QASSAM MUADDI<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When he was diagnosed with Myelofibrosis in 2022, Walid Daqqah knew that his life had entered its final years. \u064bWhat few could guess at the time is that a second life, outside the immediate social realm, had just begun.
Walid Daqqah probably knew it. He might even have symbolically predicted it. Twenty years before becoming a father, Walid chose the name of his unborn daughter \u2014 Milad, Arabic for \u201cbirth.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe name of Milad makes of my own name a complete sentence: Milad Walid Daqqa,\u201d he said.
Milad Walid Daqqah, the four-year-old girl born to Walid and his wife Sana\u2019 Salameh in 2020, became a national celebrity in Palestine shortly after coming to the world. On social media, Palestinians follow and comment on every detail of her life released by her mother, as if she were closely known to everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her story is the story of Palestinian resilience. But on a deeper level, Milad provides a physical window for us into the ongoing reality that her father had theorized and struggled against \u2014 the reality of a life lived between the teeth of occupation, a parallel reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Walid Daqqah died on April 7, 2024, in the Israeli Asaf Harofeh\u2019 hospital. In his last six months, Walid was denied family visits and constantly transferred between the Ramleh prison clinic and the hospital, his feet and wrists always cuffed to the bed. His family, who hasn\u2019t yet been handed his body, accused Israel of deliberate medical negligence. Israeli police banned the family from opening their home for mourners in accordance with Palestinian tradition, and Israel\u2019s security minister publicly expressed regret that he had died a \u201cnatural\u201d death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the time of his death, Walid was a public figure. He was known to Palestinians as an intellectual, an educator, a writer, a children\u2019s author, and a leader. But Walid Daqqah\u2019s story had a very troubled yet regular Palestinian beginning.
Walid was born in 1961 to a farmers\u2019 family in the Palestinian town of Baqa al-Gharbiyah in \u201848 Palestine. He was born under the military rule that Israel had imposed on the Palestinians who had remained within its borders after the Nakba for almost twenty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1982, Walid was deeply impacted by the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila<\/a> at the hands of Lebanese Israeli proxies enabled by the Israeli army. It was in this context that he decided to join the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following year, a PFLP cell abducted and later killed an Israeli soldier. The cell\u2019s initial aim was to negotiate the release of Palestinian detainees for the soldier\u2019s life. Israeli forces arrested Walid Daqqah in 1984 and accused him of belonging to the cell. He was later given a life sentence, which Israel later fixed in its law as 37 years. It was then that Walid\u2019s life began its longest phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think that the life course of Walid is split in two; the social time, starting from his birth in 1961 until his arrest in 1984, and the \u2018parallel time\u2019 \u2014 from his arrest until this moment,\u201d explains Abdul Rahim al-Sheikh, professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University and a friend of Walid Daqqah who wrote extensively about his work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNaturally, the first time extends into the second, and vice-versa, with a high flexibility on the level of his political, intellectual, and creative written production,\u201d al-Sheikh told Mondoweiss<\/em>. \u201cWalid spent his life going back and forth between these two times, physically, intellectually, and spiritually.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou will never have an academic degree,\u201d the head of the Israeli prison services once told Walid early on in his sentence, according to his wife Sana\u2019 during an interview for Al-Araby Al-Jadeed\u2019s podcast last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The deprivation of studying, just like that of having a family life, was later understood by Walid as a deliberate way of locking Palestinians out of the current, social time of their people, their country, and the rest of the world. Yet, Walid Daqqah was among the first Palestinians to fight for the right to education in Israeli prisons. In the early 2000s, Walid obtained a BA degree in political science, later followed by an MA degree. In 2014, he obtained a second MA degree in Israeli Studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time Walid Daqqah marked his first academic achievements and began to publish his written work, the Palestinian liberation movement had taken a critical turn following the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority the following year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Palestinian leaders\u2019 commitment at Oslo was to \u201cpeace\u201d negotiations over a limited authority in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. This meant for Walid Daqqah that the PLO, to which he belonged via the PFLP, \u201chad given up on \u201848 Palestinians and by extension on \u201848 Palestinian prisoners,\u201d says Abdul Rahim al-Sheikh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the midst of this political environment, Walid decided to join the Democratic National Assembly in 1996, a political party founded by Azmi Beshara in 1995 that participated in Israeli Knesset elections<\/a>. It was one of the earliest political parties to be formed by \u201848 Palestinians after Israel allowed its \u201cArab citizens\u201d to form their own parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It had been 13 years since Walid was first arrested, and he made his new political choices by adapting, like all Palestinians, to the new post-Oslo reality. He struggled to continue his studies, sharpen his writing skills, and win his fellow prisoners\u2019 recognition as a leader. His family, meanwhile, still hoped for an early release as part of the negotiations process. At this moment, Sana\u2019 Salameh entered his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI come from a political household. My father and my uncle had been detainees in the occupation prisons, and the prisoners\u2019 cause was a familiar topic at home,\u201d Salameh tells Mondoweiss<\/em>. \u201cI was volunteering for a prisoners\u2019 rights group called \u2018Ansar al-Sajeen [Supporters of the Prisoner],\u2019 and I wrote for a local newspaper called al-Sabbar<\/em>, mainly about detainees and prisoners, although I was a translator, not a journalist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the advice of the rights group\u2019s director, Sana began visiting Palestinian prisoners, and she requested to visit Walid Daqqah. In the following months, Sana\u2019 became Walid\u2019s main confidant. He delegated prisoners\u2019 support missions to her, including sending messages to families, completing legal procedures, and bringing clothes and food to jail, which Israel still allowed at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWalid turned out to be a trap,\u201d Sana\u2019 says jokingly. \u201cHe gave me so many missions to carry out that later one of the prisoners said that during those years, I did more work than three human rights groups together, and all on Walid\u2019s instructions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the following three years, Walid and Sana\u2019s relationship evolved. They decided to formalize it in 1999. With the help of friends and Palestinian representatives at the Israeli Knesset, Walid and Sana\u2019 obtained permission to celebrate their wedding in prison, in the presence of a few friends and family members \u2014 an unprecedented case that to this day has not been repeated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWalid is not a normal person, you don\u2019t meet someone like him every day,\u201d Sana\u2019 says. \u201cHe is charismatic and fun, but at the same time very deep, and very reliable as a lover, a husband, a friend, or a cellmate. He is as faithful to his tiniest commitments as he is to his largest ones, and many who have met him have told me that Walid changed things in their character, made them translate this change in their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2002, following Israel\u2019s siege and invasion of the Jenin refugee camp, Walid published Diaries of the Resistance in Jenin<\/em><\/a>, a series of testimonies he had compiled from Palestinians he contacted in prison who had been a part of the Battle of Jenin during Israel\u2019s Operation Defensive Shield<\/a>. He documented every aspect of the event, including the life of the community under siege, the fighting tactics of the Israeli army, and the Palestinian resistance. The study became a reference for anyone seeking to examine Palestinian resistance in the Second Intifada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, Walid and Sana\u2019 engaged in a legal battle for conjugal visits \u2014 they decided they want to have a child. Their battles in court lasted 12 years. Israel never granted them that right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou will never have a child,\u201d the Israeli prison services director told Walid, according to Sana\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Walid began to identify his struggle to unite the span of time he spent in prison with the time in which his loved ones lived outside of it. He began to put words to this temporal reality as he approached the twentieth anniversary of his imprisonment. On the first day of his 21st year behind bars, he wrote to a friend:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I write to you from the Parallel Time. Here, where space is constant\u2026we are in a time before the end of the Cold War. Before the first, second, and third Gulf Wars. Before Madrid and Oslo. Before the outbreak of the First and Second Intifadas\u2026Before cell phones, modern communications systems, and the internet. We are a part of history, and history is obviously a state of past events that have come to an end. Except for us. For us, history is a continuous past that never ends.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Although he had coined the phrase \u201cparallel time\u201d in a previous text, the letter he wrote popularized the concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWalid distinguishes between two times,\u201d explains Abdul Rahim al-Sheikh. \u201cThe first is the linear, \u2018social time\u2019 lived by Palestinians in their \u2018large prison,\u2019 as Walid calls it, in the five geographical locations they occupy: Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, \u201848 Palestine, and the diaspora.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe second is a parallel, \u2018lingering-circular time\u2019 lived by Palestinian prisoners in the \u2018small prison,\u2019 scattered across what Walid calls the \u2018sixth geography\u2019 \u2014 Israeli jails. The occupation authorities turn both prisons into an interchangeable laboratory for \u2018life and death policies\u2019 within a system of surveillance and control.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201clife and death policies\u201d that Walid Daqqah identifies as a means of controlling every detail of Palestinians\u2019 existence are drawn from his own life experience and the life experiences of fellow prisoners. To Walid\u2019s mind, the parallel time is one where prisoners build their own reality in order to resist the occupation\u2019s control. Walid Daqqah\u2019s thought, born out of practice, earned him the recognition of Palestinians as a landmark intellectual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2012, Israel released over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of the Israeli prisoner Gilad Shalit, who was held captive in Gaza since 2006. Many Palestinian families celebrated the homecoming of their loved ones. Wald Daqqah\u2019s was not among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After losing the last ray of hope they had in reuniting and forming a family, Walid and Sana\u2019 decided to \u201cliberate\u201d their unborn offspring, and began to try to conceive a child through Walid\u2019s smuggled sperm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By this time, Walid Daqqah had become a renowned name among Palestinian prisoners, alongside Marwan Barghouthi and Ahmad Sa\u2019dat, with whom he met and discussed inside Israeli prisons. Yet Walid decided to extend his reach out to Palestine\u2019s future generation, writing a children\u2019s novel through the character of Jude, a young Palestinian boy who was conceived through his imprisoned father\u2019s smuggled sperm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In The Tale of the Oil\u2019s Secret<\/em>, Walid tells the story of how Jude is helped by a group of animals to reach an old enchanted olive tree, which gives him magic oil that makes him invisible, allowing him to break into prison to meet his father for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Israeli Prison Service accused Daqqah of smuggling the novel out of prison and announced that punitive measures would be taken against him. Later, Israeli police banned the book launch that was to be held at a public hall in Walid\u2019s hometown, Baqa al-Ghabiyyah, forcing the organizers to hold the event at his mother\u2019s house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this wouldn\u2019t be the last time Walid would suffer consequences for smuggling. In 2019, he smuggled his sperm outside of prison to his wife Sana\u2019, and in February 2020 they welcomed their daughter Milad to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe sixth geography<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The birth of Walid Daqqah<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n