Almost a decade ago, Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat authored a critical essay challenging theorists of Israeli settler colonialism to reconceptualize the framework through the lens of indigeneity to tell the story of Palestine as one of Indigenous resistance and endurance rather than one of endings. Indigeneity allows us to think of settler colonialism’s “permanent incompleteness,” rejecting the very notion of complete elimination of Palestinians and Palestine during the Nakba, even as Israeli domination suffocates every aspect of Palestinian life.

In Israel’s most recent iteration of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Jenin, and beyond, Barakat’s theoretical intervention to center Palestinian resistance as a form of Indigenous refusal remains profoundly urgent as an antidote to Israel’s colonialist predisposition for annihilation.

Of the haunting images we have borne daily witness to in the sixteen months of ongoing genocide, are of the people in Gaza grieving the deaths of their loved ones. Some were miraculously able to bury their kin. Some were “buried” under the rubble of their homes, trapped indefinitely. Others had their bodies blown apart, mutilated, or so horribly dismembered that they were completely unidentifiable. Israel razed generations-old gravesites in Gaza, stole the bodies of the dead from bombed hospitals, and tortured detainees to death—only to later negligently dump their desecrated bodies on the outskirts of Gaza’s cities and towns. All of this was intentionally orchestrated to be Israel’s performance of total control over all life.

These horrors have been shocking to witness, lending themselves to a renewed rage at Israel’s maniacal violence to control Palestinian life and death—a practice that is far from new.  For decades, Israel has maintained a “corpse confiscation policy” to hold captive the bodies of the Palestinian dead and exploit their material importance in Palestinian burial traditions. By taking and holding captive Palestinian bodies in military gravesites, police morgues, or completely unknown locations, Israel uses the dead bodies to assert settler colonial domination. At the time of writing this, Israel controls the bodies of 665 Palestinian martyrs, of which 259 were held captive since the beginning of the genocide in October 2023.^[1]

On the surface, the corpse captivity policy is a clear manifestation of Israel’s systematic settler colonial genocide. The captivity and desecration of the Palestinian dead works to destroy the material evidence of Palestinian historical claims to land while simultaneously severing the body from its personhood, rupturing kinship lineages, and upending sacred rites and traditions that underscore Indigenous ways of being and mourning for the Palestinian people. More so, the Israeli legal process that authorizes these practices reveals that the captive dead body also becomes an important site to arbitrate and systematically deny Palestinian legally enshrined rights to the dignity of the dead, ejecting them from the category of human as a practice of erasure to ultimately reify Israel’s status as the total sovereign of stolen lands. On a more intimate level, Israel’s control over the dead leaves grieving families in limbo about the body’s fate as they struggle to resolve the tremendous grief of loss alongside their inability to fulfill religious and cultural obligations to the dead, thus severing Palestinians from their connection to the spiritual world. Overall, the various functions of the captive corpse policy function as an attempt to destroy Palestinian sovereignty geographically, spiritually, and existentially by stripping them of the very aspects that define their Indigeneity and humanity.

Yet paying attention to how Palestinians navigate the assaults on their world, which are meant to punish, degrade, and dehumanize them, lets us all see the captive dead body as a site of refusal and anticolonial resistance. Alongside the horrors of death, we have witnessed the haunting images of children collecting and carrying the body parts of their parents in plastic bags, Palestinians reburying the bodies of the dead according to tradition, and writing names on body bags so that they may be identified. These moments of endurance should not be celebrated as resiliency—doing so entails accepting the crazed, colonial-manufactured conditions that Palestinians were miraculously able to survive. Rather, these moments of witnessing the living lend a form of dignity to the dead in its revocation should be understood as a rejection of Israel’s sovereignty and colonization. The dead body becomes a site of anticolonial resistance for the living, an example of Palestinian refusals to relinquish autonomy over death, and a form of self-determination and agency that is necessary to imagine and achieve liberation for both land and its peoples.

I believe centering dignity as a “revolutionary becoming” (Meari 2014)—an act of anti-colonial defiance coupled with the idea of dignity constantly being remade, is at the heart of understanding these acts. By giving dignity to the dead, Palestinians defy Israel’s ability to claim control over death, and by extension, sovereign control over Palestinians and Palestine. Tracing how dignity is enacted can show how Palestinians practice decolonial and anti-colonial resistance in every act they take. Thinking about dignity as part and parcel of Palestinian anti-colonial traditions against settler colonial erasure allows us to animate alternative landscapes of justice for the dead and the living. More broadly, it enables Palestinians to define their future and futurity rather than remaining confined to what the world has oppressively carved out for them.

Notes

[1] Statistics are from the National Campaign for the Retrieval of Martyrs Bodies. www.makaberalarqam.ps/en