The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel-Palestine and The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: Resistance and Disobedience

Abstract

In the history of Palestinian resistance, whether the fellah, the fedayee, the shaheed, there is a conviction of their aims, even if it results in death or injury to the body, and there is a consciousness of the risks prior to enacting the chosen mode of resistance. However, Ajour is contributing to Palestinian resistance literature by analyzing the spiritual dimension of resistance reflected by, on the one hand, the individual decision to propel the striker forward nearer to death, and on the other hand, calling attention to the internal dialogue around individual and collective considerations. Part of the spiritual dimension is the motivation of love. Love for one’s family, love for one’s homeland, and love for dignity, freedom, and humanity as grounding principles and desires in making their decisions to strike and to continue. Reclaiming humanity by controlling one’s body, and in turn preventing the colonizer from controlling it, further disrupts and frustrates the colonial regime’s need to control and mediate all facets of Palestinian life. In so doing, the Palestinian hunger striker, even if temporarily, offers a revolutionary modality through which freedom is imagined and felt. In summary, Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body gives voice to the courageous hunger strikers, their experiences and their ideas around the resistance practice they have endured. It is through their words and analyses that the book is constructed. This book models an accountable research methodology that centers lived experience in a way that truly honors the strikers, their families, and the collective experience of the Palestinian hunger strike. And it is through this research, and through the words of the strikers themselves, that we gain new lenses and analyses about the stakes of resistance, political imprisonment in relation to settler colonialism, and the hunger strike as a move toward dignity and freedom; the possibilities of life through risking death.