“The Palestinian national cause sharpened our resolve.”

In April, the Israeli occupation introduced a death penalty exclusively for Palestinians. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrated the vote on the Knesset floor with a bottle of champagne.

The practice is not new. In 1937, the British Mandate introduced military tribunals to deliver quick death sentences to Palestinians convicted even of minor crimes. Indeed, death has been a central instrument of the occupation since the very emergence of the Israeli state in 1948. Then, as now, the penalty was designed to terrorize Palestinians and make their lives — and their resistance to colonial occupation — intolerable.

On 17 May, the Progressive International and the Palestinian Youth Organization convened a webinar, moderated by Lama Ghosheh, to examine the realities of incarceration, capital punishment, and the expanding architecture of repression in the Zionist settler-colony. Bringing together former prisoners, legal advocates, and researchers, the discussion explored the political, legal, and human implications of the proposed death penalty for Palestinians and the broader structures of colonial violence. 

The below is a transcript of the intervention by Kamil Abu Hanish, a released Palestinian prisoner and novelist who spent 23 years in Israeli prisons. Drawing on his experience of long-term imprisonment, Abu Hanish argues that the proposed death penalty is not a new development but an extension of a colonial system historically rooted in elimination, repression, and psychological domination. You can view the full webinar here. 

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I always tend to approach the subject from an intellectual and ideological angle — that is, the nature of the Zionist project. The nature of the Zionist project is, as I said, colonial, settler, replacement-based. It is by its nature an aggression founded on negating the other. When we say negating the other, this means execution: the execution of an entire people. We have seen its premises and manifestations in reality in 1948. The Palestinian Nakba continued, and we have seen various forms of execution, whether legalized or in practice, because the occupation has practiced execution in the field and in prisons in every form. Every day we witness executions of Palestinians.

But once again, I don't see anything new in the death penalty law, because Israel's legal, ideological, and political structure is based on execution. I will focus on what happened to Palestinian prisoners in the last two years, where I was an eyewitness to this practice. For about 20 years before the war, our conditions were much better compared to what happened to us after October 7th. After October 7th we witnessed a slow death. Frankly, I'm not exaggerating when I say we used to die several times a day. We waited for salvation for two whole years until we were freed, and we truly hoped to be done with this ordeal.

They want us to internalize pain. They don't want any joy for us, even as we await freedom. Hours before our release, every form of brutality was practiced against us: beatings, humiliation, attempts to break the will. Throughout the two years, every form of brutality was practiced against us — from starvation to the spread of diseases, medical neglect, the policy of cold, and beatings in every form. 

The death penalty law comes as a manifestation of this long-standing policy practiced against our people since at least 1948. Since 1948, every form of execution, genocide, brutalization, and repression has been practiced against the Palestinian people. And not just physical brutalization — the issue is not just the removal of the Palestinian body, but the attempt to erase consciousness, to break the will, to internalize defeat, to embed defeat in the Palestinian's depths so they would surrender by giving up their historical and national rights.

I don't see anything new in the matter of execution. Nor do I see it as possible to deter a people seeking freedom. In the 1930s, Palestinian revolutionaries were subjected to execution without caring about such laws. Field executions in the form of assassinations were practiced against our people, and they didn't care. We saw the phenomenon of the martyrdom-seekers who blew themselves up and stormed enemy sites without fearing death. These laws will not deter our people.

Rather, this law comes from a purely vengeful angle. The enemy wants to take revenge not only on Palestinian prisoners — he wants to torture an entire people. When they issue such a law with all this pathological sadism, when this boy, whose name shall not be mentioned, Ben-Gvir, celebrates in a childish and lowly manner at his birthday party, when he places a noose, when he releases a video dreaming of gallows and death — these express a pathological image of this occupier. Ben-Gvir is not an exception. All of Zionist society is sick in one way or another. They celebrate the death of the Palestinian people and don't see us as human beings at all.

We call for deepening studies to understand the phenomenon of the Israeli prison, because the Israeli prison is distinguished from all other prisons. We are in the era of science and technology, and there are new modernist means. Previously, they would dominate the body — they tried to demean the body, subdue it, humiliate it, deprive it, so that once one served long years in prison, they would transform from a youth into an old person. But now they internalize in the prisoner's depths: deprivation, oppression, pain. When the prisoner looks at every corner, there's a camera. He is monitored and violated.

Before October 7th, Israel wanted to appear liberal before the world, specifically before the West, and refrained from enacting such a law for media, political, and legal reasons. But after October 7th, we saw that this entity lost its mind and no longer cared about international criticism, even if they called what happened in Gaza genocide and criminality. This is the nature of colonial entities. Give me a colonial entity that has not used violence. Let us examine all these systems — in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, in South Africa, in African countries. Genocide was practiced in its most heinous forms.

We must also emphasize that what is happening in Israeli prisons is very similar to what happened in Nazi prisons. We must deepen our studies to compare Auschwitz, for example, with the Israeli prisons. Literally, I tell you, the Nazi experience is being replicated here. Now they conduct experiments on Palestinian prisoners. Perhaps you've heard that the prison service has been presenting a daily food program that hasn't changed in more than two years, marketing to the public opinion that this program is good for dieting, for example. Tomorrow, they will conduct psychological, social, and medical studies and present them to the world as novel experiments. This is very close to medical experimentation.

What I want to say is that the death penalty law is not motivated by security. The youth and state institutions did not favor passing such a law, because it would not change anything from a security standpoint. Those who sought and continue to seek to pass this law do so for performative reasons. The right tries to appear in an image of strength and revenge. These Palestinian prisoners constitute a model before their people and before the world, and this model must be broken, humiliated, and despised. When they were beating Marwan Barghouti, Ahmad Saadat, Abdullah Barghouti, Abbas al-Sayed — these national symbols — and filming it, they wanted to break these models before their own people. They want to show their herds, who are excited with joy when they see how the prisoner is humiliated.

I don't want to give these racist leaders more credit than they deserve by showcasing their statements — they're all sick. But I say that the idea of death and execution is inherent to Zionist thought. We saw what happened in the Gaza Strip — a scene that horrified the world and constituted a great shock. Israel is annihilating people, bombing residential towers and homes on their owners' heads. This aggression didn't exist before in this form. Although there were images and scenes, they were less severe.

This death penalty law is an extension of the same policy. I don't see what's new. We must focus on the nature of this state that brought destruction to the region. Recently, they waged an aggressive war on Iran. They are waging a war on Lebanon. Before that, on Egypt, on Syria, on Iraq. The Zionist project doesn't target the Palestinian alone — it is hostile to all the peoples of the region.

Everyone wonders what makes a prisoner endure thirty, forty, forty-five years in prison. The secret lies in the fact that this prisoner has a cause. When we were armed with this cause, we used to ask each other: Are you regretful? No. The answer was no. Because "I regret it" is an insult to manhood, an insult to the rebellious and defiant spirit. The Palestinian national cause sharpened our resolve to continue with all determination. We spent years drawing on those same resources — cultivating, educating, teaching, learning — and we presented our people a good model, even amid the ugly images the occupation tried to project from inside the prisons.

Let me also offer a criticism of those thousands upon thousands of released Palestinian prisoners who have not played a sufficient role. We, the prisoners, must write our narrative. There is a great responsibility on this subject of struggle, this Palestinian prisoner, to write the narrative, the poetry, of what happened to us — at least what has happened to us since October 7th. We must write everything that befell us. We must expose every practice of the occupation. The narrative and story cannot remain only oral. We must write. We have a great responsibility.

I also direct criticism at legal and rights institutions that do not fulfill their role as they should, but content themselves with cold reports. Lawyers discharge visits from time to time. With respect and appreciation for the efforts these institutions make, there is an absence of the human dimension in them. We feel they practice their role with cold professionalism — to the extent that we did not feel the lawyers who visited us were human. You'd feel you were facing a robot, not an ordinary human being.

Before it picks up a weapon, resistance is consciousness. Consciousness begins with how we understand this enemy, because many who carried weapons lost their compass — because they did not understand the nature of this enemy. It is not enough to carry the weapon and fight, because without consciousness, you lose the compass and you deviate. We have many examples. If we understand the nature of this entity well, it strengthens and entrenches in us the determination to resist — and specifically the determination of armed resistance — because the nature of such entities cannot be removed except by weapon and by force.

Whoever wants to draw a comparison with South Africa, or with other models — this does not apply to the Zionist, racist, authoritarian, Jewish project, in its disgusting racist nature. On this occasion, we say we must deepen our understanding of the nature of Judaism and Zionism in general. Because it is not enough to say that the Zionist project is only colonial. We have now entered the era of the religious narrative, and this is very dangerous. Today, the soldiers in Israel, in the Israeli army, are being given booklets by the military rabbinate — the genocidal Book of Joshua — that encourage them to commit annihilations and to commit killing. We must understand the nature of this entity in all its components.