James Maclennan
Political Anthropology
Easter Term, 2024
Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, 5(1), pp. 166-203

Introduction

‘We are a people who have a just cause that will remain a just cause, and we will always stand against administrative detention, this injustice, even if the skin is gone, even if the bone deteriorates, even if the soul is gone.’

– Khalil Awawdeh (Samidoun 2022a)

‘…hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery.’ – Frantz Fanon (1963, 208)

One morning in late August 2022, I found myself clicking on a video by Al Jazeera English reposted on a friend’s Instagram story entitled ‘Palestinian hunger striker in critical condition’ (Al Jazeera 2022. The video showed Khalil Awawdeh, a Palestinian political prisoner on the 170th day of his hunger strike, in his hospital bed, speaking slowly and laboriously, his skeletal body so emaciated his head appeared twice its normal size. I could not understand what could bring a person to resort to such self-induced suffering. Awawdeh began his hunger strike back in March 2022 in protest of his administrative detention, a policy used by Israel to hold Palestinians in prison for years on end without charge or trial (B’Tselem 2017). He follows a long line of Palestinian detainees, which started with Khader Adnan and his successful strike in 2012, who have utilised strikes as a form of self-destructive resistance to demand for their freedom (Ajour 2021, 21). 

The focus of my paper is this phenomenon – the weaponisation of life within and against the contemporary settler-colonial occupation of Palestine.  By theoretically analysing Israel’s policy of administrative detention as a ‘state of exception’, I examine the work of Giorgio Agamben (1998; 1999), illuminating two elements that stand out in the experience of Palestinian detainees that are largely absent in Agamben’s work – namely the role of colonialism and race in the functioning of this policy, and the resistance of the actors who are caught within this exception. Drawing from critics who target Agamben’s silence on colonialism and race (Jarvis 2014; Weheliye 2014), and Banu Bargu’s  (2014, 78, 14) theorisation of ‘how death itself can be a form of resistance’ through a ‘weaponisation of life’, this paper explores the dynamics of administrative detention in occupied Palestine and the necropolitical strategy that Palestinian detainees use to resist this policy. While the series of hunger strikes that have characterised Palestinian carceral resistance since 2012 have typically been individual in nature (Meari 2022, 646), given the racialised nature of the policy under protest and the colonial context in which it is situated, I aim to explore not only how detainees framed their resistance in relation to their own lives, but in relation to the Palestinian people and the broader national liberation struggle. As such, the following two questions form the foundation of this paper. Firstly, how do Palestinian hunger-striking detainees understand their resistance in relation to their own lives? Secondly, how do Palestinian hunger-striking detainees understand their resistance in relation to the national liberation movement?

This paper is divided into two main sections. The first section, which encompasses Parts I and II, establishes the theoretical framework of the paper – what Agamben (1998; 1999) means by the ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’, as well as the problems facing this theory when accounting for race and resistance—and how this framework fits in the context of occupied Palestine. The second section (Parts III and IV) introduces my methodology for understanding Palestinian resistance when faced with the state of exception of administrative detention, and entails a subsequent analysis of the lived experiences of Palestinian hunger strikers from the period 2012 to 2022. My analysis utilises Braun and Clark’s (2006; 2012) method of thematic analysis to collate, distil and develop the first-person narratives of hunger-striking detainees from 25 interviews, statements, and letters into three themes. The first two of these themes, ‘A Refusal of Bare Life’ and ‘A Weaponization of Life’, relate specifically to my first question: how the detainees understand their resistance in relation to administrative detention and their own lives. The final theme, ‘An Individual Act of Collective Resistance’, addresses my second question, exploring how detainees understand their resistance in relation to the Palestinian people and the broader national liberation movement. 

Through my analysis of the lived experience of Palestinian hunger strikers, I deploy and interrogate Agamben’s work on the state of exception, ‘bare life’ and homo sacer. My first theme, ‘A Refusal of Bare Life’, finds that Agamben’s thesis is appropriate for understanding the aim of administrative detention – that is, to reduce subjects to a state of bare life. Despite this, the response of hunger-striking detainees to this condition – a refusal to be stripped of their humanity and dignity – highlights the fact that their agency is never lost. This creates problems for Agamben, who maintains a problematic blindness to the agency of the oppressed. My second theme, ‘A Weaponisation of Life’, further explores the dynamics of the necropolitical strategy of the detainees, finding that the hunger strike is understood as life-affirming, which has both practical and metaphysical elements. Practically, the hunger strike puts internal pressure on the regime by forcing upon it a decision and external pressure by making visible the hidden violence of administrative detention. Metaphysically, hunger strikers refuse the condition of ‘bare life’ by separating their biological existence from their political existence. By sacrificing the former for the latter, they not only retain their own dignity, but create new forms of agency in the process. Furthermore, my final theme, ‘An Individual Act of Collective Resistance’, finds that this agency is not limited to the individual hunger striker. The detainees make it clear that their resistance is tied not only to their own lives but to the Palestinian people. Somewhat paradoxically, it is precisely the racialised nature of this state of exception, which divides and dehumanises along ethno-religious lines, that provides practical opportunities for resistance through external mobilisation, as well as creating new forms of collective agency and subjectivity that provide opportunities for resisting the occupation at the national level. 

Based on these findings, I conclude by proposing my own framework for understanding the resistance of Palestinian hunger strikers. One of Agamben’s (1998) main arguments is that those caught in states of exception are homines sacri (sacred men). While homines sacri can ‘be killed by anyone without committing homicide’ (Agamben 1998, 62), because they have been stripped of all dignity, humanity and hope, they cannot be sacrificed because there is nothing within these subjects to sacrifice. As such they are solely defined by their naked biological existence. Against Agamben, Palestinian hunger strikers, who are caught in the state of exception of administrative detention, not only refuse to be stripped of their dignity, a decision which requires agency, but actively sacrifice their biological existence for their political existence. Therefore, contra Agamben, I propose that these agents be understood as the antithesis of homo sacer – as vitae sacrae (sacred lives) – in which their sacredness derives not from their ability to be killed but not sacrificed, but from their own ability to sacrifice. 

The significance of undertaking this research at this moment in time cannot be understated. In 2024, when Palestinian life appears more disposable than ever, as we watch a genocide unfold through our screens, it is crucial that we recognise with urgency the processes that have led us up to this point.  From the unapologetically genocidal statements made by Israeli officials (Segal and Green 2024) to the blocking of trucks attempting to deliver aid into the Gaza Strip by Israeli protesters (Buxbaum 2024), an absolute disregard for Palestinian human life is openly championed in Israel at the level of both state and society. Events like these do not take place in a vacuum. Only by recognising the evolution of these processes can we begin to understand how the demonisation and dehumanisation of a whole group of people can assume such ideological normativity across a society. This paper, which focuses on a more hidden form of violence against Palestinians, nonetheless highlights the same processes that are at play in the Gaza Strip today—namely how differentiation (racialisation) and hierarchisation/dehumanisation (racism) allow whole populations to be exposed to violence. Recognising this continuity is not only critical in understanding the ongoing genocide, but also Israel as a settler colonial project, which is fundamentally premised upon the elimination of Palestinian society (Wolfe 2006). It raises unsettling questions about how peace, dignity and humanity may be achieved for all those living in historic Palestine. Perhaps more importantly, by highlighting how racialisation and racism interact with the resistance of those who are the targets of these processes, this paper highlights how power can and will always be challenged. For those of us who are committed to the liberation of all peoples, this should give us hope, despite the pain and suffering that resistance entails.

I. On Bare Life

The State of Exception, Bare Life and Homo Sacer

Aiming to correct, or at least complete, Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, Agamben fuses a Schmittian model of traditional juridic-institutional sovereignty with a Foucauldian account of biopower (Agamben 1998, 12). The infamous jurist of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, defined the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt 1985 [1922], 5). Agamben explains that this forms a kind of paradox, whereby the sovereign is simultaneously situated inside and outside the law, owing to the fact that it can suspend the validity of the very juridical order that grants it the power to make such a decision (Agamben 1998, 15; Schmitt 1985 [1922], 13). Agamben extends Schmitt’s proposal to locate the antithesis of the sovereign within this state of exception – the abandoned figure of homo sacer. This figure is the embodiment of ‘bare life’, a form of life that fails to fit into the Aristotelian distinction between zoe, ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’, and bios, ‘politically qualified life’ (Agamben 1998, 9). As ‘a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast’ (Agamben 1998, 65), ‘bare life’ is what remains of bios after it has been stripped of its political significance. Because homo sacer holds no rights to be included within the law, it is a form of ‘human life [that] is included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (this is, of its capacity to be killed)’ (Agamben 1998, 12). Outside of both human and divine law, homo sacer can ‘be killed by anyone without committing homicide’ (Agamben 1998: 62). And yet, crucially, this figure that Agamben describes, devoid of any political existence or agency, cannot be sacrificed, for the simple reason that there is nothing in it to sacrifice. As the referent for the sovereign decision on the state of exception, it is the exclusion of ‘bare life’ – and by extension homo sacer – from the polis that guarantees the political realm.

A crucial part of Agamben’s analysis centres around modernity and the politicisation of bare life. Agamben argues that what constitutes modernity is the shift whereby bare life ‘gradually begins to coincide with the political realm’ (Agamben 1998, 12); that is, bare life is no longer excluded from the polis but instead becomes its inner concealed norm. The rise of Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism in the 20^th Century is for Agamben testament to the precarious nature of Western democracy vis-à-vis fascism, clear examples of when the exception became the rule and when whole populations were reduced to a state of bare life, unequivocally exposed to absolute sovereign violence. For Agamben, the concentration camp, whose ‘inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life’, is the ‘absolute space of exception’ (Agamben 1998, 97, 19), ‘the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized’ (Agamben 2000, 39-40). This conditio inhumana is embodied in the ‘the most extreme figure of the camp inhabitant’—the Muselmann—an abject, passive figure occupying a space between the human and non-human, ‘a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic, devoid of any dignity or political agency’ (Agamben 1998, 103; Agamben 1999, 41-86).

Problems for Agamben: Colonialism, Race and Resistance

While Agamben’s diagnosis of the relationship between the state of exception and bare life is compelling, he misses crucial ground concerning the role of colonialism and racism in the production of bare life, and the resistance of those who are subjected to this condition. 

Firstly, while Agamben’s genealogy of the state of exception is situated firmly within the Western political tradition, from the classical division of bios and zoe to the totalitarian horrors of the Nazi concentration camp, he demonstrates little awareness of how these ‘ideas [were] shaped not only by the West’s own citizen subjects…but also by (and sometimes for) Europe’s ‘external’ but ‘internalised’ other: the peoples it had subjected to its imperial rule in the colonies’ (Svirsky and Bignall 2012, 3). Paul Gilroy, for example, highlights how the slave plantation functioned in much the same way as the concentration camp in that ‘both constituted exceptional spaces where normal juridical rules and procedures had been deliberately set aside’ (Gilroy 2000, 60). Indeed, while Agamben (1998, 166) briefly mentions the colonial origins of the concentration camp, the notion that this structure was both unprecedented and (thus far) unique to Nazi Germany is fundamental to his thesis.  This is not to say that the concentration camp, the colonial outpost and the slave plantation are comparable. As Weheliye (2014, 37) highlights, these states of exception functioned for differing legal and political purposes – the camp for physical and absolute elimination, the plantation to ‘physiologically subdue and exploit’. This, we might understand as ‘social death’ (Patterson 1982). However, these spaces are relational and constitute ‘relay points in the wave of modern politics’ (Weheliye 2014, 37). 

Perhaps the most striking example of Agamben’s blindness to the historical relationship between the colonies and the camp can be found in his discussion of the Muselmann. Despite this abject figure being the focus of Agamben’s second book in his trilogy on bare life and his keen interest in juridical categories (homo sacer), Agamben ‘nowhere acknowledges that the use of the epithet ‘muselman’ at Auschwitz coincided with its simultaneous function as a juridical category of exception experimented with by the French in Algeria since at least its 1848 departmentalisation’ (Jarvis 2014, 709). In opposition to ‘les citoyens français’ (bearers of full citizenship rights), the French-Algerian code de l’indigénat classified ‘indigènes israëlites’ and ‘indigènes musulmans’ as ‘les sujets français’ (French subjects), barring these groups from citizenship and binding them to military conscription, forced labour and a separate disciplinary system that incorporated concentration camps (Jarvis 2014). While in 1870 citizenship rights were extended to the 30,000 ‘indigènes israëlites’, during and even after the Holocaust itself the word ‘muselman’ remained a French legal term to categorise and exclude from protection those bodies it considered to be disposable (Jarvis 2014). Agamben’s silence on the etymological foundations of the term ‘Muselmann’ allows him to treat it as an ontological category that was both a product of and exceptional to Auschwitz. In doing so, he ignores the historical relations that tie the structure of the camp and the bare life it produces to other exceptional spaces. 

However, aside from Agamben’s blindness to the relationship between the colonies and the camp, the question of the Muselmann raises a more damning point concerning Agamben’s failure to foreground the role of racialisation in the production of bare life. As ‘the absolute biopolitical substance’, stripped of both political and visible markers, Agamben argues that the Muselmann is a figure that ‘transcends race’ (Agamben 1999, 85). However, the unsettling casual lexical equivalence of the most dehumanised Jew at Auschwitz to ‘the Muslim’ indicates that racialisation was, and remains still, a process fundamental to the production of bare life (Weheliye 2014). Not only does Agamben fail to question why a racial slur for Muslims appeared as the lowest category of Jew within the camp. For Agamben, it is an ‘irony’ that ‘the Muslim’ was associated with ‘the absolutely apathetic’ figure of the camp (Agamben 1998, 103), implying either that ‘he considers the association between absolute apathy and Muslims to be self-evident, or that he assumes that such an association would have appeared self-evident to those who assigned the epithet’ (Jarvis 2014, 708). In either case, by naturalising the ‘Muslim’ as representative of the most absolute form of bare life, Agamben ‘leav[es] intact the bonding of an abject process/status to a racio-religious label’ (Weheliye 2014, 54), thereby reproducing the orientalist dehumanisation of non-Western subjects through racialisation. 

Finally, while Agamben’s account features ‘subjects to whom all manner of things are done, often in arbitrary and violent ways… [they are] rarely agents in their own right’ (Walters 2008, 188; Ziarek 2008; Bargu 2014, 75-76). In fact, in his discussion of the body, which he recognises ‘is always already a biopolitical body and bare life’, Agamben explicitly states that ‘nothing in it…seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power’ (Agamben 1998, 105). Under Agamben’s framework, there should be a complete absence of political protest within sites of exception – concentration camps, slave plantations, migrant detention centres and prisons (Negri 2007; Ziarek 2008; Bailey 2009). This is clearly not the case, and Agamben’s dystopian account ‘ignores the resistance of the weak and their capacities to continue to be human and to subvert the illusory dream of total control’ (Bigo 2007, 12). 

The Racialisation of Life

Recognising the contiguity between historical sites of exception such as the slave plantation, the colonial outpost and the concentration camp can help identify the processes that continue to structure which life is to be made bare in modern politics. Using the example of the contemporary occupation of Palestine for example, Achille Mbembe, argues that necropower, that is, the ability to reduce certain populations to a form of living-death, remains a key component of modernity (Mbembe 2003, 27). In what Mbembe coins ‘death-worlds’, subjected populations continue to be reduced to a state of bare life, in which they can be killed with impunity (Mbembe 2003, 40). But in an age supposedly defined by the careful administration of life, how does the sovereign violence of old rear its head with such ease?

Foucault identifies racism as the ‘break in the domain of life’, a means of separating groups within a population and dividing them into ‘what must live and what must die’ (Foucault 2003, 254-5). Visible markers such as skin colour and hair type are just some of the classification mechanisms used for the fragmentation of the population into races, or ‘subspecies’, marking out racialised populations as threats and justifying the destruction of these groups in the name of the health of the population (Foucault 2003, 255-6). In short, racism is ‘the precondition for exercising the right to kill’, where killing entails not simply murder, but ‘also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Foucault 2003, 256). What Foucault misses here is how racism necessitates not simply the differentiation and hierarchisation of life, but the dehumanisation of certain groups that are classified as either not-quite-human or non-human (Weheliye 2014, 4). The barring of racialised subjects from the category of the human can be observed in the discourse of state-sanctioned violence from the ‘Jewish parasite’ of Europe to the ‘human animals’ of Gaza (Steizinger 2018; Bruneau and Kteily 2017). In sum, this process, involving differentiation (racialisation), hierarchisation/ dehumanisation (racism), and subsequent exposure to violence, is how the production of bare life achieves ideological normality within modern politics. Therefore, whilst Agamben argues that the distinction between ‘bare life’ and ‘qualified life’ is becoming increasingly blurred, and, as such, anyone may be caught in the exception—‘all men are potentially homines sacri’ (Agamben 1998, 53)—it is clear that racialisation and racism remain the primary mechanism in determining which life is to be caught in the exception and made bare, and as such certain target populations remain the targets of sovereign violence.

The Weaponization of Life

While Mbembe notes the persistence of necropolitical spaces such as occupied Palestine, where whole populations are racialised, abandoned, and rendered disposable by the colonial sovereign, in this discussion of the suicide-bomber and the ‘logic of martyrdom’, he departs from Agamben further by highlighting the possibilities of resistance in these spaces, possibilities that materialise through the very act of self-destruction (Mbembe 2003, 27, 35-7). 

Following the resistance of leftist militants in response to the cellularization of the Turkish prison system in the early 2000s, Bargu’s work builds on this interpretation, aiming to explore ‘how death itself can be a form of resistance’ (Bargu 2014, 78). She coins the term ‘necro-resistance’ to refer to those self-destructive modes of resistance— in her case the ‘fast unto death’ and self-immolation—which constitute a direct challenge to sovereign power ‘by wrenching the power of life and death away from the apparatuses of the modern state in which this power is conventionally vested’ (Bargu 2014, 27). Crucially, what is communicated through necro-resistance is the ‘prioritisation of the life of a political cause over the biological existence of its proponents’ (Bargu 2014, 16). If bare life is life stripped of political significance, concerned simply with biological survival, then the weaponisation of life is not simply the mobilisation of bare life, or ‘bare life on strike’ (Ziarek 2008). Instead, Bargu argues, these self-destructive modes of resistance constitute ‘a refusal of bare life’, that is, a refusal to be reduced to a form of life stripped of its political significance, agency and dignity (Bargu 2014, 81). In contrast to Agamben’s Muselmann, which embraces merely ‘pure existence…these agents actively seek to avoid and refuse [this state] by sacrificing their biological existence in the name of their political existence’ (Bargu 2014, 82).

Bare Life in Israel: The Case of Administrative Detention

Israel, administrative detention, and the state of exception

Countless scholars have compared, theorised and critiqued Israel as an Agambenian state of exception (Shenhav 2006; Lloyd 2012; Hanafi 2013; Lentin 2008, 2016, 2018). The Zionist project has certainly been able to ‘market itself to the world as an exceptional case’ (Lentin 2018, 23) – a democracy in a sea of authoritarianism, a necessary homeland for a people without a home, a state besieged by internal and external enemies. It may not come as a surprise to the reader then, to learn that Israel has operated under a permanent state of emergency since its inception. Upon its foundation in 1948 Israel adopted the British Mandates’ ‘Emergency Regulations’, under which rules could be introduced to ‘alter any law, suspend its effect or modify it’ (quoted in Rudolph 1984, 67).  This state of emergency continues to this day, and ‘enables: one rule (life) for the majority of the state’s citizens, and another (death, threat of death, threat of expulsion) for the state’s subjects, whose lives have been rendered ‘bare’’ (Shenhav 2006, 206-7).

It is these emergency regulations that form the foundation of administrative detention, a practice that entails a de facto suspension of the judicial process and the removal of legal rights of anyone who falls under its purview. By order of a regional military commander, a person can be detained for a period of up to six months without legal proceedings, justified on the simple basis that that person may intend on breaking the law in the future (B’Tselem 2017).  The detention order, which is based on classified information, can be extended if the commander has ‘reasonable grounds to believe that reasons of regional security or public security require that a certain person be held in detention’ (B’Tselem 2017). This essentially allows a person to be held in administrative detention indefinitely for years on end without any legal proceedings.  While there is some semblance of judicial oversight—individuals must be brought before a military judge within 8 days of the original order—this is essentially a box-ticking exercise. According to figures provided by an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokesperson, of the 3,909 administrative detention orders that were issued from the beginning of 2015 to the end of July 2017, just 48 (1.2%) were cancelled by the military court (B’Tselem 2017). The practice of administrative detention then, like the colonial power in whose interests it functions, appears very much like a classic example of an Agambenian state of exception. The law, and in particular the judicial system, only ‘applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it’ (Agamben 1998, 18, emphasis in original). 

Racialising administrative detention: which life is to be made bare?

We have already discussed Agamben’s problematic colour blindness when it comes to determining which life may be caught in the state of exception and made bare. The governing of citizens and subjects by the Israeli state is testament to this. As is typical in any colonial society, race is deployed as the ‘organizing grammar’ (Wolfe 2006, 387) through which populations are divided into ‘those who must live and those who must die’, friend and enemy, coloniser and colonised (Mbembe 2003, 17; also see Shenhav 2006; Lentin 2018). At the national level, Palestinian Natives are differentiated from Jewish settlers along racialised ethno-religious lines, and categorised into a citizenship tier system that restricts their ‘rights of expression, movement, organisation and equality before the law’ (Lentin 2008, 9). Furthermore, from the checkpoints, roads and settlements that carve up the West Bank, to the extra-judicial killings by the IDF of anyone who shows any sign of resistance, to the demolition of homes and villages, Palestinians are dehumanised—divided, degraded, humiliated, excluded, and evicted at every level of Israeli state and society (Lentin 2016, 35). This dehumanisation is justified on the basis of race; that is, the Palestinian’s apparent inherent, natural proclivity to violence, barbarism, and terrorism (Goldberg 2009, 140). Foucault’s (2003, 255-6) point that racism is justified on the premise that racialised populations pose an inherent threat to the health and security of a society seems particularly poignant here.

The case of the policy of administrative detention is no different. Tamar Pelleg-Sryck, a prominent Israeli lawyer specialising in the defence of Palestinian administrative detainees, highlights the fact that the background of a preponderant majority of administrative detainees is an association with a terror organisation a synonym for ‘unauthorised organisation’ (Pelleg-Sryck 2011, 133). Despite the fact that many of these organisations are humanitarian and ‘conduct political, social, educational, health and charity activities’, any association with the hundreds of organisations that have been deemed ‘unauthorised’ over the years of the occupation can constitute a violation of the law and a ‘threat to security’, which can in turn justify an administrative detention order (Pelleg-Sryck 2011). Unsurprisingly, these ‘terror organisations’ are exclusively Palestinian, and this policy has been targeted almost without exception against Palestinians since its inception. In this case, one does not have to have committed a crime to face this punishment – being Palestinian is enough. Indeed, the very category of ‘security prisoner’, under which administrative detainees fall, is racialised in that it is ‘differentiated [both] from ‘criminal’ Israeli and Palestinian prisoners and from Israeli-Jewish prisoners sentenced for security offences’ (Lentin 2018, 150, emphasis added). The categorisation of Palestinians as the sole source of ‘potential security threats’, and the deployment of administrative detention against Palestinian but not Israeli ‘terrorists’, reveals that race, constructed along ethno-religious lines, is the fundamental, demarcating principle when it comes to deciding which life is to be made bare in Israel. Therefore, it is crucial that we understand this state of exception ‘not merely in legal but also in racial terms’ (Lentin, 2016, 46).

Resistance within the state of exception: the hunger strike

The aforementioned lack of agency that Agamben affords those caught in the state of exception is especially problematic when accounting for the Palestinian case. While administrative detention may resemble an Agambenian state of exception, the phenomenon of the hunger strike is clear evidence of the agency of those subjected to this condition. Palestinian prisoners have utilised the hunger strike as a form of carceral resistance from as early as 1968 (Shwaikh and Gould 2023, 21); just a year after the occupation of, and establishment of the military court system in, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which resulted in the mass incarceration of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Transforming the prison into a site of struggle, a series of collective hunger strikes in the 1970s and 1980s won concessions from the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), including access to stationary which allowed prisoners to write letters to family, the right to buy and read newspapers, and the ability to take the General Secondary School exam (Shwaikh and Gould 2023, 37). However, since 2012, in response to the decline and fragmentation of the Palestinian national liberation movement in the post-Oslo era, we have witnessed the emergence of a new type of hunger strike – one which is open-ended, typically undertaken by individuals, and directed specifically against the policy of administrative detention (Ajour 2021, 2; Meari et al 2022, 646). This new form of struggle was initiated by the late Khader Adnan, who, after refusing food for 66 days, was released from administrative detention by a court ruling (Ajour 2021, 658).  Since then, countless detainees have followed in his wake, weaponising their lives to win their freedom. Contra Agamben, the phenomenon of the Palestinian hunger strike speaks to the political agency available to those who are caught in the exception and offers a useful case for investigating the dynamics of this agency.

From the theoretical to the analytical

Parts I and II have established the theoretical and historical context of this paper. While administrative detention may resemble an Agambenian state of exception, the centrality of race and resistance to this policy in occupied Palestine opens up a number of avenues to research. How do hunger-striking administrative detainees understand their resistance and agency vis-à-vis bare life? How are they able to weaponise their lives to resist this state of exception? If this state of exception is a racialised one, how do these actors view their resistance in relation to the occupation and the wider national liberation movement, particularly given the typically individualised nature of this specific case? These are all questions that my analysis offers an insight into, ones which have serious theoretical implications for Agamben and his concepts of the ‘state of exception’, ‘bare life’ and homo sacer. Drawing on the work of contemporary critical scholars, most importantly that of Bargu (2014), the following sections examine how these actors frame their lives, positions and resistance when faced with the exception of administrative detention. In doing so, I deploy and interrogate Agamben’s theoretical framework, highlighting its utility and limitations in relation to Palestine, and uncover the forms of individual and collective agency available to those who are caught in colonial states of exception.

Methodology

My analysis adopts Braun and Clarke’s (2006; 2012) method of thematic analysis (TA) to investigate how hunger-striking Palestinian administrative detainees understand their resistance in relation to their own lives as well as the broader liberation struggle. This method was primarily chosen as it focuses on identifying ‘patterns of meaning (themes) across a data set’ (Braun and Clarke 2012, 57), and therefore lends itself to research orientated around the shared experience of agents and the collective meaning they attach to this experience. Furthermore, the theoretical flexibility afforded by this method, which allows it to be deployed across a wide range of epistemological and theoretical frameworks (Braun and Clarke 2006; 2012), is particularly appropriate to my relatively unique approach which combines political theory with an analysis of the lived experience of agents on the ground. 

Given the flexibility of TA, it is crucial that the researcher clarify the underlying theoretical and conceptual assumptions and limitations of their specific approach, which straddle three main continua: an inductive versus deductive analysis, an experiential versus critical orientation to the data, and an essentialist versus constructivist theoretical perspective (Braun and Clarke 2006; 2012). While I am interested in the lived experience of Palestinian hunger strikers and the shared meaning they attach to their resistance, which lends itself to a more inductive approach, I interpret this meaning through my aforementioned theoretical framework. As such, the following analysis is partially inductive and partially deductive. Additionally, I adopt an experiential rather than a critical orientation to the data as the specific aims of this paper are not to make claims about the social construction of hunger striker discourse, but rather to ‘give a voice’ to the actors involved by examining the meaning they collectively attach to their resistance. This also means adopting an essentialist theoretical framework, which assumes that language reflects articulated meanings and experiences (Widdicombe and Woofitt 1995). While this leaves the hierarchical power relations and systems within this group unchallenged, it is not to say that these discourses are not gendered or classed in any way, just that this is not the focus of this specific project, which aims to explore the collective meaning attached to the resistance of hunger-striking Palestinian detainees.

Through a number of public and primarily Palestinian NGOs, media companies and think tanks, I was able to access and collect a wide range of published and translated sources from various hunger strikes. In total, I was able to collect 5 statements, 10 interviews, and 15 letters from hunger-striking administrative detainees from early 2012 to late 2022, all of which can be found in the ‘Empirical Sources’ section of the bibliography. The vast majority of these sources were from individual male detainees, which reflects the overwhelming proportion of hunger strikes during this period (Ajour 2021), but also included data from two collective hunger strikes and one individual hunger strike by female detainee Hana Al-Shalabi. The data covered a broad genealogy of hunger strikes, with statements typically made before and during the hunger strike, letters almost always written during the hunger strike, and interviews conducted primarily after the hunger strike was over. While there may be issues related to the accuracy of the translation of the sources from Arabic into English, and there are certainly some limitations regarding the focus of sources given we were unable to conduct personal interviews with the hunger strikers themselves, the data is a relatively representative sample of Palestinian hunger strike discourse from the period 2012 to 2022.In conducting my thematic analysis, I followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006; 2012) six-phase recursive approach, involving an initial familiarisation with the data, the generation of codes, the collation of codes into potential themes, the reviewing and naming of themes, and finally the writing up of the report. After the data was collected, each individual source was transferred into a separate Microsoft Word document and initial codes were generated via the Microsoft Word ‘comments’ function. This enabled codes to be noted in the side-margin whilst highlighting the relevant text. Semantic codes are descriptive, aimed at identifying explicit meanings, while latent codes are more interpretive and require a more active role of the researcher, aimed at capturing implicit meaning (Terry et al 2017). I chose to conduct both semantic and latent coding as I was interested in the explicit meaning attributed to the actions and motivations of the hunger strikers, and yet I interpreted much of this meaning through my own theoretical framework. From these codes I generated six potential themes, before reviewing and collapsing these into three final themes that offered a unique insight into how the hunger strikers framed their resistance in relation to both of my research questions. My first two themes address my first question, focusing on how detainees understood their resistance in relation to their own lives, while my final theme addresses my second question, focusing on how they understood their resistance in relation to the Palestinian collective. After naming each of these themes – ‘A Refusal of Bare Life’, ‘A Weaponization of Life’, and ‘An Individual Act of Collective Resistance’ – I wrote up my analysis, concluding each theme with a discussion on the practical and theoretical implications of my findings for Agamben’s thesis.

Part IV: Analysis

Theme 1: A Refusal of Bare Life

If, as described by Agamben, homo sacer is the embodiment of ‘bare life’, robbed of political agency and reduced to a state of mere biological existence, then the personal accounts of those held in detention suggest that the aim of this policy is indeed the reduction of the Palestinian subject to this condition. Many detainees describe the policy as a dispossession —of freedom, humanity, and dignity —- one that is intimately tied to family and nationhood. Thaer Halahleh, who went on hunger in February 2012 in response to the repeated renewal of his administrative detention order, describes the ‘torture’ of being separated from his new-born daughter, which ‘deprived [me] of my role as a human’ (Alsaafin 2012a). This is echoed in a statement released by the most recent collective hunger strike in September 2022, which details how detainees are ‘prevented…from embracing our families or seeing our children’, which aims to ‘separate us from our social reality and our national and humanitarian role, and turn us into dry fragments’ (Samidoun 2022a). Others mention being robbed of the freedom to work, to attend religious festivals, and to eat Palestinian food. For Palestinians then, administrative detention is a dispossession of life – not of biological life (zoe), but of ‘politically qualified’ life (bios), in Aristotelian terms. For some detainees, this condition cannot simply be described as a dispossession of life, but as a sentence of death. Echoing Foucault’s (2003, 256) identification of ‘indirect murder’ as a form of ‘killing’ and Patterson’s (1982) idea of ‘social death’, Mahmoud Sarsak, in an interview with Socialist Worker after his hunger strike ended in his release, explains that ‘…in Israel, prisons are there to kill Palestinians. Israel uses the prison as a tool to crush people politically, ideologically, intellectually and socially’ (Cooch et al 2013). Therefore, while administrative detention may not result in the biological death of Palestinians, the personal accounts of the detainees indicate it is certainly directed at their social, political, and cultural death, in what another source fittingly describes as ‘graves for the living’ (Abusalama 2014).  

The indefinite nature of administrative detention is key here because it distinguishes the policy from general incarceration. Based on ‘secret information’, detention orders may be renewed days or even hours before they are set to expire, and when Palestinians are released, they are often redetained hours or days after leaving the prison compound, for reasons they are not made aware of (Addameer 2022). Detainees repeatedly describe the indefinite and undisclosed nature of administrative detention as a form of ‘psychological torture’ (Saada 2012), whose purpose is ‘to humiliate and torture [them] and their families, undermine their morale [and] break their will’ (Addameer 2022). The punishment of administrative detention then, is not simply spatial. Like Kafka’s (1999) The Trial, the very lack of a process, lack of a decision, and lack of knowledge about the conclusion of the punishment is what makes the policy so crushing. One source explained how ‘[w]e can never know when we are going home’, likening it to a ‘cruel game of ‘yes hope/no hope’… a mixture of Russian roulette, ‘she loves me/loves me no’, and…a variant of that familiar theme: ‘Abandon hope all who enter here’ (Pelleg-Sryck 2011, 125). This experience is not unlike that of the camp inhabitant, who recounts becoming ‘so indifferent to your fate that you no longer wanted anything from anyone’ and ‘had no illusions about ever going home’ (Agamben 1999, 167, 169). By destroying the hope and dignity of the subject through a process of continuous psychological torture, detainees see the policy of administrative detention as aimed at reducing them to a state of ‘bare life’ —-a body, devoid of humanity and political agency, concerned solely with biological survival.

And yet, while the policy of administrative detention may appear synonymous with an Agambenian state of exception, aimed at the dehumanisation and reduction of subjects to a state of ‘bare life’, the Palestinian response to being faced with this condition – the hunger strike — is one of rejection and refusal. When describing administrative detention as ‘a return to slavery and the slave’, hunger striker Muhammad Allan maintains, ‘I refuse to be a slave at any point’ (Murphy 2015).  Similarly, Basil Mizher describes his hunger strike as ‘a rejection of this policy of subordination and domestication’ (Samidoun 2022b). This problematises Agamben’s thesis, because the very decision to hunger strike, to reject this condition of ‘bare life’, is a political one. If ‘bare life’ is the prioritisation of survival over all else, including a political existence, then the Palestinian hunger striker cannot be equated to the Muselmann, which, according to Agamben, has no political agency and is capable of neither refusal nor resistance. In stressing the defensive nature of their position — ‘I am defending my dignity’ (Samidoun 2012) – the hunger strikers reveal that their dignity and agency had never been lost in the first place. As such, it is inaccurate and inappropriate to equate those on hunger strike to the Muselmann nor Muselmänner survivors. Here, it seems particularly poignant to recount Bargu’s (2014, p. 344) point that the Turkish hunger strike should be seen ‘as the resistance to bare life’ rather than ‘the resistance of bare life’. While Agamben’s framework is clearly helpful in identifying the aim of administrative detention — to reduce Palestinian subjects to a state of bare life — and how this differentiates it from other forms of oppression in Palestine, the phenomenon of the hunger strike as a response to this policy (and the refusal attached to this response) directly challenges Agamben’s thesis and the lack of agency he affords the oppressed. 

Theme 2: A Weaponization of Life

Before proceeding, it is important to note that, although the hunger strikers view their resistance as a weaponization of life, they make clear that this action is life-affirming, rather than life-rejecting. One detainee explains that ‘[n]o one dies for the sake of dying…We love life in its natural form’ (Alsaafin 2012b), while another insists ‘I wasn’t trying to kill myself —- I underwent this strike out of love for a free life’ (Nofal 2022). Therefore, is the very value of life, or at least of a ‘politically-qualified life’ (bios) rather than ‘the life that the Occupation imposes on us’ (Palestinian Youth Movement 2022), that enables the detainee to continue with their hunger strike despite the immense physical and psychological suffering that accompanies this action. But if the detainees value life so much, why then do they resort to a form of resistance that risks their death? The answer to this question is simple. As Mizher explains, ‘fighting with our stomachs is the last means we resort to in order to live’ (Samidoun 2022c). Similarly, Samer Issawi, who undertook the longest hunger strike in recorded history at 266 days, describes his fast as ‘my last remaining stone to throw at the tyrants and jailors’ (Issawi 2013). Faced with the condition of ‘bare life’, the prospect of being reduced to a state of mere survival, detainees resist through the only option that they have available – their biological existence. But how do the detainees forge their bodies into weapons in order to challenge this dispossession? How do they understand the relationship between themselves and their bodies?

Practically, going on hunger strike forces upon the Israeli occupation a decision —- ‘freedom or martyrdom’. This sentiment was repeated time and time again by almost all hunger-striking detainees. By refusing food, the detainee directly confronts the indefinite nature of the policy by radically reducing the period of administrative detention to the biological deterioration of the body. The detainee’s life is no longer suspended, and the Israeli state and its representatives must now address both the hunger strikers’ condition and their demands according to a new time schedule dictated by the subject themselves. Indeed, because the state is responsible for the health and well-being of those in administrative detention, it now becomes responsible for the outcome of the hunger strike, whether that be freedom or death. As one hunger striker states, ‘[m]y death would be a murder by the occupation…It is not in my hands. Israel has the power to release or detain…My only conditions are freedom or death’ (Nassar 2020). Therefore, it is precisely the internal conditions of administrative detention that allow for the life of the subject to be forged into a weapon against the state. The detainees utilise the absolute disciplinary control that they are subjected to, as well as the responsibility that comes with this control, to undermine the absolute sovereignty of the occupation and force upon it a decision – freedom or martyrdom. 

The hunger strikers further weaponise their lives by making visible the violence of administrative detention through the performativity of self-directed violence. Administrative detention, as discussed, is a form of psychological violence, which aims to destroy the political identity of the individual while leaving intact the physical body. This is not to say that detainees are not subject to direct/physical violence – Khader Adnan specifically mentions being ‘humiliated, beaten, and harassed by interrogators for no reason’ (Samidoun 2012). Rather, the policy is primarily characterised by indirect/non-physical forms of violence, and what direct/physical violence the individual is subjected to occurs almost without exception behind closed doors. The detainees explain that their self-destructive act makes visible this hidden violence. Similar to how suicide bombings ‘mimic Israeli state violence’ (Abufarha 2009, 139), the ‘suffering body’ of the hunger striker, of which ‘nothing remains but skin and bone’, acts as ‘a mirror reflecting the true face of the occupation’ (Samidoun 2022a). While the hunger strike mimics the violence of the Occupation, because this violence is defensive and self-directed, it is generally effective in its performativity, garnering more international sympathy and generating more international pressure than a suicide bomber would. For instance, the shocking video of Khalil Awawdeh that I introduced this paper with garnered international attention, resulting in strong criticism from powerful actors such as the European Union (Al Jazeera Staff 2022). The idea of the body acting as a mirror highlights the performative nature of the hunger strike, which not only seeks to put pressure on the state internally by forcing upon it a decision, but creates the conditions for external pressure by making visible to those outside the prison the previously-hidden violence of administrative detention.  

Finally, the hunger strikers weaponise their lives through ‘self-bifurcation’ (Feldman 1991) —- the separation of their biological existence from their political existence and the sacrificing of the former for the latter. This point has less to do with the practical weaponisation of life for freedom, through which the hunger striker puts internal and external pressure on the state to release them, and more to do with declaring and maintaining the political identity of the individual, no matter the result of the strike. While they stress that the aim of the hunger strike is freedom, the hunger strikers acknowledge that death is a real possibility – one detainee even signs off their letter ‘The martyr-to-be, Ghazanfar Abu Antwan’ (Gaza Daily 2021). Therefore, even if they are not released, the hunger striker separates and prioritises their political existence over their biological survival. Even in their deteriorating condition, and indeed after death, they continue to exist and flourish politically. Ghassan Zawahreh vividly expresses this in a letter, in which he paints a picture of two contrasting images. The first is of the fading, wretched hunger striker — ‘[t]he merciless aches of their bodies, headaches, and general emaciation, and even the sound of pain that emits from their bones’ (Samidoun 2022d). However, this image is quickly replaced by ‘the image of the fighter and the resistance struggler, the revolutionary. The image of will, steadfastness and defiance, which does not fade’ (Samidoun 2022d). The political strength of the physically weak hunger striker is further echoed by Bilal Kayed, who declares that ‘…the body may be absent and the mind fading, but the spirit is holding fast to its decision, which cannot be deterred by any force in the world’ (Samidoun 2016). This metaphysical weaponisation of life has serious theoretical implications for Agamben, because, as previously mentioned, homo sacer is a figure that can be killed but not sacrificed for the very reason that there is nothing in homo sacer that is worthy of sacrifice. By sacrificing their biological existence for their political existence, the hunger striker becomes the very antithesis of homo sacer; not simply worthy of sacrifice, but able to sacrifice the very thing that epitomises homo sacer — mere biological survival.

Theme 3: An Individual Act of Resistance

Whilst the vast majority of hunger strikes in the post-2012 period have been individual rather than collective, and have been directed primarily against the policy of administrative detention, those on hunger strike repeatedly emphasise that their resistance is intimately tied to the collective national liberation movement. In contrast to the Turkish death fast struggle then, which emerged and ultimately remained at the margins of society (Bargu 2014, 28-31), hunger strikes in Palestine occupy a place at the very centre of the liberation movement against the Zionist settler project. But in what ways is the hunger strike linked to the national liberation movement? How do hunger strikers see their resistance in the broader context of the Occupation?

Firstly, the Palestinian collective plays a crucial role in the undertaking of the hunger strike itself. As a racialised policy, incarceration is a part of life for every Palestinian. As Mahmoud Sarsak explains, ‘[e]veryone in Palestinian society knows someone who is or has been to prison’ (Cooch et al 2013). Indeed, even those who have not been physically incarcerated live under a regime that acts very much like an open-air prison, restricting their freedom of movement and removing their rights. The prison is the symbol of the Occupation par excellence, and thus, at a time when factional division is rife at the top of Palestinian political society, ‘[t]he issue of prisoners always unites the Palestinian people in the face of the occupation’ (Samra 2020). Of course, practically speaking, mobilisation outside the prison is key to the success of the performative aspect of the hunger strike, which is only effective in putting pressure on the occupation if it can be communicated with the rest of the world. Noting that ‘Israel could not continue its oppression without the support of western governments’, Samer Issawi stresses the importance of putting pressure on these governments to ‘impose sanctions on the Israeli regime’ (Issawi 2013). That said, those on hunger strike emphasise that the Palestinian people play a far deeper role than simply helping to mount international pressure on the Occupation. For the hunger strikers, it is the ‘enormous support of the Palestinian people’ that enables them ‘to continue the hunger strike despite the extreme hunger and physical discomfort’ (Al Jazeera Staff 2021). While the Occupation attempts to break the hunger strike by isolating the individual from the rest of the population, the strength of the detainee ‘endures thanks to this solidarity and support’, which ‘can penetrate the prison walls’ (Issawi 2013). Despite spatial separation, hunger strikers describe being able to ‘smell your scent and feel the reverberations of your pounding the walls and hear the shouts of your throats’ (Samidoun 2015). The intimate connection between the individual hunger striker and the Palestinian nation not only provides a foundation for collective unity outside the prison, but metaphorically breaks down the prison wall itself, sustaining the prisoners throughout their personal battle.At the same time as the external collective fights for the internal individual, the hunger strikers view themselves as soldiers on the front line against the Occupation, ‘fighting for all Palestinians’ (Issawi 2013). If the prison is the symbol of the Occupation par excellence, then the hunger strike is the ‘symbol of the principle and demand for justice in Palestine’ (O’Hare 2015), a metaphor for the enduring struggle against a racist and unjust regime that seeks only to dispossess and destroy. As such, hunger strikers do not view their resistance simply as a rejection of administrative detention, but as a ‘rejection of the occupation itself’ (Saada 2012). Their individual battle is waged on behalf of the collective and is therefore intimately linked to the national struggle. This perspective offers vital insights into the discourse of martyrdom and self-sacrifice that permeates the accounts of hunger strikers. The detainee does not only sacrifice their body for their own personal freedom and political existence, but for the freedom and political existence of the Palestinian people. As Khader Adnan puts it, ‘I starve for you to remain. I die for you to live’ (Samidoun 2012). In sacrificing their body for the Palestinian people, the hunger striker hints at an alternative kind of political existence that goes beyond that which was discussed in the previous themes. This political existence endures not simply through a refusal of ‘bare life’, or a weaponisation of life, but through the sacrifice made for the Palestinian nation which continues to resist and exist years and even decades after the death of the hunger striker. This alternative collective political existence is neatly summarised in a letter to the Palestinian people by Samer Issawi on the 209^th day of his strike, where he asks ‘that, in case I fell as a martyr, you will carry my soul as a cry for all…[a] cry for freedom, emancipation and salvation’ (Bannoura 2013). This again has implications for Agamben’s framework. In contrast to homo sacer, the wretched creature hung between life and death, devoid of hope or dignity, the Palestinian hunger striker is capable not only of sacrificing their biological existence for their own individual political existence, but for the collective struggle of the Palestinian people, through which the subject is immortalised. As such, in the absence of biological life, the hunger striker maintains both an individual and a collective political life, one which cannot be dispossessed.

Conclusion

Two decades on from the publication of Necropolitics, we are witnessing in front of our eyes what the International Court of Justice has ruled to be a plausible case of genocide by Israel against the Palestinian people (Al-Kassab 2024). The claim Mbembe made in 2003 that the contemporary occupation of Palestine is ‘[t]he most accomplished form of necropower’ (Mbembe 2003, 27) holds true now perhaps more than any other time in history. However, the first-hand accounts of hunger-striking Palestinian administrative detainees reveal that physical annihilation is just one, albeit particularly visible, form of necropower. Hidden behind the closed doors of the Israeli prison, necropower operates by stripping away the hope, humanity and dignity of Palestinians, with the social and political death of these subjects as its ultimate goal. Yet, while this paper has focused on a less visible form of necropower than what Palestinians are being subjected to in the Gaza Strip today, the same processes of differentiation (racialisation) and hierarchisation/dehumanisation (racism) are at play. It is vital then, that we understand the dehumanising language Israeli officials use to justify the daily massacre of Palestinian civilians as a continuation of Israeli policy and logic, rather than simply a response to the October 7th attacks. What we are witnessing is not simply a genocide but an intensification of the violence that Palestinians have been subjected to for over 75 years. Put simply, Israel’s actions are part of a structure, not an event (Wolfe 2006, 388).

Yet, despite the suffering that Palestinians have endured since 1948, they have never been passive recipients of Israeli necropower. Through a thematic analysis of the first-hand narratives of hunger strikers from the period 2012 to 2022, this paper has explored the dynamics of Palestinian necro-resistance to the Israeli policy of administrative detention. I have theorised, deployed, and interrogated Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of the ‘state of exception’, ‘bare life’, and homo sacer in relation to this phenomenon, paying close attention to the role of race and resistance in this particular colonial context. Throughout my research I have found limited support for Agamben’s thesis. While the ‘state of exception’ is helpful in understanding the aim of administrative detention – to reduce Palestinian subjects to a state of ‘bare life’ – the lack of agency that Agamben affords those caught in the exception is directly challenged by the resistance of these detainees, who refuse this condition by ‘weaponising their lives’ (Bargu 2014) to win their freedom. Practically, I found that the hunger strike is effective in placing internal and external pressure on the occupation to comply with the demands of the detainee. Metaphysically, I found that, by weaponising their lives, the hunger strikers distinguish their political existence from their biological existence, and sacrifice the latter for the former, creating new forms of agency and subjectivity in the process. Finally, I found that individual hunger-striking detainees understand their resistance to be intimately tied to the collective resistance of the Palestinian people against the Israeli occupation. By embarking on a hunger strike, detainees would sacrifice their biological existence not only for their own individual political identity, but for the political existence of the Palestinian people. Ironically, it is the precisely racialised nature of administrative detention, which targets a whole population along ethno-religious lines, that enables not only the practical mobilisation of support outside the prison, keeping this struggle at the very core of Palestinian society, but also the establishment of these new forms of collective agency and subjectivity. In sum, Agamben is most helpful in theorising and identifying the structural conditions that lead to this extreme form of resistance by the oppressed, despite his blindness to that very same agency.

Having outlined my findings, I return to the hospital bed of Khalil Awawdeh, out of whose decomposing body two skeletal legs protrude like coat hangers from beneath a thin blanket. What relation does this life have to Agamben’s Muselmann? If the Muselmann, as described by Agamben, is the extreme embodiment of homo sacer, caught in the state of exception, devoid of political agency, and reduced to a state of ‘bare life’ and biological survival, then those Palestinian administrative detainees who embark on a hunger strike are the very antithesis of this figure. If we recall, homo sacer ‘can be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (Agamben 1998, 12) because there is nothing in homo sacer worthy of sacrifice. However, the three themes discussed in this paper – ‘A Refusal of Bare Life’, ‘A Weaponization of Life’ and ‘An Individual Act of Collective Resistance’ – have demonstrated that not only is the Palestinian hunger striker able to refuse the condition of ‘bare life’, a decision which in itself requires political agency, but they are also able to sacrifice their biological existence for their own individual political existence, as well as the political existence of the Palestinian people. That is, they are able to sacrifice the very thing that defines the most extreme form of homo sacer – naked biological existence. 

Bargu (2014: 16) argues that by prioritising ‘the life of a political cause over the biological existence of its proponents’, the hunger strike ‘makes a commentary on the meaning of life’, that ‘it is not worth living life if you cannot live it according to your own political convictions’. The Palestinians who weaponise their lives against the policy of administrative detention take this existential commentary further. For them, the very sacredness of life is found within its political existence, that is, in its ability to sacrifice. It is the ability to sacrifice their biological existence, for both their personal political existence and the political existence of their national cause, that distinguishes ‘politically-qualified life’ from ‘bare life’, bios from zoe. Their subjectivity and agency is attached not to their bodies, but to their ability to detach themselves from their bodies and sacrifice their bodies for their individual and collective existence. Therefore, I propose that these agents should be better understood as sacred lives (vitae sacrae) rather than sacred men (homines sacri), in which their sacredness is derived not from their ability to be killed ‘yet not sacrificed’ , but from their ability to sacrifice. The implications of this research go beyond how Palestinian administrative detainees understand their own lives and existence. As discussed, Agamben’s dystopian account of the ‘state of exception’ leaves no room for the agency of those caught in this ban. However, in highlighting how race functions in the production of ‘bare life’, we can uncover opportunities for resistance that arise directly out of the colonial structure. In our case, the very fact that administrative detention is racialised provides the foundation for the collective weaponisation of life, through which individual racialised Palestinian detainees develop new forms of collective agency and subjectivity that revitalise the national cause. It is worth highlighting here Foucault’s understanding of power as a relation, another interesting omission from Agamben’s analysis of biopolitics. Foucault (1978, 95-6) explains that where power emerges, it breeds its own resistance. As such, ‘there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle’ (Foucault 1982, 346). The state of exception is not an exception to this rule, and those caught in the ban will continue to subvert the seemingly totalitarian structures of colonial rule by any means necessary.