Sovereignty without Fangs: When the Prisoner Becomes a "Social Case" and the Land Becomes an "Archaeological Artifact"

The suffering of an entire people is sometimes condensed into two intertwined scenes: a bulldozer seizing Roman stones in Sebastia to relocate them to museums that rewrite history, and a bureaucratic guillotine seizing the rights of a freed prisoner, turning them into a "welfare voucher" that redefines dignity.

The two scenes appear separate; one in the field of archaeology and the other in the corridors of banking institutions, but the hidden thread connecting them is the same: a colonial machine working to "strip legitimacy" from both the land and the human. It is a systematic process that does not merely confine itself to the geography of place but extends to the entire engineering of the Palestinian narrative.

By the end of 2025, the change in nomenclature was no longer merely an administrative game, but had transformed into a tool for political domestication. When the "Empowerment" institution - under pressure from international dictates and conditional financial stipulations - changed from being a symbol of national honor for the prisoners to a channel for "conditional aid," we are not merely facing a financial restructuring but an "existential emptying".

The new system has subjected more than 7,000 families of prisoners and freed individuals to criteria of "social surveys" and "needs assessments," transforming the struggle stipend into a "humanitarian grant." The Palestinian prisoner, in the national imagination, is not just an absent individual but a symbol of sacrifice and an integral part of sovereignty. Turning their entitlement into "assistance" is an attempt to strip them of their militant quality and to transform a just political cause into a "social problem" that needs "management" rather than a "solution".

It is an attempt to force the fighter to barter their identity for a livelihood described as relief, which aligns perfectly with the vision that seeks to turn the Palestinian people from rightful owners into "recipients of aid" whose behavior can be controlled through algorithms of prevention and granting.

Just as the narrative of the human is stolen, the narrative of the land is stolen by stripping it of layers of its historical identity. The recent announcement confiscating 63 archaeological sites in the West Bank, led by Sebastia and Beit Iksa, is not merely a dispute over land ownership; it is a prime practice of colonial memory, supported by enormous settlement budgets that have exceeded 150 million shekels this year.

The occupation does not excavate stones to understand history but to plant an "alternative history" that serves its expansionist project. When the Canaanite or Roman stone is lifted from its place, the true birth certificate of the land is taken along with it. This process is entirely analogous to the logic of "empowerment"; for the land, without its documented history, becomes "common property" for settlement, and a people without the dignity of their material and moral prisoners becomes a "floating entity" without rootedness in struggle.

Both thefts complement each other: the theft of the stone to create a colonial narrative, and the theft of the label of "fighter" to create a narrative about a "needy community" that seeks survival, not liberation.

The battle today is not merely a "salary crisis" that we await to be solved by a banking button, nor is it "theft of stones" documented in international organizations' reports. The battle is one for sovereignty over definition: Who are we? What do we own?

Protecting the salaries of prisoners as a struggle is not a charitable act, but the first line of defense for the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance as a whole. The leniency in defining the prisoner as a fighter is the same green light that allows the occupation to define Sebastia as a biblical heritage. Sovereignty is indivisible; it begins with preserving human dignity and ends with the sanctity of the artifact.

In the end, steadfastness against the theft of stones is the same steadfastness against the "legalization" of starving prisoners. Both are defenses of Palestinian existence against the machinery of denial. In this struggle for survival, the defense of both stone and human together embodies the practical manifestation of steadfastness, and preserves the narrative that predates the existence of the occupation and will remain after it.