[This compendia 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.]
The eight articles below – previously published by Jadaliyya – cover a wide range of matters related to Palestinian imprisonment. At the heart of each of these articles is an examination of lived experiences and the impact of prisoners on the Palestinian community at large. From hunger strikes to COVID-19 policies, extrajudicial execution to refusing a mother the right to bury her child, these pieces highlight both the means and severity of settler-colonial carceral policies.
Richard Falk and Noura Erakat, “Palestinian Hunger Strikers: Fighting Ingrained Duplicity,” 11 May 2012.
"The mass hunger strike threatens to demolish the formidable narratives of national security long propagated by Israeli authorities. In its most recent session, the United Nation’s Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination concluded that Israel`s policy of administrative detention is not justifiable as a security imperative, but instead represents the existence of two laws for two peoples in a single land. The Committee went on to state that such policies amount to arbitrary detention and contravene Article 3 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which prohibits "racial segregation and apartheid." Nevertheless, this apartheid policy has so far escaped the global condemnation it deserves. In general, Palestinian grievances are consistently evaded with the help of media bias that accords faint coverage to signs of resistance, including even this extraordinary non-violent movement mounted by Palestinian victims of institutionalized state abuse."
Lisa Hajjar, “The Angry Optimistic Life and Times of Lea Tsemel: A Review of Advocate,” 11 June 2019.
"Torture was not a figment of anyone’s imagination, except for the gullible or craven Israeli judges who, for decades, chose to believe lying security agents and government officials who denied that violent and coercive techniques were staples of the interrogation of “enemies of the state.” Tsemel saw the lies for what they were because so many of her clients were tortured and so much of her work turned on judgment-proof confessions that had been beaten or sleep-deprived out of them. She explains: “The confession is ‘the queen of evidence’ and they will do anything to get it. With a confession, be it true or false, his fate is sealed.” "
Noura Erakat and Bassam Haddad, “Politics in the Time of Corona: Punishment in Palestine,” Status/الوضع, 7 April 2020.
"This podcast takes you to several cities/countries affected by COVID-19 to discuss social, economic, and political challenges facing their societies, with emphasis on the most vulnerable groups and on what this pandemic reveals about the human condition (wow, big phrase). Based on personal and incisive conversations with various interlocutors on location, we hope both to learn from others and to provide some solace as we address how we are collectively experiencing and dealing with similar challenges."
Basil Farraj, “COVID-19 and Cycles of Israeli Torture behind Bars,” 27 Oct 2020.
"Torture has accompanied the Israeli carceral project since its inception with numerous reports and testimonies documenting the large-scale torture practiced against prisoners by the various Israeli armed and intelligence agencies. Palestinian and Arab prisoners have long been subjected to methods of torture ranging from various physical and psychological methods to what Walid Daka, one of the longest-serving Palestinian political prisoners, describes in a text written and smuggled from prison as a civilized and hidden mode of torture that turns prisoners’ “own senses and mind into tools of daily torture.” Daka argues that policies and measures put in place by the Israeli Prison Service including isolating imprisoned political leaders, segregating prisoners along geographic considerations, and punishing prisoners’ collective gestures constitute part of an invisible mode of torture directed at reshaping prisoners’ minds and spirits, and towards redefining the Palestinian political imprisonment experience. While this article deals particularly with torture committed in interrogation rooms and during pandemic times, Daka’s text is important for thinking through broader manifestations of Israeli torture and how it is to be contextualized in the present carceral moment."
Noura Erakat, “Quick Thoughts: Noura Erakat on the Extra-Judicial Execution of Ahmad Erakat,” 26 Feb 2021.
"It is noteworthy that the Israeli authorities have refused to conduct a proper investigation. They did not interview witnesses, did not conduct an autopsy of Ahmad’s body, did not investigate the car for mechanical malfunction, and did not review the available video tapes. Rather, they simply proclaimed that Ahmad was a “terrorist” engaged in an attack, and that has been the end of their story. Since then, the state has held onto Ahmad’s body and refused to release it to the family for a proper burial. It is being held along with the bodies of 72 other slain Palestinians as both a form of collective punishment and as bargaining chips for the return of two Israeli soldiers’ bodies currently held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip."
Aya Abo-Basha, “Salt and Water: An Ode to Ghadanfar Abu Atwan and Bassel Al-Araj,” 30 June 2021.
"When a prisoner declares a strike against administrative detention, they (re)assemble different collectives into being. Prisoner solidarity tents pop up across colonial divisions, where people set up rows of plastic chairs beneath a blue tarp. Whether in the tent at dwar al-Saʿa in the heart of Ramallah or in front of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) in Bireh, or in Nablus, or in Dheisheh Refugee camp near Bethlehem, each hunger strike usually provokes the mounting of a similar blue-tarp. No matter which tent I sat beneath during my fieldwork in 2016, they were similarly familiar: I would always find mothers, fathers, or siblings carrying a framed portrait—their incarcerated husband, daughter, or grandson—beneath their chins. On the one hand, the multi-sited prisoners’ tents made detainees’ waiting collective. On the other, waiting in the hunger tent created, through the hunger-striker’s body, a temporality that rejected the passive waiting of administrative detention."
Mouin Rabbani, “Gratuitous Cruelty: On Burial of Suha Jarrar,” 14 July 2021.
"What Khalida Jarrar has endured in recent years, and particularly this past week, is an instructive microcosm of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Palestinians, their leaders, and institutions either serve Israeli interests or have no value at all and are treated accordingly. At the slightest sign of opposition parliamentary immunity, the Palestinian Authority, rule of law, and similar concepts are instantaneously transformed into fiction. Israel acts as it does because it knows it can and is confident it will not be held to account by others."
Hedi Viterbo, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine, Jadaliyya’s New Texts Out Now (NEWTON), 2 Nov 2021.
"This book, while heavily critical of Israel’s conduct, also poses a radical challenge to these and other prevailing narratives. It lays bare how Israel neither simply erodes childhood nor disregards legal and human rights norms. Instead, Israeli authorities have pursued a more sophisticated course of action: deploying law, rights, and the category “childhood” in general—and increasingly embracing international child rights law in particular—to entrench, perfect, and launder Israel’s oppressive control regime. Law and rights have thus aided Israel in its efforts to subjugate Palestinian minds, bodies, and interactions; to confine Palestinians to a legally enshrined model of childhood that works to their detriment; to discipline older Palestinians through their young; to conceal and justify state violence; to portray abusive soldiers as children deserving of compassion; and to expand the Zionist settlement project while dispossessing Palestinians. Much of this, supposedly, has been done in the name of “the child’s best interests”. "