The recent death of Nelson Mandela led many to reflect not only on his impact and legacy in South Africa, but on the role of “great men” in making history. Whether reflectively or not, our theories of history play a role in how we understand the constitution and the trajectory of the events around us. This is particularly important as we look to situations of protracted conflict as these theories can inform questions such as how does conflict begin, how is conflict sustained and how can conflict be resolved or transformed? In a place like Palestine, one might identify at least a certain version of the “great men” theory of history at work when we hear questions like: Where is the Palestinian Gandhi (or Mandela, or King)? This question is often posed as observers survey both what appears to be an intractable conflict in Palestine-Israel as well as what they see as the predominance of Palestinian violence as either cause of and/or response to Israeli military occupation. The implication is that if there was a Palestinian leader who could lead a mass program of nonviolent direct action—like Gandhi in British colonial controlled India—Palestinians could finally be successful in ending the occupation and realizing political self-determination in the establishment of a state. The main questions explored in this paper will include: What has been the shape of nonviolent resistance in Palestine? How has this resistance been discursively fixed or destabilized? It gives particular attention to the persistence of certain understandings and articulations of nonviolent resistance that are expressed in questions such as “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” and offers a critique drawing from postcolonial theory as well as suggestions for future research, including an interrogation of the religious/secular binary. From a scholarly perspective, this topic is important not least in how it provides greater attention to the constitutive role of marginalized people in the production of concepts and practices of resistance, helping us to better understand overlooked and seemingly everyday practices. From a practical perspective, it aids in our recognition of the colonialist legacy latent in contemporary peacebuilding theory and practice and reminds us to constantly rethink the ways we inhabit a world shaped by colonial history. From a policy perspective, it allows us to examine the manner in which power is projected, presenting a “de-centering” as it discusses expressions of social organization and political subjectivity besides the state.

The question of how Palestinians should engage with the Israeli legal system is complicated for prisoners and detainees, whose current and future situations, both individual and collective, are inherently intertwined with that system. From the early days of the occupation, in addition to pursuing judicial proceedings, international law, or other traditional justice mechanisms, prisoners have engaged in acts of extra-legal resistance, aimed at making the prison system itself unworkable. Actions have included the development of alternative institutions (such as political, financial, and educational systems within the prisons), noncooperation (such as refusing to comply prison protocols or refusing to work), refusal of family or lawyer visits, refusal of meals, and prolonged hunger strikes. Such acts of resistance, including recent hunger strikes, have had a reverberating effect, diffusing beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the physical prison institutions to influence policy and inspire local, national, and international activism. Indeed, prisoners’ resistance has managed to preserve some sense of internal political unity despite external political fracturing, and has also maintained the support of the general population when support for political parties was lacking. Finally, the prisoners’ movement has been able to maintain a spirit of resistance that challenges the perceived complacency of political leaders in recent years. This paper assesses the short and long term impacts of prison-based resistance among activist networks, and examines how hunger strikes in particular resonate in unique ways from other forms of activism. I briefly summarize the history of the prisoners’ movement, and I explain the system of alternative institutions that prisoners developed. Using the 2011-2013 hunger strikes as a case study, I then discuss the short-term impact of prisoners’ resistance on rights in the prisons, the national struggle, and international solidarity efforts. Lastly, I describe the long-term impact of prison-based resistance on individual prisoners, the state, and the national movement. The paper is based on interviews conducted by the author with former political prisoners and current activists in Palestine.

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to coordinated and explicitly political protest actions in Palestine. Less has been written about quotidian resistance, although it is equally central to Palestinian strategy, as is reflected in the axiom, “to exist is to resist.” In this paper, I argue that Palestinian public transit usage is one form of everyday anti-occupation politics, posing an implied protest against the Israeli military’s systematic restrictions of movement in the West Bank. I draw from Middle East Sociologist Asef Bayat, who complicates mainstream understandings of social movements in his studies of “everyday life as politics.” Analyzing various case studies in the Middle East, Bayat draws attention to the “non-movements” of the dispossessed – the shared though uncoordinated practices of the public that pose an implied, collective challenge to the state policies of which they run afoul. In the context of Palestine, Bayat only acknowledges the more traditional, concerted social movement politics against which he is contrasting non-movements, but I argue that Palestinian non-movements are, in fact, an increasingly effective threat to the Israeli occupation. Against a backdrop of strict limitations and hindrances to movement created by the Israeli system of checkpoints, travel permits, road restrictions, and more, public movement throughout the West Bank becomes an unequivocal protest, though not undertaken or articulated for that purpose. Palestinian transit, then, enables what Bayat calls “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” the essence of the non-movement, and forces the Israeli military to deal with the moving presence of the subject population it seeks to immobilize. In other words, against the Israeli goal to impose a condition of non-movement on Palestinians in the West Bank, they resist through their own “non-movement” of moving about on public transportation.

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.

In this paper, the intertwining trajectories of Palestinian citizens and the Israeli-Zionist state are a window into the dialectic relationship that exists between ‘power’ and ‘resistance’. Ever in contention, ever in conversation, dynamics of power and resistance dislodge, dislocate and displace one another, transformed through their intersections and interactions. Thus to understand Palestinian struggle is to see it as part of the field of force. Situated in and surrounded by the colonial context, it mirrors its logics and fetishisations, shares its language and its ethos. And yet, because it is a colonial story, this relationship is articulated in binaries, dichotomies and partitions. The Israeli colonial geography is determined in the ethnicisation of territory, in which the indigenous Palestinian is always othered, outside and absent; a threat to be removed and then replaced. And yet, Palestinian citizens, who make up 20% of the country populous, are inducted into the political and spatial order of the state, permeated by and permeating the Zionist project, even as they are explicitly excluded from it. The material expression of this tension is the production of Palestinian enclaves and frontiers; spaces that are always under siege, increasingly constricted and contained, inherently segregated and illegitimate within the hegemonic order. Palestinian resistance is thus produced in relation to the deep chasms, ghettos and fractures that colour the ethnocratic, settler-colonial landscape. The locus of which is anchored in the fight for Palestinian land and space, against (and enclosed within) the Judaising logic of the Israeli state. In this paper, different facets of Palestinian land struggles are explored in their encounters with the multiple borders that attempt to contain them. The analysis is based on more than 2 years of ethnographic field-work with three contemporary cases of community land-struggles: A popular movement for housing rights (and thus survival) in Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jaffa-Tel Aviv; an enduring protest-movement against the Judaization project in the Galilee region; and the existential struggle for land rights of Bedouin communities in the southern desert. Through investigating their moments of containment, contention and transgression, we unravel how resistance is entangled with the structures of power. And through analysis of these everyday and insurgent struggles, we gage how the boundary lines – and thus the structures of power that define them – are produced and reproduced; how they are challenged, unveiled and disarticulated, and even transcended and transformed.