Walid Daqqa (1961–2024)

Walid Daqqa (1961–2024): Father, Philosopher, Prisoner

Seven months into Israel’s war on Gaza, political prisoner Walid Daqqa died of cancer after thirty-eight years in prison. In 1987, he was convicted of leading a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine unit that killed an Israeli soldier, a charge he persistently denied. Through the decades of his imprisonment, Daqqa became an icon of Palestinian militancy whose novels and political writing explored the unique logic of Zionist captivity and the forms of subjectivity it aims to mold. He gave voice to the experience of double captivity, what he called “parallel time,” imposed on the estimated 4,500 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, as well as those living in 1948 Israel and under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1967, over a million Palestinians have been imprisoned. As Nasser Abourahme observes in this section, “the Israeli state and its colonial occupation of Palestine just don’t function without the constant violence of mass arrest and confinement.” Notwithstanding the psychological brutality of this regime on Palestinians, the “parallel time” of captivity also extended to Zionist consciousness. Daqqa argued that Israeli guards “live their own form of slavery, not only in the awful machine of their settler colonial regime but also in ‘serving’ Palestinian prisoners” to whom they have become captive.1

Daqqa remained steadfastly committed to upholding his humanity even as his captors became degraded in their inhumanity. In prison, he was tortured, refused medical treatment, and denied family visits. Circumventing his imposed isolation, he had a daughter in 2020 with his wife Sanaa Salameh through artificial insemination. Daqqa’s daughter’s name is Milad, which means “birth” and “new beginning” in Arabic. Her birth was deemed illegal and she was denied an Israeli birth certificate for the first year of her life. In the aftermath of Daqqa’s death, the Israeli government refused to release his body to his family.

The impact of Daqqa’s commitment to Palestinian sociality and futurity was a threatening affront to Zionism, reflected in Israel’s exercise of postmortem punishment. When Daqqa died in April, his family was not informed, his body was not released, and his mourners were violently attacked by the police. All of this is in accordance with Israeli law. Among the routine tactics of Zionist repression is the practice of withholding prisoners’ bodies and interring them in the Cemetery of Numbers where families cannot visit. This policy of postmortem detention has been generally reserved for Palestinian prisoners from the occupied West Bank or the Gaza Strip; Daqqa is among the first Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to be subject to the policy since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. The reach of postmortem punishment extends to mourners, who are also viewed as a criminal security threat. On April 7, 2024, Israeli police raided the funeral tent erected at Daqqa’s family home in Baqa al-Gharbiya, a Palestinian neighborhood in Israel. This attack on mourners, as scholars Abdaljawad Omar and Rana Barakat explain, reveals not only the fragility and insecurity of Zionism but, most revealingly, a conception of power whose only language is force. However, as Omar observes, “force is not power.”2 This idea is axiomatic of Daqqa’s life and legacy.

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This section aims to bring into view Daqqa’s intellectual contributions to decoding the logic of the prison. Nasser Abourahme offers a cogent assessment of Daqqa’s thought in “‘Every Wound Has a Tale’: Consciousness Against the Logic of the Prison,” which outlines Daqqa’s important analysis of the way imprisonment dually constitutes the subject: “not just [as] a prisoner but [as] a prison themselves.” Abourahme also raises critical points about the legacy of Daqqa’s focus on the disciplinary function of Zionism’s carceral regime to reshape Palestinians into docile subjects, particularly in the wake of October 7, 2023. As he notes, “Not only did the Al-Aqsa Flood attack on October 7 completely overwhelm the Israeli state’s surveillance and security architecture, but Zionism’s (re)turn to genocidal exterminatory violence marks a retreat from the effort to ‘mold consciousness.’” In light of these developments, we might broaden, as Abourahme suggests, Daqqa’s motif of the “bigger prison” of colonial occupation to include Israel itself, one that “white Europe ‘gifted’ its Jews.”

The section also features three translations of Daqqa’s prison writing. The first is an excerpt of Daqqa’s most well-known work, Molding Consciousness, or The Redefinition of Torture, written from the Gilboa Prison in 2009 and translated by Nasser Abourahme and May Jayyusi. The excerpt is drawn from the book’s opening pages and describes the overlapping conditions of existence for the Palestinian civilian and the prisoner. The final two works are reprinted with permission from Middle East Report Online and translated by Dalia Taha. These two pieces powerfully engage with the impact of Israel’s carceral regime on children and youth, inside and outside prison walls. In the first, “A Place Without a Door,” Daqqa meditates on his struggle to find words to describe his imprisonment to his young daughter, Milad. He comes to realize that despite her age, she is already deeply familiar with captivity through her everyday experience with walls, barriers, and checkpoints. In the final piece, “Uncle Give Me a Cigarette,” Daqqa encounters a fellow Palestinian prisoner—a twelve-year-old boy whose wrists are too small for handcuffs. He represses his impulse to protect and father the boy, instead engaging him as the adult the boy wishes to be.

Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher and currently assistant professor of Middle Eastern and North African studies at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony, forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2025.

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. She is also a faculty member and former cochair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016). She currently coedits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press and is a member of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal editorial collective.

Notes

1. 1. Daqqa quoted in Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, “The Parallel Human: Walid Daqqah on the 1948 Palestinian Political Prisoners,” Confluences Méditerranée 117 (2021/2): 73.

2. 2. Sina Rahmani, host, The East Is a Podcast, podcast, “The Martyrdom of Walid Daqqa w/Rana Barakat and Abdaljawad Omar,” April 17, 2024, https://eastisapodcast.libsyn.com/the-martyrdom-of-walid-daqqa-w-rana-barakat-and-abduljawad-hemayel.