03 ISSUE X
FEBRUARY 2026
FEBRUARY 2026
A Parasitic Life
Dispossession begins with narrative framing; containment follows through introjection, producing self-surveillance and internalized control, as occupiers confiscate a people’s visual memory.
By Jana Mohamed
In 1982, amidst the Israeli invasion of Southern Beirut, the Palestine Research Center (PRC), the research body of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), where vast archives on Palestine are stored, endured hostile dispossession and looting by the Israeli Occupation Army. The seized collections were transmitted to the Zionist state’s “Army and Ministry of Defense,” to become part of Israeli colonial archives. The assemblage entailed periodicals, manuscripts of notable Palestinian figures, maps, rare photographs, visuals and pictorials, comprehensive research on the Palestinian question, ephemera, and cultural expressions of the struggle. Before it was seized, the PRC had been actively assembling what was arguably the world’s largest repository of materials on the Palestinian struggle.
Image by Timothy A.clary/AFP, via Getty Images.
In his 2024 documentary, “A Fidai Film,” director Kamal Aljafari resuscitates and disrupts these illicitly cached images that have remained obstructed in Israeli files since then; a premeditated attempt to efface a people through the deprivation of their collective memory. The film functions as a repellent against the erasure of the Palestinian people, and the felonious control and colonial theft of their visual record.
This is a blatant case of colonial containment; precisely, intellectual containment or epistemological containment. It consists of a desire to contain and dominate all facets of a people’s roots. And quite brazenly, render a society invisible. To analyze ‘Containment’ is to recognize it across several interrelated dimensions, and spatial or physical containment is perhaps the most visible. It’s displayed through walls, checkpoints, and other restrictions that operate on exclusionary grounds. Territorial containment builds on that phenomenon, most clearly in the deliberate drawing of borders or acts of conquest, designed to isolate populations.
Politically, containment functions through the denial of sovereignty and autonomy, and the absolute refutation of self-determination. Economically, it emerges through the control of labor, the extraction of resources, and the enforcement of dependency. And as illustrated earlier, in the context of knowledge containment, where narrative becomes the subject of control, archives and ancestral relics are vulnerable to hoarding, and knowledge becomes susceptible to skewed portrayal through wrongful assignments of jurisdiction. These forms of containment are never discrete; rather, they overlap and rely upon one another. Territory, for instance, can shape economic conditions, as both depend on political authority and spatial control to sustain systems of domination.
Containment isn’t peripheral or secondary. It's a structural, reproduced logic that aims to organize imperial association, a way of thinking, and a method of governing that persistently functions to manage, separate, and impose itself on populations. Its logic isn’t limited to conflict, either. It is central to the colonial project's maintenance of dominance and to the postcolony, as this dialectic doesn’t retire at decolonization.
Under the state of containment, the colonized begin to internalize those limits through self-regulation and self-surveillance, in accordance with the structures that once confined them. For those who remain contained, there is protracted uncertainty in a state of “perpetual temporariness,” in which temporary fixtures become permanent, though strictly temporary.
Containment supplements far beyond mere restriction. In many contained zones, poor infrastructure and environmental degradation lead to severe health risks and the spread of disease, driving internal displacement and leaving people in a perpetually unstable limbo. Over time, pressure under these systems of containment can generate crises, such as the eruption of civil war or other forms of internal conflict.
Fanon locates containment outside of the ordinary notion of spatiality. The intent of containment could be embodied and far more psychological. Fanon himself argues that colonialism is an inherently violent project that confines not only land and bodies but also the mind; all subjects in the colonial apparatus. Through the reinforcement of racial hierarchy and domination, adjacent to the state of containment, the colonized subject embodies inferiority and alienation, prolonging as a form of hegemony, shaping how the oppressed see themselves and their place in the world in relation to their identity. Fanon’s repertoire insists that decolonization be a radical and violent endeavor, since these structures operate with impunity.
In apartheid South Africa, containment structured everyday life through the regulation of movement, rights, labor, and belonging. Townships, enforced through pass laws and the Group Areas Act, restricted Black mobility and expelled Black South Africans from urban centers. Politically, racial hierarchies were codified into law, denying the majority basic rights until 1994. Economically, land dispossession and restrictive labor regimes entrenched subordination. As a disciplinary system, apartheid relied on passbooks, checkpoints, and influx control to manage populations, indicating the coloniality of power that structured who could live, work, and belong.
In the Palestinian case, containment is candidly apparent and multifaceted; as Noam Chomsky notes, an “open air prison” precisely, in reference to the Gaza Strip. Territorial fragmentation is visible through checkpoints, apartheid walls, Zionist settlements, permit regimes, and sustained blockades that limit mobility and isolate populations in both the Strip and the West Bank. Sovereignty is denied as control is exercised over borders, resources, and infrastructure, while restrictions on trade, land, water, and labor entrench economic dependency. The confined setting induces health crises, and ongoing genocide and militarization. Palestinian containment is far more than physical barriers; it paralyzes routine function.
Containment is a parasite on futurity; it feeds on space, movement, and prospects of political imagination. Despite its masquerading justification, it remains a contemptible extension of colonial acquisition.
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