Prison Israel-Palestine: literalities of criminalization and imaginative resistance

Abstract

This article offers a reflection on the Palestinian experience of imprisonment. It begins by addressing the settler logic of criminalization and goes on to identify how this criminalization extends to the systematic thwarting of resistance. In engaging with different kinds of prison writing and art, it further explores the relationship between the literality of imprisonment and the imagination as a question of collective consciousness.

Keywords:

• Palestinian prisoners
• torture
• collective consciousness
• criminalization
• doppelgänger politics

Notes

1. This article constitutes part of a wider study I am conducting on the gated community fractal of settler colonialism.

2. Arthur Nelsen’s Occupied Minds: A Journey Through the Israeli Psyche (2006) shows how a considerable diversity of Israeli positions are inhabited within the overall conservatism of Israeli society.

3. This is maintained by human rights organizations such as Addameer and Defense of Children International.

4. I explore this at greater length in “A Question of Faith in Humanity” (Rooney 2013).

5. For instance, in writing of Fritz Baer, Gabriel Piterberg states: “Baer’s indefatigable search for a German Romantic rendering of Jewish history is reminiscent of Herzl’s indefatigable literary search for the acceptance of the Jews by Prussian Junkers in Das neue Ghetto and Alteneuland” (2008, 138).

6. I agree with Tom Langley (2012) that Israeli politics have become more literal since the second Intifada, but whereas he sees this as a confirmation of Agamben’s theory of bare life as a state of exception, I would argue that Agamben’s diagnoses themselves partake of a performative literalization of concepts. Langley does, though, address ambivalences in Agamben’s position.

7. Just after writing this article, I discovered the illuminating anthropological research of Lena Meari (towards a forthcoming book), which shows that for some prisoners madness can actually be a way of ensuring psychological resistance to confession, maintaining sumud or collective resilience.

8. I would argue that the significance of this loyalty differs from the Zionist case because of the different structures of inclusion and exclusion.

9. In an interview with Lindsey Moore, Fadia Faqir states: “I interviewed Palestinian ex-prisoners who were released in an exchange in 1983. The interviews shocked me, opened my eyes to the injustice across the [R]iver [Jordan]. I went and researched Israeli prisons and started educating myself about the Palestinian issue” (Faqir 2011, 2).

10. See also Tone Andersen’s When the Boys Return (2012). I am grateful to Mai Masri for arranging the YMCA visit, and to our hosts.

11. I am grateful to the curators for a tour of the Abu Jihad Museum.

12. Interestingly, Hannan Hever writes: “Many critics emphasized repeatedly that the character of the ‘opsimist’ [sic], the Palestinian who survives under Israeli rule, is very similar to the character of the evasive Jew surviving through his wits in the gentile world – a character immortalized in the works of Mendele Mocher Sfarim and the stories of Sholom Aleikhem” (1996, n.p.).