes a ‘second shock’ for prisoners, but also how Israel abuses Palestinians in the aftermath. [24] The period in which the victim is spatiotemporally disoriented, is crucial to fixate security, social, economic and cultural policies within the consciousness of the brainwashed individual or group. The shock leaves its victims intellectually numbed, psychologically paralyzed, and prone to conform. Conformity, however, Daqqah argues, is not a fate, for several liberation movements and anti-colonial struggles were able to overcome the imperial ‘shock.’ Therefore, the barbarity of Israel’s atrocities, during al-Aqsa Intifada, aimed at mirroring a state of defeat and surrender between the two prisons. Through heavy military and propaganda bombardment of Palestinians, Israel carried-out a collective brainwashing to eradicate resistance whereby forcing them to internalize defeat through the notion of living without war, neither heroes nor victims, alas, by colonial standards.

17Going a step further in problematizing prison duality in the whole of Palestine, Daqqah engages Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to investigate Palestinian subjectivity. Shabas cloned what happened in the larger enclaves inside the smaller prisons utilizing the panopticon as an absolute surveillance technology to implement the schemata of power over prisoners, be it sovereign, disciplinary, bio, or autonomous. [25] This architectural model has not been used only for security matters, but also to re-form consciousness of the Palestinian self where captives are transformed into bearers of the power they are subjugated to, agents for their jailer/colonizer who interminably aims at fragmenting their entity, privatizing their struggle, and conjuring a conformant ‘alternative leadership’ liable-to-be a ‘peace partner.’ Here, the Palestinian is also transformed from a progressive self within a unique social collective that has its own values, rights, and national character, into a tamed, passive self with a molded consciousness. Such a self is preoccupied with its own individual salvation that does not go beyond daily life needs, themselves created and decided by the jailer/colonizer.

18The lasting transformation of modalities of power by which Israel dealt with Palestinians, and political prisoners in particular, is not limited to their solid physical conditions. Daqqah suggests that aspects of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity found currency even within the walls of Israeli prisons, not only at the levels of consumption, privatization of services, exchange of information, but also at the level of national values. [26] Daqqah contends that Israel combined both solid and liquid modernity in what he calls ‘comprehensive occupation’ [27] controlling both Palestinians’ space and time to target their consciousness. Within this spatiotemporal matrix, Palestinian prisoners witnessed new modes of fluidity in their social relations, where all the evils of conspicuous consumerism, spectacle resistance, and fragmentation on the outside have been mirrored inside prisons. In addition, there was an unimagined leap in their relations with the prison colonial Israeli mechanisms: While PA ‘cooperation’ with Israel has become full-fledged complicity, on the security level in particular, in exchange for legitimacy, prisons witnessed an unprecedented emergence of prisoner-functionaries (Kapo), [28] which Daqqah himself has been paying a high price for confronting.

Palestinianism re-membered

19Living such realities, according to Daqqah, was not only an ontological experience, but also a philosophical reality of living in a ‘parallel time’ - a concept he coined to depict life in prison juxtaposed to ‘social time’ experienced in the outside. The concept appeared in two literary forms: The letter of Parallel Time (2005), and the lyrical play The Story of the Forgotten in the Parallel Time (2011). This work was rendered into a theatrical play The Story of Parallel Time (2014) produced by al-Maidan Theater in Haifa, [29] and sparked a frenzied controversy and was received with animosity by Israelis. [30] While the letter invokes defining historical moments through which the Zionist settler colonial regime evolved to dominate Palestinian time as early as 1947, the play depicts life under incarceration during al-Aqsa Intifada. Although saddening and alarming, both pieces are among Daqqah’s most eloquent writings showing how prisoners claim agency via knowledge production with the potential to break the lingering ‘parallel time’ and reinserting them in the living flow of ‘social time, ’ hereby making Palestinian political prisoners freedom fighters anew.

20From the Cold War to al-Aqsa Intifada, Palestinian prisoners have been cut off from the external world, isolation that is illustrated by the existence of countless inventions introduced in today’s daily life to which they do not relate. “Tubeless tires” are among those inventions that Daqqah uses as a parody of politicians who steer Palestinian life in a rusted vehicle, but, alas, do not waste a chance to step on nails without having the courtesy of self-repair. Although Palestinian prisoners live a unique situation that is unmatched throughout the world, such as having a ministry without a State, Daqqah expressed his bitter dismay: “We are part of a history, and history obviously is a state of past events that have ended, except for us; for us it is a continuous past that never ends. We communicate with you from it as a present that shouldn’t be your future. Our time is different from yours, for time here does not pace itself on the axis of past, present, and future. Our time, which flows in the lingering place, dropped the concepts of conventional time and space from our language, or it confused them, if you wish. Here, we don’t ask when and where we shall meet, for example, for we have met and keep meeting at the same place. Here, we travel at ease, back and forth, on the axis of the past and present, and every moment, post presentness, is an unknown future that we are not capable to deal with. We have no control over our future, and our case is quite similar to that of all Arab peoples. Yet, there is a substantial difference: our occupation is foreign and theirs is Arab. Here we are in captivity because we search for a future, while their future has been buried alive.” [31]

21In addition to its political and moral significance, Parallel Time shows how the political prisoners of 1948 were lost in negotiations. It seems to have brought Daqqah and his intellectual enterprise to be acknowledged through, or perhaps, lost in translation within Israeli circles - mind you from Hebrew, and with a misspelled name - Daka. The bright side is that Daqqah’s Parallel Time was translated (from Hebrew, not Arabic, to English) by a critical Israeli journalist, [32] while a shortened version of his Consciousness Molded was published in a volume co-edited by a Jewish Israeli academic and Arab lawyer. [33] On the dark side, however, a Zionist theory vulture, ironically a ‘former prison officer in the Israeli military, ’ dared to question such a positionality-which underscores the pretense of giving voice to ‘incarcerated Palestinians.’ He admits that the unspeakable act of “giving a voice itself can, in some cases, be a colonial endeavor of a dangerous epistemological kind,” [34] yet, he did just that! The question here is what makes a former perpetrator self-proclaim such a positionality in giving voice, no matter in what tone, to ‘incarcerated Palestinians, ’ mind you, not to Palestinian political prisoners. The just cause of the prisoners - who fought within the Palestinian national movement against the Zionist settler-colonial movement and its pariah State of Israel - has been subjected to a gross distortion by being badly depoliticized through this violent double act of misrepresentation and misinterpretation. This immoral stance, both of over-imposing ill-informed positionality and depoliticized theorization, constitutes yet a layer of colonial violence.

22While it is not squarely untrue that Palestinian prisoners did not conform to the different modes of ‘docile sovereignty’ - that aimed at crafting sub-non-national subjectivities among them-constructing their counter-subjectivity was not, by any means, a mere ‘practice of freedom’ in the Foucauldian sense. [35] Hence, transforming Palestinian prisoners, as former freedom fighters, into ‘politicians of freedom’ who make a good case for ‘Decarceration Theory, ’ is adding insult to their injury. That is, insinuating that Palestinian prisoners, after all these years in captivity, are not entitled to freedom, but only to undertake ‘practices of freedom’ within the walls of human-zoo-like prison facilities - is outrageously immoral.

23There is no doubt that Foucault is the hero in theorizing the prison, but he constitutes a never-hero when it comes to settler colonialism in Palestine. [36] Not to mention that, such theory vultures avoid to use postcolonial dictum in their work, especially in Israel, however masterly demonstrated by others. [37] They dare not to frame Israel as colonialism, more precisely settler colonialism, so they hyphenate their titles - ‘Israel-Palestine’ - to conflate between the oppressor and the oppressed as to collapse the moral non-equivalence. Nonetheless, there is a plethora of literature that illustrates the status of Palestinian political prisoners according to international humanitarian law, [38] and the dangers of de-politicizing their cause by labeling them ‘security threats, ’ [39] thus denying legitimacy to their revolutionary violence. In his succinct account on this matter, Daqqah asserts that in Israel “two judicial systems […] in effect operating: a military system for Arabs and a civilian system for Jews.” [40] Backed by formidable political rightwing lobby, Israel’s General Security Services (GSS or Shabak in Hebrew) and the Israel Prison Service (IPS or Shabas in Hebrew) have managed, throughout the years, to institutionalize racial discrimination in the Israeli penal system between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel on three level: trials, conditions of incarceration, and the probability of obtaining pardons.

24To recapitulate, one must transcend the mere act of criticizing colonial de-politicization of the Palestinian struggle to another level that yearns for more than Said’s “permission to narrate.” [41] Rana Barakat advocates that writing history cannot be done without righting history, not only as an indigenous act of claiming agency, but as a strategy of indigenous ongoing resistance. [42] In her response to Mahmood Mamdani’s most recent work, [43] Barakat raises a loud cry against the disguise of a call to theoretical justice: “[h] ow can a continuous history, rather than one divided into phases, as Mamdani relates and many historians follow, change the way we think about the past and the future and our political imagined community? Rather than a focus on any one party or politician in 1948 Palestine, can politics also be read on a continuum in relation to a liberationist praxis and through an attention to the conceptual possibilities involved in survivance. Where do we locate peoplehood and alternative political communities in this vision? Is de-Zionization of Israel, Palestine?” [44]

Seeds of Hope

25Married to activist Sana’Salamah on August 11^th, 1999 in Askalan Prison, preoccupied with the desire to father a child as early as 2003, denied conjugal visits, and facing titanic difficulties in ‘liberating’ semen for artificial insemination, Daqqah wrote a series of stories for children that reverses the whole course of events. In 2017, he released the first part of a trilogy: The Oil’s Secret Tale, [45] followed by The Sword’s Secret Tale in 2021, [46] while The Spirit’s Secret Tale is still a manuscript. The three stories, consecutively, narrate the lives of prisoners, refugees, and martyrs who inhabit the marginalized geographies, alive in popular imagination, and almost absent from the Palestinian establishment’s official discourse.

26Since its release in September 2018, The Oil’s Secret Tale has achieved wide acclamation throughout Palestine and beyond, yet triggered a huge controversy, and several events to celebrate the book were banned by Israel. [47] Upon its publication, an audio recording by Daqqah was circulated, explaining the aim of writing the story and allowing Joud - the 6-year-old protagonist who came into the world through artificial insemination - to triumph over the Zionist State by visiting his father: “Prison is not the only thing that holds us captive with its walls and barbed wire. If you ask me the most important conclusion I’ve arrived at throughout the three decades and half I spent in captivity, I would say that we lost Palestine not because we are weak, but because we are weak and divided due to ignorance. Ignorance is our most furious enemy, it’s more dangerous than prisons, as it transforms your mind into a prison-cell in which your future and the future of generations to come are held captive. My motive in writing The Oil’s Secret Tale was not creative writing but rather sumud (steadfastness) in captivity, for sumud was not possible throughout these long years, without liberating my mind from its prison cell, little by little. As much as I yearn for liberation from prison, I yearn for liberating prison from myself. What caused me the most pain is that through my captivity I ‘lived’ with the grandfather, the father, and the son, and I recognized a scenario that keeps repeating itself, as if captivity is inherited. Therefore, I wanted Joud to emerge from The Oil’s Secret Tale against all odds, and to forge a path that does not lead to prison. I wanted him to think of a future that is different from ours. I wanted to release the imagination for these generations in order to be released from the scenarios that have been scripted for us and that we have scripted for the next generations, and a whole nation that entered captivity. I write to release myself from prison, with a hope to release it from myself.” [48]

27Daqqah’s work is not only a rich example of revolutionary poetics, but also a philosophical endeavor showing the popular politics of hope in the heavy presence of hapless official Palestinian politics. [49] Daqqah’s adolescents’ trilogy bear more than an example of the so-called ‘practices of freedom.’ Like most of Daqqah’s oeuvre, the trilogy reflects political, social, and pedagogical activism.

28While writing and theorizing the possibility of having a child for almost two decades, Milad (Arabic for ‘Birth’) came into the world through a liberated seed for artificial insemination. After nine months of risky pregnancy and labor, Sana’ gave birth to their first daughter Milad in Nazareth on February 3^rd, 2020. [50] After Milad was born, Daqqah was sent to solitary confinement for six months, Sana’ was denied visits, and Milad was refused a birth certificate, for she was considered ‘illegally’ born by Israel’s Ministry of Interior. This bio-scene reinforces Daqqah’s take on the possibility of separating the corporal from the intellectual, hence reversing the linear Hegelian slave-master dichotomy in crafting prisoners’ subjectivity in relation to their Zionist jailers. [51] This very act of liberating future, in the disguise of a prisoner’s seed, is no longer a metaphor, but rather a challenge to the normative course of history, a revolutionary act in its own merit, an indigenous triumph of parallel humans par excellence.