[This article is part of a bundle of content produced by Jadaliyya’s Palestine Page Editors on Palestinian Prisoners. This bundle engages a range of subjects centering the Palestinian prisoner in the realm of carcerality and colonialism, as well as resistance to them. Click here for a full list of articles and compendia included in this bundle.]
A sense of Deja vu rushed through me the moment I walked into the Palestinian Authority’s now infamous “Mabahith” questioning room[1]. It is 2AM. I am being escorted into my third and final round of interrogations for the night.
The dusty and icey-white neon lights were struggling to stay on. All the desks were drowning under a wilderness of files and boxes. A sly-looking, overly-confident, clean-shaven, thirty-something year old man grinned at me, and gestured that I should sit down across the desk from him.
Dark bags under his eyes signaled exhaustion, but he seemed genuinely excited to see me. His desk was on the right side of the room I walked into, with only one small window behind him.
The lights, room decor, and even the attitude of the interrogator were almost a replica of when Israeli soldiers had interrogated me ten years earlier. I had been detained for coordinating the Palestinian Freedom Rides. Only three things were different in the PA’s room -- the portrait of Mahmoud Abbas looking down at us, a confiscated stencil that read: Qawim Fayadak Al-Isar -- “Resist, for your hands are a hurricane”, and that the interrogator was Palestinian.
Let me begin by saying that it pains me to make this comparison between the occupier and occupied. At the end of the day, the Palestinian interrogator is my people, my “tribe” - so to say. We speak the same language, enjoy the same music, and smoke shisha at the same cafes in Ramallah. He is the son of political prisoners, and has suffered under Israel’s Apartheid regime no less than I have.
That is why this comparative analysis is not an attempt to score political points against the PA, but to analyze how seven decades of Israeli settler-colonialism have infected the mechanisms through which Palestinian self-government now function. The similarities between the carceral experience within PA and Israeli prisons is simply an apt case study through which to examine this political infection.
Yet comparing two systems of incarceration is not a simple task because the carceral state is everywhere. Today, every nation on earth “has institutions of confinement like jails”, and “each adopt a wide range of policies, practices, and institutions that scrutinize individuals and communities both before and after their contact with the criminal justice system”.
The carceral state is a globalized phenomenon. Israel’s security forces train the American police, and American security forces train the PA’s forces. The PA security forces coordinate with Israeli forces on who to arrest. The United States is the core financial backer for both parties, with the ability to evaluate these decisions and optimize them to serve its interests.
It was Tony Blair, the UK’s former Prime Minister, with American and European Union financial support, who helped oversee and streamline the expansion of the Palestinian Authority’s incarceration centers post the second intifada. Israel’s privatization of certain aspects of its prison system adopted the lessons learned from the US and UK. G4S, a British security company, offered Israel key prison technologies.
In short, carceral systems across the world have become a web of networks that are self-replicating.
Consequently, it would be frivolous to compare the mundane aspects of these carceral systems, like the size of cells, or the type of food, or the amounts of visits allowed. These differences do not transformationally change the spirit or the aim of this experience. Any differences on the material front more often than not only reflects the schism between the financial resources available to each side. The Israeli government, when compared to the PA, has millions of dollars more to spend on expansive incarceration infrastructure.
Instead of material differences, what is being compared in this article is the social psychology of incarceration used by Israel’s settler-colonial regime, and just how much the Palestinian Authority has embraced that regime’s modus operandi. The thesis is that we are dealing with a unified ecology of oppression, where the PA’s systems of incarceration are merely the products of the womb of Israel’s massive carceral system.
The core aim for incarceration in most societies is social control. But social control to what ends? That differs from one society to another, some societies mainly seek to protect private property and social stability. Other societies seek to maintain racial supremacy, while some pursue social control to maintain authoritarian rule. Of course, the lines distinguishing between the above aims can blur together, and often do.
In the Holy Land, however, the core aim of social control is clear: to protect and strengthen the unequal status quo required to sustain Israeli settler-colonialism and its domination over the Palestinian people. The secondary aim is the endurance of the PA’s authoritarianism in service of the continuation of settler colonialism. Within this context, however, the PA has additional, separate, independent interests that are to Israel irrelevant, and as long as they don't contradict Israeli policy it has a free hand to pursue them[2].
Over the last decade, I have been arrested and/or detained 8 times by both the PA and Israel. I have also spent considerable time conducting trainings on how to maintain resilience in prison for activists and children, as well as listening to and engaging with political prisoners to understand their experiences.
The analysis below is an amalgamation of my observations.
My core thesis is that service to the settler colonial project engenders three core characteristics within the Israeli and Palestinian carceral system that are different and distinguishable from other prison industries across the world. These characteristics are: Existential angst, teaching helplessness, and a culture of societal betrayal.
Below I’ll share glimpses of my experiences to help explain each characteristic.
Existential Angst
In 2012, Israeli soldiers pepper sprayed me, pushed me to the ground, banged my head on their military humvee, and then arrested me. I was at a march in Hebron. Two kids were arrested with me, both teenagers. As we arrived at the police station, a soldier hit me in the gut with the butt of his rifle, as the kids watched. Moments later, one of the kids had a pistol pointed at his face, and was told to admit to me being their “leader” and ordering them to throw stones at the army.
A few months later, PA security forces dragged me through the streets of Ramallah for participating in a protest against the PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, who was meeting with an Israeli war criminal. When we got to the station, a fellow protester was thrown head first onto the ground. As the police officers beat him, we were told to admit we had aimed to create “public chaos” if we wanted to put an end to our colleague’s suffering.
In all the detentions I have faced by the PA and Israel, the first central step is always using different forms of exaggerated violence and surveillance. These tactics include violent yelling, being dragged on the ground, humiliation, being tied up and seated in uncomfortable positions, being surrounded by a dozen or so muscular men with big guns aimed at your body, knees on the neck, punches to the gut, and being held in rooms with many cameras. All steps designed to remind us, the detained, that we must now accept that we are docile bodies, as Foucault put it.
These aspects of arrests are not novel. Nor is the second phase, which consists of interrogations focused on “the crime committed”. The quick aim in these initial interrogations is to assess the detainee and hopefully force them to criminalize themselves. Lying, beatings, and threats are allowed. Anyone watching CSI or a movie with an FBI interrogation knows what these tactics look like. They’re also not unique to the Israeli regime and Palestine.
But the third phase of interrogations is pretty unique. In every interrogation I have been through, and colleagues of mine have suffered through, there is always a third phase of questioning.
“You think you can defeat Israel with these protests?” blurted an Israeli intelligence officer. I was being held in an Israeli detention center near Hebron. My crime was being at a march to open Shuhada street. “All Pharaohs are defeated, ask Moses” I responded with amateurish zest, while gasping and unable to open my eyes from the pepper spray. “We are not Pharoah. But tell me, how do you plan to defeat us? What’s next?” said the interrogator with a serious but curious voice. “Do you plan to spark a third intifada?”
A few years later, in a similar tone, the PA’s intelligence officer spoke with a firm voice, but sounded confused: “You are in the “youth movement”. It has thousands of followers. Your goal is to lead a coup against Abbas and the PA. I know who you all are…but why are you in a rush? Abbas will be gone soon, nobody likes him anyways”. I was tired, detained from a protest in Ramallah, and had been in detention for about 6 hours. With more experience, and a bit of jadedness, this time I had decided to remain silent. He smiled: “Israel, the Arab regimes, the traitors. I spent my life resisting the occupation. We are a weak society. How do you plan to change that? What’s next? You want a revolution?”
“What is next?”
Whether on the Israeli side or the Palestinian side of the carceral system, those running it are always searching for what is to come, expecting that one day something will bring an end to their control.
That is their job - of course. To do what’s possible to protect the status quo. Yet over the years, I have noticed that this line of questioning is also underlied by a bulging sense of existential anxiety.
Existential angst is commonly defined as “a general sense of anguish or despair associated with an individual’s recognition of the inevitability of death”. Palestinians willing to challege the status quo trigger this sense of despair for those upholding the settler-colonial regime, in that the Palestinians they “catch” in an act of revolt becomes a potent reminder that their control and power could be fleeting.
In interviews I conducted over the last 5 years with other political prisoners held by both the PA and Israel, it became evident that the more a Palestinian political prisoner presses this point, the more violent the interrogators become.
Sartre's theory of existentialism emphasizes that it is only by existing and acting in a certain way that we give meaning to our lives. Those running the Israeli and Palestinian carceral systems give meaning to their lives, whether concsiously or not, through maintaining this system of control and supremacy. One PA security official who was running a detention center told me: “We are trained to believe we are here to protect society from an impending threat. Only those of us who become dogmatically convinced of this threat, or can act like they are, are promoted. Either way, we have to believe that it is either you or us.” Of course, the PA’s rulers also use this system to achieve personal ends and vendetta’s outside of the context of settler-colonialism, based on personal interests.
Yet for both the PA and Israeli carceral systems, the same thing that gives them meaning - the subjugation of the “dissident” Palestinians, is also the constant reminder that, at some point, this system could end. It is a delicate paradox that creates a spiral of anxiety.
Consequently, the carceral experience for Palestinians, whether held within Israeli or Palestinian prisons, revolves around their captors using all forms of tactics to anxiously figure out “What’s Next?”
Both sides have developed a broad range of tactics to do just that. For example, “Asafeer”, or song-birds -- are fake prisoners and informants trained to make detainees share their deepest secrets by acting like friends. Intelligence officials often seek to befriend prisoners, even those already sentenced, as a means to figure out their plans. Different forms of torture and blackmail are used.
In this context of an overflowing existential angst, the carceral state mechanisms in both Israel and Palestine have become centered on penalizing acts of freedom, and figuring out how to preemptively strike against them in the future. Justice, reform, punishment, discipline -- they are all periphery goals when compared to the core objective of neutralizing the existential threat that, for this system and its upholders, is a constant source of dread.
Over years of subjugation, the Israeli carceral system has found that the most effective act of pre-emption against the pursuit of freedom is an education in helplessness. In this context, the PA has become its trusted teaching assistant.
An Education in Helplessness
Learned helplessness is “an apathetic attitude stemming from the conviction that one’s actions do not have the power to affect one’s situation.” A senate report identified how the CIA, in cooperation with a number of psychologists, had sought to utilize learned helplessness as an interrogation tactic.
The forced inculcation of learned helplessness onto another person requires ensuring that the individual in question continuously faces negative, and uncontrollable events. These individuals must continue to be defeated and face uncertainty, until they lose hope in the idea that anything they do can make a difference.
If the effective pursuit of freedom is the existential threat facing Israel and the PA, then the most powerful antidote to that pursuit is instituting learned helplessness. As a result, the Israeli carceral process is sophisticatedly designed to teach Palestinians helplessness. Palestinians are systematically arrested, often randomly, at young ages. The lessons in learned helplessness start from the moment of arrest, where one is blindfolded, handcuffed, informed to follow orders, and figuratively and literally thrown into the dark.
In one of my arrests, after a round of interrogations, those arrested with me were dropped off at Ofer Prison near Ramallah. Seeing those with me being pulled out of the Humvee, I began to prepare to go down with them. A soldier pointed his M16 at my chest. “Not you!” he yelled.
An hour-long drive ensued. Blindfolded, it was unclear where I was being sent. We arrived at a settlement outpost near Hebron. For the next two days, I would find myself in a dirty neon lit cell, where the lights stayed on until my sense of time disappeared. It dawned on me that this was solitary confinement, apart for a few hours where another prisoner was thrown into the cell with me. My fellow prisoner was volatile, thrashing across the cell. He then tried to ask me personal questions, to which I did not respond, explaining to him it was better we did not share such details here. The goal of this experience was to break any sense of control I had over my surroundings.
In developing a training program for children that would help prepare them for Israel’s arbitrary arrests, we analyzed the experiences former child prisoners faced. We found a systematic approach of interrogation that included night raids, random violence, and intense interrogation tactics meant to break them down until they felt totally helpless.
For more seasoned Palestinian activists, months of preparation are invested in planning their arrests and interrogation. Israeli forces are now aware that activists have a certain checklist of expectations of what their arrest will look like, and hence ensure that they create elements of shock and awe that reinforce a sense of lack of control.
The Palestinian Preventative forces follow similar tactics in their arrests of Palestinian activists. In the Jericho prison, detainees are usually tied down for long hours, and randomly beaten and insulted for days on end until they agree to humiliate themselves at the guards’ wishes. This follows very closely the CIA tactics referenced above.
During my most recent arrest by the PA, I was pulled out of the prison to meet with the warden. I was on hunger strike, along with other political detainees. The warden informed me he had been a political prisoner in the 80s, and had also been on hunger strike. “Son, I know what hunger strikes are, and I know how they can be defeated. Now you feel a sense of control, a sense of power. But I am the one in control, and I know that if I create enough confusion and uncertainty for you and your colleagues, eventually you will lose control - and remember who really has the power here. That is what the Israelis did to break us, and we were much more hardened than you lot…”
Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, the occupation’s tactics of control have seeped into the psyche of Palestinian security officials.
Across the world, after being indicted, most prisoners are forced into a disciplinary routine. Studies have shown that under such uncontrollable circumstances some prisoners eventually develop a sense of learned helplessness within a few years. But this can differ based on a number of factors, such as the prisoners mental health and whether the carceral system has a prisoner reform program. Yet for the PA and Israel, learned helplessness is not a byproduct but a goal of the process.
Palestinian political prisoners have in the past managed to collectively resist Israel’s tactics. Prisoners have imposed their dignity and rights through sacrifice and disobedience, using tools such as hunger strikes. Yet over the last two decades, a malaise has crept into the mindsets of most political prisoners. Acts of disobedience are now most often individual, not collective. How much of this is due to Israel’s policies of imposing learned helpless, and how much is due to the decay of the Palestinian political movement, is hard to ascertain without proper academic research. What we cannot doubt, however, is that teaching helplessness has played a role.
Inculcating learned helplessness, however, is not the only place where the Israeli and PA carceral processes are interlinked. The final similarity is the construction of betrayal.
Building the Culture of Structural Betrayal
The only thing more useful to the settler colonial enterprise than a helpless community, is a community that agrees to betray itself to serve its oppressors. In personal relationships, the act of betrayal occurs when “partners violate their deeper values to gain a temporary sense of empowerment. The way that potential partners empower themselves when feeling vulnerable is the most telling way to assess the probability of betrayal.”
Both the Israeli government and the PA realize that the vulnerability and sense of powerlessness created by learned helplessness creates a thirst for empowerment and meaning, a thirst that they can manipulatively quench.
In this context, the reader’s mind will jump to outright treason - for example a prisoner sharing details about their accomplice, or becoming an informant. This form of betrayal is certainly present within Israel and the PA’s carceral pursuits, and tactics such as blackmail and financial incentives are used to recruit.
Yet this direct treason is relatively rare and hard to force. This direct treason is not the aspect of betrayal I am alluding to here. My reference is to a culture of structural betrayal that is more intricate, indirect and subversive. It is a strategy that seeks to slowly push incarcerated Palestinians to violate their deeper values, to collaborate with their oppressors, but without being fully aware that they are doing so.
This is best explained in an example. In one documented story, two teeanagers were arrested for participating in protests. Unable to break them, the Israeli interrogators decided to take each one of them on a ride, separately. The first young man, let’s call him Sami, was taken to the top of a hill overlooking where the protest happened. The second young man, let’s call him Shadi, was taken to the location of the protest. The interrogators began asking Shadi simple questions -- such as: “Where is your village? What direction did we come from?”. Feeling that the questions were innocuous, Shadi started pointing in different directions. Unbeknownst to him, his friend Sami was watching but couldn’t hear what Shadi was being asked.
It looked as if Shadi had betrayed his trust, pointing out where they came to the protest from and where they clashed with the soldiers. Heartbroken and frustrated to “see” his friend turn on him, and egged on by the soldiers to speak up or else he’d get a double sentence, Sami tearfully spilled his guts out.
Later, the soldiers had recorded Sami confessing, and played the recording to Shadi.
Feeling betrayed at such a young age by their close friends, and then feeling ashamed, under such stressful circumstances, creates a deep vulnerability. The narrative that was then pushed to these youth via the “asafeer”, informants acting as fellow prisoners, is that of a broken Palestinian society where even one’s best friends cannot be trusted.
In too many contexts, this carceral tactic of seditious betrayal begins to create a narrative of harsh self-criticism and pessimism in any possibility of achieving change. Some political prisoners manipulated in this way, are then released into a Palestinian society where the most corrupt leaders have the most power and money, while they are relegated to marginal roles, despite their sacrifices. The shock leads them to become unaware amplifiers of this narrative, or silent observers who cocoon themselves in family life and avoid further political engagement.
Tragically, this self-defeating narrative undermines and thus betrays the value of pursuing freedom, the value of sacrifice, and the value of collective trust.
Within the PA’s security forces, the culture of structural betrayal and defeatism is also ingrained, but through different means.
Dragged into an interrogation by Palestinian Intelliegence forces, I was interrogated about a project to collect war crime evidence hold Israeli generals accountable via the International Criminal Court. I told the interrogator it was shameful that he was questioning me on this topic instead of assisting me in taking war criminals to trial, and that he should assess his loyalty or the loyalties of whoever commanded my detention. “Why are you even doing this work?”, I demanded.
He responded with a high sharp tone by telling me that he joined the Palestinian General Intelligence Forces after his brother was murdered by the Israeli army, and the informant who handed his brother in was never caught. He explained how that was his calling and duty. I asked him how interrogating me and other activists continuing the same struggle his brother sacrificed for even made sense to him.
He sat there silently for a moment, and then yelled: “I am the one asking the questions here, not you!” It may have been my attempt to read hope into that moment, but it felt like a veil had lifted.
That experience also opened my eyes to the founding illusion of the PA’s Security Forces. Its core cadre, its base, consists of young men who enter truly believing they are serving their people’s cause.
Slowly, however, they are enmeshed into a system of settler colonial collaboration that is multi-layered, nuanced and complex, and of which they only see their small bureaucratic corner where they are framed as heroes. A contradiction occurs where, in order to live their lives and keep their daily wages, they convince themselves that they are serving the cause they entered believing in.
The contradictions between what they are doing and what their values are become blurred, or even justified. The internal corruption, but also comradery and loyalty, fuse to create the subversive culture of structural betrayal where they engage in acts counter to the values of the pursuit of freedom, but convince themselves it is ok to do so because society as a whole is broken and corrupt.
As these PA security members then imprison, beat, and detain their own people, they look for every possible form of confirmation bias to convince themselves that their own people are the enemy. If they see a young woman at the protest not dressed with a hijab, they convince themselves it is because she is a foreign agent. If they see Palestinians from the Negev or Haifa, it is because this is an Israeli conspiracy.
They grasp at any straw they can, and in so doing further destroy the fabric of Palestinian society only to serve the settler colonial carceral project.
Tragically, the cycle of existential angst, teaching helplessness, and enforcing structural betrayal does not stay within the dark walls of the prison complex. A multi-layered carceral archipelago subsumes Palestinian existence.
The Russian-Doll Carceral System
“The concept of carcerality captures the many ways in which the carceral state shapes and organizes society and culture through policies and logic of control, surveillance, criminalization, and un-freedom…. {These are} "punitive orientations" that revolve around the "promise and threat of criminalization" and the "possibility/solution of incarceration."
As one analyzes the policies of control, surveillance, criminalization and unfreedom adopted with Israeli and PA prisons, it becomes evident that they are simply a more extreme and miniaturized form of the carcerality instituted by the Israeli state against all Palestinians within the 1948 borders, creating an overbearing promise and threat of criminalization.
It is as if Palestinians live within a Russian-Doll Carceral system. This is a layered system of five “Carceral Dolls”, stacked inside each other.
The largest Carceral “Doll”, so to speak, is Israel’s overarching system of domination, spanning its drones, checkpoints, apartheid walls, settlement expansion, discriminatory polices and a wide range of other human rights violations. This system of domination is driven by the same settler-colonial purpose and faces the same existential dread faced by a prison warden or interrogator facing a Palestinian freedom fighter. This existential dread explains the unending Israeli government demand for recognition of its “Existence” from Palestinians -- as if its ability to dominate them in every single aspect of life (and death), was not enough proof it existed.
The “Carceral Doll” within Israel’s overarching system of domination is the PA’s systems of control. These include the PA’s security forces’ tactics of shutting down democratic processes, banning freedom of expression, and forcing a discourse of submission. The PA also conducts mass surveillance of Palestinians under its control. Most importantly, however, the PA is the central driving engine of the discourse of “Learned Helplessness” within Palestinian society. The PA’s language, and particularly the narrative pushed by President Abbas, is one of victimhood and weakness that relies on American good will and foreign aid, but never ever empowers Palestinian agency.
Those who challenge the PA’s overarching system of injustice, or who pursue acts of agency to challenge the occupation, are placed into the fourth “Carceral Doll”, the PA’s prisons.
While those who challenge Israel’s overarching system of injustice are placed into the fifth, and most highly surveilled “Carceral Doll” -- Israel’s prison-surveillance complex.
In short, whenever Palestinians seek to liberate themselves from a carceral system, they are placed into a more stringent one as punishment, and the efforts to enforce helplessness and/or betrayal onto them intensify.
At the heart of it, however, it is all one unified mechanism of control designed to squash the pursuit of freedom.
As carceral regimes become more advanced, and with Israel being a technological leader in this space, Palestinian society faces a formidable challenge. How do we break out of this Russian-Doll Carceral system?
[1] Mabahith means “detectives” in Arabic, and the Detective Unit’s office in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh is where a number of police interrogations are conducted. These interrogations turn violent in certain cases.
[2] These interests include maintaining corrupt cronyism, where certain individuals’ economic and political interests reign supreme. In this context, oftentimes the PA’s rulers pursue policies aimed at self-preservation based on their independent assessment, outside the context of the system’s collaboration with Israel’s security apparatus. The independent goals of the PA outside the context of Israel’s settler-colonialism deserve a more in depth analysis that this piece will not delve into.