“You're Not Defeated as Long as You're Resisting”: Palestinian Hunger Strikes between the Singular and the Collective: An Interview with Lena Meari

Samera Esmeir and Ramsey McGlazer: Thank you for agreeing to discuss your engagement with the practice of the hunger strike in Palestine with Critical Times. Could you begin by explaining your understanding of the site of the hunger strikes, the Israeli colonial prison, and how it relates to Zionist settler colonialism more generally?

Lena Meari: Israeli colonial prisons are part and parcel of the Zionist settler-colonial project; they replicate its eliminationist ambitions. The elimination of the natives is an organizing principal of settler-colonial societies that aim to establish themselves on the natives' territory. The prison-as-elimination involves the killing of the colonized through their encampment, enclosure, segregation, separation, and isolation in a “living cemetery.”¹ This cemetery serves the goal of terminating anticolonial forms of life by suppressing the fight for freedom. In this sense, the Israeli colonial prison is not merely an institution of confinement. It is also a laboratory for testing modern colonial techniques of domination and designing the material conditions, management forms, and treatment methods that aim to subjugate Palestinians and terminate their struggle for freedom.

But notwithstanding their eliminationist aspirations, the settler colony and its prisons in Palestine are a project, not a secured fact. Palestinian aspirations for freedom have continued to permeate the prison, transforming it into a space of struggle, a place where prisoners struggle to interrupt colonial historical time. Within the asymmetrical power relations between the colonized and the colonizer, a ceaseless Palestinian interruption of the colonial order reproduces the understanding of Palestine as resistance. Hunger striking as an extreme, life-threatening praxis of struggle in Israeli colonial prisons exemplifies this interruption. Each singular/collective hunger strike interrupts the colonial order within and beyond the prison walls and asserts Palestinians' persistent struggle for a liberated future.

SE and RM: Can you say a bit more about the history of the hunger strike as a tactic of resistance and what you call a practice of “interruption”?

LM: The practice of Palestinian collective hunger striking dates back to the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war. As a tactic, this six-decade history is messy, nonlinear, and made up of various acts of singular and collective suffering, sacrifices, gains, and retreats. Still, the desire for freedom is the thread that ties this history together; it is the driving force that interrupts both the order of the colonial prison and the subjugation of Palestinian life in prison and beyond.

During the last decade, we have witnessed what some call “individual” hunger strikes (idrab fardi). These have emerged as a result of the regression of the Palestinian national liberation movement in the post-Oslo era. Rather than suggest that this transformation from collective to “individual” strikes indexes the demise of collective, anticolonial struggle and strike, I argue that the singular subject in struggle is also collective, in that it has the potential to politically mobilize the collective. This, I suggest, is one of the hallmarks of contemporary Palestinian hunger striking; it connects singular action and collective emancipatory struggle in ways that are impossible to appreciate within frameworks that announce or lament the demise of the latter.

SE and RM: Can you elaborate? How could—or rather, in your view, why should—the singular subject engaged in a hunger strike be understood as a collective subject?

LM: In my view, the “individual” hunger strike is a moment in the Palestinian fight for freedom that bridges past collective struggle and future, collective, liberatory struggles to come. It is, in other words, what fills the gap between past and future collective struggles for freedom,² preventing the transformation of the present into an empty, transitional period, or a stop on a one-way path leading toward retreat and defeat. Individual hunger strikes are what at present maintain the memory of past collective struggles and anticipate anticolonial collectivity-in-struggle to come. If this kind of individual-collective hunger striking is a practice that interrupts the colonial order, it is also a practice of gathering anticolonial collectivity. It recalls, activates, maintains, and anticipates a collectivity-in-struggle.

SE and RM: Perhaps we could slow down and discuss the practice of the hunger strike in more detail. Can you lay out your understanding of that practice? What does a hunger strike entail, and what concretely does it seek to achieve?

LM: The hunger strike is a form of strike that involves refraining from eating as a political act of protest. Distinct from conventional modern labor strikes in which laborers refrain from work by turning their labor into a means of struggle—a weapon—hunger strikes entail the deployment of the strikers' bodies as weapons. Hunger strikes thus risk the decay of the body, even its death. In this way, they politicize the body.

The practice of hunger striking is not uniform across time and space. It derives its particular meaning from the historical, material context in which it is situated. Writing about the praxis of the Death Fast Struggle waged between 2000 and 2007 by Turkish leftist political prisoners who protested against the introduction of high-security prisons, Banu Bargu theorizes the hunger strike as a means of making life itself into a weapon. In Bargu's argument, the weaponization of life is a tactic that uses the body as a conduit of political action. However, this weaponization is irreducible to the corporeality of the body; it involves a metaphysical element and bears on the meaning of existence and the form of life that is worth living.³

Considering the IRA (Irish Republican Army) hunger strike at the Maze prison in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1981, Allen Feldman notes the need to analyze the particularity of each hunger strike. The hunger strike, he writes, “is a dramatic and eloquent form of political expression, but its physical immediacy can obscure its performative contexts, particularly when one hunger strike is compared to or legitimized by another.”⁴

How, then, should we understand hunger strikes in their particular performative contexts, while recognizing how the hunger strike travels globally and comes to overlap with the problem of the prison? In Palestine, the captive, along with the martyr and the injured, is a vanguard figure in the struggle for liberation. All three figures symbolize the Palestinian cause for Palestinians and their supporters. The captives' hunger strike is a dramatic event not only for them but also for their families and the communities who engage in public acts of protest and solidarity. In addition, hunger strikes anchor captives' ways of narrating their political captivity.

Palestinian hunger strikes emerged from the dialectical relation between the oppressive material conditions of Israeli colonial prisons, on the one hand, and the formation of a community of Palestinian captives and a Palestinian captive movement (al-haraka al-asira), on the other.⁵ More broadly, hunger strikes echo the dialectic of oppression and resistance in the Palestinian colonial context. But this is only one part of the story. For the hunger strike, understood as one out of several practices cultivated in and through the Palestinian liberation struggle—including such practices as sumud, or, in English, “steadfastness,”⁶ and the disappearance of strugglers⁷—entails the possibility of opening a new horizon for emancipatory politics within and beyond the walls of colonial prisons. While the hunger strike is a praxis of struggle that aims to negate the present oppressive reality of the prison, it cultivates revolutionary subjectivity immersed in life-as-struggle and aspires to a liberated Palestinian future.

SE and RM: Can you say more about this aspiration and this opening? How do both play out in the colonial context that your work engages?

LM: The modern colonial prison in Palestine dates back to the era of British colonial rule, and specifically to the 1930s when the colonial state, in its effort to control Palestinians, systematized and standardized the prison system. The Israeli colonial regime inherited the British prison system.⁸ Like other settler colonies, the Zionist settler-colonial project aimed to take over the land and to eliminate the people either through killing or expulsion. But there were those who survived. Suppressing their anticolonial struggle and eliminating their aspirations for freedom, as well as their material ability to engage in a liberation struggle, would then become a key objective of the prison. Following the 1967 war of occupation and the expansion of the Zionist settler-colonial project into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Palestinian freedom strugglers became the main targets for political captivity and mass incarceration.

On June 7, 1967, the Israeli occupying forces issued their first military proclamation. All legal authority over the occupied Palestinian territory would fall into the hands of the Israeli military commander in the “interests of security and public order.” Since 1967, more than 2,500 military orders have been issued by Israel,⁹ creating a complex military regime that legislates nearly every aspect of Palestinian life and criminalizes any form of opposition; over the years, a quarter of the Palestinian population has been arrested. These arrests are strategies of colonial pacification that attempt to transform anticolonial struggle into legal disputes to be adjudicated in the liberal-legal juridical system of the colonial state, or in its military courts, which have become a key engine for the maintenance of the colonial order. Consequently, Palestinian captives often refuse to recognize the legitimacy of colonial courts, given their understanding of the role of the court system in sustaining colonization itself. The Palestinian captive movement has historically understood its role as a matter of confronting prison authorities and inverting Israeli colonial prisons into revolutionary fortresses, spaces of resistance, and popular universities. Captivity, then, is a site for confronting the colonist's strategies; it is not a violation of rights to be opposed through legal means, as human rights–based accounts would have it.

From within the walls of prisons and their harsh conditions, Palestinian captives designed creative means to develop an educational system, organizational structures, and communication networks within and beyond colonial prisons. Forming part of the Palestinian revolutionary forces,¹⁰ they rejected the idea that captivity marked the termination of struggle, and transformed colonial prisons into spaces of confrontation and for the cultivation of communities-in-struggle. Every minute gained in prison demanded sacrifice, suffering, and the persistence of hope. Struggle, as a life-affirming practice, was necessary to confront the colonial aim to eliminate life. The hunger strike, or what Palestinians refer to as “ma‘rakat al-am‘a’ al-khawiya” (the battle of the empty intestine), is the most radical act of struggle in prisons. It is a pivotal practice in this struggle.

SE and RM: What do the written and oral accounts of Palestinian political captives reveal about the practice of the hunger strike and its anticolonial trajectory?

LM: These accounts address both the concept of the prison and the prison's particularity and materiality.¹¹ They illustrate how Palestinian political captives consistently struggled to improve their living conditions amid the harsh material conditions in prisons, while simultaneously cultivating a collectivity-in-struggle and constituting themselves as vanguards for the anticolonial liberation struggle. The first documented hunger strike dates back to early 1968, less than a year after the 1967 military occupation and the initiation of the Palestinian resistance movements. Palestinian captives in Nablus Prison engaged in a hunger strike for three days to protest the beatings and humiliation they had been enduring, demanding better conditions. A series of hunger strikes followed. On August 2, 1969, two concurrent hunger strikes took place at two different prisons: at Al-Ramleh Prison, one that lasted for eleven days, and at the Kfar Yona Prison, one that lasted for eight days. These hunger strikes included demands for more and better food, better mattresses, the admission of stationery, an increase in break times, allowing for the gathering of more than two captives at a time, and an end to the requirement that they address wardens using the term “Sir.” The Al-Ramleh hunger strike was terminated with the repression of the captives, their isolation and subjugation to further humiliation. The Kfar Yona hunger strike, on the other hand, resulted in minor gains such as the introduction of stationery for writing letters to families and an end to the obligation to use the honorific “Sir.” In April 1970, Palestinian women political prisoners in Neve Tirza Prison engaged in a hunger strike that lasted nine days; they were consequently punished and placed in solitary confinement. Their gains included improving the ventilation in their rooms, increasing break time, and introducing some special needs for women through the Red Cross.

These early hunger strikes exposed the harsh material conditions under which Palestinian captives lived. But they also demonstrated that the achievement of minimal and partial material gains depended on extreme acts of protest in which captives endured the intensification of their oppression and suffering. Since these partial gains were vulnerable to retraction, their preservation required recurrent protests and hunger strikes. Hence in the 1970s, a series of hunger strikes took place in ‘Asqalan Prison (1970, 1973, 1976), rehearsing almost the same demands, such as allowing the admission of stationery and clothes, extended break times, improvements in the quality and quantity of food, and better mattresses. Lasting forty-five days, the 1976 strike was the longest collective hunger strike until then. Its gains included the admission of stationery, handing over the prison library to the prisoners, allowing correspondence with families, improving the food, and replacing the captives' mattresses. When these gains were denied again, captives in ‘Asqalan Prison commenced a twenty-day hunger strike in 1977.

SE and RM: You pay particular attention to Abdul Qadir Abu al-Fahem. Who was he, and why is he an important figure in this history?

LM: Abdul Qadir Abu al-Fahem died in the 1970 strike. His name is engraved in Palestinian memory as the first martyr of the Palestinian captive movement. Documented in The Martyrs of the Palestinian Captive Movement in Israeli Prisons, his singular story demonstrates how hunger striking exceeded its practical role as a means to an end; his martyrdom encouraged struggle and motivated others to engage in it.¹²

The scream announcing the hunger strike came from cell number 16 amid a shock to the prison authorities, who thought that the oppressive techniques they employed had succeeded in defeating the captives' will to struggle. The attempts to suppress the hunger strike failed. Abu al-Fahem, who suffered from injuries that the prison authority refused to treat, resided in cell number one. His comrades attempted to convince him not to participate in the hunger strike; he refused their advice and solidified his will despite his wounded weak body. He recognized the threat to his life, but he was convinced that his engagement would encourage other hunger strikers and support their persistence and sumud. Along with other captives, he endured the oppressive techniques employed to defeat the strike, including harsh force-feeding through a hose inserted into his intestine by way of the mouth and the nose. On May 10, 1970, Abu al-Fahem was transferred to the prison clinic, where they announced his death.¹³ His suffering and martyrdom would become a memory and force that strengthened the will of the captives and motivated their engagement in the succeeding chain of hunger strikes in ‘Asqalan prison.

SE and RM: How do Palestinian political prisoners articulate the role of the prison in anticolonial resistance?

LM: In one of my long conversations with Abu Nasser about his past experience in captivity, he handed me a thick book, composed of 401 pages in small print. This was Al-Sijnu Laysa Lana (The Prison Is Not for Us). Abu Nasser described this text as “the essence of the collective experience, produced by a collection of Palestinian captives with high sentences in different prisons. We wrote it in 1983 and 1984, while the formal printing and publication was in 1985 by a comrade who was released then.”

Al-Sijnu Laysa Lana is an extensive, rich, and deep historical document detailing the collective experience of Palestinian political captives between the years 1967 and 1985. Introduced by an unidentified compiler, it is a collective work meant to document the experiences of the “freedom prisoners” (asra al-huriyya) who had been and continue to be held behind the bars of colonial prisons. The prison is depicted as a vanguard site of struggle, and detention is described as a period for the preparation and formation of revolutionaries. The text is divided into two parts, the first of which details Zionist policies aimed at eliminating and breaking Palestinian captives through cruel treatment. The second part outlines how Palestinian captives, though disadvantaged, succeeded in confronting, resisting, and gaining victory over wardens through various means of struggle, including strikes. These strikes take different forms; the hunger strike is the most radical of them. Strikes are employed when other available forms of struggle fail to alleviate or mitigate the suffering imposed by wardens.

SE and RM: How does this text inform your understanding of the hunger strike? What theoretical insights do you draw from it?

LM: In theoretical terms, the strike is at once a condensation of suffering and a moment of temporal compression that prevents the continuation of suffering. Engaging in a hunger strike requires and creates stiffened strugglers. Practically, the strike, regardless of its form, entails the captives' suspending the routines of their daily lives. Activities mandated by the prison authorities are suspended, as are all activities that captives have gained the right to through long struggle. These include family visits, breaks, showers, medical visits, access to medicine, talking to guards—or eating. The suspension of eating is the most dangerous form of strike. Any suspension can be partial, or involve one or several daily activities, or be conducted gradually according to a set timetable.

But the open-ended hunger strike is total, dramatic, and immediate. It seeks to interrupt the order fashioned and implemented by prison authorities. This strike, unlike other kinds, entails a self-targeting on the part of captives themselves, without whom the prison does not exist. If the colonial justification for the prison is the existence of the captives, who must be pacified through punishment, then who is left to be punished if the captives have taken control over their own corporeal existence? In this kind of self-targeting or self-striking, the monopoly that the prison aims to exercise over the bodies of the captives is shattered. The prison is no longer. Or at least it is no more for the time being. Or, in a legal register, since the prison authorities are responsible for the fate of prisoners under their custody, the strike is a sign of their failure to fulfill their duties and commitments—that is, the prison's failure to be a prison as it was designed to be.

SE and RM: What are some of the political risks associated with the hunger strike? How do the accounts that you study address these risks?

LM: The open hunger strike is a dramatic and generative act that has the potential to mobilize the political support and solidarity of Palestinian, Arab, and international movements. However, it also risks the intensification of oppressive practices. When mass support and media coverage increase, prison authorities are pressed to meet the captives' demands. Hence, the rules of hunger strike maintain that the more widespread the mass movement in support of the captives' struggle and their demands becomes, the more their struggle is grave and escalating, the greater the likelihood that the captives will succeed in achieving their just demands, or some of them. Paradoxically, however, the more the hunger strike is supported and covered, the more oppressive practices are deployed to break it. These include pulling captives out of their cells, stripping them, and mocking their slender bodies; conducting provocative room searches, confiscating their remaining assets; revoking all rights, such as the right to access daily newspapers or to the radio; reducing break times; overcrowding rooms; transferring captives to other prisons; and threatening to break their strikes. Additional practices also include solitary confinement and the dissemination of rumors that some captives have ended their strike. More directly oppressive techniques include harsh beatings as well as the use of forced feeding which has led to the death of tens of hunger strikers. In response, captives look inward to the values of spiritual elevation, human nobility, generosity, sacrifice, dedication, will, resoluteness, deep faith, and attuned awareness.

SE and RM: How has the practice of the hunger strike shifted historically? How do captives themselves conceive of the strike historically?

LM:Al-Sijnu Laysa Lana identifies four stages (marhala) of hunger strikes from 1967 to 1985. Lasting from 1967 to 1971, the first stage was characterized by spontaneity, reactions to policies, and the defense of captives' dignity. This stage reflected the captives' rejection of the oppressive and degrading conditions that they faced during those early years of political action. Struggles during this stage were confined to discrete prisons; planning and centralization were also absent, and discipline was weak. Still, this historical stage witnessed a break in the barrier of fear, and it confirmed that the prison's oppressive authority could be interrupted and forced to retreat.

During the second stage (1971–76), captives continued to strive for partial improvements, but their struggles were still confined within discrete prisons; external mass support was weak. The third stage (1976–80) was similar to the second, with an important exception: during this stage, hunger strikes not only demanded partial improvements in prison life but also began to confront the totality of the conditions of their captivity.

In a self-critical gesture, Al-Sijnu Laysa Lana recounts a decade-long experience of hunger strikes. A strong will and readiness for sacrifice are said to be insufficient absent the ability to organize and plan strategically and tactically. Such was the lesson of the forty-five-day ‘Asqalan hunger strike, which failed to bring about a reversal in the conditions of detention and concluded instead with only minor gains despite the sacrifice and suffering endured. A lack of planning for a long strike, as well as a failure to anticipate the prison authorities' response, contributed to the limited gains of the strike. This in turn enabled collaborators among the captives to campaign against the leadership of the captives' movement, questioning both the legitimacy and the ability of the struggle in general, and hunger striking in particular, to improve the conditions of their detention. The captives' experience was bitter; any hunger strike to come needed to reendow the hunger strike with a practical value. The strikes at Nafha and Juneid prisons did precisely that. Al-Sijnu Laysa Lana posits them as strikes of the fourth stage (1980–84)—characterized by a totality of struggle.

SE and RM: What were the most significant hunger strikes, and what explains their significance?

LM: The Nafha hunger strike was a historical event. It generated a total intifada across all colonial prisons and beyond. Like the ‘Asqalan hunger strike, the Nafha hunger strike sought to transform prison conditions. The strike's success rested in part on the recently organized captive movement. Since the ‘Asqalan hunger strike in 1976, the captives’ movement had had four years to develop its organizational structure, work to marginalize those who colluded with prison authorities in all central prisons (‘Asqalan, Ramleh and Al-Sabea‘), develop a communication network across prisons, and prepare for the historical role that the movement would come to play once the new Nafha Prison opened in May 1980.

The Nafha Prison was the site to which the leadership cadres of the captives movement that had been forming in ‘Asqalan and Al-Sabea‘ prisons were transferred and in which they were isolated. A captive who participated in the Nafha hunger strike recounts that about one thousand captives from other prisons joined in the strike, which lasted for thirty-three days. The prison authorities attempted to violently break the strike. They isolated twenty-seven captives, separated each one of them in a cell, and force-fed them. Four captives were martyred. Nevertheless, the hunger strike achieved its demands. Beds for the first time were set up in Nafha and gradually in other prisons. Cell sizes were extended. Mesh windows replaced the metal shutters on the cell doors. Family photo albums and stationery were allowed in.

The Nafha strike brought about a qualitative leap in the living conditions of the captives, who were backed by their people and the free people of the world. In its unity, and through the stiffness of singular captives, the captive movement showed that it was capable of waging a collective struggle across all prisons. The collective, democratic decision to end the strike, despite the debate around it, was understood as a victory for the movement. The prison authorities’ plan to isolate, discipline, and pacify the movement's cadres failed. The hunger strikers surpassed the famous saying, “Yes to the pain of hunger, no to the pain of kneeling,” moving instead toward, “Yes to death itself over kneeling and humiliation”; they pursued their struggle to the edge of death. The intimate relationships among captives at Nafha radiated unity and revolution to all other detention centers and beyond.

SE and RM: What hunger strikes followed this one? How, if at all, were the theory and practice of the hunger strike transformed by this one?

LM: Three years later, another successful strike was initiated at the Juneid Prison and spread to other prisons. This was another strategic turning point in the history of the Palestinian captive movement. The strike forced the Israeli police chief to sit with the strikers at the Juneid Prison. Improvements in the captives' living conditions included concessions that were previously considered impossible to achieve, such as the introduction of radios, televisions, and civilian clothes. This strike enjoyed widespread popular solidarity through mass demonstrations and sit-ins. Following these events, the director of the prison service was changed, and another moderate director was appointed in his place. Following the strike, families could provide captives with bedsheets and pajamas, and captives could obtain headphones and recorders; the amount of allowed canteen food increased, and captives acquired television sets. These gains were not permanent. When the Juneid Prison authorities withheld these gains, the captives, already endowed with internal powers, initiated another strike in March 1987. Three thousand captives from different prisons engaged in a hunger strike for twenty days.

This second Juneid Prison strike contributed to the eruption of the First Intifada (1987), during which the Palestinian captive movement, understood as a reflection of and motivator for the national movement, waged several hunger strikes. While some of these strikes were in response to the intensification of oppressive practices targeting the captive movement during the intifada, others were acts of solidarity with strikes organized outside of prisons and called by the united national leadership of the intifada.

SE and RM: What then becomes of the hunger strike in the post-Oslo era? How did the Oslo Accords affect the conditions of captives and the shape of hunger strikes?

LM: The struggle of the captive movement was always linked to the struggle of the broader national liberation movement. Therefore, it was not surprising that the post-Oslo transformations affected the captive movement immensely. The Oslo agreements involved the reciprocal recognition between Israeli leadership and the leadership of the right-wing Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). This recognition accompanied the continuation and expansion of colonial conditions and power relations. While the oppositional relation of Palestinians to Israeli colonists was to end according to Oslo, the conditions of colonization were to last and to intensify. The granting of recognition, under these terms, expressed the gradual containment of the Palestinian resistance.

The factions composing the captive movement were divided in their approach to the agreements. Still, there was a shared expectation that the peace agreements would release all Palestinian captives, without exception. This did not happen. The release of captives was both gradual and incomplete. More hunger strikes were waged during the 1990s to protest the mechanisms employed in these releases. In June 1994, Palestinian captives across different prisons went on a three-day hunger strike to protest the means by which five thousand captives were released. In June 1995, the captives waged another hunger strike for eighteen days and demanded the release of all captives without exception. Another hunger strike in 1998 protested the release of 150 criminal prisoners as part of the deal that included the release of 750 prisoners under the Wye River Agreement. In 2000, an open-ended hunger strike was announced. In 2001, female captives at Neve Terza Prison waged an eight-day hunger strike. Another nineteen-day hunger strike, across different prisons, followed in August 2004. This strike was violently repressed. Absent a centralized leadership and decision-making mechanism, the strike ended at different times in different prisons. The captives were left frustrated; their conviction in the efficacy of hunger strikes was questioned. As a result, a new practice of hunger striking emerged. Rather than unifying strikes across factions, different political factions began to wage their own strikes. These hunger strikes reflected the predicament of the post-Oslo era. Instead of confronting colonial power, some of these strikes appealed to the colonial power and to the Palestinian Authority, demanding the release of the captives under conditions that remained colonial. In reflecting the logic of the Oslo Accords, these hunger strikes, paradoxically, indexed the defeat of anticolonial praxis. Nevertheless, the narrative of defeat was never a linear one.

SE and RM: You suggest that we should not accept a linear narrative of “defeat.” In fact, you seem to suggest that the hunger strike itself, the persistence of the practice of the strike, is what makes it possible for us to complicate the familiar story of defeat and state containment. Can you say more about why you argue against the narrative of defeat?

LM: Historically speaking, amid the weakness of the captive movement and the failure or very limited gains of collective hunger strikes since 2004, the end of 2011 witnessed the emergence of another new form of hunger strike, in which a single captive engages in an open-ended hunger strike demanding his release. Palestinians refer to this modality of hunger strike as “individual strike” (idrab fardi). Considered controversial among the prisoner's movement and its supporters, this strike was debated for its ineffectiveness in improving the conditions of detention and for being very risky and costly for the individual captive who confronts the prison authority alone. For those engaged in it, seriousness and determination are key components for the success of individual hunger strike in mobilizing widespread collective support.¹⁴ The “individual” hunger strike evolved as an act of protest against administrative detention,¹⁵ employed as a naked colonial means for subjugating Palestinians; coercing them to announce their defeat. The emergence of this mode of hunger strike signifies the failure to subjugate Palestinians and to terminate their acts of struggle. The singular act of the hunger strike and its life-threatening nature prompt the Palestinian response: “You're not defeated as long as you're resisting.”

SE and RM: Can you say more about the “individual” hunger strike?

LM: Upon receiving an administrative detention order on July 27, 2020, Palestinian political prisoner Maher al-Akhras immediately announced an open-ended hunger strike demanding his release.¹⁶ Al-Akhras, forty-nine years old, a father of six children from Silet al-Dhahir, south of the Palestinian city Jinin, has a long history of imprisonment in Israeli colonial prisons. His journey with administrative detention began in 2009 as he spent sixteen months in administrative detention, to be followed by eleven months in 2018. His last arrest, after which he waged an open-ended hunger strike, led to al-Akhras's fifth detention and his third under an administrative detention order.

During his 103-day hunger strike, al-Akhras experienced frequent seizures, acute headaches, and significant weakness in his vision and hearing, in addition to severe pain all over his body, especially his chest area, all of which constituted serious and imminent threats to his life.¹⁷ Insisting on continuing his hunger strike, he affirmed his position to himself, his family, community, and people, as well as to all free people around the world: “My aim is freedom, either freedom or martyrdom; both options constitute victory for my people and prisoners.”¹⁸ After a serious deterioration in his condition, al-Akhras was hospitalized in an Israeli hospital on September 9, 2020, but refused to cooperate with the doctors. On October 25, the Israeli court froze his administrative detention without releasing him. He persisted in his hunger strike until November 6, 2020, when he was released after an Israeli court ruling. Palestinians celebrated his freedom as their own; his freedom was perceived as the possibility and opening of their own freedom.

SE and RM: So you see the advent of the “individual” hunger strike in relation to the state's increasing reliance on administrative detention?

LM: The Palestinian strategy of confronting administrative detention had never been comprehensive and systematic.¹⁹ During the 1987 Intifada, the Palestinian confrontation of the then-widely-used policy of administrative detention was part of the broad Palestinian confrontation with the colonizer. The post-Oslo period witnessed a qualitative change in the methods of administrative detainees, as they boycotted the military courts of appeal for six months. They also burned wood beds and tents in prisons, which resulted in the eruption of violent confrontations with military police forces. During the Second Intifada in 2000, as administrative detention was employed widely against Palestinians for long periods with multiple renewals of administrative orders, Palestinian administrative detainees protested against their detention and harsh material conditions by refusing to comply with the decisions of the wardens, gathering in the wards, chanting against administrative detention, and refusing to sign and receive renewal decisions. In addition, every administrative detainee whose detention was renewed burned his bed and tent. This resulted in additional violent confrontations and massive crackdowns in administrative detention sections in prisons. At the time, some detainees resorted to boycotting military courts.

The critical point in Palestinian struggle against administrative detention came in April 2014. For the first time, Palestinian administrative detainees waged a collective hunger strike against administrative detention, as one hundred detainees participated in an open hunger strike for sixty-three days, which ended without any oral or written agreement between the detainees' representative committee and the prison authority to limit the use of administrative detention.

But about two years prior to this collective hunger strike, Khader Adnan, from Arraba village in Jenin district, inaugurated a new form of struggle against administrative detention. Following his administrative detention on December 1, 2011, Adnan began an open-ended hunger strike that lasted for sixty-six days, from December 17, 2011, to February 22, 2012. Adnan continued his hunger strike until he won a court ruling to release him.

Thus when Maher al-Akhras waged an open hunger strike in 2020 for 103 days, he was building upon a form of hunger strike that for the last decade had been the means of struggle against administrative detention. This form of struggle has come to be known as the “individual” hunger strike, in contrast to the decades-long collective hunger strike.

SE and RM: But, you have prompted us to ask, in what sense is Adnan's or al-Akhras's hunger strike individual?

LM: A radically situated subject, al-Akhras cites and rehearses a collective history, while concentrating in his body and will the collective desire for freedom from the confines of political captivity. Far from an abstract or delimited individual, al-Akhras is a medium of collective struggles. And there is more to this singular-collective action. During long, open-ended hunger strikes like al-Akhras's, especially when the body of the hunger striker suffers decay and his life is under threat, the Palestinian community gathers around the hunger strikers, follows their condition day by day, and fills both virtual and public space with acts of solidarity. The extension of the body of the hunger striker to the collective body of Palestinians, as well the Palestinian community's care for the striker and its celebration of his victory and freedom as their own, blurs the dichotomy between individual and collective hunger strikes. The individual concentrates the collective, gathers it, and reactivates it. What emerges is a collective-individual with a potential to both embody the collective spirit of anticolonial resistance and to politically mobilize the collective and their aspirations for freedom.

SE and RM: What are some of the implications of this collective mobilization for ongoing struggles?

LM: To appreciate the hunger strike as confrontation with administrative detention is to refuse to label the Israeli colonial practice of administrative detention a legal dispute to be dealt with through colonial military courts. Hunger strikes are a life-risking fight for freedom, a fight that brings the hunger striker to the edge of death, treating death as an interruption in the subjugation of the colonized. In this way, the hunger strike exceeds its practical role as a means to an end and constitutes a singular-collective subject as the seed for the emancipatory collective struggle to come.

SE and RM: And what are some of the theoretical implications of this constitution of the singular-collective?

LM: As Palestinian strugglers wage a long-term hunger strike to end administrative detention, they resort to a means of struggle that has been historically established by the collective of Palestinian captives. They embody the collective praxis of the hunger strike, but they also radicalize it, at a time when collective struggles have seemingly retreated. When taken to the extreme, the hunger strike is a life-and-death struggle, a fight for freedom driven by the forced choice between “martyrdom or freedom.” The hunger strike that risks a life to obtain freedom resonates with the fight to the death that Hegel delineated in his account of the master-slave dialectic, which has instigated such rich and diverse intellectual discourses on oppressive encounters.²⁰ Hegel argued that it was only by risking one's life that one obtained freedom, since one who values life over freedom surrenders to the other and grants recognition without requiring it in return. But unlike in the Hegelian dialectic involving the encounter between two abstract subjects shaped by desire, negation, and the need for recognition, the Palestinian hunger striker's concrete subjectivity is embedded in a colonial encounter and in historically specific material acts of struggle cultivated by the collective of Palestinians. It seeks freedom, not recognition.

The Hegelian dialectic perceives death as total negation that ends the dialectic and prevents recognition. What sets the hunger strike apart from the Hegelian confrontation is that the act of the Palestinian hunger strike involves a struggle in which the actual death is not the end but an opening for the possibility of freedom. Through waging a fight for freedom, Palestinian hunger strikers know the cost of freedom, for, to echo Fanon, they have fought for it.²¹ Freedom for each hunger striker is achieved through action, through the concrete act of the hunger strike in the time of the now, regardless of the uncertainty of the future. In this act, hunger strikers undergo a process that engages “radical forms of political disidentification in order to be free, creating new forms of identity.”²² Whereas “to be recognized is to achieve an identity that is produced and evaluated within a dominant discourse”—such as legal discourse, in the case of administrative detention—“to act is to exceed that identity.”²³ In the hunger strike, the striker turns inward to stiffen their own will when their body is decaying. At the same time, they turn to their people to support their battle for freedom, looking away from appealing to the colonizer to recognize their right to freedom. This turn departs from the Hegelian paradigm of life-and-death struggle between two opposing forces. It shifts the battlefield, and this means we have to attend to the formation of the hunger striker's revolutionary subjectivity. Hunger strikers turn away from the colonial state and its colonial legal arms and cultivate, through praxis, the source of their emancipation. The individual hunger strike that evolved in the post-Oslo era, with its historically specific political conditions, and in response to the deterioration of collective emancipatory struggle under the formal policies of the Palestinian Authority, involves a redeployment of the Palestinian material tradition of struggle. It seeks to bring about the awakening of anticolonial ethical commitments as radical alternatives to the emergent liberal-legal forms of Palestinian struggle deployed by Palestinians, constituting a challenge both to the colonizer and to co-opted Palestinians.