Oslo and the Imprisonment of Palestine

From within and from the heart, between captivity and resistance, this article is a profound insight into the situation as it actually exists on the ground in Palestine today, and as it is lived by the people on a daily basis by Ansar Falasteen al-Hurra

To be in captivity is to be in a position where one's enemy possesses the ability to administer punishments for deviant behavior and to issue rewards for co-operative behavior while he himself remains out or reach.
Captivity is a condition in which resistance no longer seems to matter, as the scope of its effects and the results of its aftermath have been contained entirely within the dimensions of one's own prison cell.

Captitivity is a condition in which oppression is self-enforcing, to the degree where it is no longer recognizable as oppression, and where the oppressor has succeeded in rendering himself invisible.
Capitivity is a condition in which the prisoner must get permission to move from Cell Block A, Block B and from Cell Block B to Cell C, and where he must return back to Cell Block A before a certain hour knowing all the while that any of the doors could slam shut behind him at any time.

Captivity exists when the laws and regulations themselves are designed not to protect, but rather as a foundation on which to construct a web of oppression so compulsive that it borders on the psychotic, endowed with an impenetrable structure and a growing multitude of layers, like the stories of a prison compound...An elaborate verticle maze of ever-growing height and complexity.

Captitivity exists when normal routines of everyday life are turned into a daily struggle of all-consuming proportions, to the point that it almost becomes too exhausting for all but the very strong to conduct the daily life, and where nobody so much as dares to dream the larger dreams of self-fulfillment and personal aspiration.
Captivity is the armed robbery of one's vision, the forcible removal of one's ability to see beyond his own immediate space, where the grandness of the universe has been sealed off from one's normal line of sight, such that the real horizon and the sun that rises over it disappear from view.

Captivity is the condition of being a goldfish in someone else's goldfish bowl, in which one's enemy controls the water level or a computer program running in a small box on someone else's desk in which one's enemy controls the off-on switch.
Captivity is the condition of being totally predictable where the limits of one's own existence have been externally rather than internally determined because someone else is controlling the effective parameters of one's own behavior.

Captivity is the real-world manifestation of the vision belonging to Rafael Eitan the proverbial 'cockroaches in a bottle', or rather, in several smaller bottles.
Captivity is the condition in which one finds to his dismay that he is grateful for a few small crumbs of bread from the prison guard, grateful that the crumb was not in fact a poison, but rather a infinitesimally small piece of real bread.

Captivity is where one becomes accustomed to stoically accepting the punishments meted out to him, and for which he is privately grateful again to his dismay, that he was not subjected to an even harsher punishment.
Captivity is when one succeeds in getting an audience with the judge to ask his legal oppressor for mercy and in which he considers the fact of the interchange itself as grounds for optimism and even as a sign of potential goodwill.

Captivity is a circumstance in which one is fatalistically optimistic about the future because it must be better than the present but where one remains passive because there seems to be nothing left to hope for but hope itself.
Captivity is the highest aspiration for martyrdom to the martyr, death is real, even his own but the suffering has become so extensive that reality itself has become an abstraction.

Captivity is a condition in which the only thing that is predictable is the arbitrary nature of life that manifests itself under the passing whim of the indifferent and absent tyrant.
Captivity is being trapped in a rat's maze in which the walls are constantly shifting their position such that the goal itself is lost in the confusion and in which one's own sphere of movement becomes smaller and smaller over time.

Captivity is a condition of being sealed off from the center of one's life and of separation from one's family, one's home, one's history, and one's rights.
Captivity is the opposite of normality...It is the antithesis of freedom...It is the ultimate final solution for an oppressor who believes in enforcing the peace by wrapping the fingers of his Iron Fist around the captives' collective throats.

Captivity is the condition of having been placed inside a trash compactor where the engine switch has been turned on and where one struggles just to stay alive by standing completely still in order to remain in one piece.
Capitivity is a condition in which every person constitutes an illegal entity, where his nationality is an illegal organization, and where his citizenship is that of an illegal alien.

Captivity is a condition in which the enemy controls the details of one's motion and the scope of his action.
Captivity is the feeling of powerlessness, the threat, the fear that the enemy from the east and the enemy from the west will soon combine to lock the people up within their fatal joint embrace.

Captivity is a form of existence in which the universe appears to be small and finite rather than expansive and open-ended, where one is surrounded by concrete barriers instead of peace and open space, where even the flag has not enough space in which to fly freely and where one is afraid to wander away from home any length of time for fear that it will no longer be his when he tries to come back.

Captivity is a condition in which one is required to obtain the continuous permission of his enemy day in and exhausting day out for the right to pursue the most basic aspects of his existence, where those permissions are routinely denied, and where even the lowest prerequisites of human existence are granted on an entirely provisional basis.

Captivity of a nation is a condition in which there is no discernible difference between the life of a prisoner and the life of a free human being where the concept of imprisonment in a real prison cell has been reduced to the status of a mere formality.
Captivity is, however, never a permanent status nor must it always be destructive to morale to the contrary it must spawn a new form of resistance not against one's fellow cellmates, and not against the prison guards inside the walls who know, in their hearts, that because of what they are made to do that they are themselves among the most oppressed of all the prisoners.

Resistance is the second dawn of the voice of Palestine emerging from the deep underground, from the violated soil of the occupied homeland.

Resistance is the new generation rising up in new and creative and strategic ways together with the prison guards who must protect them, who must lead them against those who are controlling the keys to the enclosures, against those who have constructed the perimeter walls that imprison them all.

Ansar

Courtesy of the Free Arab Voice, 3 September 1997