Close to the buffer zone with Israel, Gazans have paved a road called shari‘ al-jakar, literally translated as “street of spite,” as a symbolic claim to sovereignty, spiting their previous overlords by proving they can pave their own roads without Israel’s permission. The deep satisfaction derived from such an action is easily understood. Driving around the land where the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip had once stood, one can see the wide multilane highways that used to connect the Jewish-only settlement blocks where eight thousand inhabitants lived. Extending alongside them are the dusty, potholed one-lane roads that the 1.8 million Palestinians had been forced to use. Against this blueprint of Israel’s colonization of Gaza, Palestinians are now free to build their own infrastructure, wherever they want. And the pleasure felt from this sense of liberty, of quasi sovereignty, is immense. This is so even when everyone understands all too well how truncated such sovereignty is. In matters of life and death, Israel’s occupation grinds on relentlessly in the form of an external structure of control on a besieged population. But within this prison cell, Gazans have staked their flag.

— Hamas contained by Tareq Baconi (Stanford studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and cultures)