“For what?
To free the oldest Arab prisoner!
Who is he?
The future, father, the future.”
These were the last words in Walid Daqqah’s The Oil’s Secret Tale, which he wrote and smuggled out of prison in 2018. When I first read those lines, I wondered what he meant when he said that the future is the oldest Arab prisoner.
Daqqah’s tale shook our common knowledge about liberation and those who struggle for it. Most importantly, it shook up the meaning of Palestinian freedom. His novel was intended for children and youth, but it also functions as a map of the Palestinian national struggle.
Daqqah questioned all of our dogmas about who the enemy is, how to confront it, and what makes us refuse to surrender. The Oil’s Secret Tale reflects the teachings and philosophies he upheld over three decades of resistance against the Israeli settler colonial regime. Despite his imprisonment, he maintained the ability to read, engage, and write for the future of Palestine. His life was slowly taken through deliberate medical neglect and the weaponization of his medical condition against his own body. He struggled for months to survive until his martyrdom on April 7, 2024.
These have been our darkest times. Gaza faces a genocide, and the Israeli army expands its operations into Lebanon and the cities of the northern West Bank. Yet Walid Daqqah’s work continues to inspire Palestinians and those in solidarity with the struggle for freedom. His writings addressed the horrific events and dark periods in Palestine’s history, not as mere eulogies but as acts of resistance and a call to maintain hope for freedom — freedom for himself and for his people.
What if the apartheid wall disappears?
Walter Benjamin states in his seminal essay, “The Storyteller,” that the nature of every real story is that it contains something useful for the people, the readers. To tell the story in Benjamin’s eyes, it should have purposeful moral guidance. “In every case, the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers,” Benjamin tells us. Storytelling is not just based on writers’ experiences or the experiences of others — it is transformed into the experience of their readers or listeners.
Daqqah’s novel was made for his people. It is a map to be examined by those who feel defeated and entrapped in a militarized colonial reality.
The epidemic of our age
Daqqah recounts the story of a 12-year-old boy named Jood, who is determined to meet his father for the first time. During his journey to free his father from Israeli prison, he encounters “Umm Rumi,” a wise tree that embodies the role of a Palestinian grandmother, sharing oral tales and the wisdom of generations. In their conversations, she reveals the “secret of the oil,” a substance characterized by its very mystery. Umm Rumi repeatedly tells Jood that he must use it wisely to address the “epidemic of the age.”
The oil lies within the kernels, and when she decides to trust him, she explains how to extract olives from them. She cryptically teaches him that the kernels he can see do not hide, but the ones he cannot see do. “Take what you do not see,” she instructs.
This passage marks the beginning of his journey toward discovery, suggesting the importance of navigating hidden paths. It serves as a reminder to avoid getting lost in the complexities of the present and to remain focused on the future. Jood gathers what he can from the olives for its oil. To conceal himself from the prison guards.
This moment illustrates that their meeting transcends the simple reunion of father and son; it re-centers the question of “what is to be done?” and what journey lies ahead for us.
During this encounter, a discussion unfolds between Jood, his father, and the other prisoners about the most effective ways to utilize the magic oil. What should we do? Should we use it to hide the settlements, the bypass roads in the West Bank, or perhaps conceal the apartheid wall? These questions, posed by Daqqah, reveal a deeper issue. One prisoner suggests the priority should be releasing those behind bars, highlighting the core dilemma Daqqah addresses: where do we begin, and what should we seek to save?
Jood joins the discussion, saying his mission is to heal people from the epidemic of our age. When he asked Umm Rumi what this epidemic was, Umm Rumi replied: the loss of freedom. The prison, the wall, and the settlements are the visible symptoms, but the epidemic is far deeper — the loss of reason, ignorance, and the erosion of morals. Hiding colonialism and exploitation is not the solution, Jood argues. Instead, we must confront it with reason, wisdom, and morality.
According to Daqqah, imagining and engaging with the future is a crucial task for us today, especially amid the collapse of the national movement, Arab normalization, and the expansion of settlements. We are reminded of Walter Benjamin, who argues that the future must be central to historical thought. In “On the concept of History,” Benjamin observes that European Jews were often denied access to the future, leading their traditions to focus on memory and remembrance. This is part of the internal conflict that led Benjamin to oscillate between Zionism and Marxism as potential futures for the Jewish people. However, he died in 1940, at the height of the Nazi regime, during one of the darkest periods in history. In parallel, Walid Daqqah, through years of captivity and communication with generations of Palestinian resistance, has come to realize that Palestinians face another barrier to the future — beyond the colonial settlement structures, checkpoints, and military apparatus.
Defining the prison
Mahmoud Darwish published thoughts from his first stint in prison in Al-Jadeed Magazine, titled “Ink…on paper of the dowry of the word,” in 1965.
“The formal indictment also condemned me formally because I left my big prison, which is my homeland, for a few hours, so I was punished by entering the small prison,” Darwish writes.
He does not mean by this that there is no difference between the two. The entire text is about the difference, explaining that the big prison is present and that it contains authorities, surveillance, a government, and soldiers.
According to Darwish, the purpose of prison is “the feeling that you are a prisoner in your homeland, which may lead to disbelief in the value of life and faith and its futility when you feel that you are exiled within the borders of your homeland. Reaching this result is a sign of their victory over you.”
Darwish’s words lay the foundation for the critical research conducted by Daqqah, whose Dissolving Consciousness, which he wrote in 2011, critically examines Israel’s objectives within what he calls the “small prison.” This term symbolizes the prison system, where Israel’s aims are realized through the persecution, targeting, and “dissolution” or “searing” of Palestinian consciousness.
Dissolving Consciousness is not only a research text on colonial mechanisms and psychological and mental violence but also penetrates the field to become a foundational philosophical text on the meaning of freedom.
“Prison as an example is the subject of this study. The state of losing the ability to interpret reality, the feeling of impotence, and the loss of initiative is not only the fate of prisoners but is a description that applies to all Palestinians,” Daqqah writes.
The main motive of the study is to monitor and track how Israel penetrates the Palestinian mind, neglecting it, obstructing it, distorting it, and distancing it from the values of freedom, dignity, and homeland. The worry that pervades the text comes in light of the success of this process towards the imprisoned resistance elite; it will be applied directly to the entire people, and on this basis, he sees the connection between the two prisons. The Oil’s Secret Tale and Jood’s path reflect this worry about the future of the Palestinians — the worry about their minds and their morals.
Drawing on Foucault’s theories of surveillance and power and Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine,” Daqqah blends theory with his own observations of Palestinian prisoners’ daily reality. He sees this as a crucial mission, trying to delve into the facts and not retreat into writing heroism about captivity.
After the Second Intifada, Daqqah observed that “waves of prisoners arrived daily,” reflecting the severe threats faced by Palestinian youth, whom he regards as the core of the Palestinian resistance. His repeated focus on the future connects to these youth, representing the next generation—a generation targeted, colonized, and brutalized, with the clear intent to mold and imprint upon their minds.
He shows us in Dissolving Consciousness how “consciousness is remolded” through steps that begin with shock, targeting the body — and more importantly, the mind — alongside the unraveling of social ties, morals, political solidarity, and collective organizations like parties and political factions. All of these forms have come under attack by the prison systems in various ways.
Prisoners were divided by geography and region, starting the process of fragmentation and individualization within the prisons. Collective action and collective means of association were punished. Symbols of nationalism and politics were confiscated.
Accordingly, the prisoners’ consciousness was eroded by financial concerns as they became tied to support from the Palestinian Authority, which covered their financial needs and facilitated deeper integration into the Palestinian social fabric. As a result, the Palestinian prisoner, once solely focused on the liberation struggle, evolved into a member of a distinct sector — similar to that of a government employee — who is driven by its financial interests and demands.
In his study, Daqqah concludes that during the events of Gaza in 2014, prisoners chose to remain silent and refrained from addressing the ongoing massacres, a response that reflects the precision of Israel’s policies aimed at undermining our collective awareness and moral compass. “The target is no longer the body of the prisoner. The torture is no longer material. It is the spirit, the mind, which is disfigured,” Daqqah writes.
This observation brings into focus the widespread and troubling silence on the Gaza genocide today among all Palestinians — whether in the 1948 territories, the West Bank, in the diaspora camps, or even among Arabs in general, with the exception of the resistance movements in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon.
Daqqah helps us better understand how and why our current reality has been warped, but his writings were fundamentally linked to a deep-seated worry about the future. His injunction for us is to reconsider the extent of our resilience and our commitment to collective Palestinian values. While he mourns our collective condition, Daqqah also reminds us that the future carries hope.
In the end, the child Jood decided not to disappear the settlements or the apartheid wall, which represents the mere surface of colonialism. Yet, he granted “a large number of children” the freedom of movement- to the beaches of Haifa, Akka, and Tiberias —symbolizing the liberation of the Arab future, and the Palestinian dream of freedom. Amid the dark times marked by assassinations, the destruction of entire cities, broken families, fear, exhaustion, death, and bloodshed, Daqqah’s words carry a deep lament, woven from his own life experiences that mirror Palestine’s struggles today. Yet, he held onto hope and resisted to the very end, defying both his Jailor and his illness, and the settler colonial regime.