“Thawabit Na”
Since the Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestinian land, its ultimate goal has been the expulsion or extermination of Palestinians. To ensure the total consolidation of Zionist control over Palestine, the Zionist entity has deployed various methods such as ethnic cleansing, identity erasure, economic strangulation, raids, bombings, and imprisonment.
On March 30, the Israeli Occupation’s Knesset further expedited this extermination by passing a law authorizing the death penalty for Palestinians in Occupation prisons. This institutionalization of the death penalty in Occupation prisons, a murderous manifestation of the entity’s ever-deepening fascism and fear of collapse, mirrors the transition of illegal, white supremacist lynchings in the American settler colony to a sharp increase of “legal” executions under Jim Crow.
Similar to liberal Zionists’ preferred method of killing Palestinians, liberals during Jim Crow and even today prefer a more mandated, legalized version of exterminating indigenous, POC, black, and otherwise “unwanted” populations. Both Israel and the United States wield the death penalty as legalized violence to entrench settler supremacy, all while professing fidelity to the rule of law.
Imminent death has been faced daily by Palestinians in Occupation prisons since the creation of “Israel,” through constant torture and beating, unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and widespread disease. According to the Prisoners’ Affairs Commission and the Palestinian Prisoner Society from October 2023 to January 2026, 87 Palestinian prisoners have become martyrs under the Zionist Occupation’s custody. One of these prisoners, Walid Daqqa, smuggled his sperm through prison walls to reach his wife four years prior to his death. A few months later, his wife, Sanaa’ Daqqa, gave birth to their daughter, Milad: a breathing symbol of Palestinian life and continued resistance despite the chains of imprisonment. Walid died in Israeli detention a few years later, officially from cancer, but after enduring torture, starvation, and deprivation of medicine. The Zionist Occupation willfully expedited his death as punishment for his steadfast humanity, choosing to create life and continue his family lineage upon Palestinian soil.
Walid is one of thousands of Palestinians who effectively faced a death penalty through the Israeli incarceration machine before the passing of this Knesset bill that makes race-based executions a matter of official policy. While Zionists and other imperialist mouthpieces depict Palestinian prisoners as terrorists who deserve death, Palestinians regard Wlid as a hero who inspired them through his actions and rhetoric of resistance.
In a letter written on the anniversary of his twentieth year in prison, Daqqa wrote, “I must confess, that I am a human being who still clings onto his love as if it were embers, and will remain resilient with this love, and I will continue to love all of you, for love is my modest and only victory against my jailer.”
Deliberate and accelerated deaths in prison at the hands of colonial or imperialist oppressors are not confined to Palestine. Similar patterns have occurred in U.S. military prisons worldwide — from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib — as well as in American prisons built on Indigenous lands. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the US government handcuffed and kidnapped indigenous children from their families and sent them to alleged boarding schools where they were restricted from speaking their native languages and would often disappear.
According to Red Nation, a native liberation organization, a recent report by the US Interior Department found that more than 500 indigenous children at these boarding schools were killed. The actual death toll is believed to be far higher, considering there are more than 53 burial sites at these schools. Today, indigenous populations are imprisoned in both reservations and US jails.
Public hangings of black communities in America were very common in the early 20th century and commonly led by local sheriffs along with the Ku Klux Klan in public areas. In a similar pattern, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have repeatedly breached international law (a product of colonial powers) through lethal operations against Palestinians carried out jointly with “Israeli” settlers and conducted openly in daylight.
When the public hangings became overbearing for liberal racists, threatening their artificial image of American democracy and superiority, southern states maneuvered around this outrage and fought to legalize the death penalty. Racist killings that had previously troubled white liberals became easy to accept and ignore once they were hidden behind prison walls and “legitimate” bureaucratic paperwork. According to Racist Roots, between 1910 and 1961, the state executed 362 people behind Central Prison’s closed doors. Almost 80 percent of these prisoners were Black.
As backlash mounts on the world stage, Israel’s tactics turn ever more fascist and frantic, pushing the legalized modernization of death penalties and hidden mass killings of Palestinians to appease both liberal and far-right Zionist elements in the Knesset at once. Just as white supremacist slave catchers lynching Black people gave way to police killings on the streets and today’s bipartisan support of the death penalty by both Republicans and Democrats, the Zionist project has evolved from 1930s paramilitary attacks on Palestinians to IOF and settler violence, culminating in the Knesset brazenly violating international law while codifying its own death penalty.
Indigenous populations from Turtle Island to Palestine have endured various colonial strategies of death throughout history, and no legal structure has saved them. Palestinians’ self-determination will come from resisting their oppressor, not relying on the legal systems and courts of the colonial oppressors. Prisoners have long been rotting away in their cells without any tangible methods to free them. In the imperial core, inmates have been ignored and hidden from the public, while in the Israeli dungeons they are tortured and sometimes recorded for the world to see.
Palestinians have experienced a lingering death sentence on their shoulders, whether it be a settler cutting down their trees, a symbol of death throughout the land, or the constant buzzing of the drone on top of a child’s tent in Gaza reminding them of the incessant bombing. The death sentence is an excruciating reminder of the impending and encroaching ultimate goal of the Zionist project: the extermination and expulsion of Palestinian life.
It adds another layer of weight to all the time I have spent here in the heart of the empire, while my people are slaughtered thousands of miles away on the ground, and to the ultimate duty we have to resist imperialism within our lifetime.
Former Black Liberation Army veteran Assata Shakur, who was liberated from US prisons by her comrades, once said, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” When our prisoners are abandoned in the empire’s jails, all of humanity is placed in danger. Incarceration rates will keep rising while prisons increasingly function as death camps at the heart of global imperialism.
From the ICE detention centers to the thousands of jails across the US, to the Occupation’s dungeons, prisoners are the compass of our struggle, and the masses must struggle against imperialism before it furthers its genocidal agenda in alliance with the Zionist regime.
“Thawabit Na” is a pen name from a writer vetted by Vox Ummah. Al-Thawabit are the six fundamental principles of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. We must reject colonialism, denounce normalization, free Palestine from occupation with Al Quds as its capital, support armed resistance, secure the right to return for all Palestinians, and preserve Palestinian self-determination and self-autonomy.
