Hannah Arendt and Palestinian Political Prisoners

• In Event: Resisting Oppressive Systems

Abstract

This paper employs Hannah Arendt’s notion of political loneliness to analyze the context of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, particularly as they engage in hunger strikes to resist their criminalization and imprisonment conditions. Mass incarceration of Palestinians, augmented and made possible by the practice of administrative arrests and more recently by defining Palestinians as ‘unlawful combatants,’ has been used to silence and isolate Palestinians since the early days of the State of Israel. In light of this context, we employ Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘holes of oblivion' to highlight the critical roles of loneliness, isolation, and atomization in the Palestinian experience of Israeli imprisonment. Particularly, we argue for viewing prisons and concentration camps as laboratories of total domination where prisoners are deprived of their humanity, relationships, and agency. We argue that this framework allows us to reconceptualize Israeli prisons as political institutions — not merely carceral ones — functioning as ‘laboratories’ that perpetuate forced loneliness, isolation, and torture as mechanisms for erasing Palestinian humanity and agency.

Author

• Emily Schneider, Northern Arizona University