CONCLUSION

Since 1967 the Palestinian political captives have been engaged in renego-

tiating the Israeli colonial prison boundaries, borders, and grids of time.

These negotiations turn the prison into a Palestinian national site for the

community of captives as well as for the larger Palestinian national move-

ment. The conflictive, merging, and transformational relations of colonized/

colonizer create dynamics of regenerating some of the Palestinian national

identities and ideologies, and transforming others into new shapes, contents

and horizons of meaning. The kernel pattern of these dynamics relates to the objective conditions of imprisonment and how the political captives,

individually and collectively, perceive, interpret and react to it. From the

beginning – in 1967 – the conditions of incarceration were ‘rights degree

zero’ for the Palestinian political captives. The annexation of the material by

the Israeli authorities was interpreted by the Palestinian political captives as a

two-fold process. First, this policy was a realization of the larger colonial

scheme of taking control of the land and emptying it of its inhabitants. Second,

and more important for our discussion here, the appalling material conditions of the prison were interpreted as a systematic policy of draining the Palestinian

subject of his ‘Palestinian-ness’. The perception that the colonial authorities

wanted to turn the Palestinian subject into a cultural wasteland, together with

the objective conditions of imprisonment – meaning the captives’ inability

to change them, at least in the early period after 1967 – set the stage for

building a community mainly through the field of meanings and the actions,

practices and rituals related to it. These conditions interacted with the national

ideologies that prevailed among Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. In this context, the practices of reading and writing became central in

asserting one’s ‘Palestinian-ness’ and regenerating variations of it. This

book traces these community-building processes through the different aspects

of the colonized/colonizer relations; the socio-economic formations of Palesti-

nian society in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; the hybrid and at times

conflictive cultural processes of signification and their interactive dynamics

of constructing the mechanisms of literary production, circulation and con-

sumption among the Palestinian political captives between 1967 and 1993.