8 February 2023
"יש שני סוגים של מניאק. שני סוגים. יש מניאק שיודע שהוא מניאק, הוא יודע שהוא מניאק. ויש מניאק אחר. מניאק שיושב, ואוכל ומעלה גירה כמו חזיר, ורק הם שם למעלה יודעים שהוא המניאק שלהם. הוא לא יודע. הוא לא יודע."
מאחורי הסורגים, סרט 1984.
“In an opinion for a unanimous court, Justice Elena Kagan struck down the Fourth Circuit’s special circumstances exception – because it isn’t mentioned in the text of the law. In an attempt to temper the harshness of the judgement, however, she pointed out that the prisoner litigation act doesn’t require exhaustion of administrative remedies when those remedies are ”unavailable”. And she said it was at least conceivable that once the internal investigative process began, it would’ve been impossible for the ordinary administrative process to go forward.”
Noah Feldman, “Prisoners Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt”, Bloomberg, 6 June 2016.
“I think you need to be careful.”
Lawrence Summers, 92nd Street Y Interview, 3 February 2022.[1]
“This is the reason why I am preoccupied with a sense of the tragicomic.”
Cornel West, Hope on a Tightrope, 2008.
“The security situation increased the number of [Palestinian] administrative detainees to about 850”
Israeli HCJ 1892/14, Judgment, 29 December 2022, para.7.
“Indeed, the period during which the petitioner has been in administrative detention is prolonged, about one year and four months. However, we have been convinced that for now the petitioner should remain in detention.”
Israeli HCJ 8839/22, Judgment, 2 January 2023.
“Being an interrogator is 70 percent character, 30 percent learned. You have to know how to use intonation when you speak to a prisoner. You have to let him feel you are the boss, always.”
“Psychology and Sometime a Slap: The Man Who Made Prisoners Talk”, New York Times, 12 December 2004.
“Moreover, doctors in emergency rooms across Israel write false medical opinions in accordance with the demands of Shin Bet, and have done so for years.”
Ruchama Marton, Letter to the Editor, BMJ, 11 February 2020.
Exile, violence, colonization, and forced captivity are prolonged defining features of Palestinian existence. For decades the Israeli prison has generated a combination of these elements targeting the physical and mental integrity of the Palestinian political prisoner.
Palestinians’ experience in Israeli prisons is amply documented by them in Arabic literary form. A quest not only to capture history considering its arbitrary and voluntary manipulation by their captives, but also to rehabilitate psychologically and socially.[2] Israel’s panicked endeavor to secure political presence premised on justified legitimacy as a state generated mass and prolonged process of imprisoning various components of Palestinian society, including women and children. [3]
In the United States this phenomenon has been obscurely represented by an American Jewish person who decided to exercise his exulting identity in Palestine serving in the Israeli army as a prison guard. However, Jeffery Goldberg’s narration in his mystic book Prisoners reveals the inner psyche of many American Jews, rather than any other local fact. Indeed, together with Thomas Friedman he is the ultimate repugnant character of an American Jew.[4]
Israel’s entire experience with Palestinians is shaped by its military’s brutality and repudiation combined with the country’s population’s convenient, intrusive, greedy, and acquisitive denial. It is a daily practice by Israeli Jews informed by Israel’s exclusivist ideology, educational system, and the pseudo-intellectual study of its history and present in the State’s institutions of higher learning.[5]
There are more than 4,500 political Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention facilities, primarily from the 1967 occupied territories. From a Palestinian perspective the term political prisoner denotes sacrifice in the cause of liberation. A societal affirmation that their captivity and loss of freedom is not in vain. Israel’s legal, political, and cultural apparatus considers them enemies who have engaged in damaging activities.
Among the Palestinian political prisoners there are about 850 placed in administrative detention. Imprisonment with no charge, often for prolonged periods, where Israeli authorities allege potential risk from the individual without sharing the evidence with anyone except the accusing party. It is a one-sided procedure that starts with the Israeli military court and is routinely legitimized by the Israeli civilian courts, including its Superior instance. Indeed, in the Israeli case the distinction between military and civilian courts is artificial, while access to Supreme Court review lacks minimal features of a decent legal procedure given its sham character and no option to receive and challenge the purported evidence.
Palestinian political prisoners are interrogated by Israel’s notorious Shabak[6] and prosecuted through the country’s flawed military justice system. They are held in prisons and detention facilities inside Israel in violation of article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War (1949).
According to the latest data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the year 2019 witnessed 31,700 prosecuted persons, of which 28,200 were convicted (88.8%). The information indicated surveying persons and denoted the term residents. It is not clear if the statistics capture Israel proper (pre- 1967 occupation), that usually includes illegally annexed East Jerusalem as well, or it also relates to prosecutions of persons from the West Bank and Gaza. In any event, CBS’s data shows that convictions among Arabs (Palestinian citizens of Israel) was 94% compared to 87% among Jews and others. Common Israeli sociological wisdom is that much of the Jewish inmates are of Mizrahi origin. Further, the rate of conviction for security offences was 96.5%.[7] In the past few years CBS retracted from its traditional reporting about 99% general convictions rate in Israel.
Israel’s degrading approach to Palestinian political prisoners is long standing and amounts to torture, cruel, and inhumane treatment. The country’s legal system failed to prohibit or even constrain illegal interrogation methods under international law. Torture and other abhorrent interrogation techniques continued routinely[8] at times gaining the blunt support of the judiciary and at others enjoying its attempt for sophisticated understanding. Significant segments of the Israeli medical profession have collaborated with torturous policies and failed to challenge them.[9]These international crimes fall under the International Criminal Court’s mandate who has jurisdiction over Israel’s conduct in East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza.
1987 Landau Committee which investigated the Shabak’s behavior in the interrogation room was the first time the issue reached the Israeli public attention. The Committee legitimized aggressive interrogations calling them “moderate physical pressure” and granted retroactive necessity defense for the interrogators in a potential criminal proceeding, despite finding that they consistently lied before courts and internal investigative bodies. 1999 Supreme Court ruling barred four painful and degrading interrogation practices if they are not “required for the purposes of the interrogation”, implicitly presuming that Shabak’s interrogation could be justified given its nature while maintaining the retroactive necessity defense. The Court also admitted that the legal issue before it was easy, but “we are part of the State of Israel.”[10]
In 2018 the Supreme Court upheld a torturous interrogation by the Shabak against a Palestinian detainee held in administrative detention for a year during which he was barred from meeting an attorney for extended periods. After the administrative detention, the person was prosecuted and convicted based on his admission. He incurred insignificant sentence compared to the alleged risk he posed.[11]
Despite its demonstrated untrustworthiness throughout the years, the Israeli Shabak continues to gain justifying court rulings for its glaring illegal performance. Most recently the organization’s former legal adviser, who worked within the security agency for more than 25 years, wrote about the Shabak’s poor rule of law culture calling for an outside intervention to remedy its serious deficiencies.
Administrative detention is a code name for Israel’s arbitrary rule in the 1967 occupied territories and a symbol of its Apartheid nature in the entirety of historic Palestine.[12] More than 850 Palestinian detainees presently endure the sham procedure facing Israel’s most destructive brutality physically, mentally, and legally. In times of despair and defiance, political prisoners have resorted to externalized suffering by starving themselves almost to death to gain minimal attention or improve their severe detention conditions.[13]
Legal and societal acceptance of misjudging Palestinians is overwhelming in Israel. Consequences are rare to absent. Decent legal treatment might trigger awareness of the daily illegalities of Israel’s brutal occupation and remind Israeli Jews of their unstable legitimacy as a polity dating to the days before Ben – Gurion as first Prime Minister.
Moreover, the military and civilian legal systems function as a single unit regarding Palestinians detained administratively and follow similar procedure with regard to ‘fair trial rights’. Acting as an equity appellate instance, the Israeli Supreme Court consistently upholds administrative detention of Palestinians, even those that have been extended several times and could last for years. It does so after a private session with the Attorney General’s representative and the Shabak. No wonder that administrative detainees waged collective boycott against this legal system.[14] Here are 15 of the most recent Supreme Court’s administrative detention rulings, available on the Court’s website:
HCJ 8842/22, 17 January 2023.
HCJ 286/23, 17 January 2023.
HCJ 389/23, 16 January 2023.
HCJ 22/23, 9 January 2023.
HCJ 8839/22, 2 January 2023.
HCJ 8533/22, 22 December 2022.
HCJ 8529/22, 22 December 2022.
HCJ 8620/22, 30 December 2022.
HCJ 8531/22, 19 December 2022.
HCJ 7989/22, 14 December 2022.
HCJ 8367/22, 12 December 2022.
HCJ 7987/22, 5 December 2022.
HCJ 6898/22, 19 October 2022.
HCJ 5970/22, 29 September 2022.
The Banana, One of the Shabak's Interrogation Techniques
[1] For other troubling behaviors by Summers see Cornel West, “Why I Left Harvard University”, 47 Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, pp.64-68 (2005); Lawrence Lessig, “Epstein at Harvard: We’re Not Finished Yet”, The Harvard Crimson, 14 April 2021. Together with Martha Minow and Noah Feldman, Summers is a fierce defender of Israel’s image and reputation on American campuses regardless of his actual knowledge of the facts. The three can euphemistically be called the ‘Harvard School of Israel’. See, for example, Lawrence Summers, “Harvard, Israel, and Academic Freedom”, The Harvard Crimson, 3 February 2015. A similar character in the American political sphere is Hillary Clinton. Lacking any attempt for intellectual pretense despite assuming the role of representing the conforming intelligentsia and a version of American liberalism, Hillary Clinton has constantly adhered to Power Rangers’ creator and one of the owners of the largest Spanish speaking TV networks in the United States, Israeli-American Haim Saban. Saban is Clinton’s Sheldon/Miriam Adelson. In such a dichotomy of Israeli influence in American politics the impactful AIPAC and principally insignificant JStreet are irrelevant. See Connie Bruck, “The Influencer”, The New Yorker, 3 May 2010; Philip Rucker & Tom Hamburger, “Billionaires Adelson and Saban, at odds in campaigns, unite on Israel and hit Obama”, Washington Post, 9 November 2014; Itay Hod, “Hollywood Mogul Haim Saban Calls for ‘More Scrutiny’ of Muslims”, The Wrap, 18 November 2015; Gabriel Debendetti, “Team Clinton’s favorite billionaire”, Politico, 4 November 2016; Janice Williams, “Where is Hillary Clinton? Former Presidential Candidate Attends Dinner at Haim Saban’s in L.A.?” Newsweek, 12 May 2017. See also Matthew Yglesias, “Haim Saban”, The Atlantic, 10 June 2007; Gidi Weitz, “And Then Haim Saban Called: What Links Netanyahu’s Bribery Case and the U.S. Election”, Haaretz, 6 June 2020. It is another instance where Clinton has demonstrated that she is spinless and horrible politician.
[2] ايمان مصاروة، أدب السجون في فلسطين (2020)؛ محمود موسى محمود زياد، الأدب الفلسطيني في سجون الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، 1987 – 2000 (جامعة بير زيت، 2006).
[3] See Naseer Aruri, “Resistance and Repression: Political Prisoners in Israeli Occupied Territories”, 7(4) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.48-66 (1978); Amnon Kapeliouk, “The Closed World of Palestinian Prisoners”, in 10(1) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.155-157 (1980); Soraya Antonius, “Prisoners for Palestine: A List of Women Political Prisoners”, 9(3) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.29-80 (1980); Elias Sanbar, “The Status of the Palestinian Prisoner”, 4(4) Arab Studies Quarterly, pp.291-300 (1982); Lea Tsemel, “The Political Prisoners”, 7(2) Arab Studies Quarterly, pp.123-128; Raija – Leena Punamaki, “Experience of Torture, Means of Coping, and Level of Symptoms among Palestinian Political Prisoners”, 17(4) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.81-96 (1988); Barbara Harlow, “Prison Text, Resistance Culture”, MERIP (1990); Human Rights Watch, Torture and Ill Treatment: Israel’s Interrogation of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (1994); Catherine Cook et al, The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children (Pluto Press, 2004); Amahl Bishara et al, “Assume the position: a play about prison is followed by arrests”, Electronic Intifada, 28 May 2004 (Amahl’s penetrating analysis is matched only by her passion for speaking truth to power); Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Voice Therapy for Women Aligned with Political Prisoners: A Case Study of Trauma among Palestinian Women in the Second Intifada”, 79(2) Social Service Review (2005); Esmail Nashif, “Palestinian Political Prisoners: Identity and Community”, (Routledge, 2008); Rita Giacaman & Penny Johnson, “’Our Life is Prison’: The Triple Captivity of Wives and Mothers of Palestinian Political Prisoners”, 9(3) Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, pp.54-80 (2013); Human Rights Watch, Israel: End Abusive Detention Practices, 23 February 2013; Protecting the Rights of Palestinian Children Detained in Israel, The Lancet, 16 March 2013; Dani Filc et al, “Palestinian Prisoners’ Hunger-Strikes in Israeli Prisons: Beyond the Dual-Loyalty Dilemma in Medical Practice and Patient Care”, 7(3) Public Health Ethics, pp.229-238 (2014); “Interview with Marwan Barghouti: Life and Politics in Prison, National Unity, and Resistance”, 43(4) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.57-65 (2014); “Interview with Ahmad Saadat: Leading from Prison, Ending negotiations, and Rebuilding the Resistance”, 43(4) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.49-56 (2014); Nahla Abdo, Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System (Pluto Press, 2014); Ashjan Ashour, Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Laura Carlotta Cimmino, Military Child Dtention in the West Bank, Masters Thesis, University of Gothenberg, 2015; Thomas Hill, “From the Small Zinzana to the Bigger Zinzana”, 45(3) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.7-23 (2016); Samah Saleh, The Politics of Sumud: Former Palestinian Women prisoners’ Experience of Incarceration under Israeli Occupation, PhD Thesis, Goldsmith College - London, 2016; Lotte Buch Segal, No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Sahar Francis, “Gender Violence in Israeli Detention”, 46(4) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.46-61 (2017); Areen Ali Shekh, “Palestinians in the Israeli Prison System: Racism and Injustice”, Masters Theses, California State University (2018); Amnesty International, Palestinian Administrative Detainees Complete 100 Days of Boycotting Israeli Courts, 11 April 2022; OHCHR, UN Experts Condemn Israel’s ‘Sadistic’ Punitive Measures Against French – Palestinian Rights Defender Salah Hammouri, 19 October 2022.
[4] See David Klion, “Jeffery Goldberg Doesn’t Speak for the Jews”, Jewish Currents, 2 August 2018. See also Edward Shapiro, “World War II and American Jewish Identity”, 10(1) Modern Judaism, pp.65-84 (1990); Shaul Magid, “The Holocaust and Jewish Identity in America: Memory, the Unique, and the Universal”, 18(2) Jewish Social Studies, pp.100-135 (2012); Leonard Saxe & Matthew Boxer, “Loyalty and Love of Israel by Diasporan Jews”, 17(2) Israel Studies, pp.92-101 (2012); Steve Bayme, “American Jewry and the State of Israel: How Intense the Bonds of Peoplehood?”, 20(1/2) Jewish Political Science, pp.7-21 (2008); Gal Beckerman, “American Jews Face a Choice: Create Meaning or Fade Away”, New York Times, 12 November 2018; Richard Falk, “Israel and Jewish Identity”, 8(1/2) Dialectical Anthropology, pp.87-111 (1983). For New York Times’s reporting on Palestinian prisoners see: John Kifner, “Israel Says Arabs under Detention Now Number 3,000”, New York Times, 23 March 1988; Joel Brinkley et al, “Israel Releases a Major Palestinian from Detention in the West Bank”, New York Times, 30 January 1989; Stewart Ein, “Allegra Pacheco; Lawyer from L.I. Fights for Palestinians”, 22 March 1998; Diaa Hadid, “Israel Allows Hunger-Striking Prisoners to Be Force-Fed”, New York Times, 30 July 2015; Jodi Rudorin, “One Palestinian’s Refusal to Eat Puts Israel in a Bind”, New York Times, 18 August 2015; Raja Abdulrahim, “’Preparing to Die’: Palestinian Detainees Turn Hunger Into Weapon”, New York Times, 11 August 2022.
[5] Uri Ram is considered a critical sociologist and a historian of critical thought in Israel. In 2020 he published a book with Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism that was formed pursuant to David Ben Gurion Law – 1976. The Institute operates in accordance with a 1982 treaty with Ben-Gurion University. Ram claims the aspiration to narrate Israel’s sociological study in its entirety as already declared in the book’s title The Israeli Sociology: Intellectual History 1882 – 2018, which is a development of the author’s 1992 PhD at the New School in New York. Nevertheless, Ram fails to genuinely capture significant hurdles particularly regarding the critics: incomplete importation of critical thought; insignificant scope of research; substantial institutional and communal resistance; the banality of Benny Morris; and, consequently, lack of minimal demand and transformative political activity as these academics often hope to realize. Their only counterpart for an intellectual and political conversation in Israeli society seems to be moody, detached, image protecting, and intellectually bankrupt forces that describe themselves as ‘Zionist left’ or ‘Zionist liberals’. In between there are the obscure ‘post Zionists’ who audaciously reach the ‘post’ stage by apologetically justifying this intense ideological leap in Israel’s terms while celebrating Zionism’s realization of its objectives.
[6] Shabak is one of the terms denoting Israel’s Security Agency (ISA). Another term is Shin Bet.
[7] Available at:
[8] See Human Rights Watch, Israeli Interrogation Methods under Fire After Death of Detained Palestinian, March 1992; “Israel Defends Use of Force in Interrogation”, New York Times, 8 May 1997; “U.N. Panel Rules Uses of Torture”, New York Times, 10 May 1997; Elizabeth Olsen, “Israel Denies Groups’ Charge That it is Torturing Detainees”, New York Times, 21 November 2001; Chaim Levinson, “Torture of Palestinian Detainees by Shin Bet Investigators Rises Sharply”, Haaretz, 6 March 2015; Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Concluding Observations, 3 June 2016; Chaim Levinson, “Torture, Israeli-style- as Described by the Interrogators themselves”, Haaretz, 24 January 2017. See also Barak Cohen, “Democracy and the Mis-Rule of Law: The Israeli Legal System’s Failure to Prevent Torture in the Occupied Territories”, 12(1) Ind. Int. & Comp. L. Rev., pp.75-105 (2001).
[9] See Amnesty International, Under Constant Medical Supervision: Torture and Ill-Treatment and the Health of Professionals in Israel and the Occupied Territories, 13 August 1996; “Israeli doctors complicit in torture: rights group”, Reuters, 26 June 2008; John Yudkin, “The Israeli Medical Association and doctors’ complicity in torture”, BMJ, 7 October 2009; Harriet Sherwood, “Israeli doctors ‘failing to report torture of Palestinian detainees’”, The Guardian, 3 November 2011; Ruchama Marton, From the Personal to the Political: The Involvement of Physicians in Israel in the Torture and Ill-Treatment of Detainees, Presentation at Center for Middles East Studies, Brown University, 13 March 2012; Sharmila Devi, “Israeli doctors accused of collusion in torture”, The Lancet, 9 March 2013; Derek Summerfield, “The longstanding complicity of the Israeli Medical Association with torture in Israel”, Mondoweiss, 9 September 2021.
[10] HCJ 5100/94, Judgement, 6 September 1999, paras.37-40. Chief Justice Barak wrote the judgment to which all other eight judges agreed. Before this judgment, the overwhelming approach in the Supreme Court to torturing Palestinian detainees had been consistently very conservative. Barak’s legal acrobatics are noteworthy even if detestable. To confirm this reading of Barak’s ruling and the Supreme Court’s judgement, see another torture related one almost 20 years later: HCJ 9018/17, Judgement, 26 November 2018, para.41. This reading extends also to problematic interrogation applied by the Shabak against non-Palestinian detainees. See AHCJ 6970/22, Judgement, 7 February 2023, para.2.
[11] HCJ 9018/17, Judgement, 26 November 2018.
[12] Any decent, informed, and outspoken person who has witnessed or confronted the Israeli state is ought to recognized that it represents the contrary of its image, particularly in the United States and Britain, regardless of the level of familiarity with its history. For an apologetic articulation of Israel’s resemblance to Apartheid South Africa, from a British cautious approach, see Chris McGreal, “Worlds Apart”, The Guardian, 6 February 2006; Chris McGreal, “Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria”, The Guardian, 7 February 2006. While in the United States the dominance of Israel’s American Jewish supporters is well established, in Britain it is suffice to recall the political treatment of Ken Livingston, Jeremy Corbyn, and Ken Loach that forms a burdening umbrella over Israel’s analysis. See also Amir Oren, “The Secrets Behind Israel’s Strategic Alliance with Apartheid South Africa”, Haaretz, 11 December 2013. While the struggle against Apartheid South Africa benefited from the spirit of opposition nurtured by African Americans for generations, only recently has Palestinians’ capabilities emerged in the United States, compensating for wealth and numbers possessed by Israel’s advocates with nothing but pure talent.
[13] See Ashjan Ashour, Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Norma Hashim & Yousef Al-Jamal, A Shared Struggle – Stories of Palestinian & Irish Republican Hunger Strikers (An Fhuiseog, 2021); “Strike of Arab Prisoners in Israel”, 7(1) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.169-171 (1977); Amnesty International, Palestinian hunger strikers detained in Israel must be treated humanely, 9 August 2012; Nidal Al-Mughrabi, “Palestinians escalate hunger strike in Israel jails”, Reuters, 11 May 2012; Noah Browning, “Two Palestinians end hunger strike that fueled protest”, Reuters, 27 February 2013; Zena Al-Tahhan, “A Timeline of Palestinian mass hunger strikes in Israel”, Al-Jazeera, 28 May 2017; UN expert calls for Israel to end practice of administrative detention and immediately release Maher Al-Akhras, 23 October 2020; Raja Abdulrahim, “’Preparing to Die’: Palestinian Detainees Turn Hunger to Into Weapon”, New York Times, 11 August 2022; Aljazeera Staff, “Thirty Palestinian prisoners held in Israel launch hunger strike”, Al-Jazeera, 25 September 2022. For a traditional bizarre analysis of this phenomenon see Grant Rumley, “The Goal of the Latest Palestinian Hunger Strike”, Foreign Affairs, 24 April 2017.
[14] Amnesty International, Palestinian administrative detainees complete 100 days of boycotting Israeli courts, 11 April 2022.
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