The Politics of Karameh: Palestinian Dignity and Defiance Against the Necrocarceral State

Abstract

For decades, Israel has systematically confiscated and withheld the bodies of slain Palestinians as a form of punishment and control over the living. The bodies are deposited without proper identification in secret military-controlled gravesites or in police morgue refrigerators where they lie frozen indefinitely. As their families are forced to negotiate in Israeli courts for the retrieval and burial of their children, their grief is compounded by the denial of traditional burial rites. Thus, Israel’s corpse confiscation policy has become synonymous with the intergenerational dehumanization and criminalization of Palestinians from birth into death. This dissertation centers the politics of Palestinian death, grief and mourning as critical sites for exploring questions of Indigenous rights, sovereignty and belonging in contexts of ongoing settler colonialism. Drawing on long-term engagement with the Palestinian grassroots movement to return the dead to their families, each chapter explores a different mode of Israel’s corpse confiscation policy over seven decades of entrenched Israeli settler colonial occupation. I use ethnographic research, in-depth interviews, and archival and legal research to examine the intersections of carceral, border and legal systems that underpin a form of settler colonial governance I term necrocarcerality. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how Israel’s corpse confiscation policy manifests as a tool of settler colonial expansion on the body, as well as how Palestinians have resisted its intention to punish through the diverse ways they respond to being denied burial rites. I argue that their varied, yet interconnected strategies comprise a “politics of karameh (dignity)” that must be understood as a collective expression of anticolonial defiance against Israel’s necrocarcerality. Thus, the captive dead body becomes a critical site of Indigenous sovereign expression under the precarious conditions of life in the settler colonial state. By centering the criminalization and incarceration of the Palestinian corpse, alongside Indigenous practices of grief and mourning, this dissertation shows how the politics of death may inform a liberated Palestinian future.