One Prisoner Back on the Streets

Last night a man of 27 was outside my house. He was surrounded with maybe fifty family and friends who were celebrating his return. They stood outside all talking with intense energy and enthusiasm, for this man of 27 was released from Israeli prison yesterday after 6 years there. He was apparently held for a conspiracy against a soldier. I don’t think the way forward in this situation is to blame others. That said, we exist within systems of power relations, and these systems often bind us to certain roles and possibilities. He may or may not have been responsible for planning or was part of the executing of a plan to kill an Israeli soldier. I don’t know, and I don’t care. The point is that there is a cycle of violence here, and not one that we can easily dismiss as intractable and incomprehensible. There is an explanation for conspiracies against soldiers or the state. There is a brutal military occupation of the Palestinian land and people that is enforced everyday by those two mechanisms. This man was bred to violence. Now that may seem a highly contestable claim, but he was in fact born into a violent existence, one created by occupation. The soldier is the symbol of Palestinian oppression and so it makes sense to hate that symbol and to want to destroy it. He may have participated in a conspiracy, and he is accountable for that violence, but that violence cannot be stopped with six years in prison, or even a hundred. It can only be stopped with the violence to which it responds also stops. Only then can 20 year old young men live their lives instead of being defined as symbols of violence.