The Palestinian Prisoners Movement

Resistance and Disobedience

Julie M. Norman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000410914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Providing a contemporary history of the Palestinian prisoners movement, this book illustrates the centrality of the movement in the broader Palestinian national struggle. Based on direct interviews with former prisoners and former security sector personnel, it offers new insights into the strategies that prisoners employed to gain rights over time, as well as the tactics used by prison authorities to maintain control.

Prisons have functioned as microcosms of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, with the Israeli state aiming to use mass incarceration for security, and Palestinian prisoners seeking to take back the prison space for organizing and resistance. Prisoners' actions included but were not limited to hunger strikes, as prisoners often relied more on everyday acts of noncompliance and developing an internal "counterorder" to challenge authorities. The volume demonstrates how the Palestinian prisoners movement was intertwined with the Palestinian national movement, strongest in the popular mobilization era of the 1970s and 1980s, and significantly weaker and more fragmented after the Oslo Accords of the 1990s and the second intifada.

Presenting a fresh analysis of a central, but often overlooked aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the volume offers valuable reflections on prison-based resistance in protracted conflicts more broadly. It is a key resource to students and scholars interested in contemporary conversations on mass incarceration, criminal justice, Middle East politics and history.

1 Introduction

The experience of incarceration impacts nearly all Palestinian communities¹ in some way, regardless of geographic location, socioeconomic standing, or political affiliation. Approximately 20 percent of the Palestinian population (and close to 40 percent of the Palestinian male population) have been detained or imprisoned at least once (Addameer 2016a, 4), including an estimated 500–700 minors every year (Defence for Children International (DCI)) 2017). Some detainees have been in prison for decades, while others have been held for days or weeks at a time in detention, and others have been arrested on multiple occasions. Widespread incarceration began after the 1967 war, coinciding with the start of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.²

From the early days of imprisonment however, Palestinian prisoners have mobilized to claim rights and improve conditions by engaging in acts of resistance that challenge the status quo of the prison system. Actions have included the development of alternative institutions (such as political, financial, and educational systems within the prisons), non-cooperation (such as refusing to comply with prison protocols or refusing to work), refusal of family or lawyer visits, refusal of meals, and individual and collective hunger strikes. Prisoners have used these tactics (in addition to judicial proceedings, international law, and other justice mechanisms) to secure rights within the prison, challenge their detention or incarceration, and further the Palestinian national movement. However, the story of the Palestinian prisoners movement has rarely been told. As one former prisoner stated:

The prisoners movement was not well documented. So we need to rewrite the story from the beginning to give it the attention it deserves. If we decide to do that, then we will realize the effect of the prisoners’ movement.

(interview with author 2014)

Gaining insight into the prisoners’ experience in general, and the prisoners’ role in activism and resistance in particular, is thus crucial for understanding the Palestinian national struggle, the relevance of prisoner releases in any future peace process, and the relation between prisoners’ movements and political resistance in protracted conflicts. The aims of this book are twofold: first, to situate the Palestinian prisoners movement in the broader Palestinian national struggle, and second to understand the dynamics of political dissent in prison and detention spaces where opportunities for traditional resistance are severely limited. I begin however with a brief historical overview of prison-based resistance from an international perspective.

Prison-based resistance from a global perspective

Political resistance in prisons extends well beyond the Palestinian case, functioning as an integral element in various struggles, with tactics including hunger strikes, labor strikes, and other acts of refusal or disobedience.³ In the early twentieth century, hunger strikes were first employed by imprisoned suffragettes in Britain. Approximately 1,000 women were incarcerated between 1905 and 1914 for suffrage activities (Purvis 1995), with the first hunger strike employed in July 1909. In the following decade, hunger strikes and other forms of prison resistance, including refusal to wear prison clothing or do penal labor, were used by Irish prisoners in the Irish struggle for independence. Thomas Ashe, imprisoned for participating in the 1916 Easter Uprising, died after being force-fed during a hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison, and three years later, Terence MacSwiney was the first prisoner allowed to die after 73 days of hunger strike in Brixton Prison. There were at least 30 more hunger strikes in Ireland between August 1918 and October 1923, culminating with a collective strike involving approximately 8,000 Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners protesting the division of the island following the Irish War of Independence, as well as their continued detention under the new Irish Free State (Healy 1982).

The hunger strike tactic was reprised by Irish prisoners during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In May 1972, republican prisoners in the Crumlin Road Gaol launched a hunger strike to demand political status, in addition to improving prison conditions. This hunger strike, initiated by prisoners independently of the IRA leadership outside, importantly influenced the inclusion of prisoner status as an IRA pre-condition for talks with the British, resulting in the granting of “Special Category Status.” Though less than the official political status sought by prisoners, Special Category Status allowed for de facto POW-style lifestyles in the prisons, including free association and abstention from prison work and prison uniforms.

The revocation of Special Category Status in 1976 eventually led to the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze/Long Kesh Prison, led by Bobby Sands, in which ten men died. The demands of the hunger strike were essentially to return to the conditions allowed by Special Category Status: the right to not wear a prison uniform; the right not to do prison work; the right of free association with other prisoners for educational and recreational activities; the right to one visit, letter, and parcel per week; and the full restoration of remission lost through the protest. While the strike was called off before demands were met, partial concessions were granted soon after, although special status was never restored. Moreover, the hunger strike “attracted massive international and domestic political attention to the prisoners’ demands and led to a direct political gain” (BBC “The Search for Peace: Hunger Strike”).

Other politically motivated hunger strikes in recent years include a “death fast” by hundreds of political prisoners in Turkey in 2000 (Bargu 2014); frequent hunger strikes by political dissidents in Cuban prisons, resulting in deaths in 2010 and 2012 (Amnesty International 2012); and intermittent hunger strikes by detainees at the United States’ Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp. In most of these cases, the aims of the hunger strikes were two-fold; first, to gain specific rights for the detainees involved; and second, to call public attention to the issue of political imprisonment.

Along with hunger strikes, prisoners in Ireland, South Africa, Israel-Palestine, and elsewhere have used labor strikes from prison work as a form of resistance. Perhaps some of the most notable labor strikes were organized by prisoners in forced labor camps in Russia’s gulag, when hunger strikes and other forms of resistance failed. One of the most prominent Soviet prison labor strikes took place in 1953, following the death of Joseph Stalin, when approximately 10,000 miners went on strike in Vorkuta Camp, one of the most notorious camps in the Gulag (Popa 2010). As Scholmer (1963) notes, “although the concessions eventually granted by the authorities were relatively minor… had the strike been emulated by other communities, industrial production would have declined drastically and with it might have come a collapse of the political system itself” (187). As it was, the strike achieved some minor concessions before it was quelled, and news of the strike spread through both the prison and civilian populations as a rare example of resistance against the regime.

Strikes are just one form of prison resistance. In the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn documents a number of prisoner actions, including protests, escapes, and mutinies, in addition to hunger strikes and labor strikes (1973). In Ireland, Palestine, and South Africa, a range of other tactics were usually used before a strike. In Northern Ireland for example, the 1981 hunger strike followed years of prison resistance including the blanket protest, which lasted from 1976–1981, in which prisoners refusing to wear the prisoner uniform wrapped themselves only in prison blankets; and the dirty protest, from 1978–1981, in which prisoners refused to wash, and, unable to leave their cells to empty their chamber pots, smeared their excrement on the cell walls. Other acts of protest ranged from simply refusing to comply with orders, such as refusing to be counted or refusing to address guards with honorifics, to prison riots and rebellions.

In addition to acts of refusal, prisoners have also resisted through creating their own systems of self-governance and education within prisons. Even in the Gulag, prisoners in the Soviet Kengir Camp managed to take control for 40 days in 1954 and establish their own provisional government as well as religious and cultural activities (Solzhenitsyn 1973; Kramer 1978). In Burma in the 1970s, as Fink (2001) notes, detainees made the prison into a “life university;” “despite the miserable living conditions, activists endeavor[ed] to find ways to engage in political debates and to learn from each other… to create a community, maintain their morale, and improve themselves” (171). Likewise, as Buntman (2003) writes, prisoners managed to transform South Africa’s Robben Island Prison from a “hell-hole to a university for political leaders,” including “a complex of educational and sporting institutions and practices,” as well as political organizations (5).

In these ways, resistance by politically motivated prisoners has taken many forms in many different contexts. However, most instances of political imprisonment since the start of the twentieth century have involved some form of prisoner resistance, even in cases of severe repression. In protracted conflicts like Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Israel-Palestine, prisoners’ movements have linked closely to the broader national struggles, and have functioned as microcosms of the wider conflicts.

Prison-based resistance and political struggle in Israel-Palestine

In Israel-Palestine, the issue of Palestinian imprisonment has deep historical, political, and social significance. Like elsewhere in the Middle East, prisons represent one element of state concentrated power (Khalili and Schwedler 2010), while also functioning as sites of resistance and dissent. Paralleling the broader Palestinian national struggle, prison-based resistance emerged soon after the start of the occupation in 1967, peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, and subsequently tapered after the Oslo peace accords and the replacement of traditional political factions with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. While lacking the organization and discipline of earlier years, prison-based resistance continued during and after the second intifada, most recently with the use of individual and collective hunger strikes to protest administrative detention (detention without charge or trial).

Initial first-hand accounts (in Arabic) of the prison experience and prison-based resistance include Qasim’s The Captivity Experience in the Zionist Jails (1986), Khalyl’s The Imprisonment Experience in the Israeli Prisons (1989), al Hindi’s The Democratic Practice of the Palestinian Prisoners Movement (2000), and Qaraqe’s The Palestinian Political Prisoners in the Israeli Prisons after Oslo: 1993–1999 (2001). Further primary source documentation of prisoners’ activities are archived in the library of the Abu Jihad Museum for Prisoner Movement Affairs at al Quds University in Abu Dis, and the Prisoners Section of the Nablus Public Library.

One of the first English-language analyses of the prisoners’ movement appeared in Maya Rosenfeld’s Confronting the Occupation: Work, Education, and Political Activism of Palestinian Families in a Refugee Camp (2004), offering ground-breaking insights into the experiences of former prisoners based on interviews with residents of Dheisheh Refugee Camp. Rosenfeld has also written on the interdependence of the prisoners movement in the national movement in Baker and Matar’s comprehensive volume Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israeli Jails (2011), which examines the issue of Palestinian imprisonment from different angles. The Palestinian prisoners experience was further examined in Esmail Nashif’s Palestinian Political Prisoners: Identity and Community (2008), which provides a rich analysis of the prisoners movement rooted in anthropological theory, especially on material and aesthetic dimensions and identity. Nahla Abdo’s Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Within the Israeli Prison System (2014) offers essential background on the often overlooked experiences of female prisoners, while situating the prisoners movement in the context of anti-colonial struggle.

This book draws from these foundational sources, but focuses less on the broad ethnography of the Palestinian prisoner experience, and more on the element of resistance as part of that experience. Furthermore, this book looks beyond the specific space of the prison to explore how the prisoners issue and the prisoners movement influences and interacts with local, national, and international activism, as well as impacts long-term approaches to security policies and peace negotiations.

Indeed, rather than operating in isolation, the prisoners movement has demonstrated a synergy over time with the broader Palestinian national movement, sometimes influencing the outside political struggle, and sometimes being influenced by external factors. Like a double-helix, the prisoners movement and the national movement have been intertwined and subject to similar constraints and shocks. Historically, the prisoners movement managed to weather some constraints more effectively than the national movement, despite of, or perhaps because of, its isolated position. Nevertheless, in the post-Oslo period, shifting political organizing both inside and outside the prisons, combined with adaptive Israeli policies to manage the prisons, has changed the nature of activism and resistance in such a way that the prisoners movement mirrors the national movement in terms of its recent weakening and fragmentation.

Many of the former prisoners interviewed for this book viewed the prisoners movement and the national movement as one and the same. As noted above, the prisoners movement was strongest when it worked in close coordination with the Palestinian political factions that led external resistance in the 1970s, 1980s, and through the first intifada, including Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). These factions became much weaker in the 1990s however, with the decline of the Leftist PFLP and DFLP after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the shift of Fatah from a resistance faction to a moderate political party in the Palestinian Authority. Furthermore, the “resistance vacuum” left by the old parties allowed for the emergence of new parties like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose tensions with Fatah in particular would eventually split the Palestinian nat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Imprisonment, Detention, and the Legal System
• 3. Resistance through Organizing: The Counterorder
• 4. Resistance through Actions: Hunger Strikes and Civil Disobedience
• 5. Palestinian Politics and Shifts After Oslo
• 6. Diffusion of Activism
• 7. Security and the State
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Hunger Strike Survey Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index