The Bridge of Return: Palestinian Hunger Strikes as Embodied Anti-Colonial Resistance

This article examines the hunger strike as a form of embodied resistance among Palestinian political prisoners, arguing that it transforms individual bodily suffering into a site of collective anti-colonial subjectivation. Drawing on interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018 with former hunger strikers, the article is grounded in a feminist decolonial methodology rooted in storytelling. Hunger strikes are framed by participants not as isolated acts of individual protest, but as contributions to the collective national struggle for freedom and self-determination. By situating the Palestinian case within a transnational framework, including Irish Republican and Turkish leftist hunger strikes, the article explores how the incarcerated body becomes a site of political meaning making and resistance to colonial state violence. In Palestine the hunger strike confronts both the material conditions of imprisonment and the broader settler-colonial logic that seeks to depoliticize and erase Palestinian political life. The striker's body, always under threat of death, emerges as a living archive of struggle and a defiant evo-discourse to colonial domination.