Geography in Ominous Intersection with Interrogation and Torture: reflections on detention in Israel

Abstract

This paper describes and reflects on the author's detention as a prominent Palestinian geographer in an Israeli prison for 23 days by the Israeli Security Police (Shin Bet) in July 2006, and the nightmare of abuse, debasement and physical coercion, amounting to torture, he was subjected to during this ordeal. The author argues that the detention was political, punishment for the way he has ‘done the geography of Palestine’ and has documented Israeli erasure of the Palestinians from the land. It was centred on extracting imagined ‘usable’ information from him about his contacts, especially in the field of geography in the Middle East. The paper develops a geographic analysis of the micro-space of detention, and places reflections in a framework that looks at the use of torture as a means to extract ‘intelligence’, at the current mounting intimidation of academics in the wake of 9/11, and at McCarthyism redux and the ‘“disciplining” of the disciplines’. It also looks at recent material describing analogous practices by the US army in interrogating detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The paper provides rich empirical first-hand documentation in the form of a thick description of abuse practices suffered by the author inside an Israel prison near Haifa (known as Al Jalama), such as sleep deprivation, environmental manipulation and mortification of the body by handcuffing, chaining and other practices.

Notes

1 This ‘mediated’ aspect of manipulation, which relieves the interrogator of any feeling that he is causing the coercion of the detainee, was specifically emphasised by Tony Lagouranis in radio interview with Owen Bennett-Jones, bbc World Service, ‘The Interview’, 8 July 2007, where he noted that, when employing so-called ‘enhancements’, ‘in a way, it was not so stressful for the interrogator’, because ‘you're simply using the environment to cause these things. I never actually lay my hand on the detainee to cause him pain.’

2 In addition to these types of torture, which are directly inflicted on the body, El-Sarraj's survey includes the following items: external cold 92.9%; external heat 76.7%; deprivation of food 77.4%; solitary confinement 86.0%; intense noise 81.6%; verbal humiliation 94.8%; threat against personal safety 90.0%; forced witnessing of torture of others 70.2%; irritant gas 13.4%; and electric shock 5.9%.

3 Where the following symbol appears ▪▪▪ information has been redacted due to its sensitive nature.