The Prison as University: The Palestinian Prisoners' Movement and National Education
Let me start by saying that the role of the Palestinian
prisoners' movement in educating its cadre, and thereby
contributing to Palestinian “national education” is a large topic,
and one worthy of much more discussion and research. As a
Palestinian political prisoner who has spent the past twenty years
in Israeli jails I would like to highlight some of the general
characteristics of the prisoners' movement's struggle to build a
system of self and collective education as a central part of
developing a patriotic and revolutionary culture that can be a
pillar of the liberation movement.
It was at a very early age that I began to understand the
occupation, and the state of being under occupation. Some of my
first interactions with the occupation involved hearing
conversations in my family, for example about how my older brother
was not allowed to enter Jordan because of his “security file” with
the occupation. I learned the meaning of occupation in the
all-too-frequent days of curfew imposed on our refugee camp. Any
question I asked about these difficult times were met with the same
answer; “it's Israel, it's the occupation.” Little by little I
learned the meaning of Palestine through the stories
narrated by my father and grandmother about the Nakba and the
difficult early years of exile and refuge. I fell in love with
Palestine through the stories of “el-blad,” memories of the
times before the Nakba, or “real life” as my grandmother used to
call it. In those days of diving into my elders' stories – the late
1970s – I had no other source through which to learn about
Palestine other than those stories and the few words of secretly
uttered by a teacher risking the loss of his job and livelihood at
the hands of the district military commander if the latter found
out.
In the early eighties, Palestinian society transformed into a
volcano of protest against the Israeli regime's attempt to impose
the “village leagues” as a kind of political leadership that would
replace elected municipal leaders and the Palestine Liberation
Organization. This period of protests changed my life. I became an
active part of the growing popular movement. My activism was not
limited to participating in strikes, rallies and protests, for I
had begun the lifelong process of political self-education. This
was harder than it may seem. Finding books about Palestinian
political history and the Zionist colonization of Palestine
required a great deal of effort and discretion; all of these books
were banned by Israel, and most of them had been burned or
confiscated by the army. It was very difficult to find a book about
Palestine or Palestinians, even if it was a novel by Ghassan
Kanafani, or a book of poems by Mahmoud Darwish. I quenched my
thirst for these texts by consuming the secret books and pamphlets
which, you may be surprised to hear, were not instruction manuals
for making explosives, but historical, literary, political writings
by various Palestinian and international authors that we would
secretly pass around from one person to another. If an Israeli
soldier caught you with one of those texts, you would most likely
end up in prison.
In those years I fed my revolutionary fervor with patriotic
songs. I particularly craved the compositions of Marcel Khalifah
and Ahmad Qa'bour, and the voice of Muthaffar al-Nuwwab reciting
his own poetry. Tapes with recordings of patriotic music, like
their printed counterparts, were also illegal as far as the
Israelis were concerned. We recorded these songs on tapes with
foreign love songs just in case a soldier decided to check. It was
through these banned songs and poems that I learned the meaning of
struggle for freedom, the meaning of international solidarity and
how a victory for one can be a victory for all.
Despite the harshness and difficulty of those days, I miss
them. Today, after two decades of isolation in prison, I say “if
only I could relive those days!”
I was first imprisoned in 1982 at the age of sixteen. In
prison I found what I was not expecting to find: I found inside the
prison what I could not find outside of it. In prison I found
Palestine's political, national, revolutionary university. It was
in prison that I realized that knowledge is what paves the road to
victory and freedom.
In prison, and through a long and arduous struggle, the
prisoners' movement has been able to win and maintain the right to
a library. Members of the prisoners' movement came up with
ingenious ways of smuggling books into Israeli prisons, methods
that Israeli prison guards were never able to discover. The
movement systematically organized workshops, seminars, and courses
held inside the prison to educate prisoners' on every relevant
topic one can imagine. The developers choose for Friv games a flash
format, which is quite exciting and comfortable format. That means
that in order to play these friv games you must be sure that you
have on your computer required and necessary hardware and
software. Every day, the prisoner holding the position of
"librarian" would pass through the different cells and sections,
and prisoners would exchange the book they had just finished for
the one they were about to begin. The librarian carried the
“library book,” a record of the books available in the library, and
a list of the books each prisoner had requested.
Talking about this reminds me of one of the most memorable
prison library moments. We had found out that the movement had
managed to smuggle Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun into
the old Nablus prison. We all raced to get our names on the list of
people wanting to read the book, and the wait lasted weeks! Several
times, we resorted to making copies of sought-after books like
this. Of course, copies were done with pen and paper, and I
remember copying Naji Aloush's The Palestinian National
Movement of which we made five hand-written copies. I remember
how we all raced for the writings of Gabriel García Márquez and
Jorge Amado, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Hanna Mina, Nazim Hikmet, and
many, many others.
Through the will and perseverance of the prisoners, prison was
transformed into a school, a veritable university offering
education in literature, languages, politics, philosophy, history
and more. The graduates of this university excelled in various
fields. I still remember the words of Bader al-Qawasmah, one of my
compatriots who I met in the old Nablus prison in 1984, who said to
me, “before prison I was a porter who could neither read nor write.
Now, after 14 years in prison, I write in Arabic, I teach Hebrew,
and I translate from English.” I remember the words of Saleh Abu
Tayi' [Palestinian refugee in Syria who was a political prisoner in
Israeli jails for seventeen years before being released in the
prisoner exchange of 1985] who told me vivid stories of prisoners'
adventures smuggling books, pieces of paper, and even the
ink-housing tubes of pens.
Prisoners passed on what they knew and had learned in an
organized and systematic fashion. Simply put, learning and passing
on knowledge and understanding, both about Palestine and in
general, has been considered a patriotic duty necessary to ensure
steadfastness and perseverance in the struggle to defend our rights
against Zionism and colonialism. There is no doubt that the
Palestinian political prisoners' movement has played a leading role
in developing Palestinian national education.