Resistance without borders: Lessons from Alaa Abd el-Fattah

What was originally planned to be an evening of literary solidarity for Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a British-Egyptian writer, activist, and software engineer who has spent most of his time in prison since 2014, turned into an evening of celebration and hope following his release on Monday last week—almost one year after he had completed his latest five-year sentence for “spreading false news” about a prisoner dying under torture, a conviction human rights groups condemned as grossly unfair.

The Year It Should Have Been Freedom, an event hosted by Skin Deep Mag and Haymarket Books with support from the Freedom For Alaa campaign, Books Against Borders, CAGE International, BLM UK, and Abolitionist Futures, brought together voices including Omar Robert Hamilton – Alaa’s first cousin, writer and filmmaker – Dr Asim Qureshi, Research Director at CAGE International, writer and organiser Harsha Walia, and actor Khalid Abdalla, known for both his activism and his roles in film and Netflix’s The Crown.

Read: Egyptian court removes activist Alaa Abdel Fattah from terrorist list

At its heart was Alaa’s book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, a collection of essays written during his time in prison, translated by friends and family, and eventually published as a testament to resilience. The writings span his prison blogs, reflections on the 2011 Egyptian revolution, critiques of technology and surveillance, and uncompromising statements of solidarity with Palestine. In fact, the collection is more than a memoir of incarceration—it is a refusal of despair.

Through readings, speakers drew out the ways in which the injustice of Egypt and its regime is inextricably linked to the colonisation of Palestine. Cultural historian and lead editor with the recently established publishing house Safarjal Press, Hazel Jamjoum, reminded us that “Alaa is very much a part of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement.” In his essay, Palestine On My Mind, Alaa himself wrote: “I’m an Arab and Palestine’s always on my mind.” To speak of Alaa, then, is to speak of Palestine; to speak of prisons in Cairo is to speak of cells in Gaza and the West Bank; and to recognise one injustice is to glimpse the entire structure that sustains it.

Read: Egypt has 60,000 prisoners like Alaa Abdelfattah

In the same essay, Alaa describes travelling to the Gaza Strip and visiting the ‘Empty Stomachs’ tent, a sit-in supporting Palestinian political detainees on hunger strike to resist Israeli administrative detention—a sanitised term for imprisonment in which detainees are held without being informed of the charges against them, and without access to a trial or legal counsel. He later wrote: “I’ve been on hunger strike four times since then, and each time I remember the Palestinian captives’ strike,” highlighting that oppression is not confined by borders; the mechanisms of control, surveillance, and imprisonment operate across contexts. Equally, acts of resistance—whether in Gaza, Cairo, or elsewhere—transcend these boundaries, connecting struggles and showing that resistance extends beyond any single site of oppression.

Such strategies of endurance form part of what Lena Meari, Associate Professor at Birzeit University, Palestine, calls “a Palestinian philosophy of confrontation in colonial prisons”: a refusal to surrender the spirit even when the body is confined. Jail, an institution designed to slowly drain one’s will, is instead transformed into a space for cultivating defiance—a space for thinking, learning, and imagining freedom.

Reflecting on the hunger strikes undertaken by Alaa, his mother Laila Soueif—a political activist and mathematics professor at Cairo University—and countless other political detainees, Dr Qureshi observed that “what we need is a politics of infatigueability.” This endurance, he suggested, is lived not only in acts of protest but in the very bodies of those resisting; when all else is stripped away, the body itself becomes the final site of resistance against the oppressor. As Alaa also stressed, we need nothing short of “the full mobilisation of every strand of the people, the full mobilisation of every strand of the people, the full mobilisation of every strand of the people.”

The philosophy of confronting prisons is not confined to the walls of Egyptian or Israeli jails; it speaks to a wider condition in which repression takes many forms. Some are overt and brutal, others bureaucratic and insidious, but all aim to discipline dissent and contain resistance. Around the world, including in Britain, protesters who stand in solidarity with Palestine face crackdowns that echo, in quieter form, the criminalisation of dissent abroad. From heavy-handed policing of marches to attempts to curtail free expression under the guise of public order, one sees the same logic at work: dissent must be punished, resistance must be broken. But the body that resists hunger in a cell and the body that resists a baton on the street are bound by a shared logic of defiance, each refusing to yield to the forces that would crush them.

To celebrate Alaa’s release, then, is not merely to rejoice at one man’s freedom—it is to recognise the universality of his struggle and our responsibility to continue resisting. It is a reminder that we do not have to be winning while we fight for what’s right. It is a reminder that, even when the world feels like it is closing in on us, we have not yet been defeated.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.