Staging the Palestinian Muslim: A Hamas’ Manual for Political Prisoners

By Esmail Nashif
English

The Israeli prison is one of the major sites for reproducing Palestinian and Israeli identities. This article focuses on how Palestinians engage with the political imprisonment experiences. Specifically, it tries to explicate the processes of channeling the realities of political imprisonment into the textual domain, and how these textual formations intervene in the prison context. At a certain stage of their institutional history, most of the Palestinian national organizations have published manuals for its cadres on how to act during their arrest and interrogation by the Israeli colonial apparatuses. Recently, Hamas published such a manual of its own titled A Conflict in the Dark. Exploring this manual ethnographically could tell us about Hamas’s different positions towards the current colonial situation. Here, the author concentrates on the textual strategies through which this manual tries to inculcate certain perceptions, structures of feelings, and attitudes towards the Israeli colonizer during, but also before and beyond, interrogation. It is argued that this process of entextualisation contributes to the construction of a definite Palestinian subject.

Keywords

  • political prisoners
  • Palestine
  • Hamas
  • prison literature
  • Israel
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info