Wealth & Money Quote by Hassan Nasrallah

“Cities are like prisons” is a deliberately blunt image, engineered to make the everyday mechanics of occupation feel visceral rather than abstract. Nasrallah isn’t describing urban planning; he’s describing a system of control that can switch off normal life at will. The phrase “closed quickly” does a lot of political work: it frames Israeli power as instant, frictionless, and total, while casting Palestinian movement and commerce as contingent permissions that can be revoked. In a single stroke, he turns checkpoints, closures, and curfews into a moral metaphor: incarceration.

The real target, though, is not only Israel. “This is the result of Oslo” is an accusation aimed at the Palestinian leadership and the broader promise of the 1990s peace process. Oslo sold itself as a transitional pathway to sovereignty; Nasrallah recodes it as a managerial upgrade of domination, where Palestinian self-rule becomes administrative cover for a landscape still governed by external force. The subtext is that negotiations didn’t fail accidentally; they were structurally designed to produce containment, not liberation.

Calling West Bank cities “prisons” also positions resistance as the only plausible antidote. If the conflict is framed as a carceral regime rather than a border dispute, compromise starts to look like collaboration and militancy starts to look like self-defense. As a revolutionary figure, Nasrallah is using Oslo’s widely recognized disappointments - fragmented territory, mobility restrictions, periodic lockdowns - to argue that incrementalism is a trap: a peace process that normalizes emergency powers until “everything stops” feels like the point, not the breakdown.