My paper aims at an analysis of the inter-relationship between the historical development of the movement of Palestinian political prisoners and that of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation in the OPT. Part of the analysis is based on a re-evaluation of findings from an anthropological study on Palestinian political prisoners, family and community in a West Bank refugee camp, which I carried out in the 1990s. Another part benefits from a follow-up study (in progress) that explores post-prison activism, biographies, prison and post-prison writings of former political prisoners. Starting in the late 1970s and culminating in the first Intifada, the prisoners' movement enjoyed a prominent position within the OPT-based branch of the Palestinian national movement and in the public at large. I explain its elevated standing as the outcome of an empowering relationship; I argue that the comprehensive, all-encompassing, internal organization that the prisoners set up inside Israeli prisons was a forerunner, which stimulated the formation of key structures that led and sustained the popular struggle against the Occupation, especially the popular committees of the late 1980s and the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising. At the same time, the persistent Israeli policy of mass imprisonment of grassroots activists contributed to the proliferation and reinforcement of the prisoners' organization. The establishment of the PNA was followed by a large scale prisoners' release. Only a small fraction of the "pre-Oslo" prisoners remained behind bars; the movement ceased to exist, if not altogether, then in the vital role it assumed hitherto. Many former prisoners were incorporated thereafter into the PNA apparatus and the state building process, which simultaneously absorbed the rank and file of the national movement and induced the disintegration of the popular structures that nourished it. While resumption of mass imprisonment in the wake of the second Intifada led to the re-emergence of the prisoners' movement, the latter failed to gain a position of comparable magnitude, impact and authority to that of its predecessor. This received evident manifestation in the failure of the "National Conciliation Document" (2006), a prisoners' initiative to mark a way out of the Hamas–Fatah divide that haunts the Palestinian political field. My attempt to explain the movement's decline centers on two factors: the dearth of political education and paucity of organizational experience that characterized the new generation of prisoners and the inability of the Palestinian leadership to further a definite political goal through the second Intifada.