The freedom fighter Walid Daqqa, who spent 38 years in captivity, wrote this article for "Al-Hadath" newspaper during the recent campaign of repression against him. Before his murder in Zionist prisons, he was subject to arbitrary transfer, isolation, and deprivation of visits as punishment for his intellectual work, and for facilitating the birth of his daughter Milad, through the smuggling of sperm, with his wife Sanaa Salama on February 3rd, 2020. This article, written from prison in three installments, contains insights and depth that offer lessons in reclaiming the unifying spirit to rebuild what has collapsed of a Palestinian national identity caught between the project of national liberation and the project of state building.
At a time when the culture of deeply engaging literature is declining in favor of a culture that privileges the consumption of the image and the short text, the importance of the former grows in prisons. In the prisons, this deep culture functions as a tool of the prisoners' individual steadfastness, on the one hand benefiting from their isolation from the world of technology, the internet and social media. On the other hand, this culture also benefits from the increasing rationalization of the prisoners’ reality due to the consequences of this development on his life and the need to confront his reality. For prisoners, modernity seeps into their world through their jailer, who relies on modern tools and complex human engineering to detain and suppress them.
If, in the reality of the nation-state, modern systems have weakened its sovereignty and its ability to control the educational process, and have introduced into its cultural programs, under the pressure of globalization, values that have fragmented society and weakened its cohesion, then these tools, in the context of imprisonment, have transformed prisons into closed institutions of total surveillance and pressure, leaving no trace that can be clearly identified or confronted with the old national discourse. It also doesn’t point to it as a cause for feelings of weakness, or pain, or even as a violation that human rights institutions can document.
When your material reality weakens, and becomes simple in its options during confrontation, your vision is supposed to become clearer. But when your enemy is armed with all scientific means, you are materially defeated before them, left on the ground unable to face them, and even worse, unable to explain your defeat and weakness or even to scream. In the absence of a national organizational tool like a liberation movement, it falls on you as an individual to refuse to be fragmented or scattered, to cling to your narrative, repeating it to yourself before shouting it to others so that you do not forget who you are.
If, as nationalists, we once faced informants and agents — agents of colonialism and occupation — using the tools and discourse of the liberation movement (the "dog Abu Nab/with the fangs" phase), then, in the post-modern occupation state, we face attempts to alter consciousness through manipulation and infiltrate the awareness of individuals, making them drift where the occupier desires using their tools (the "hyena phase"). The hyena, in folklore, does not devour you; it first hypnotizes you, making you lose your will and awareness to the point where you start calling it "father," and you only wake up when your head crashes against the wall of its cave, causing you to bleed. The bloodshed from the head, rather than any other part of the body, symbolizes in this tale the need to regain consciousness to reclaim your stolen will.
In this sense, freedom as a value vis-à-vis liberation as a project takes on a new meaning under occupation in the post-modern time, as a condition of will. Big Brother (George Orwell) has turned into a monitor, in an attempt to imitate him, echo his vocabulary, or consume his product. You, live on air, willingly and publicly disclose your most intimate details to the occupier, surrendering your freedom while deluded that you are exercising it. In reality, you are merely hypnotized, echoing behind the occupier, calling him "father."
The post-modern prison experienced by the prisoners’ movement has become more complex today, requiring us to deconstruct and understand it as a reality so that we can redefine torture or pain. More sophisticated tools or discourse or culture, appealing to the mind more than before, are necessary to understand and confront imprisonment in this era. In the modern era, the division was clear, especially in Arab dictatorships, where a jailer wielding a baton and a prisoner with cuffed wrists made the scene of imprisonment starkly clear and simple.
When the distance between "us" and "them" is as clear as the difference between winter and summer in prison, where there is no use for intermediate seasons, no blossoming almonds, and no falling autumn leaves, certainty becomes alluring and comforting, not requiring serious challenge. Instead, we settle into collective discourse, raising spirits and encouraging steadfastness. The righteousness of the path needs no proof; it is as clear as the shackles. Collective discourse, by nature, is ideologically and emotionally charged and its vocabulary primarily focuses on material steadfastness, thus it simplifies political culture into one of good and evil people, and reduces struggle into a single form. We thus distance ourselves from the foundational narrative we began with and draw closer to the nation-state, or so it seems, while moving further from the homeland.
When the cell, in the post-modern era of Israeli prisons, ceases to fulfill some of its functions — deprivation of light and concealment — but retains its third function — imprisonment that withholds sunlight from the prisoner without hiding him shackled in dark underground dungeons — this does not mean that the prison has become less horrific or brutal. Instead, it has shifted its focus from targeting the prisoner’s body to targeting his mind, turning his mind into a literal cell and his senses into tools of torture.
In this context and with the new meaning of imprisonment, which can be summarized under the title: "Torture yourself, by yourself," followed by the slogan "Educate yourself, by yourself," education among the prisoners’ movement takes on importance not only as a tool of national steadfastness — especially since factional cultural discourse, such as the culture of "Know Your Enemy,” has mostly disappeared after the Oslo Accords, and what remains is no longer able to explain the national reality, particularly the reality of prisoners and its complexities — but also as a means of personal steadfastness and a necessity to maintain mental and psychological balance to preserve the self as a human and moral value first, and as a national value second.
The education presented by the factions to the prisoners until the late 1980s, derived from the principle of democratic centralism, served as a beacon illuminating our direction, near and far, from the shore and the safety of the homeland, or so it seemed to us. Our certainty appeared at a time when politics had not yet separated from economics, and the values of the individual and the collective were still intertwined in a national fabric we called the "liberation movement." Today, in confronting the post-modern reality, culture resembles an individual compass or a GPS for each prisoner searching for his conviction, after the factions formed one exactly like the nation-state that abandoned its historical functions, in favor of the neoliberal globalization economy, and its role in shaping the national identity, leaving its citizens to face their fate with their individual strength.
Thus, the national liberation movement abandoned its roles in favor of Oslo, giving up the idea of the homeland for the sake of the state. As a result, liberation and sovereignty are gnawing away at the homeland and the historical narrative, and freedom has been annihilated by security persecution. This has left the prisoner, observing the Palestinian reality from within his cell, confused, transforming the task of imbuing the national identity into an individual mission for each prisoner.
Identities, even if they are imaginary, or as some call them “collective imagination,” a certainty that we imagine, and a story that we tell ourselves as peoples so that reality remains comprehensible to us — in captivity, they are the last stronghold of the rational mind. They produce your ‘self’ and your identity and they charge it with new moral and national meanings to maintain your balance in the shadow of a crazy reality. You, as an individual, discover, with your own strength, the importance of the collective. You reformulate your collective ties by championing the story that you tell yourself, not according to your collective Palestinian reality as it is, which leads you to frustration and madness, but according to imaginations that seek to produce your mind, or more accurately, your rationality. Exactly like the hunger striker whose body is devoid of any energy, devoid but with rational purpose, as he stopped depriving himself of food, for which if he continued would lead him to certain death.
Here, prisoners discover the experience without text. They learn, on their own skin, that "man does not live by bread alone.” But this realization shapes the inner self. In collaborating with the jailer or the occupier, they come to understand that "there is no Torah without flour." In striving to resolve the dilemma between the two sayings, the prisoner discovers the importance of this tension between bread and Torah in shaping two types of reasonings — the instrumental reasoning and the rationality that encompasses the needs of the spirit, heart, and morality. Pluralism then becomes a constructive force rather than destructive force in defining the homeland. The Marxist draws closer to the Islamist, and the religious to the secular, all within a framework of identity that neither negates nor demonizes the other, and makes the possibility of working together the core of a shared truth. In this context, academic study had played a significant role in shaping such awareness and transforming it into tangible behavior and reality.
The cultural text that charges identity amidst imprisonment is not necessarily a written text. Rather, it is often a set of daily behaviors and stances through which prisoners reproduce their collective national and moral values. By doing so, they expand the boundaries of their identity, turning the prisoner into a living "text," becoming open books to each other that acculturate between them. In this sense, consciousness is no longer personal but takes on a collective dimension. When the prisoner is the text of himself, and the Palestinian intellectual who can turn him into a written text is absent, away from the rhetoric of the giant of patience and its generals, the intellectual prisoner becomes both the scene and the observer, the tortured and the reporter of the torture, the abstraction and the detail at the same time. This task is difficult and often, at times, seems almost impossible.
The prison administration did not ban academic education for prisoners merely out of restrictions and revenge — although this was part of it — but because they were alarmed by the sight of hundreds of prisoners who joined the Open Hebrew University and then Palestinian universities, especially Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, as they immersed themselves in their books and pamphlets for long hours, which the jailer wanted to be a time that would steal the soul and empty it.
Academic studies have provided prisoners with scientific tools to confront their reality. For the first time, they were exposed to theories in social sciences, politics, international relations, and other fields. Through these studies, far removed from slogans and ideological rhetoric, they realized that the Palestine they had fought for, been pursued for, and for which their comrades had been martyred, was not fully known to them. It is no exaggeration to say that academic studies served as a guardian of awareness in the absence of cultural and national mobilization. Rather they prevented the distortion of consciousness amidst the Palestinian division, which has become a research topic for student prisoners.
Meeting prisoners from all factions in study circles provided an opportunity for objective discussion of national concerns and an exercise in democratic dialogue. Additionally, the Israeli Studies master’s program, which requires proficiency in Hebrew, offered a chance to understand the 'other,' not merely through the lens of 'know your enemy,' which is limited to security and military knowledge, but through understanding the intellectual and religious foundations behind their colonial project. Nonetheless, the percentage of student prisoners relative to the total number of prisoners remains a small elite, and they have yet to significantly influence the direction of the national and prisoner movements, especially as this experience is confined to Hadarim Prison.