Coding Palestinian peoples in zoomorphic pejoratives such as “human animals,” “arabushim rats,” and “two-footed beasts,” the civilisational project of Zionism has desperately sought to proclaim itself predestined and unassailable by constructing the figure of the savage who is abstracted and subtracted from humanity. Its narrative power is sustained by possessing and categorising time, and ​as such, it depends on corralling the native into a biotemporal enclosure​ by classifying them under bestial taxonomie​s—with no place in history or claim to a future. The regime of civilised time must extract, steal, and transmute all temporalities from the savage rendered incapable of marching forward.

Yet among them are those who refuse to march forward. They carry a lump in their throat and hurl it at the machinery of progress and chronological succession. They interrupt the smoothness of this temporal order by declaring themselves out of tune. They inhabit an interstitial time that cannot be measured, but that upends, drop by drop, all mechanisms of domination and annihilation; that operates not to defeat civilised time, but to abolish its conditions altogether. Drop upon drop, this is the time of waiting that labours to break open “political possibility through overturning relations of force.”¹ This is Zaman al-Intizar, the Time of Waiting.

HERE HANG THE BLUE BREATHS OF OUR LONG NIGHT.
HERE IS SUSPENDED THE SONG BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE HOUR.
“INDEED, TOMORROW IS NEAR FOR THOSE WHO WAIT.”²

when the sky breaks apart,
In Gaza, the Palestinian body has been scattered into ashlaa’—remains of flesh, pieces of bones, the body dismembered from itself, the dead disconnected from the living—denied not only the right to life, but also the right to death. Throughout the land, there is a scattering of radm, a rubbled chaos of homes, schools, parks, hospitals, mosques all dust. Splintered into shazaya is a project of fragmentation, where Palestinians are dispersed across Gaza, the West Bank, the camps, the ’48 territories, and the diasporas, pushed even further into prison, graveyards, and disappearance. Ruination produced by perpetual war is how colonial time organises itself, and how the Israeli settler identity is consolidated.

The settler-colonial entity is aware of its impermanence and squirms under the psychic grip of acute insecurity. It requires biblical fictions and mythologised pasts to maintain its perennial conquests of time, fabricating a temporal structure of catastrophic continuity, Nakba, designed to envelop every part of the natives’ network of relations: a siege within a siege. Expelled and isolated in time, the native waits.

On 7 October 2023, these moments of waiting amassed force, grew heavier in their longing, and burst open as toufan. Drop upon drop, these moments are without precise beginning and slip from all attempts at disciplinary chronology. They hold weight in their coming together. Toufan becomes an assembling force, a tender gathering, an act of “re-membering the dismembered.”³ It is a practice of return against the Zionist logic of fragmentation, a return to ontological continuity with the land that is inseparable from the Palestinian body and identity. The wait to return could no longer be contained, it was a deluge. A Palestinian bulldozer flattened the coloniser’s fence that delimited the occupied space. Young men atop the occupation’s tanks, bicycles whistling past forbidden zones, and hang gliders piercing through Zionist aerial domination: impossible images that unsettled colonial time. The Palestinian resistance shattered the coloniser’s logic of inside and outside, of this side and that side by reclaiming land for those to whom it belongs, for the ancestors and for the unborn.

With this “superfluous rupture”⁴ of the Israeli time regime, Toufan inaugurated a new temporality that sought to abolish the terms and structure of Nakba. It pried open the grip of the coloniser, propelling the Palestinian land and body towards possibilities that make return possible—return not to a past, but to a future.

Israel fears that its time is running out, so it settles, sediments and stagnates; forever caught inside the violence of its foundational hour. The time of Palestinian waiting is a long trembling movement—longevity is its pain and its strength. Resistance is wait materialised—it carries a time older and heavier than the colonial entity. Waiting does not happen in time, it creates time, moulds a past and liberates the future. It is a stubborn accumulation, ephemeral and thick.

and when the stars fall, scattering,
To be martyred is not to end, it is to transform into a witness. Shaheed is the one who waits with the truth for so long that he becomes one with it. In al-Bireh, Bassel al-Araj completed his waiting with his gun. In Rafah, a little girl was waiting inside her house when her legs were torn into shreds. In Sabra and Shatila, more than two thousand Palestinian refugees were in wait. Wafa Idris and Dalal Mughrabi became their waiting. Majd Arandas, Heba Abu Nada, Abu Ibrahim, Salma Mukhaimer, Adnan al-Bursh waited.

In camps across Palestine and Lebanon, photographs of martyrs on posters, plaques, and banners run from town squares to the entrance of homes as ephemeral monuments. These memories accumulate over walls, layer upon layer of commemorative tributes that connect one martyr with another, an uprising with the ones that followed, a street here with Al-Quds there. Long funeral processions simultaneously hold the body of the martyr multiplying into tens of thousands of mourners as well as these bodies cohering into the singular and shared body of the martyr. Reverberating with bitter and joyous zaghareet, the site of mourning is turned into a sight of celebration as the community cries out,

“يا شهيد ارتاح ارتاح واحنا نواصل الكفاح”
(“rest, rest our martyr, we will continue the struggle”)

Songs, stories, and slogans blossom into memory-making rituals that expand the time of the martyr, ascribing to him the realm of eternity. The community braids his absence into their everyday routines, defying the occupation’s rules of assembly, speech and mobility. These memories shape the narration of Palestinian time and consciousness; act as a generative field for strength and succour; and articulate a pulsating political will. They form an insurgent lexicon that rearranges the experience of time against the totalising grip of colonial history. They establish a continuity of the martyrs with their people, of the world of the living with the dead. The time of memory insists that what is absent is not gone.

The fighter-martyr, as well as the figure of the fida’i, embodies revolutionary sacrifice. In Gaza, the recycling of ordinary and discarded materials into catapults and handmade explosives has expanded over decades into the repurposing of advanced Israeli weapons. The fighter-martyrs utilise simple, low-tech weaponry such as the Yassin 105 anti-tank rocket, al-Ghoul sniper rifle, and the Shawaz EFP against a sophisticated massive military arsenal, AI-powered weapons systems, and surveillance machinery. They place explosive devices on tanks and armoured bulldozers, putting the time of the machine in direct confrontation with the time of bare hands. Four decades of Zionist military legend, the Mk4M Merkava, is destroyed by locally produced drone-fired shells, shattering its claims to permanence and invincibility. The time for developing, improvising, and adapting these basic weapons was gradually accrued in waiting over decades. Wait allows the resistance to build the unimaginable “from scratch and to make the impossible possible.”⁵ The weapons that are sent to dislodge Palestinian life from meaning are repurposed into guerrilla strength and are subverted into a practice of reclaiming absence from the assigned signifier of emptiness.

In collecting and assembling the martyr piece by piece, ashlaa’ after ashlaa’, honouring their remains in plastic bags and ice cream vans, and placing cardboard epitaphs for last rites, Palestinians in Gaza use the “architecture of the shredded body as a source of power”⁶ by sacralising absence against genocidal violence. In their persistence, martyrs and those who re-member them, create absence as a unit of time; they sculpt absence to overturn the Zionist temporal order, disrupting and humiliating the colonial machinery and inflicting upon it material, psychic, and political losses.

and when the seas will be burst forth,
Prison is an architectural process of crystallising the settler-colonial order in space, and of compressing and elongating time for those held captive. With its heavy walls, the prison is able to maintain its domination by fabricating a distinction between an inside and an outside. It follows the colonial design of fragmenting land, segregating the built environment, and separating kin on the “outside”; as well as creating division among captives, isolating the individual, and fracturing consciousness “inside.”

In waiting, the individual body joins the national body and creates a network of circulation against these temporal and spatial lacunae. Captives use three strategies reappropriated from Zionist temporal control to achieve wholeness with their collective time: stopping time, “parallel time,”⁷ and repetition time. Spatially constrained, time is all that the captives can rely on, and with their waiting they begin to conquer time, which may sometimes allow victories in space. Because space and time are so tightly interlaced in a prison, an attack in one dimension necessarily weakens the other, thereby bending the spacetime continuum that grants the prison its imperishability.

*

Wielding their hunger to strike the enemy, prisoners defy and destroy the structure of “prison-as-elimination.”⁸ They declare that the jailer cannot have power over their life or death. In March 2023, ‘Volcano of Freedom or Martyrdom,’ the hunger strike of more than 2000 prisoners led by Marwan Barghouti, announced its victory even before it began as the occupation withdrew its latest set of restrictions. In their “collective will,” they foregrounded their desire “to launch [themselves] as arrows from the strings of [their] rebellious souls.” To stop colonial time from materialising itself on their bodies, they directed their bodies as a weapon and reclaimed sovereignty over themselves.

The hunger strikes of 1968 in Nablus prison, 1969 in Ramla prison and Kfar Yona prison, 1970 in Neve Tirza prison, and 1987 in Juneid prison, among several others, reaffirmed the link between the prisoners inside and the strugglers outside, inverting the logic of captivity. Shaped by the martyrdom of Abdul Qadir Abu al-Fahem in Asqalan prison in 1970; Rasem Halawa, Ali al-Ja’fari and Isaac Maragha in Nafha Prison in 1980; Mahmoud Freitikh in Juneid prison in 1984; Hussein Nimr ‘Obeid in Asqalan prison in 1992; and Sheikh Khader Adnan in Ramla prison in 2023, the movement asserts that the individual body might be gone, but its sacrifice strengthens the collective Palestinian body. The Palestinian prisoner movement has been organising this “battle of empty intestines” (معركة الأمعاء الخاوية) at the scale of a collective and, at other times, in the intimacy of an individual to improve living conditions, protest against humiliation and torture, and secure their liberation. This is a movement waged not through the legal fictions offered by the occupation, but by themselves.

*

In his analysis of “searing consciousness” (صهر الوعي), Walid Daqqa examines new techniques of torture that aim to induce cognitive friction and a crisis of perception among Palestinian captives to tear them from national consciousness. His study exposes how the occupation introduces and tests several instruments of violence to detach the body from the self inside the prison, eventually to utilise them to separate the body from the land outside the prison. The Zionist design is to keep Palestinians on both sides of the prison wall from comprehending the entirety of their struggle, such that Israel is perceived as the only intact and whole reality. Daqqa’s articulation of “parallel time” becomes a challenge to this reality and an invitation to defeat it by organising the everyday in a strategic temporal discipline.

The strength of “parallel time” comes from the spatiality it precipitates, “where we see you but you don’t see us, where we hear you but you don’t hear us.”⁹ This ethic was embodied in the creation of Al-Zahraat, a clandestine magazine that was conceptualised in Damon prison by young Palestinian women captives. Tasks were divided according to interest and expertise—some would write, others would draw, and a handful would steal pens and paper. Gradually, it became so popular that many girls and women inside the prison wished to contribute to the magazine. Each copy was carefully made and reproduced by hand, secretly circulated across cells, and to prevent any risk of turning defunct, smuggling it out grew into a practice of archiving. Several women captives have also been engaged in craftsmaking—from using olive and avocado seeds for making bracelets and tasbeehat to unraveling woven threads from fabric for creating delicate tatreez wonders on scraps of cloth—reconfiguring their relationship with time. With each object they assert their intergenerational knowledge and become “a continuous past that never ends.” Their time “flows while space rests,” a time outside this time, a fugitive time that runs parallel to the prison’s temporal thickness coagulating around its edges. This is the “futuristic heritage”¹⁰ that creates a link between present and future against enforced isolation, that introduces a temporal dimension elusive to capture, that remains committed to its inheritance of slowness.

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Khalida Jarrar once remarked that prison is the art of exploring possibilities. Repeating certain tactics learned from other captives over the decades, as well as repeating a particular gesture over and over again across several days, has allowed Palestinian captives to execute miraculous escapes. In 1938, Issa Hajj Suleiman al-Battat escaped from Atlit prison, long before Israel was established. In 1996, Ghassan Mahdawi and Tawfiq al-Zaben escaped Kfar Yona prison by digging a tunnel. In 2002, during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, four captives dug their way out of Ofer prison with spoons. In 1996, Saleh Tahaineh and Nu’man Tahaineh escaped from the same prison, and despite their attempt at self-liberation being short-lived, they remained mentors for Mahmoud al-Ardah and Mohammed al-Ardah, who in September 2021, along with Zakaria Zubeidi, Munadel Nafe’at, Yaqoub Qadri, and Ayham Nayef Kamamji, liberated themselves from Gilboa prison by digging a tunnel using a spoon.

Repetition time, sometimes so small that it goes unnoticed within the immensity of the occupation’s spatiotemporal order, but charged with patience, it contaminates the jailer’s time and disfigures the settler-soldier’s time with its lag and latency.

When Yaqoub Qadri affirmed that they “made the impossible possible” and when Mohammed al-Ardah called the occupation “a mere illusion made of dust,” they seized the temporal order concentrated in the prison wall and dragged it to its past, a mound of dust. With their repeated gesture of digging, they broke the totalising fiction of the prison and unearthed a temporality that the prison always hides: its beginning, its non-being.

*

These three practices of time are held together by the “Palestinian Will”¹¹ that is nourished by the wait intensifying on both sides of the wall. One of the most glorious counter-temporal gestures has been the birth of hundreds of Palestinian children beyond the prison walls through sperm smuggling; born out of the wait of their mothers and fathers. While the occupation withholds the bodies of martyrs, captives have been smuggling the future and expanding life. Walid Daqqa’s daughter Milad called the prison “a place without a door,” but he had always been “drilling a hole in its wall.”

HERE OUR SHADOW RECOILS INTO THE SHORE.
HERE THE WAVES GASP AND TEAR ALL LIGHT.
THE INFINITE STRETCHES FOR THE “CHILDREN OF DARKNESS.”

Intizar shares root with manzar, entwining wait with sight. Zaman al-Intizar becomes an ethic of seeing—underneath the earth, tunnels swell in subterranean defiance, and above, from Yarmouk to Bourj al-Barajneh, all camps carry only one address; in Beit Hanoun, people continue to return to the rubble of their homes while others refuse to leave, and in Shuja’iyya, they promise to rebuild their city; hours of foraging for za’atar and ‘aakoub in al-Jalil, and weeks of planting aubergine seeds in plastic buckets and tin cans in Jabaliya—each sight births a defeat to Zionist temporal determinism.

Keys rust in fingers and tents grow pellucid, but in the utterance of “ahna samidoun hon,” the practice of sumud germinates into an act of staying put in space and time simultaneously.¹² Sumud: a spatiality of wait where the geography that has been rendered inaccessible to Palestinians is imagined and lived again in time, where generative infrastructures of everyday life are built. This is the temporality that precedes the enemy, and will outlive him. Needles of صبر that exceed and explode the frontiers of the coloniser’s clocks.

Written without diacritics, منتظر signals both the one who waits (muntazir), and that which is awaited (muntazar). To wait is to turn indistinguishable from one’s longing—like Handala who has still not revealed his face.