Abstract
This essay honors Khader Adnan’s life and martyrdom in May 2023 following eighty-seven days of hunger strike in protest against his illegal administrative detention by the Israeli regime. Adnan is an important figure of Palestinian resistance who, in 2012, revived waves of mass Palestinian hunger strikes in Israeli prisons. Through these hunger strikes, Adnan aspired to a life of dignity, and sacrificing his body was not about death as much as it was about life and freedom. As Adnan’s story shows, through the embodied praxis of hunger striking, Palestinian prisoners assert ownership over their bodies and fates, deciding when and how to die in the face of the Israeli carceral regime that keeps them confined indefinitely.
“My dignity is more precious than food.”—Khader Adnan, while on hunger strike in 2012.Footnote1
Over the past two decades, Palestinian political activist Khader Adnan spent a total of eight years in Israeli prisons, including six in administrative detention.Footnote2 During his incarcerations, he went on several hunger strikes beginning with 25 days in 2004, followed by 66 days in 2012, 56 days in 2015, 58 days in 2017, and 25 days in 2021.Footnote3 His most recent hunger strike of 87 days led to his death on May 2, 2023. All of these strikes were in protest against the Israeli regime’s notorious and ongoing illegal practice of administratively detaining thousands of Palestinians without charge, trial, conviction, or time limit.Footnote4
As a result of his repeated hunger strikes, Adnan became an icon of steadfastness and resistance in the face of Israeli settler-colonial incarceration, and his death brought outrage and grief to Palestinians and allies everywhere. Many considered his death an assassination by Israeli occupation forces who detained him indefinitely without charge, denied his release despite the deterioration of his health, and who refused to allow his family to visit him. He was the first Palestinian detainee who died on hunger strike in the post-Oslo era, and his death was a turning point in the Palestinian Prisoners Movement.Footnote5
In this tribute to Adnan, I reflect on the legacy of hunger strikes that he revived among Palestinian prisoners—a legacy that began in 1968, a year after the Naksa.Footnote6 To do so, the tribute builds on interviews I conducted with Adnan, members of his family, and other administrative detainees on hunger strike in 2015.Footnote7 Adnan sacrificed his life for freedom and dignity, even though he yearned for life. Indeed, through weaponizing his body, and ultimately through his death, Adnan reclaimed his humanity from Israeli incarceration and colonization.
“I Keep Remembering … That My Comrade Khader Adnan Was Released”
Adnan went on strike for the third time on May 6, 2015.Footnote8 Protests against his illegal detention organized by several prisoners’ rights organizations spread in Palestine, and it was during that time that I was able to interview his family, who were suffering greatly yet somehow managed to engage with the journalists, lawyers, and prisoners’ rights groups during this excruciating period. Following a long process of negotiations with Israeli occupation forces, Adnan agreed to end his hunger strike on July 12, after fifty-six days. Palestinians celebrated this moment as a victory; indeed, the protests his family and activists had held demanding his immediate release in front of the Israeli hospital where he had twice been forcibly admitted and chained to his bed throughout June, left hovering between life and death, were not for naught.
Throughout July, Adnan’s health deteriorated further, suffering from internal complications resulting from his hunger strike. He was admitted for surgery in a hospital in Nablus.Footnote9 The day after he was discharged, I was able to interview him. Adnan said that after achieving his freedom in his first hunger strike, Israeli occupation forces detained him again; his second hunger strike, he went on, was therefore to honor his first, and so on with his subsequent hunger strikes. He emphasized that the motive for the hunger strikes was not only to protest the policy of administrative detention, but also to protest against the humiliation and violence perpetrated against him during his detention:
I believe humiliation in itself warrants a hunger strike. The administrative detention was not the only reason for my strike … It was the barbarity of my interrogation, including humiliation, insults, assaults, and beating that was the main reason for my strike, not just the detention order.
The hunger strikers I interviewed were motivated by what they saw as Adnan’s effective and successful techniques at resisting Israeli incarceration, so they followed suit. One said, “We notice that there is a new mode of resistance in the Israeli prisons—the individual hunger strike—revived by Adnan, and we want to follow such success.” Another hunger striker said candidly: “I heard that Khader Adnan and other young prisoners had succeeded in their hunger strikes, and I asked myself: ‘Why, if my comrades succeeded, would I not? Do they have more capacities than I do?’” Throughout the unbearable conditions of their hunger strikes, many thus recalled Adnan’s success: “All I want is to strengthen my will, and I keep remembering and putting in my mind that my comrade Khader Adnan was released and achieved his freedom,” another told me.
Further inspired by Adnan, Palestinian hunger strikers stress the fact that what they experience in the Israeli prison system goes beyond the incarceration of the captive body. For them, it is about human dignity, and in the act of hunger striking they are afforded a non-material strength to protect their humanity. This strength is sustained by Israeli occupation forces’ continued dehumanization of administrative detainees on hunger strike. As Adnan put it:
It was the hardest time … I was vomiting … for long hours, from night to dawn. When my tears fell, the Israelis thought I was crying as a result of weakness, but the tears fell only from the distress of vomiting against my will … the jailors who came to shackle me felt disgusted and wore gloves. I felt their inferiority and told myself: “you are inferior because you treat me like this.” It was disgusting that my situation caused disgust in humans who lost their humanity and dignity.
I sent a message to my children to tell them, “If I die, I am on my way to you.” My resistance was for the sake of my freedom to be with them. If I fell as a martyr, I was searching for the path of freedom, and my hunger strike was launched to reunite me with my family. I did not escape from my family. If I escaped, I would not go on hunger strike. My battle is to be with my mother and with my children, to be with my loved ones, so I am not escaping from my responsibility.
“The One Who First Says ‘Ah’ is the Loser”
The ongoing “battle of empty stomachs,”Footnote11 as the Palestinian Prisoners Movement has been termed, is a battle in which death stands for life. In other words, the potential death of the body from starvation becomes a tool to threaten the Israeli regime, compelling it to negotiate with the strikers to release them, thereby reclaiming their lives. Importantly, the constant reminder of the presence of the settler-colonial jailor sustains the hunger strikers’ resolve. For the hunger strikers, then, a victory through a negotiated agreement is nonetheless a victory. This is clear in Adnan’s statement:
I insisted to be released on [July 12]. I swore to God in front of [my lawyer] not to change my mind, even though the decision paper issued by the Israeli senior army commander that said I would be released on the 16th was in my hand, but I refused. They accepted my demands at the end and thank God I was released … These days were not easy at all, and some people were wondering why I insisted on the 12th. They were not persuaded because they did not understand the important thing that without my insistence to be released on the 12th, we would not have such Palestinian joy in my victory … Palestinian negotiators should learn from the Palestinian hunger strikers. The last moments are critical and they decide the victory.
Adnan also criticized the opposition of the Palestinian Authority (PA) regarding the hunger strikers’ decision to negotiate with Israeli occupation forces—a radical divergence from the PA’s role as per the Oslo Accords framework. In the view of Adnan and other prisoners, the PA has abandoned the anti-colonial resistance project to liberate Palestine and Palestinians. Thus, the Palestinian hunger strikers’ form of anti-colonial liberation politics, which includes calculated negotiation with the Israeli colonizing oppressor, departs from the PA’s approach of replacing resistance with neoliberal state building.Footnote12
“The Strike Continues until Freedom and Dignity”
While confined to a bed in an Israeli hospital in 2012, Adnan uttered the now famous phrase: “The strike continues, the strike continues, the strike continues until freedom and dignity.”Footnote13 Through his numerous strikes, Adnan revived the exceptional praxis of hunger striking among Palestinian administrative detainees and political prisoners that began in 1968, giving rise to revolutionary subjectivity in a Palestinian context marked by the impasse of the national movement against a violent settler-colonial and apartheid oppressor.
While the hunger strike is practiced individually, it prompts collective resistance to the settler-colonial carceral regime. Indeed, Adnan and the other hunger strikers I interviewed consider themselves to be part of a collective Palestinian struggle for liberation that was abandoned after Oslo. In other words, through the sheer force of the struggle for liberation, what is ultimately an isolated protest—leaving the individual body starved in the confines of the Israeli regime’s carceral machine—transforms into a collective Palestinian revolutionary subjectivity.
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Notes on contributors
Ashjan Ajour
Ashjan Ajour is a researcher in sociology at the University of Leicester in the UK. Her research interests and teaching experience are situated in sociology, gender studies and feminist theories and movements, political subjectivity, incarceration, decolonization, and global Indigenous politics. She is the author of Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Notes
1 “‘My Dignity Is More Precious Than Food’: Palestinian Prisoner Enters 53rd Day of Hunger Strike,” Al-Haq, February 8, 2012, https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6932.html.
2 “The Basis for Administrative Detention in Israeli Law,” B’Tselem–The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, January 1, 2017, https://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention/old/israeli_law.
3 “Prominent Palestinian Activist and Political Prisoner Khader Adnan Passes Away Due to Deliberate Medical Neglect at the Hands of the Israeli Occupation,” Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, May 2, 2023, https://www.addameer.org/news/5021.
4 Addameer, Administrative Detention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: A Legal Analysis Report, 2016, https://www.addameer.org/sites/default/files/publications/administrative_detention_analysis_report_2016.pdf.
5 Julie M. Norman, The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: Resistance and Disobedience (London: Routledge, 2021).
6 Zena Al Tahhan, “A Timeline of Palestinian Mass Hunger Strikes in Israel,” Al Jazeera, May 28, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/5/28/a-timeline-of-palestinian-mass-hunger-strikes-in-israel.
7 See Ashjan Ajour, Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and Ashjan Ajour, “The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body: Conceptualizing Hunger Striking Subjectivity,” Cultural Politics 17, no. 2. (July 2021): 193–211, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8947893.
8 “Fear For Life of Khader ‘Adnan, a Palestinian Administrative Detainee on Hunger Strike,” B’Tselem, last modified July 13, 2015, https://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention/20150623_adnan_hunger_strike.
9 Bilal Daher, “Prisoner Khader Adnan Was Transferred to the Hospital Due to the Deterioration of His Health” [in Arabic], Arab 48, July 23, 2015, https://www.arab48.com/%D9%81%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B7%D9%8A%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%AA/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%83%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A9/2015/07/23/%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D8%AE%D8%B6%D8%B1-%D8%B9%D8%AF%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%84%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%B4%D9%81%D9%89-%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AF%D9%87%D9%88%D8%B1-%D8%B5%D8%AD%D8%AA%D9%87.
10 “Khader Adnan on Hunger Strike For 38 Days against Arbitrary Detention,” Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, October 9, 2018, https://samidoun.net/2018/10/khader-adnan-on-hunger-strike-for-38-days-against-imprisonment-without-charge-or-trial/.
11 Ghadeer Awwad, “The Battle of the Empty Intestines: Palestinian Hunger Strikes,” Palestine Square (blog), Institute of Palestine Studies, July 15, 2015, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232395.
12 For more about the history of the PA and the Palestinian liberation struggle, see Tariq Dana, “The Prolonged Decay of the Palestinian National Movement,” National Identities 21, no. 1 (2019): 39–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2017.1343813; As‘ad Ganim, Palestinian Politics after Arafat: A Failed National Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston, MA: Beason Press, 2007); Joseph A. Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (London: Routledge, 2006); Edward W. Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Vintage Books, 2001); Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).
13 “Video: Sheikh Khader Adnan Speaks from the Hospital” [in Arabic], Wattan News Agency, February 21, 2012, YouTube video, 00:08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRpizpjXNCw.