The Palestinian anthropologist Esmail Nashif's detailed and thoroughly researched exploration of community formation among Palestinians who were imprisoned in Israeli jails draws on a vast array of methodologies, analytical techniques, and source materials. Using data from interviews, observations, newspaper articles, textual analysis, and studies of physical structures, Nashif catalogs historical representations of the community of political prisoners and highlights the conceptual and prominent ideological features of the community's self-representation. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the role that images and ideas about Palestinian political prisoners play internally and of the myriad factors that gave rise to the community itself.
In his introduction, Nashif situates himself in the unique position of a Palestinian anthropologist conducting research on his own compatriots and precariously straddling two roles: that of academic and objective researcher and that of fellow Palestinian. Although Nashif at times mentions personal or familial connections to an informant, he mostly employs the techniques and voice of an objective researcher. He also relies heavily on archival materials, many of which are included in the book to provide readers with a direct connection to the materials that ground his analysis.
The next three chapters situate the community of Palestinian political prisoners historically. In chapter 2, Nashif stresses repeatedly that the larger Palestinian narrative is a colonial history in which political captivity has played a continuous and prominent role. In chapter 3, Nashif documents that during the British Mandate period colonial officials constructed police stations and jails in nearly every town. The architecture and layout of these prisons would affect the experiences and social lives of the prisoners after the end of the Mandate. He then, in chapter 4, describes how Israeli prisons later became an important site of Palestinian nationalism. Political prisoners schooled each other on how to construct their own captivity narratives in concert with other narratives of oppression and detention.
The final three chapters focus on the community's ideology and the textual modes it employed to construct a coherent group narrative of captivity. Chapter 5 locates interrogation as a watershed moment of initiation into the community; it is usually depicted as a loss of innocence and an intellectual awakening. Nashif devotes particular attention to a philosophical text entitled “The philosophy of confrontation behind the bars.” In the following chapter, he focuses on a series of 337 lectures delivered intermittently by a prominent Palestinian intellectual that reveal how internal Palestinian dissonance was negotiated in the context of captivity. Finally, chapter 7 explores the debate over “which literary genre can authentically express the experience of political captivity” (p. 165). He also considers the tenuous relationship between fact and fiction in Palestinian literature as it relates to stories of captivity.
In his conclusion, Nashif stresses that the community's pedagogical system, in which members learn how to properly articulate their captivity, overlaps with the larger Palestinian narrative of struggle and resistance against a colonial oppressor. Despite sometimes dense writing, Nashif does commendable work of bringing fresh analysis and new insights to both subjects.
