A politics of conviction: The refusal of colonial carcerality in Palestinian graffiti

Abstract

In this visual essay, I curate and annotate nine photos of Palestinian prisoner graffiti, foregrounding a Palestinian politics of conviction. Prisoner graffiti is a prominent genre of Palestinian street art, countering Israel's system of colonial carcerality that attempts to dispossess and displace Palestinians. Israeli colonial carcerality functions not only through the “small prison” of Israeli detention, but through the “large prison” of Israeli colonial occupation and apartheid. The distinct forms that this incarceration takes across the fragments of Palestine—from the lands occupied in 1948, 1967, and the diaspora—all aim to crush a Palestinian will to resist. Israel works to construct its carceral systems as inescapable, suggesting to Palestinians that they have no choice but to submit to their colonisation. Against this colonial carcerality, we find in Palestinian prisoner graffiti what I term a politics of conviction. Persisting through their conviction and imprisonment under Israeli colonial law, Palestinians cultivate a conviction in liberation. Directly countering the apparent inevitability of incarceration and the reification of carceral systems, this politics of conviction asserts the inevitability of al-ḥurriya (freedom) from both the small prison and the large prison. This conviction in liberation is constituted by a range of feelings, including love for the prisoner and the dignity that they embody. I suggest that this politics of conviction might form the affective basis of a distinctly Palestinian abolitionism—working to abolish the colonial structures that uphold both the small and large prisons.

Gaza: A decolonial geography

“…On the one hand, the Nakba is ongoing and has never stopped, with new spatial arrangements constantly forming and re-forming, which brings forth the need for ongoing critical inquiry. On the other hand, decolonial praxis is readily evident in the decoloniality of living that takes shape in the quotidian, often mundane Palestinian spaces and forms of life that persist in and beyond colonised space (Abu Hatoum, 2021;Harker, 2009Harker, , 2011Joronen & Griffiths, 2019;Nabulsi, 2023b). Taking the detailed knowledge of colonialism alongside an ethic of decolonial geography leads us to key questions of academic praxis, to the issue many of us have been grappling with since the latest genocidal escalation of colonial violence: what can we, as geographers, do to support Palestinian calls for liberation?…”