2023 Workshop
Ashjan Ajour
Lecturer in Sociology, School of Social, Historical and Political Studies, University of Wolverhampton
Hunger Strike Experience and the Embodiment of Palestinian Dispossession and Collective Revolutionary Subjectivity
The hunger strikers’ discourse of their dispossession in the Israeli prison system and sacrifice of the body in their hunger strike is constructed in relation to the way in which Israeli settler colonialism aims at the dispossession of Palestinians and the annihilation of their political subjectivity and resistance. This article illuminates the relationality between the hunger strikers’ lived experience and Palestinian collective subjectivity. Through interviews it reveals that the exceptional act of hunger striking is an exemplification of the collective anti-colonial resistance subjectivity in the face of colonial dispossession. From their singular encounter with colonial power, they constitute an intersubjective political consciousness of Palestinian self determination at the collective level.
This article situates the hunger strike experience in the wider context of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler colonialism and the condition of the indigenous Palestinian people. It investigates the hunger strikers’ subjectivity within that context and provides insights into their experiences in relation to it. Their embodied practice of hunger striking, which is a singular and solitary act, is in fact viewed by the interviewees as the carrier of the collective political struggle against Israeli colonisation. The hunger strike becomes a representation of Palestinian self-determination and the body of the hunger striker a symbol of the collective Palestinian body politic and collective will. The accounts of former hunger strikers stress that the dispossession experienced in the Israeli prison system goes beyond the incarceration of the captive body. It also functions with the aim to dispossess Palestinian detainees of their humanity and annihilate their political subjectivity and Palestinian collective revolutionary consciousness.
I look at the experience of individual hunger strikers in relation to the broader collective national liberation movement which strives for freedom and self-determination. This provides an understanding of the historical production of resistance subjectivity in the context of settler the Israeli colonial project. The article is based on in-depth interviews between 2015 -2018 with Palestinian former hunger strikers who were protesting against their administrative detention in Israeli prisons. They recounted after their release reached through agreements with the Israeli Prisons Authorities (IPA). The narrated experiences of Palestinians hunger strikers risking their lives in the face of the colonial dispossession reveals a way of being that can inform the production of knowledge about the praxis of resistance. Interviewees emphasized that they went through this experience because they aspired to life which challenged the hegemonic discourse of the dominant Zionist narrative that characterises them as suicidal terrorists.
Hunger strike has a long a history in Palestine and it is an ongoing contemporary phenomenon which reflects the continuing struggle between Israeli settler-colonialism and Palestinian anti colonial resistance. Following the decline and fragmentation of the national struggle in the post-Oslo period the Palestinian hunger strikers’ commitment to liberation politics became divorced from the post-Oslo politics which replaced resistance with a neoliberal state building project (Dana 2017; Ganim 2009; Khalidi 2007; Massad 2006; Said 2002; Sayigh 1999). Despite that, and the fact that contemporary Palestinian hunger strikes appear to be individual acts of resistance, the hunger strikers' discourse reveals a form of collective subjectivity driven by broader Palestinian revolutionary politics.
Ashjan Ajour completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London in August 2019. Her research interests and teaching experience are situated in sociology; gender studies and feminist theories and movements; political subjectivity; incarceration; and decolonization and global indigenous politics. In 2019, she engaged as a teaching fellow in Sociology at Warwick University and worked as a research fellow in the School of Media, Communications, and Sociology at the University of Leicester focusing on the “Decolonising the Curriculum” research project. She is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Wolverhampton.