Invoking Dignity: Ontological Resistance through Hunger Strike, Starvation, and Self-Debilitation

“Starvation” and “Dignity” are two words that seem to belong to completely oppositional worlds. Yet Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli settler-colonial prisons invariably connect their starvation to dignity. How can dignity be demanded by starvation? What circumstances force a person to equate food with (in)dignity? And what does it mean to invoke dignity through starvation against humiliation? In this article, the authors investigate the ways in which Palestinian resistance movements in Israeli colonial prisons link their hunger strike quests with a mission to freedom, as “a battle of dignity.” Ultimately, they examine the act of hunger striking in Israeli colonial prisons through the lens of dignity and, simultaneously, consider dignity anew through the act of the hunger strike. The authors extend their discussion further into the relation between dignity and imposed famine to situate dignity in the wider Palestinian anti-colonial movement. To do so, dignity is discussed through a series of dichotomies rather than framing the Palestinian acts of resistance through limited “universal” abstractions. Those dichotomies capture five main tensions in performing and perceiving dignity in relation to hunger strikes. They express the vast existential, moral, political, social, and conceptual intensities that intertwine with dignity and self-starvation. These dichotomies are between: death vs. life; self-harm vs. selfsacrifice; individual freedom vs. collective dignity; famine vs. hunger strike; and, finally, dignity vs. indignity. Through analyzing the first four dichotomies, the authors unpack the tension within (in) dignity and its mobilization through the body in its weakest state, before theorizing a contextual understanding of dignity in terms of the sacredness of an enduring ontology of resistance.