Incarceration

In early 1988, mass incarceration of Palestinians seemed to provide a more encompassing solution to Israel's ghetto control problems. If Palestinians were blocking the roads, why not simply put them in prison? Extensive incarceration had the dual attraction of removing protestors from circulation while also fitting nicely into a policing paradigm. What could be more police-like than putting criminals behind bars? If the military was eager to bolster its law-and-order image, incarceration seemed enormously worthwhile. Imprisonment was also a useful alternative to deadly force, helping Israeli officials project a calm, legalistic, and police-like aura. The ghetto setting, in other words, generated symbolic incentives for mass incarceration.

Before the Intifada, the number of Palestinians detained by Israel hovered at around 5,000 on any given day. That number more than doubled in the first year of the uprising, however, and by 1989, some 14,000

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Palestinians were full-time prisoners, plus several hundreds held in temporary holding facilities. The army built five new prisons and recruited thousands of troops to serve as guards, creating a large new prison bureaucracy. By 1989, Israel was imprisoning some 1,000 persons out of every 100,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, making the region the most heavily imprisoned society in the world (among countries assembling such data).^[35] By way of comparison, Israel proper had only 110 prisoners per 100,000 in 1989, the United States had 426, Northern Ireland had 120, and South Africa had 240, while the Western European average was below 100.^[36] At the height of the 1950s Gulag era, the Soviet Union had 1,423 prisoners per 100,000.^[37] The Palestinian experience, in other words, was closer in per capita terms to the Gulag than to apartheid South Africa.

Incarceration began with an arrest by Israeli soldiers, who were authorized to detain Palestinians on the slimmest of grounds. Sometimes, male Palestinians were arrested without being suspected of a concrete, specific offense. On other occasions, they were arrested on suspicion of throwing stones, building roadblocks, or displaying Palestinian flags. After detention, prisoners were taken to holding facilities in regional command posts scattered throughout Palestine, and these were crowded, dirty, and unpleasant. Former detainees and at least one soldier recalled that the holding pens often stank of unwashed bodies, defecation, and urine, since multiple prisoners used an open bucket in tightly enclosed spaces. The stench was often so strong that detainees felt they were suffocating.^[38] Miriam, an administrative officer responsible in 1988 for tracking West Bank Palestinian detainees, acknowledged that conditions could be difficult, since "we didn't always have a suitable place to keep them [the prisoners] before bringing them to central prisons."^[39] The army resorted to using metal storage containers, which in summertime became highly efficient conductors of heat. After one or two weeks in the pens, detainees were screened by investigators; some were sent to more intensive Shabak interrogation, while the rest were taken for quicker questioning sessions with police or military interrogators, sent to batch trials for conviction, or released.

During the first year of the Intifada, prison guards often abused detainees. Itai, a reservist who spent a month guarding prisoners in Gaza City, recalled that

their way of behavior, the soldiers there [in the prison], it was barbaric. You could see it in the way everyone who would go through the place would give people blows, a blow here, a blow there. The group who was supposed to take the guys to the court in Gaza were issued with truncheons. On the

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way to the court, they would try their truncheons out on someone and it was … it was something really terrible.

Every night, they would bring in new people … like trash in trash carts. They would pile them up inside the trucks, throw them … on the road, lift them up in a line—they are tied, of course—and then start to make them march.… On the way, what they go through on the way … They get beaten up there, really badly beaten up. I don't even know how to describe those beatings.^[40]

In interviews, other detention camp veterans related similar stories.^[41]

Had Palestine's ghetto setting not prevented Israel from using more direct methods, prisons might not have assumed so central a role in Israel's coercive repertoire. As is true in today's United States, where prison plays a crucial role in the lives and imagination of poor African American males, incarceration became a central part of the Palestinian male experience. The detention camps, in turn, spawned related evils such as overcrowding, guard abuse, and inter-prisoner disputes.^[42] Had the West Bank and Gaza's institutional setting not channeled Israel toward policing, prisons would not have assumed such a central role.