Since 1967, Israeli settler colonialism has imposed a regime of complex punitive measures on Jerusalem and its people. These range from revocation of residency rights and demolition of homes to incarceration. In the last decade, Palestinian Jerusalemites have been increasingly subjected to a particular form of imprisonment—house arrest. This has emerged as a way for Israel to expand its carceral governance of Palestinian Jerusalemites to children and their families and to penetrate their homes.1 In this essay, I explore my personal experience of imprisonment and house arrest and consider forms of escape and resilience.

On 4 September 2022, I was arrested from my family home in Shaykh Jarrah in occupied Jerusalem on charges of “incitement.” I am a mother of two young children and was working as an independent journalist. For ten days, from 4 to 14 September, I was detained in Israel’s Hasharon prison, after which I was subjected to house arrest for more than ten months. This was made possible through a conditional release order—to indefinite house arrest—that was granted only after I signed a paper agreeing to the conditions set by the judge, including release on bail of fifty thousand shekels [fourteen thousand U.S. dollars] and a prohibition on all contact and communication via phone or internet.2

Hasharon prison is what we might call a “conventional” prison, a specific place with a set of specific characteristics: it is high-walled, grey, tightly enclosed, and heavily monitored. Despite the difference in the prisoner’s surroundings, the objectives of house arrest are the same as those of prison incarceration. In both, the aim is to destroy the will of the prisoner and produce a different subjectivity, that is, to destroy the Palestinian will to freedom and subject it to the conditions of colonial power. Thus, home becomes a prison.

Prison helped me discover the true colors of everything, the beauty of colors, but painting soon became about much more than colors. As ‘A’isha ‘Awda writes in Ahlam bi-l-hurriya (Dreams of freedom), escape occupies the prisoner’s mind “like air filling a vacuum.”4 Nawal Sa‘dawi wrote of how overwhelming hope will disintegrate prison bars, doors, and locks, allowing the prisoner to fly away like a bird.5 Art was not only a way of flying free from my prison, but a way of purifying myself of the prison, of expelling it from my entire being.6

I began to question the meaning of freedom the moment I left Hasharon prison by bus. I had been detained there for over ten days in harsh conditions, placed in solitary confinement and in a highly monitored cell within a section normally used for male criminal prisoners. I was the only female prisoner in Hasharon prison at the time. I was then moved to Damon prison near Haifa, where Israel holds female Palestinian prisoners, with another Palestinian woman, Azhar ‘Assaf.7 After years of researching and reporting on Palestinian female political prisoners, I suddenly found myself entering the prison as one of them.

This was the most surreal moment of my life. I was sitting next to Azhar ‘Assaf on a small seat in a narrow, dark room inside the bus. We were in handcuffs, singing and clapping with joy, “To Damon, to Damon.” We believed at the time that we were on our way to a place with more freedom. When I arrived, the female prisoners were there to welcome me. I hugged each one of them and learned their names. At that moment, I was informed by the senior prisoner, Marah Bakir, that a court decision had been issued for my conditional release. I do not know how to define my feelings at that moment. I had finally reached the parallel universe that had always occupied my thoughts and that I had been looking for. I had finally met the female prisoners I had always kept in my thoughts, the same ones whose families I had interviewed as a journalist to convey their suffering. I was among them now, hearing them and seeing them with my own eyes.

At that moment, I felt unable to grasp the true meaning of freedom, especially when I found out that my release was conditional, and that my freedom would be restricted and partial with every detail, definition, and stipulation decided by the colonizer. When I found myself under house arrest, I was once again undergoing something that I had covered as a journalist, having written about countless child-prisoners confined to their homes in occupied Jerusalem. I was soon to experience all the details of house arrest directly.

I was sitting among the female prisoners in a closed circle in the recreation yard, drinking coffee they had prepared for me with much love and talking about their living conditions. They were very surprised when I told them that I did not want to leave them. I asked the person in charge to phone my family and ask them to delay paying the fine, which was fifty thousand shekels, so that I could stay with them for one night. Then one of them said to me: “Your place is outside, not here. You are our voice outside.” The prisoner Isra’ Ja‘abis added: “Would you let me go instead of you?”8 The laughter and tears continued, and I found myself saying goodbye to them, telling them that life outside the walls of Damon is just a bigger prison. I promised to make their voices heard, no matter the cost.

In the two and a half hours I spent in Damon, I experienced the “parallel universe,” as the late prisoner Walid Daqqa described it.9 I thought of the meaning of freedom and of the six prisoners who in September 2021 escaped Gilboa high-security prison through a tunnel. I thought of how they must have felt when they emerged into freedom, the light and heat of the sun hitting their bodies without barriers, and the tunnel as the dividing line between two spaces: prison and freedom. Yet, as I left Damon prison, escorted by my parents to my family home in Shaykh Jarrah, it was not into freedom that I stepped. I remained stuck inside the tunnel.

Having returned home, I found it devoid of its usual characteristics, and the roles and functions of the family were disfigured. It became a “parallel home.” Faced with this altered reality, I tried to understand the significance of freedom and confinement, prison and home, peeling away their usual understanding as broad terms, and focusing on their implications in the colonial context of occupied Palestine. Although house arrest might be thought of or appear to be a softer or more lenient punishment than imprisonment, it also represents an aggressive effort by the colonizer to penetrate spaces of intimacy, part of what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has described as Israel’s effort to “occupy the senses” of Palestinians.10 It seeks to invoke a specific set of feelings—fear, isolation, anxiety—and undermine or deny another set of feelings—security, freedom, accomplishment. It seeks to exclude, and thereby control and dominate, the colonized. In describing my experience, I hope to reveal the invisible, to give voice to the unspoken, and in doing so raise awareness and resist these corrosive conditions.11

Yasin al-Hajj Salih draws an intrinsic link between freedom and movement—the instinct “to take a step further than usual, to explore a wider space, previously unknown, with all the potential danger therein”—which, at the same time, contends with the human impulse to remain in place and the prohibition of movement or confinement.12 Freedom appears to be a human instinct, a kind of existential energy, and is often portrayed as the most sublime value and the ultimate demand, ingrained in human experience. When freedom becomes the prevailing system, we might speak of this as sovereignty. Yet, various forms of unfreedom qualify the universality of freedom, which is often sublimated to survival in conditions of detention, torture, illness, or genocide. Freedom takes on meaning, then, in a kind of intermediate space between bare life (when freedom is not even a demand) and sovereign life (where freedom is no longer a demand).

In the absence of sovereignty, Palestinians inhabit a condition less than freedom. Under Israeli settler-colonial rule, which seeks to control the meanings, representations, and forms of freedom, occupied Palestine has been transformed into a vast prison, from Ras al-Naqura in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south, filled with various smaller prisons, each aiming to control the Palestinian soul, dissolve Palestinian consciousness, and undermine the effectiveness of Palestinian existence. This is met by Palestinian resistance, in the past, present, and future, as Palestinians explore and innovate outlets for freedom, beginning in the home and proceeding to the homeland.

In Palestine, and in Jerusalem specifically, home has a particularly political dimension. On the one hand, it is a space of intimacy, providing the shelter for social reproduction: sleep, food and drink, sex. On the other hand, the home is an identity, a means to remain and resist, a source of survival and steadfastness, a dream, and one dimension of freedom. This is why colonial power targets the home to humiliate and control the colonized. In Palestine, one’s home is often under threat. It can be confiscated or seized, as happened to thousands of homes during the Nakba of 1948. It can be demolished, transformed into a pile of rubble in front of its owners’ eyes as a form of punishment.13 Demolition and the denial of building permits have severely restricted the housing stock for Palestinians, pushing up prices and making the prospect of buying a house in Jerusalem an impossibility for many.14 In these conditions, a home might simply be a dream about which young people fantasize, but which feels unattainable. This dream is a specter that also visits the hearts and minds of prisoners languishing in the occupation’s prisons, reminding them of their life outside the prison walls.

For Palestinian women under colonial rule, the home—especially the family home—can be a platform for survival and resistance. As Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes, “the home (both physically and emotionally) is a site of resistance, survival, and a source of women’s voices.” She continues:

Although the home can be a place of patriarchal subordination and oppression, it can also be one where women’s humanity is affirmed within a regime (local and global) that dehumanizes and brutalizes them. Moreover, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian emphasizes, it is not merely a site of personal growth, but of political development and identity formation. In discussing my own experience of house arrest, I hope to build on this Indigenous feminist praxis and join the voices of other Palestinian women who have spoken about the impact of various forms of colonial state violence, including incarceration, and drawn attention to them for the sake of survival, resilience, and, ultimately, liberation.

Although house arrest is seen as a milder form of imprisonment, and its term shorter than many prison sentences, it also serves to distill and clarify questions of freedom. House arrest means living under the threat of consequences for unsupervised communication with others or moving beyond what the carceral system deems acceptable. This highlights that fact that freedom is not merely living outside the prison walls but entails the ability to move without restriction and to engage in interactions without surveillance. Thus, under house arrest, unfreedom becomes associated spatially with the home rather than the prison. Temporally, house arrest establishes time as an infinite loop, placing a hold on everyday life such that it cannot proceed as normal, or even retrogressing.

In my case, I was restricted to my parents’ home rather than the home in which I had lived with my husband and children. I come from a conservative, traditional Jerusalem family, and my marital home, the home I established with my husband, was where I had moved to form an independent family and explore wider social freedoms. The Israeli court, however, placed me under the supervision of my parents, bringing me back to the early stages of my life, wrenching me out of adulthood and returning me to childhood. I was once again the little girl who needs her parents’ permission, who requires their approval to make any decision. Returning with two children, my daughter Karmel and my son Qais, both under six years old, complicated the situation further. I found myself between two overlapping systems of oppression: the patriarchal Palestinian society that dominates Palestinian women and the colonial system of Israeli occupation that directly targets my life and freedom as a journalist, as a human being and a mother.

House arrest distorted the meaning of home, family, motherhood, and self. The house was no longer where I used to go to visit my family, a place holding many of my early memories and associations with security and safety; a place to which I would come back from school as a child and later from university and work; or a place of refuge from the daily struggles of motherhood, where I could bring my children to get some respite. What all these forms of return had in common was the desire to feel safe and free. This same home was turned into a place that imposes authority and control, not only in terms of traditional society, but now with an added colonial dimension. My presence there is mandatory, leaving it means violating a colonial security order. Rebelling against this order would return me to prison, also depriving me of connections to home.

I continuously try to resist any change in the quality and form of my relationship with our family home. I like to remember that it is there for comfort, love, and security. I do this to maintain my psychological balance and to reduce the strain and intensity of the situation. I believe that I am fully aware of the occupation’s goals in confining me to this home and preventing me from contacting anyone and communicating in any social space outside it. Therefore, I feel pity toward the home rather than hate. It is the location of my existence and space in this country. However, I do not find it a “five-star hotel” as the many visitors who came to console me described it. Quite the opposite. It is an open space to struggle, scream, and sometimes cry. If its walls could speak, they would reveal much.

One of the goals of house arrest in Jerusalem is to distort the intimate relationship between Palestinians and their home as a place, transforming their associations with it from safety to fear, from comfort to anger, and, finally, from attachment to repulsion. Thus, the colonized’s physical connection to place is disrupted, facilitating the process of their displacement, perhaps pushing the person away not only from their home, but also from their homeland.

The family is the nucleus of Palestinian society, the major nerve of most Palestinians’ existence, and the genesis and primary source of their personal, political, social, and cultural values and principles. Thus, the family is a critical target for Israeli settler colonialism. Israel threatens and exerts pressure on family members to blackmail and control Palestinians.16 Through house arrest, Israel’s colonial rule further intervenes in Palestinian families, stripping parents of their role as nurturer of their children, and forcing them to play the role of prison guard, with all the violence and tragedy this entails.

The distortion of the parent-child bond is not, needless to say, something that originated with house arrest. In this iconic novel The Secret Life of Sa‘id, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist, Emile Habibi describes an encounter between Baqiyya, the titular character’s wife, and Wala’, their son. Wala’ had formed an armed cell with other Palestinians living inside Israel, but it had been discovered by the Israeli authorities, and Wala’ “took refuge in their basement hideout and was now resolved to die a martyr rather than surrender.”17 Sa‘id and Baqiyya are sent by the authorities to negotiate their son’s surrender, a task they undertake out of fear for his safety and their desire to protect him. Baqiyya encourages Wala’ to lay down his arms and come out: “That cellar is too small, shut in. You’ll suffocate down there.” Wala’ replies, giving voice to the way Israeli surveillance penetrates the Palestinian home:

In a subsequent exchange, Habibi illuminates how colonial power pits parent against child. Baqiyya tells Wala’: “If we’re ‘careful,’ it’s only to protect all of you. Where’s the shame in you coming out to us, Wala’, to your father and mother? . . . we aren’t your enemies.” To which Wala’ responds: “You are not on my side, either.”19

Actual imprisonment in conventional prisons seems less harsh on a psychological level, simply because it is much more blatant. There, the identity of the enemy is clear, recognized by their uniform, language, and job, and, as the colonized, your approach toward them is clear. You are in conflict with them, on opposite sides. Time and place are understood and well-defined. You know that you will remain in prison for a specific period and in a specific place, and your feelings are already determined.

However, with house arrest, everything is unclear, incomprehensible, invisible, and intangible. Time is undefined, the future is unknown, and the place has many dimensions. Is it the family home that I always loved to return to as a visitor but not to live there, or is it a new form of prison that I must get used to or resist?

House arrest imposes a colonial condition more complex and discordant, on both individual and collective levels, than actual imprisonment. Resisting it, and emerging from it with minimal damage, thus requires a greater and more mature awareness. The imbalance it introduces in the parental relationship serves colonial imperatives, triggering a state of thorny conflict within the family during this period, and even after it. It tests every family member, putting their human and patriotic values in question. This was made even more difficult by the fact that I was not just my parents’ child, but my children’s parent.

The colonization of maternity in Palestine means that the Palestinian mother often finds herself torn between her duty of care for her children and her duty toward the homeland. My conflict with motherhood began in the early stages of my pregnancy with my eldest daughter, Karmel. In 2017, when I was five months pregnant, I was arrested because of my work as a journalist with the Iliya Institute for Media, telling the stories of prisoners and martyrs.20 It was then that the nature of the relationship between the expectant mother and the Palestinian cause began to surface urgently and frequently in my mind. It became particularly real in Room No. 4 of the Russian Compound (Maskubiyya) detention center, in Jerusalem, as I was being interrogated. The interrogators used my pregnancy to blackmail and intimidate me.

I remember very well the interrogator’s repeated attempts to threaten me with a real prison sentence, and thus the possibility of giving birth to my daughter in prison. However, I, in turn, used the pregnancy to protect myself. I refused to sit the way they wanted me to and refused to abide by the terms of their investigation, which included staying there for a long period of time. I kept reminding them of my rights as a pregnant woman, to turn the tables in my favor. Nevertheless, I do not deny that I felt fear for the fetus at that moment. It felt as if my womb had been invaded and this was disconcerting.

I was arrested a second time the same year and again interrogated in Room No. 4 of the Russian Compound. This time, however, my arrest was used to threaten and intimidate my husband, who was himself being interrogated. He was informed of my detention and knew that it would be prolonged unless he satisfied his interrogators.

I had to be strong, I had to hold myself together, as I knew very well that there was no alternative to being strong in these moments. But I did fear for my pregnancy and my fetus. This conflict has no boundaries: it penetrates all your intimate spaces as a woman and as a mother and reminds you that you are a colonized person, and that the entire future of your motherhood is in their hands and at their disposal.

In colonized societies, women’s bodies become associated with the homeland and its boundaries, as well as being the literal sites of procreating and reproducing the nation. As a result, colonial powers systematically target women’s bodies to impose racial domination, subsuming them within the logic of Indigenous extermination.21 Sexual violence has been committed in colonial contexts against Indigenous women’s bodies through rape, the control of their reproductive capacities, torture, and murder.22 Women’s bodies become the scene of settler-colonial practices aimed at eliminating the Indigenous population and limiting its reproductive capacities.

My body still cannot shed its memory of the moment when I felt most terrified for my fetus. In 2017, during a live broadcast concerning the controversy over electronic gates at Bab al-Asbat (Lions’ Gate) in occupied Jerusalem, a group of soldiers pushed me and kicked me to the ground to prevent me from covering the events. I was nine months pregnant and my stomach was prominent. For a moment, I felt that I had lost my child, that my insides had been torn apart. My heart was beating violently, but I resisted and carried on broadcasting until the end. My body was also violated by the surveillance machines every time I went to Gilboa Prison to visit my husband. There were no exceptions for pregnant women.

When time came to give birth, this occasion was incomplete and distorted. When I gave birth to my first child, my husband was in prison. The occupation was able to steal away the most cherished and warm moments in my life. Perhaps this strikes you as melodramatic, but it is just one example of the countless violations of intimacy and distortions of social relations, including motherhood, that Palestinian women experience under occupation—a simple example of the way Israel subjects them to systematic deprivation and occupies their emotions.

In 2022, I was arrested in front of my two children, inside our home. This left deep emotional scars, disrupting the sense of security for parent and children both and breaching their shared space. The moment of my arrest, I remember perfectly how Karmel and Qais fled to my parents’ room and shut the door behind them. I was strong in front of the security officers, but when they asked me to come with them, my first thought was that I had to say goodbye to Karmel and Qais. I went to see them and told them that I was going but would come back, and I kissed them. Of course, one of the security officers was with me, and that’s when I realized the amount of fear that had been planted in Karmel’s and Qais’s hearts and how incapable I was of controlling the circumstances and protecting them from this brutal feeling.

In prison, to maintain my composure, I stopped myself from thinking about them or remembering their scent, but my longing and sense of motherhood were unleashed in one moment of pure humanity. In that moment, I felt as though I were outside of myself and I shouted in front of the cameras and soldiers standing in the court corridor, “I want my children!” I believe it was Lama-the-mother who yelled at that moment. I do not regret this scream, the purest and most authentic manifestation of humanity, which laid bare the violence of the occupation. My only thought was of my children and that I wanted to return to them as soon as possible. There was never a question of me rejecting the conditions and staying in Damon. In that precise moment I realized that my decision was no longer mine alone, that my children were part of the decision, and I had to do the right thing for them and not for me. They were my responsibility, my obligation. If I were not a mother, I could have rejected the conditional release and taken the path of imprisonment for a specific period, with each day legally accounted for.

As it was, for more than ten months, I continued to live under house arrest and my children continued to be fundamental to each decision and choice that I made. I want them to understand that the psychological effect of the experience engraved in their minds is not simple; it is ongoing, and accounts for their constant fear and anxiety of separation from their mother and their feeling of a lack of security and stability in their lives. Helping children to become aware of and understand this situation, in a manner appropriate to their age and capacity, is part of parental protection. They cannot be isolated from it under the pretext of alleviating its impact on them.

I tried to help my children overcome the shock by including them in the event, not isolating them from it. I decided to take them with me to one of the court hearings, so that they would know that the court is not an imagined monster, nor a place that robs us of our inner strength. I also took them with me to Damon prison, so that they would learn what prison is really like. I constantly and intentionally talk to them about terms that have become part of our daily lives at home, such as “prison,” “house arrest,” “court,” and “police.” I believe that this helped them cope with our current situation, but it was not able to restore their sense of security. This will take a long time. And I also believe that real security does not exist in the context of our lives in Palestine.

Raising children in a colonial context is thus one component of our collective resistance. Mothering is a life force in a world that we can only change together, and motherhood is a revolutionary subjectivity, not just a biological role. Writing about Egyptian women who participated in the 2011 Egyptian uprising that brought down the government of Husni Mubarak, Nadine Naber describes how their motherhood “is constituted by a radical potential precisely because they do not experience motherhood as incompatible with revolution. Instead, their mothering is a practice resisting state violence.”23 Similarly, in Palestine, revolutionary motherhood extends beyond biological childbearing to nurturing and educating children in a context of anti-colonial struggle.

Modelling the coexisting of motherhood and political action, providing the tools for critical thinking, and transmitting our histories to future generations are all forms of revolutionary mothering. Motherhood thus becomes a powerful tool to resist colonialism, to foster revolutionary spirit, and contribute to building a decolonized future. The thread of revolution, therefore, can be woven into the fabric of everyday life. But, as Naber notes, revolution also requires moving beyond the romanticized individual masculine hero to focus on the collective mobilization of both men and women in the care work that typically falls on women and, especially, mothers.24 It is not just that mothering can take on a revolutionary spirit, but that any future revolution requires mothering, in its many forms, if it is to sustain itself.

In addition to its impact on my relationship with my parents and my children, house arrest posed a fundamental challenge to my relationship with myself. House arrest effectively serves the colonizer’s goal of establishing a prison within the colonized person. This prison is constructed of self-doubt: doubting one’s decisions, one’s principles, one’s choices, the entire course of one’s life. Doubt afflicts the body and the mind.

Under house arrest, isolated from the public sphere and unable to participate in society, the self faces continuous attacks that seek to penetrate it permanently. This penetration occurs through self-censorship that the prisoner imposes on himself or herself, and through the conditions that colonial power imposes. I ask myself, what makes me myself? What factors played a part in forming my own self? Why did I make the choices that I made? What is the thread that connects them? Why did I agree to the conditional release order? What is the relationship between this decision and the obsession with freedom that smolders within me? What is the true meaning of freedom? Did I fail when I showed my weakness?

I was imprisoned on charges of “incitement”—refusal to conform to the colonizer’s norms of thought and speech. Here the system seeks to control and punish not only that which is material or tangible, but to reach into the realm of the invisible, holding the colonized accountable for their words, thoughts, and intentions. In this sense, house arrest is an appropriate punishment. If actions result in imprisonment behind bars of iron, the prison for those whose thoughts violate the colonial order is made of something less substantive, some invisible material. This prison is something in the air we breathe, a fortress built around the mind, an intangible and invisible censorship diffused via technology to produce a constant and destabilizing sense of uncertainty.25

The penetration of the psychological self is often accompanied and exacerbated by the penetration of the physical body. This occurred on various occasions, the most significant being the strip-search to which I was subjected before interrogation. This humiliation is imposed on all prisoners, male and female, and its impact remains forever engraved on the psyche. During this search, the mind disassociates from the body as the colonized individual feels the violation of their privacy and the breach of the body’s sanctity. There is no option to refuse. This search is made under the pretext of ensuring that no prohibited materials are hidden within the body’s crevices, but it also aims to upend the psychological balance of the prisoner.

Another such violation occurred when I was waiting for my court appearance. I was in the waiting room and demanded my right to access sanitary napkins. This request was rejected and I was forced to use the limited amount of paper tissues I was given. This led the toilet to malfunction, and it overflowed with water mixed with blood, which reached the chair of the guard in charge. He shot up and shouted out in disgust. I could not control myself when this happened. I felt so humiliated, and I sobbed and screamed for several hours without stopping. I think it was a form of refusal to accept what had happened. I felt that a very private and intimate space had been violated.

I was also subjected to a series of inspections upon entering Hasharon prison, including a review of my medical file and a medical examination. My entire medical file was in the hands of the prison authorities, who exploited a diagnosis of depression to label me a dangerous prisoner and place me in a highly monitored cell (ha-shagaha in Hebrew). These cells have three surveillance cameras, one of which is located directly above the toilet seat. This surveillance, which penetrates and distorts any sense of privacy, is done under the pretext of protecting the prisoner from self-harm, but the result is to leave both body and mind vulnerable to the prison authorities. I felt that everything related to my sense of privacy had been violated. The guards called me a “terrorist” and brought up my medical record at every inspection. They regarded me with suspicion and doubt, and I felt their eyes speculate about me and their distrust was reflected in the way they treated me.

I was placed in the criminal section of Hasharon prison, the only woman among men convicted of drug offenses, murder, and rape, among other crimes. I felt the eyes of the other prisoners on me, watching the way I moved. The other prisoners called me crude and offensive names and tried to push through the cell window, intruding on my space and leaving me constantly anxious and fearful of bodily assault. I felt that my body was constantly being scrutinized by every prisoner, so much so that I had to seek protection from the guards—which confounded me even more and left me in a state of heightened anxiety.

Colonialism works to reshape our sense of self and, because dismantling colonialism begins with our lived experiences, we must dismantle it within ourselves and in our relationships as an essential and fundamental condition for liberation. We must confront and transform the power relations that become a part of our self-formation, destroying and rebuilding those parts of ourselves that have been conditioned by colonial power. Despite everything, I refuse to allow oppression to pollute my intimate space, my home, and my relationships with my parents and with my children. Freedom is not associated with a particular time or place, but with the awareness that accompanies the revolt of the colonized self against the domination of colonial power. This revolt fills all space and time with its willpower and produces a new psychological, mental, and social environment in relation to self, family, home, and the idea of freedom itself.

Ultimately, the sense of oppression under colonial rule only serves to magnify the liberation of the energies of the colonized, transforming them from marginalized, oppressed, and subjugated individuals into active and decisive agents of history. This emergence from oneself would not be possible without the oppressive circumstances in which these new possibilities were forged. How else could I have found the way to express my suffering but also my freedom with such clarity, even if these were already latent in my consciousness? How could I have accepted putting the genie back in the bottle?

Freedom meant returning to and reclaiming the self, liberating it from the intended effects on my consciousness of this violent and oppressive colonial system of house arrest. From childhood, I could not accept submission—as an idea, a practice, a framework. After this experience, I have come to reject it with my entire being, with my body and my mind and with all my desire for life and freedom. The question now is how to turn this rejection into positive action? How to lift the siege imposed on my body and mind? I decided that no order issued against me would achieve its purpose. I found a revolution in reclaiming myself, unleashing latent creativity and generating new possibilities. Light flooded into my tunnel and my great escape began to take form.

Lama Hani Ghosheh calls herself, “a free journalist and a master’s student in Israeli studies at Birzeit University, a diploma student in Hebrew language, an emerging researcher interested in producing critical and liberatory Palestinian knowledge using original research tools and methodologies that rely on transforming the experiences and narratives of Palestinians, intertwined with their pains and challenges in the colonial context they live in, into knowledge that transcends the rigidity of theory.”