A legendary prison break confounds and infuriates Zionist authorities
The symbolism is irresistible: six men—political prisoners according to world opinion, terrorists according to their captors—tunneled out of Israel’s Gilboa, a heavily guarded colonial stockade, and then disappeared into the early morning darkness in an escape so daring and unlikely that it surely would become a big-budget production if Hollywood didn’t hate Palestinians.
The hole from which they emerged beyond the prison wall couldn’t have been much more than a foot in diameter. How did six grown men squeeze through such a small cavity? How did they manage this feat of primitive engineering? How did they bamboozle the Zionist security apparatus? We don’t know. They just did. This unknowability informs the magic of their escape.
They emerged from the earth like precious resources, like natal organisms, like seeds determined to initiate life. Arabs rejoiced across two continents while Israelis and their imperialist sponsors vowed to reassert control: more law, more order, more spying, more imprisonment. As always when Palestinians prove capable of human behavior, the occupiers have been bellyaching about savagery and lawlessness, but underlying the outrage is the usual anguish that the natives again rejected their jurisdiction. The occupiers have been humiliated, demystified, outwitted by people whose supposed inferiority is a critical component of their self-esteem. No longer can Israelis be comforted by the scornful belief that Palestinians are simple beasts crawling around on their bellies. The six escapees breached something much more serious than a maximum-security prison; they burrowed into the granular underground of Zionism’s fragile psyche. First, that tiny hole. Next, the entire country.
The joy most observers felt about the escape speaks to the degradations of life under capitalism. So many of us, anxious and overworked, would like to surface from a small aperture into a different world. Yet we can recognize that the six men escaped due to incredible effort and devotion, exactly what will be required in a time of increasing scarcity and insecurity, of ecocide and entropy, in which terms like “segregation” and “lockdown” are a regular part of our vocabulary. We identify with the underdogs who made it out even though we know that the world is still far more dangerous for them. Those underdogs invited us to at least subconsciously read their breakout as a contest between rebellion and authority, imagination and constraint, primordialism and technology.
But the escape wasn’t merely a symbolic act. It was a physical miracle, with material repercussions we’ve yet to totally comprehend. A humiliated colonizer is a dangerous creature, prone to gratuitous violence as a means to reassert a sense of psychic superiority. The colonizer wants to capture and demean the escapees. The colonizer’s self-perception is contingent on these grand gestures of authority. Gilboa is inside the green line, in what is improperly known as “Israel proper.” Once above ground, where did the men go? Presumably to the West Bank, with perhaps a subsequent flight to Jordan or Syria, which would require another daring escapade. Again, the magic is in the unknowing.
Two have since been captured in the biblical town of Nazareth, apparently snitched out by a pensive local. If it is true, for we can never rule out misinformation, the outcome is basically what most of us expected to happen in the case of rearrest. Even here, though, there is cause for optimism. The occupier is damn near useless without the cowardice and mendacity of a few native informants. The dregs of Palestinian society represent the apogee of Zionism. Now we await news of the other four escapees….
After the truth-shower 