Fugitive Solidarities
On Kanafani, Shakur, Jackson, and Sinwar
Dylan Saba
In the early hours of September 6, 2021, Zakaria Zubeidi, former leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade in Jenin and director of the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp, lifted a floorboard in the bathroom of the fifth cell of the second branch of the maximum security Gilboa Prison in northern Israel, where he was a detainee. Beneath it was a hole, meticulously excavated with plates, panhandles, and other appropriated tools over nearly a year of furtive planning. Into it, he, along with five Palestinian Islamic Jihad members, also inmates, disappeared. Around 20 minutes later, they emerged in the prison yard. In a nearby watchtower, the sentinel staffing it was asleep. Guard dogs in the area began barking at the disturbance, and automated surveillance cameras dutifully pointed themselves at the escaping prisoners. But the Israeli soldier who was supposed to be monitoring the feed was instead watching TV, and Zubeidi and his comrades slipped off into the night.
Within two weeks, all had been re-arrested, the results of an intensive manhunt. But the impact of the dramatic escape reverberated across historic Palestine: it had been one of the largest prison breaks in the country’s history and transformed the prisoners into symbols of Palestinian perseverance, steadfastness, and resistance. Though they were ultimately recaptured, the effort was more than worth it. Upon his release in the prisoner exchange deal negotiated by Hamas as a part of the January 2025 ceasefire deal, one of the Islamic Jihad prisoners, Mohammad Arda, stated to a journalist: “to live a single moment as a free man is worth a lifetime of suffering.” Zubeidi too was released and returned to the West Bank a hero—one of the most prominent Palestinians released in the exchange.
“In a future defined by imperial and ecological decline, and where nationalism remains a principle mobilizing force, the antagonism between a politics of exit and escape as resistance will be of vital significance.”
The Palestinian revolutionary has always been a fugitive, on the run. This is not a matter of crossing distance—though sometimes it is, as when the Palestinian Liberation Organization was effectively chased by Israel around the center of the world, from Jordan to Lebanon to Tunisia—but of attaining speed, and of shirking captivity: escaping the confines of occupation, and nurturing a national subjectivity that can outrun and outlast colonial attempts at erasure. To escape in this sense is not to flee, or at least not without the intent to return. It’s to slip out from underneath that which has been imposed from without: Zionism, and its attendant enclosures and regulatory regimes. Palestinian escape is the art—the political act—of moving fast while staying put.
This mode of resistance is not unique to Palestine. In the United States, another settler-colonial imposition, escape has featured heavily in Black subversion against the horrors of chattel slavery, apartheid, and neo-slavery. Though not identical to the occupation of Palestine, slavery and its afterlives have produced in America what George Jackson called a “captive society,” in which racial hierarchy is sustained through social engineering and violence. In refusing submission to this regulatory regime—the function of which is to forcibly eliminate Black national consciousness, break the bonds of communal solidarities, and press a permanent underclass into forced or quasi-forced labor—Black revolution, from maroon societies to the Attica uprising, has often been a prison break.
By contrast, Israel and the United States are imbued with a politics inherent to settler colonialism as a structure: exit. Each takes as its national origin a permanent departure from Europe and indigenous exclusion at the point of destination. Exit has continued on as an ethos for each state: internal contradictions are resolved not by meaningful political integration or development, but by settler expansion as a release valve. For Israel, this has meant a refusal to meaningfully address the national claims of Palestinians, choosing instead to manage the conflict in perpetuity via its massive advantage in military strength (it has also avoided the antagonism between its religious and secular national identity through permanent quasi-war). The United States too has continually deferred the fundamental class conflict engendered by the gap between the American promise and American reality through the frontier itself, first as manifest destiny, and then as global hegemony.
Race in the settler colony is constituted at the intersection of these political forces; it is jointly produced by the sentinel with her television set and the fugitive with his plate. The inability to look squarely at the dispossession upon which the entire state project rests creates gaps through which revolutionary subjectivities seep out, producing and sustaining new forms of deviance, and in turn, new forms of repression. This process is the settler colony’s motor of conquest but may also contain the deferred promise of its abolition. In a future defined by imperial and ecological decline, and where nationalism remains a principle mobilizing force, the antagonism between a politics of exit and escape as resistance will be of vital significance.
*
On the morning of April 29, 1956, Ro’i Rothberg was stationed guard at the Nahal Oz kibbutz, where he lived and served as the security officer. Just 21 years old, he had been a messenger boy during the 1948 war. After completing his military service, he settled in the Nahal Oz, which was established in 1951 as a military outpost near the armistice line with Gaza, and then transitioned into an agricultural community in 1953.
Sometime around dawn, Rothberg noticed some Palestinians who had crossed over from Gaza to reap sorghum from the fields around the kibbutz. This was not a new problem: for years, such “infiltrators” had regularly advanced past the armistice, sometimes under Egyptian military cover, to gather up bushels of sorghum before retreating. Earlier that month, the confrontations had escalated: on April 4, the Egyptian military killed three IDF soldiers near the border of Gaza, and the next day Israelis responded by massacring 58 Palestinian and Egyptian civilians by shelling Gaza City (they also killed four Egyptian soldiers). Rothberg was apparently known to the infiltrators, whom he regularly chased down. According to an IDF military logbook, a day or so prior he had caught four Arabs in the fields, beat them up, and drove them back across the border. So when he saw more infiltrators that morning, he followed them on his horse, but as he approached, they disappeared into the surrounding woods. It was an ambush. Armed attackers emerged from nowhere and shot Rothberg off his horse. They shot him again and smashed his face in with their rifle butts before dragging him across the armistice into Gaza.
The incident shocked Israel, and then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan delivered a eulogy that would become one of the most famous speeches in the history of Zionism. He implored the young nation never to turn away from the Palestinians, who would not relinquish their national claims. The eulogy concluded:
We will make our reckoning with ourselves today. Let us not flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who are sitting and longing for the moment their hands can get our blood. We must not avert our gaze, lest our hands be weakened.
That is our generation’s fate and our life’s choice—to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fist and our lives cut down. Ro’i Rothberg—the blond boy who left Tel-Aviv to build his home alongside the gates of Gaza, to serve as our wall. Ro’i—the light in his heart blinded his eyes, and he did not see the flash of the blade. The yearning for peace deafened his ears, and he did not hear the sound of murder lurking.
The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and defeated him.
The “gates of Gaza” is a reference to an episode in the life of the biblical character of Samson, who plays an essential role in Israeli self-mythologizing as a symbol of overwhelming strength, anxiety, and self-destruction. Samson was an ancient Israelite judge, given superhuman strength by God. One day, for reasons unknown, he ventures to Gaza, where he finds a prostitute and lies with her. His enemies, the Philistines, wait at the gate of the city to ambush him in the morning. To thwart the ambush, he rises in the middle of the night and lifts the entire gate clean out of the ground and carries it to Hebron.
Dayan’s message to Israel is clear: we’ve been granted the power to take this land, but its defense requires constant vigilance, for we are outsiders, and the Arabs will never forgive our intrusion. “Yearning for peace” is youthful folly, for the moment we falter, Dayan warns, the swords will be at our throat. This is the price to pay for the bounty the Zionists have pursued, by “fate” and “choice” venturing far from home and taking by force what was ordained by God. Of course, Dayan’s warning proved prophetic, and his message went unheeded. Not because the Israelis yearned for peace—they managed that prohibition just fine—but because they inevitably averted their gaze. A little over 67 years later, on October 7, 2023, the infiltrators returned, this time by the hundreds, and overtook Nahal Oz completely.
Samson may seem like an odd choice for a hero: unlike other biblical figures, Samson does not seem to concern himself much with the righteousness of his actions or with the will of God. Neither does God seem all that concerned with the righteousness of Samson. “With Samson, God simply supplies super strength to a crude, impulsive person [. . .] points him in the direction of a foreign enemy, and lets the chaos unfold,” notes writer Avi Garelick. “Unlike other heroes, who struggle to align their actions with God’s will, Samson doesn’t so much as blink.”
Instead, Samson is single-mindedly focused on the Philistines, with whom he is libidinally and violently obsessed. He falls in love with a Philistine woman and prepares to marry her. He tells 30 guests at the wedding that if they answer his riddle, he will give them new suits. The men convince Samson’s bride to tell them the answer. Furious at this betrayal, Samson heads to Ashkelon, slaughters 30 other Philistines for their suits, and upon delivering them to the wedding guests abruptly turns back home. When he later returns to find his bride had betrothed another, he destroys an entire wheat harvest in her community by wrangling 300 foxes, setting them on fire, and letting them loose in the fields. Violence escalates, with the Philistines murdering the woman and her father in a failure to appease Samson, and Samson, after temporarily being captured, murdering scores more—over 1,000 Philistines—an attempt to quiet his unquenchable bloodlust. These are the events that precede his trip to Gaza.
Samson is eventually recaptured, returned to Gaza in shackles, blinded by the Philistines as punishment for his many crimes, and publicly paraded in a Philistine pavilion. In one final act of obliteration, Samson calls upon God to summon his supernatural strength. He leans against the pillars of the pavilion, collapsing it on top of himself and the 3,000 revelers, killing himself and everyone around him. (It is in reference to this episode that Israel’s nuclear deterrence strategy is notoriously named the “Samson option”).
In all, this makes Samson an apt symbol for the Israeli national psyche. Zionism is premised on the divine right of Israelis to the land of historic Palestine, whose native inhabitants must either submit or be destroyed, a deferred punishment for any and all historic crimes perpetrated against the chosen people. And imbued with incredible destructive power—whether by the Holy Spirit or by the functionally unlimited military backing and political cover of the global hegemon, the reader can determine for themself—Israel is quick to take bold, dramatic actions in response to nearly any provocation. This use of disproportionate force often engenders new crises, which then inspire more aggression; perpetual harm sustaining perpetual enemies sustaining the raison d’être of the state.
But Samson is defined as much by his blindness as he is by his strength. Indeed, Israel seems fated to fail Dayan’s essential charge: “We must not avert our gaze, lest our hand be weakened.” To this Israel only nods and strengthens its hand. But Ro’i’s insufficiency was not the caliber of his weapon—it was what he could not see, and what he could not hear. Paranoid, and taking this vulnerability too literally, the state invests heavily in systems of surveillance, military intelligence, and espionage. Ironically, these only feed the arrogance that constitutes Israel’s prime vulnerability. The automated camera system is functioning well, why not watch some television?—all of a sudden, an escape, an attack! Humiliated, Israel responds in the only way Samson knows how to, with overwhelming force. This is the politics of exit in action: Israel is in a constant state of overcompensation for and overreaction to the consequences of having looked askance.
This is, at core, because Dayan’s charge to Israel is impossible. The Israelis can be diligently on guard, but truly seeing the Palestinians and confronting their national claims means facing the fundamental antagonism of the colonial project, namely that a state built on maintaining a demographic majority in perpetuity requires a dehumanization in practice and ideology that does not comport with the reality of Palestinian life and existence.
In the same year Dayan delivered Rothberg’s eulogy, the writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani—20 years old at the time—offered to the Palestinians his own injunction. In the short story “Letter from Gaza,” Kanafani’s narrator pens a letter to a friend, Mustafa, who had left the Strip for Sacramento, California, presumably with the intention to make a new life there. The writer of the letter, recently accepted to the University of California, had planned to join Mustafa. But when he goes to Gaza to prepare his belongings, he finds that he cannot leave.
His niece, the 13-year-old Nadia, had been injured by Israeli bombardments. He goes to visit her in the hospital, laden with gifts: a pound of apples and some new red trousers she had written to him in Kuwait asking him to bring. But when he arrived, he saw how bad her injury was; her leg had been amputated at the top of the thigh.
The narrator leaves the hospital, seeing Gaza in a new light, the “blazing sun [filling] the streets with the color of blood.” The land he was prepared to leave for good suddenly contained a new meaning, and he felt an overriding duty to construct a life in resistance there, to reclaim Nadia’s amputated leg. He learns that Nadia lost her leg protecting her brothers and sisters from the Israel bombs—moving quickly, she had jumped on top of them, smothering and protecting them with her body.
No, my friend, I won’t come to Sacramento, and I’ve no regrets. No, and nor will I finish what we began together in childhood. This obscure feeling that you had as you left Gaza, this small feeling must grow into a giant deep within you. It must expand, you must seek it in order to find yourself, here among the ugly debris of defeat.
I won’t come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth.
Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you.
Palestinian life, Kanafani’s young narrator learns, is found among the rubble—in the space between debris. Its value, an absolute value, is measured in sacrifice. There is no freedom in California, “the land where there is greenery, water and lovely faces.” There is no freedom in fleeing, in exile. The way out is not from, but through: an escape.
*
Four years later, the writer and revolutionary George Jackson—then 18 years old—was arrested and charged with armed robbery for allegedly stealing $70 from a gas station in California. Despite some exculpatory evidence, he pled guilty on the promise of serving only a short time in jail. Instead, he was sentenced to a prison term of one year to life under the state’s Indeterminate Sentence Law.
“There is no freedom in fleeing, in exile. The way out is not from, but through: an escape.”
Over the course of his incarceration, which lasted over a decade until his 1971 assassination at the hands of San Quentin prison guards, Jackson wrote dozens of letters—to his mother, his father, his comrades, his attorney, and later an editor—that are collectively addressed from Black Americans (“the hunted running blacks”) as a call for insurgency. In them, he describes the condition of incarceration that extends, for colonized Black people in America, beyond the prison walls: “Being born a slave in captive society,” Jackson writes, “had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortunes that lead so many blackmen to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments.” In his self-narration, Jackson entered prison as a teenager, but he had been captive since birth; his sentence of one year to life tells him only what he has always known.
What is captive society? George explains in letters to his father: “The whole of the Western European’s existence here in the U.S. has been the same one long war with different peoples.” On this historical telling, territorial conquest, enslavement, apartheid, and incarceration are not independent modes of oppression, but interdependent and contiguous phases of colonial warfare. Colonial subjects in the U.S. are already prisoners of this long war even before they are incarcerated, making the prison a site of what Black nationalist revolutionary Queen Mother Moore called “re-captivity.”
As scholar Orisanmi Burton argues in Tip of the Spear, a new account of the Attica Prison rebellion, the conceptualization of slavery and its afterlives as derivative of settler-colonial war—as opposed to creations of law—helps to explain why negotiation had, over the course of generations, proven impossible, as neither remonstration nor prostration in the face of this warfare yielded anything like freedom. Instead, the system of slavery simply changed with the times. Chattel slavery had shifted form to segregation, which shifted form to “economic slavery,” but across these transformations, the fundamental truth of America—that White wealth was the martial conquest of indigenous land and Black labor—persisted without remuneration, amelioration, or even basic acknowledgement. Anyone who tried to contest this process, either semi-consciously or as a political rebel, was either murdered by the state or warehoused away in the carceral system.
In the decade of Jackson’s imprisonment, the colonial world exploded. As Burton narrates, national liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and Asia shook the world order with a revolutionary energy that reverberated from the periphery to its imperial core. Inspired by these historical developments, Black rebels in the U.S. began to view themselves as internally colonized subjects and wage urban insurgencies. Over the course of the ’60s, the Civil Rights Movement gave way to more radical forms of Black militancy and revolutionary nationalism. In particular, the Black Panther Party emerged as the vanguard of this struggle. In prison, Jackson became the group’s Field Marshal. In response, the state sought to contain this militancy through incarceration, but that only served to bring new militants—and new ideas—inside the prison walls.
Armed with these new conceptual frames, Jackson resolved himself to political action. Alongside his comrades in San Quentin, he formed the Black Guerilla Family, a Marxist-Leninist Black power prison gang dedicated to cultivating a revolutionary mentality among inmates. This drew the full repressive force of the state, which, having already stolen their lives, could deal only death. One by one, the police murdered his comrades in the Black Panther Party: Bobby Hutton, the first person recruited to the Party, and its Treasurer, was killed in 1968. He was followed by John Huggins, and Bunchy Carter, the leader of the Los Angeles chapter and the Deputy Minister of Defense, respectively, who were killed by Black nationalists inflamed by the FBI. Fred Hampton, the Deputy Chairman, and Mark Clark, the Defense Captain, were also murdered, by the state directly, in 1969. Meanwhile, 21 Black Panthers were awaiting trial in New York after their chapter was infiltrated.
The next year would be bloody, too. In 1970, a year before his own assassination, Jackson compared the experience of being hunted in a cage to the subjugation of political dissidents in the Dachau concentration camp. Above all else, Jackson rejected passivity. He refused to “lie down and be kicked” and would not wait for his oppressors to exhaust themselves. He would fight back.
In January 1970, Jackson and two comrades—later dubbed the “Soledad Brothers” following several stints in Soledad Prison—were charged with the January 16th death of a prison guard, a capital offense that carried an automatic death sentence. Three days prior, another guard had shot and killed three black inmates in the yard, including Jackson’s close friend and Black Guerilla Family co-founder W.L. Nolen. Eight months later, George’s younger brother Jonathan Jackson, then 17 years old, burst into a Marin County courthouse armed with an automatic weapon. On trial for an unrelated matter was another San Quentin inmate, James McClain. Jackson, McClain, and two incarcerated comrades testifying for the defense took five hostages, including the judge, the prosecutor, and three jurors, in an attempt to negotiate the release of the Soledad Brothers. Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, and the judge were all killed in the attempt to flee the scene.
Jonathan’s martyrdom only sharpened George’s resolve; perhaps he knew, consciously or otherwise, that it presaged his own. If it wasn’t before, it was now unmistakably clear: he and his comrades were at war. He made attempts to smuggle in arms and took every opportunity to encourage militancy within the prison walls. And beyond San Quentin, the prison movement Jackson’s writings helped establish was heating up. In the late spring of 1971, for example, the recently formed Black Liberation Army (BLA) killed two police officers in New York City. By that summer, Jackson had become a special target of the state: Burton’s research reveals that he was an early target of prison activist surveillance that became the FBI’s covert Prison Activists Surveillance Program, an outgrowth of COINTELPRO which would go on to carry out extrajudicial assassinations in the early to mid-1970s.
What exactly transpired on August 21, 1971 is unknown. Prison officials state that Jackson killed three guards and two white prisoners before making a run for the prison’s outer walls, where he was shot down and killed by a sentry. Other inmates present at the time deny this narrative, asserting instead that Jackson, aware of a plot to assassinate him, fled the prison’s interior to save his comrades from befalling the same fate.
Jackson’s letters had circulated widely and were profoundly influential in the emerging prison movement he helped to establish, and at the Attica prison in New York, another hotbed of revolutionary energy—including BLA elements—Jackson’s death was received as a call to action. Prisoners there observed a day of mourning and fast on August 22. When, only several weeks later, tensions in the prison boiled over, inmates entered a state of open insurgency.
The Attica rebellion began, according to Burton’s newly public account, with an act of typical carceral violence: a white guard was attacking a black inmate, Tommy “Kilimanjaro” Hicks. Hicks, much larger than the guard, and having had enough, stuck back with a punch to the face and a roundhouse kick to the body. This sent several onlookers—including Samuel Melville, a white member of the Weather Underground, a militant organization aligned with Jackson’s vision, and John “Dacajeweiah” Hill, a Native American prisoner-theorist—into the fray.
The rebels not only overpowered the prison guards, but they managed to break out of the cell block entirely, an unthinkable event in the supposedly riot-proof prison. The inmates flooded Attica, causing massive destruction and opening every possible enclosure, adding new rebels to their ranks. During the pandemonium, they took 42 guards and staff hostage. They eventually congregated in the prison’s D yard, where they barricaded themselves. Over a thousand inmates, more than half of the total prison population, took part in the uprising.
Over the next four days, the Attica rebels set up a commune in the yard, delegating responsibilities, such as medical and security, and electing representatives to engage Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald in negotiations. They presented a set of demands that ranged in scope from the more mundane (e.g., better food, more adequate medical care, the introduction of workman’s compensation for on-the-job injuries) to the more transformative (e.g., an end to racial discrimination, the prosecution of abusive prison officers, and amnesty for the rebels). Many of these demands were acceded to. But as Burton argues, the spirit of the Attica rebellion carried with it abolitionist demands implicit in the revolutionary acts themselves that transcend the text of their negotiations. Like the Palestinian escapees would 50 years later—nearly to the day—they had created their minute of freedom.
The rebellion ended in a bloodbath. On September 13, 1971, rather than complete the negotiations, Commissioner Oswald along with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller orchestrated a police raid of the commune. Under cover of tear gas, more than 800 members of law enforcement massacred at least 38 people, including 9 (an additional hostage would succumb to injuries a month later) of the hostages. At least 128 people were shot with live ammunition. Oswald and Rockefeller initially tried to say that the rebels had slit the hostages’ throats, but medical evidence later proved that they had been shot. Prison guards, hungry for retribution, had been allowed to take part in the raid.
The uprising and its brutal repression sent shockwaves through the U.S. prison movement and beyond. That fall, uprisings took place in prisons across the country. A Vietnamese contingent in Cuba sent a solidarity message via a community of Black expats there to the rebels, stating: “our victory in Viet Nam is also your victory.” In a statement relayed through the National Lawyers’ Guild, Attica responded:
You and all those who have taken an active stand against fascism, imperialism, racism and injustice have been our impetus as you’ve made the concept of liberation a reality. The people in Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, the Palestinians, the Mozambicans, Angolans, and those from Guinea-Bissau are our paragons.
At the time of Jackson’s assassination, less than a year before Ghassan Kanafani’s—a car bomb planted by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, killed him and his 17-year-old niece in Beirut on July 8, 1972—a recently published collection of Palestinian resistance poetry, Enemy of the Sun, was found among many other volumes in his cell. Perhaps, as scholar Greg Thomas speculates, because he had copied the titular poem down by hand—a conventional way of circulating illicit scripture in prison—a version of it was printed in the Black Panther Party’s newspaper commemorating his life on September 25, 1971, misattributed to Jackson himself instead of its author, the Palestinian communist poet Samih Al-Qasim. The effect was striking. A little over a month after his death, and weeks after the Attica rebellion, Jackson returned posthumously as the author of a Palestinian creed of resistance in the face of Samson’s voracious destruction. Circulated to over 100,000 people, this became his final charge to the hunted running Blacks of America:
I may—if you wish—lose my livelihood
I may sell my shirt and bed.
I may work as a stone cutter,
A street sweeper, a porter.
I may clean your stores
Or rummage your garbage for food.
I may lie down hungry,
O enemy of the sun,
But
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist.
You may take the last strip of my land,
Feed my youth to prison cells.
You may plunder my heritage.
You may burn my books, my poems
Or feed my flesh to the dogs.
You may spread a web of terror
On the roofs of my village,
O enemy of the sun,
But
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist.
You may put out the light in my eyes.
You may deprive me of my mother’s kisses.
You may curse my father, my people.
You may distort my history,
You may deprive my children of a smile
And of life’s necessities.
You may fool my friends with a borrowed face.
You may build walls of hatred around me.
You may glue my eyes to humiliations,
O enemy of the sun,
But
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist.
O enemy of the sun
The decorations are raised at the port.
The ejaculations fill the air,
A glow in the hearts,
And in the horizon
A sail is seen
Challenging the wind
And the depths.
It is Ulysses
Returning home
From the sea of loss
It is the return of the sun,
Of my exiled ones
And for her sake, and his
I swear
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist,
Resist—and resist.
*
In 1967, Assata Shakur—then a 20-year-old student at Borough of Manhattan Community College named Joanne Chesimard—was arrested for the first time. She and 100 other politically active students had chained and locked the entrance to a campus building in protest of the school’s lack of Black faculty and were charged with trespassing. Like Jackson, Shakur had been energized and awakened by the revolutionary upheavals of the late ’60s, in particular the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and over the course of her time in college developed an ideological commitment to Black and Third World liberation. After graduating in 1970, she joined the Black Panther Party for a brief stint in the organization before becoming a member of the BLA.
Shakur quickly became a target of the state. Over the next few years, the militant organization executed a number of high-profile armed attacks in which the FBI alleged her central involvement, including the May 1971 killings of two NYPD officers and the January 1972 deaths of two more. During this period, Shakur was accused of having participated in other attacks and robberies attributed by law enforcement to the BLA. By late 1972, the FBI deemed her the leader of the BLA cell that had committed the New York assassinations and made her capture a top priority. NYPD deputy commissioner Robert Daley described her as “the soul of the gang, the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.” The FBI raided her home, accusing her of harboring fugitives. Instead of cooperating with the agency that was determined to destroy her and her comrades, she went underground.
On May 2, 1973, Shakur was riding in the passenger seat of a car driven by her comrade, Sundiata Acoli, when the vehicle was pulled over by two New Jersey state troopers. Another Panther, Zayd Malik Shakur (no relation), was sitting in the rear. Ostensibly, the stop was for a broken taillight, but it quickly turned violent: a shootout left one of the officers and Zayd Malik Shakur dead and Assata badly wounded—after exiting the vehicle, an officer shot her in the arm and chest. Eventually she was taken by law enforcement to a hospital, where she was tortured and interrogated before being arraigned. She would spend the next four years at Rikers Island in New York City, including a combined 21 months in solitary confinement. During this period, she was charged with a series of other crimes—kidnappings, robberies, and murders—all of which would ultimately be dismissed or result in acquittals at trial. But in March of 1977, after a 1973 venue change and a 1974 mistrial due to her pregnancy, Shakur was convicted by an all-white jury of murder for the turnpike shooting, despite evidence that she was shot with her hands in the air. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.
On July 4, 1973, two months after her arrest, Shakur penned an address in which she outlined her revolutionary vision, explicitly linking the struggle against colonial empire in the U.S. and around the world. The letter was a declaration of war on the ruling class and its defenders. “They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa,” she wrote. “They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of Indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the people who live there are sick and starving.” The real criminals were those massacring Third World peoples abroad and murdering political dissidents at home, all while sustaining a coercive and violent political-economic structure that kept black Americans permanently subordinated. She signed off the address with a call to continue the fight in the spirit of those martyred on the path to liberation, including George and Jonathan Jackson.
“They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the people who live there are sick and starving.” – Assata Shakur
Not long after her conviction, Shakur and her BLA comrades began plotting an escape. On the afternoon of November 2, 1979, three guests visited the Clinton Correctional Institute for Women, where Shakur had been held since February of that year. They managed to sneak firearms into the facility. The men took two prison guards hostage and made their escape in a commandeered van—along with Shakur and the hostages in the stolen vehicle. Just beyond the edge of the prison grounds they abandoned the van with the two hostages inside. They took two getaway vehicles, one of them driven by Silvia Baraldini, a member of the May 19th Communist Organization (an offshoot of the Weather Underground that included BLA members). Upon learning of the escape, police set up checkpoints and roadblocks in the surrounding areas, but the militants fled undetected. Shakur spent the next several years in hiding before eventually making her way to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro’s government.
The BLA continued their clandestine operations into the early 1980s. And by the summer of 1982, with images of Israel’s brutal invasion of Lebanon reaching the U.S., the organization began to openly identify with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. In the August 21, 1982 communiqué from the BLA’s Revolutionary Armed Task Force, a section titled “On the Question of Allies” reads:
It is our clear understanding that a war is being waged against capitalism and imperialism, the major threat to the toiling masses of the world. Wars of national liberation constitute the most significant forces for the dismemberment of this monster. U.S./Zionist/Apartheid brands of imperial domination are being fiercely contested. [. . .] From the PLO we have learned the lesson of tenacious steadfast struggle. [. . .] Exposing the genocidal intent of the illegal Israeli state they have rededicated themselves to the protracted struggle for their homeland.
*
That same year, a Palestinian university student named Yahya Sinwar—then 19 years old—was arrested for the first time by Israeli authorities. Though not formally charged, he was detained on suspicion of subversive activities and spent several months in prison. It was his first exposure to the conditions in which he would spend the majority of his adult life: as a captive in his homeland. Like Jackson, it was behind bars that Sinwar came to understand his national struggle and the meaning of resistance.
Sinwar’s family had been expelled from Majdal Asqalan by Zionist gangs in 1948. The village was destroyed during the Nakba and the Israeli town of “Ashkelon” built atop its ruins. The family fled to Gaza and settled in the Khan Younis refugee camp, where Yahya was born in 1962. After a childhood in the camp, he enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Sinwar was arrested again in 1985. Inside, he met and grew close with Ahmed Yassin, a devout man 26 years his senior who had been exiled from al-Jura—a small village next to Majdal Asqalan—to Gaza in 1948. Yassin had been active as a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood and helped establish the Palestinian wing of the organization in Gaza. Though he was a quadriplegic and nearly blind following a childhood accident, Yassin was involved in stockpiling weapons for the group. An Israeli sting operation led to his arrest in 1984. In 1985, he was released as a part of the Jibril Agreement—a prisoner exchange deal, one of the first between Israel and a Palestinian resistance group, in which the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) negotiated the release of 1,150 Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers captured in Southern Lebanon during Israel’s invasion three years prior.
Yassin would go on to found the Islamic Resistance Movement, abbreviated as Hamas, in late 1987, just as the first stones of the First Intifada—a largely nonviolent popular uprising led by many of the prisoners released in the Jibril Agreement—were tossed. A 25-year-old Sinwar, now released, established the internal security organization of the nascent movement. But the next year, Sinwar was arrested again, this time on charges of plotting the abduction of two Israeli soldiers and killing four Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel. He was sentenced by Israeli authorities to four life sentences.
Sinwar would spend the next 22 years of his life incarcerated. Inside, Sinwar devoted himself to the study of his captors in an effort to develop the strategy of the national resistance movement. He taught himself Hebrew and read Israeli newspapers regularly. Covertly, he translated tens of thousands of pages of autobiographies written by former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal spy agency, and circulated these translations among his fellow inmates. A leader of Hamas within the prison, Sinwar wanted his comrades to understand Israeli counterterrorism strategy and tactics.
He diligently maintained his connection with the movement and its leadership beyond the prison with the help of contraband cell phones and his lawyers. Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and in response to the brutal repression of the First Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo Peace Process, which its leadership had opposed, Hamas established itself as a national liberation movement committed to the practice of armed struggle. For his part, Sinwar never lost focus on the prison movement and helped plan operations to abduct Israeli soldiers in order to free himself and his comrades in prisoner exchanges.
Like Jackson, Sinwar had a younger sibling, Mohammad, whose political development was rapidly accelerated by his older brother’s incarceration. Mohammad was only eight years old when Yayha was first arrested and followed him into the Hamas movement in 1991. After his own stints in Israeli prisons throughout the 1990s, he rose through the ranks of Hamas’ Khan Younis brigade, achieving the rank of commander in 2005. The next year, he led a raid into Israel, organized jointly with members of other Palestinian factions, through a secret underground tunnel dug from Gaza. The militants emerged near IDF positions, and ambushed an Israeli Merkava tank, blowing it open from the rear with an RPG. Mohammad and his crew captured the tank’s gunner, Corporal Gilad Shalit, and brought him back with them as a captive to Gaza. It had been the first successful abduction in over a decade. Five years later, in 2011, Shalit was returned to Israel in a prisoner exchange that liberated 1,027 prisoners from Israeli captivity. Among them was Yahya Sinwar.
Upon his release, Sinwar quickly rose through the ranks of Hamas’ leadership, first attaining the top rank in the movement’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and then ultimately becoming the political head of the organization in Gaza in 2017.
While he was incarcerated, Hamas had participated actively in the Second Intifada, an armed uprising against Israel that extended from 2000 to 2005, and gained the movement enough popularity in Palestine to win a majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian elections. This led to a civil conflict between it and the U.S.-backed Palestinian National Authority (PA) that by 2007 had resulted in de facto Hamas rule in Gaza and PA rule in the West Bank. In an act of collective punishment, Israel imposed a near-total blockade on the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza, effectively turning the roughly 140-square-mile territory into an open-air prison.
As Hamas’ political leader in Gaza, Sinwar’s principal objective was to end the Israeli blockade by achieving a long-term ceasefire with Israel. In 2018, the movement participated in a series of weekly non-violent protests near the border wall with Israel, demanding an end to the blockade and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Israel responded to the actions, which extended through the end of 2019, by killing 223 of the Palestinian protesters, including 46 children, and injuring over 9,200.
In late 2018, Sinwar still believed popular mobilizations against Israel—including international pressure—could achieve peace. In a rare interview with Western media, Sinwar told journalist Francesca Borri that he felt there was an opportunity to change the status quo. He insisted that the daily reality of the siege was the transformation of Gaza into a prison, in other words one-sided warfare against the Palestinians of Gaza: “the siege is a type of war, it’s just war through other means,” Sinwar explained. A Gaza under blockade, he said, was little different from the Israeli prison he left in 2011: “I never came out—I have only changed prisons.” Because a two-sided war was desirable for no one, Israel must be pressured to accept a just peace. “I am not saying I won’t fight anymore, indeed. I am saying that I don’t want war anymore. I want the end of the siege,” Sinwar told Borri. “You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It’s breaking. And should break everybody. I want them free.”
The Israelis, focused on Iran and largely unaffected by the struggle for life in Gaza, simply ignored the issue. For the Israeli population, and for its far-right government, Gaza was manageable, precisely because of its function as a prison. An advanced missile defense system first deployed in 2011, the Iron Dome, prevented the various projectiles Hamas and other militants regularly fired from the Strip from causing more than a handful of casualties. The more than two million stateless Palestinians in Gaza loomed too large as a demographic threat for there to be any serious consideration of annexation. Warehousing them away and engaging in serial aerial bombing campaigns to reduce any buildup among the militant groups—that is, from Israel’s perspective, a state of permanent quasi-war—was preferable to any political solution. For its part, the U.S. attempted to override the Palestinian issue by pushing the Arab states toward normalization with Israel, facilitating the Abraham Accords in late 2020 and early 2021. The window for change was rapidly closing. By late 2022, Sinwar and his comrades in Hamas began, in secret, planning their escape.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza fired thousands of missiles into Israel in the span of 20 minutes, overwhelming the Iron Dome’s interception capabilities. At the same time, Hamas fighters breached the border wall at over 100 locations and entered southern Israel—armed with RPGs and other light weaponry—by land, sea, and air. The militants descended upon IDF bases surrounding Gaza, largely finding the occupation forces totally unprepared and functionally defenseless. They overran the bases, killing hundreds of troops and taking dozens captive. Hamas officials later recounted shock at IDF acquiescence in the face of their attack, having expected much fiercer resistance from the Israeli forces. After overrunning the IDF bases, the militants decided to press forward, raiding the surrounding kibbutzim for more hostages: according to Hamas, the objective was to take military-age Israelis captive, enough to free every Palestinian in Israeli prisons.
What was planned as a precise military operation turned, over the course of the morning and over the following hours, to chaos. Following the initial wave of Nukhba fighters, militants from other resistance groups, non-Nukhba Hamas militants, civilian Palestinians, and armed gangs flooded through the openings in the wall, stepping out into the lands that many of their families had been forcibly displaced from generations prior. They encountered Israelis—the vast majority, for the first time—and those with arms engaged in violence: against the scattered Israeli security personnel attempting to ward off the invasion, and against civilians. They too entered kibbutzim and many took Israeli hostages of their own, including children and the elderly. The IDF never fully recovered from the total security collapse of the early morning and responded with largely indiscriminate and uncoordinated fire.
At Nahal Oz, where 67 years prior Ro’i Rothberg had fallen, several dozen militants poured into the military base and adjoining kibbutz. The base housed a major IDF surveillance unit for Gaza, tasked with collecting reconnaissance and operating remote-controlled gun turrets on the border wall. Caught completely by surprise, most of the combat unit was either killed on the spot or taken captive. Israel had once again averted its gaze.
*
In the 1912 painting The Blinded Samson by German artist Lovis Corinth, a massive and brawny Samson—eyes blinded and covered by a bloody rag, hands tethered to one another by a slack chain—thrusts forward through the frame, hunched over and grimacing in pain, in a final burst of confused bellicosity. Here, in his bloody face, and in his loosely bound limbs, is the colonial solidarity of empire: faced with the broad spectre of its waning global hegemony and the concrete threats posed by guerilla militancy at the periphery, the U.S. and Israel have, in the period since October 2023, opened the gates of hell. The crises this belligerence has catalyzed—institutional in the U.S., geopolitical in Israel—are individual, yet mutually reinforcing. Forging between these terrains a joint struggle for anti-colonial liberation, a solidarity of the oppressed, is the project of left internationalism.
The barriers to doing so are significant. Struggles for national liberation are necessarily rooted in particular geographies and draw upon distinct cultural symbols, languages, and histories. And impeding association with Palestinian national liberation has become a special focus of the U.S. security state: for decades, lawmakers and law enforcement have developed an entire counterinsurgency infrastructure to criminalize and otherwise obstruct material solidarity with Palestine. As such, forward-looking association is not free, and poses real security risks to movement actors.
But we are free to associate retrospectively. Doing so reveals not only that the U.S. and Israel are tied together into a single rubric of empire, but that the national liberation struggles of each—though distinct—exist in a grand dialogue of transposed signs, wonders, and actions. Through these linkages a revolutionary solidarity can take shape. Its contours are in part analytic: from Kanafani, Jackson, Shakur, and Sinwar, we receive a portrait of colonial counterinsurgency, of one long war waged by military force, by siege, and by captivity. But connecting their various escapes in narrative reveals something further, a subterranean internationalism of the deed that may ultimately point the way out.
“Through these linkages a revolutionary solidarity can take shape. Connecting their various escapes in narrative reveals something further, a subterranean internationalism of the deed that may ultimately point the way out.”
French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, theorized revolution as an escape so destabilizing to the status quo that it knocks it out of equilibrium, changing its structure irreversibly. For the revolutionary fugitive, the choice between fight or flight is false; a proper escape is already a counterattack. They took this concept—what they call ligne de fuite, or “line of flight”—directly from one of Jackson’s letters. In Anti-Oedipus, they write: “the revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary [. . .] provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the shuffle. What matters is to break through the wall, even if one has to become black like John Brown. George Jackson. ‘I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon!’ ” Versions of this quote appear throughout the works of Deleuze and Guattari, always with attribution to Jackson, but never with a proper citation. This may be because the quote is a mistranslation: Jackson originally wrote, in a letter to his attorney, “I may run, but all the time that I am, I’ll be looking for a stick! A defensible position.” The elision from “stick” to “weapon” has given rise to both speculation and criticism: Was it an innocent ambiguity in the French translation of Jackson, or were Deleuze and Guattari, intentionally or otherwise, disavowing some element of Jackson or his original message?
The scenes of escape connecting Kanafani, Jackson, Shakur, and Sinwar—and the broader convergent political evolution between the Black and Palestinian anti-colonial national struggles—suggest that the stick/weapon distinction may not be so profound. Jackson’s martyrdom was one of the key events to inspire a revolution in Attica that would echo half a century later in Palestine, on a much larger scale. Neither revolution has succeeded; Samson, the enemy of the sun, has not yet fallen. Yet the overwhelming reactionary force each engendered—the system of mass incarceration that followed the prison radicalism of the 1970s in the U.S. and the campaign of genocidal violence Israel has waged in Gaza—have permanently shaken the terrain on which he walks. The struggles, of course, are not identical, and take place on wholly distinct terrains. But the common technologies of colonial warfare—siege and counterinsurgency, incarceration and apartheid—have engendered a common technology of resistance, the escape.
For the first year of Israel’s genocidal assault, its officials spread rumors that Sinwar was hiding deep in the tunnels below Gaza surrounded by Israeli hostages functioning as human shields. The hunt for him became a key military objective of the IDF, but they were never able to successfully locate him. In October 2024, Sinwar was discovered by Israel, completely incidentally, hiding in plain sight on the front lines of the war, participating in combat operations against Israeli soldiers and tanks. Without knowing who he was, Israel targeted Sinwar and several other Hamas militants in the Southern Gaza city of Rafah. Sinwar fled into a partially destroyed building, where he engaged in a firefight with the IDF, fending off their advances with gunfire and then grenades. The troops then sent a surveillance drone into the building, which recorded an injured Sinwar sitting in a chair, face covered by a kuffiyeh. With his non-injured hand, he throws a stick at the drone—or was it a rifle, exhausted of its ammunition?—a final act of defiance.
What Kanafani’s narrator saw in Nadia’s missing leg, the persistent rays of sunlight struggling through the rubble and debris of defeat, shone through Jackson, the Panthers, and the Attica revolutionaries. The French writer Jean Genet, who wrote the introduction to Jackson’s Soledad Brothers, also reflected on his time spent with Palestinian militants in the early 1970s in his 1986 Prisoner of Love. In its pages, he traced the bright impermanence of this revolutionary lineage: “the people you call terrorists know without needing to be told that they, their persons and their ideas, will only be brief flashes against a world wrapped up in its own smartness. [. . .] The Black Panthers knew their own brilliance, and that they would disappear. [. . .] And the [Palestinian militants], too, are tracer bullets, knowing their traces vanish in the twinkling of an eye.” Flashes of sunlight, the permanent impermanence of revolutionary struggle. Sinwar, too, understood without needing to be told the meaning of his existence. What matters in captive societies, where siege, incarceration, and warfare are not distinct modes of oppression but different expressions of Samson’s wrath, is resistance. In this sense, abolition and decolonization point to a shared political horizon, each an articulation of the fight for national liberation—a defensive stand taken against the one long settler-colonial war against different peoples.
Where and when will the sun return? Sinwar’s stick flew through the air at the Israeli drone, which dutifully captured it on footage, relaying the images first to Israel, and then to the world. We did not see it land, but in the period since October 7, U.S. politics have been transformed. A new internationalism courses through the streets, a profound disillusionment emerging as the U.S. commitment to Israeli barbarity has strained the institutions and alliances core to its national stability, an equilibrium knocked off kilter. At the same time, the long war against Black life in America, now—in direct response to the prison militancy of the 1970s—most principally expressed through the violence of policing and prisons, has sparked popular street uprisings that reached major inflection points in 2014 and again in 2020. How these forces carry forward remains to be seen. But somewhere, someone is plotting the next escape.
The long war between Samson and the sun cannot go on forever. The U.S.–Israeli insistence on exit—on blowing past borders and limits, expanding through social contradictions, and attempting to warehouse away and stamp out radical subjectivity—is the same capitalist logic animating human-powered ecological destruction. So far, Samson has weathered every challenge, restabilizing into a new repressive regime. But each successive revolutionary escape–counterattack more forcefully shakes his balance. For the sake of humanity, we must see that he falls.