Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body

Abstract

Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body intervenes on the topic of resistance and offers a new perspective on the post-Oslo, post-2000s intifada phase of the Palestinian struggle. Its analysis of hunger strikes sheds light on different forms of resistance and in doing so contends with the tension present in the choice to categorize such political action as individual or collective. It asks what these two analytical frames provide within a larger assessment of Palestinian resistance traditions historically perceived as collective. In examining the imprisonment of Palestinians, this book delves into their lived experiences and offers tools for expanding the frameworks of other fields. For example, in the case of carceral studies, the book’s specific focus on the hunger strike and the infrastructure of Israeli prisons informs a more nuanced approach for thinking about imprisonment. While carceral studies often centers the US prison system, which is deeply rooted in racial regimes of slavery, captivity, and the management of excess bodies from society that informs the logic of criminality in the US legal system, Israeli imprisonment of Palestinians is understood as political imprisonment of the noncitizen, whereby torture is normalized and criminality takes on a vastly different meaning. In both contexts, prisoners regard their experiences as conditions of the “living dead” (12) while enduring different repressive practices of carceral regimes. These elements complement and further expand the possible analyses of the function of racialized carceral regimes. As such, the study of the Israeli prison system offers additional dimensions for thinking through the politics and practices of imprisonment on various populations and how criminality is differentially understood based on context. In relation to settler-colonial studies, this contribution illuminates the embeddedness of the prison system within the settler-colonial structure and thus makes visible another type of Indigenous erasure. As the settler’s existence is dependent on the erasure of the native, and Palestinian survival is seen as a looming demographic threat, the carceral state offers another avenue in which to implement Indigenous erasure through captivity. This book offers a striker-centered narrative and analysis of the act of hunger strike as a personal engagement of mind, body, and soul as well as a collective experience of sumud and self-determined resistance. The individual act of hunger striking forces the occupier into a negotiation with the striker. This dialectical challenge of power serves a collective, national struggle through an individualized resistance modality, which shows that when a