Expanded Carceral Regimes: Past and Present

Lama El Khatib: The entry point into our conversation today, and this WE financescape edited by Asphalt more broadly, is to pose a question on how our contemporary conjuncture of ongoing mass extermination of Palestinian life is connected to and implicated in global networks of capital from various lenses. This analysis lays the ground for studying and speculating on ways to continue to resist. One major battleground of these intricacies in Palestine is, of course, prisons. 

To start: let’s talk about the now. Perhaps you can elaborate on the role that carcerality plays in Gaza today and the ongoing genocide, but also how this genocidal violence is expanded through carcerality to other geographies across Palestine. A way to ground this in material conditions is to look at how prisons, or the situation in various forms of imprisonment,  have deteriorated over the last months.

Basil Farraj: If we are trying to analyse this current moment and understand how this genocide is unfolding in the Gaza strip and in Palestine more broadly, we have to examine the larger reality under which Palestinians live. 

The notion of carcerality is all-encompassing here, because in the Palestinian context (and beyond), the prison is not only the physical space of the prison: it’s the transformation of the entire geography of Palestine into carceralised locations. Be it the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the checkpoints, the wall, settlements, or spaces of confinement themselves, the Israeli regime has been continuously using these various spatial and legal arrangements to imprison those that it defines as “dangerous to its security.” It’s also a historic tactic with a historic function. Nearly a million Palestinians have been imprisoned by the Israeli authorities since 1948.  The arrest and detention campaigns have severely escalated following October 7. Since then, over 10, 000 Palestinians have been arrested, in addition to an unknown number of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who continue to be detained in Israeli detention centers. Throughout the genocide, Palestinian prisoners have been subject to increasingly brutal conditions, and their rights – albeit at a minimum already – were completely stripped from them.

The Gaza Strip is a key example where populations have been continuously entrapped. We all remember statements by Israeli ministers declaring a total siege on the strip: no water, no electricity, no fuel. We have to remember that Israel controls these resources across all of historic Palestine, and as such exercises power over Palestinian livelihood throughout the entire geography. 

It is against this backdrop that we see the Israeli regime’s recourse to multiple modalities of violence at once: including bombings, extrajudicial killings and the destruction of housing and infrastructure.

LEK: Maybe we can actually spend a bit more time with what you called expanded carceral regimes or the way carceral regimes are enacted and enforced via multiple modalities. It is expanded historically (as in it has persisted in different forms across time) but is also expanded across space: it looks very different in different parts of historic Palestine and takes various forms. 

But this reality also carries a  mirror image: the question of prisons and prisoners is also central to Palestinian resistance historically and today. The demand for the release of prisoners is always a central motto for Palestinian resistance in its many forms.  And the prison in that sense plays a special role within the formation of a political subjectivity marked or committed to Palestinian liberation. This is why many prisoners and scholars have noted that prisons also function as a way to capture and entrap political subjectivity. So it becomes clear, I think, through that dynamic that the prison is not a measure of security as much as it is a measure of entrapping or rather severing (killing) the political horizon of Palestine.

BF: Since the occupation of Palestine, the settler regime transformed areas in what we refer to as the 1948 areas into zones under Israeli military regime, and the Palestinians that had remained in these cities and villages into subjects beholden to the rules and regulations of the military governor. This logic was extended after the 1967 occupation to the remainder of Palestine, where the Palestinian population is ruled through military law and military orders. The latter implies a comprehensive set of legal and bureaucratic mechanisms for the governing of Palestinian life, which includes all aspects of Palestinians’ everyday reality:  the places they can go, their right to leave, their ability to cross certain checkpoints, etc.  This layer of carcerality is historic. It was already there, and continues to be fortified. The West Bank has been entirely fragmented into isolated, small pockets where one cannot really move or manoeuvre. 

This is an attempt to reshape the political subjectivity of Palestinians. It is not merely a process of ridding the colonised of their rights. It has a deeper political function. It’s telling you: “you’re not supposed to be free; you are not a political subject.” So the Israeli regime resorts to carceral tactics not only to detain Palestinians, but to rid them of the political nature of their existence. Of course, the Israeli regime has never fully succeeded in doing so.  

Alongside the  bureaucratic and the legal, the carceral regimes operate through the transformation of the geography of Palestine in its entirety.  Across the West Bank, the geography is pierced by  military towers, checkpoints, settlements and inaccessible roads. Palestinians are denied autonomy and sovereignty over the land, the air, the water. But, what does this do? It’s an attempt to tell Palestinians every aspect of their life is under Israeli control,  to break the fighting spirit of the population.  But also, as we know from other colonial histories, when an indigenous population is denied access to the land, it is also an intervention into time designed to sever them from their past and dominate their future. Israel also continues to hold bodies of those who died while in Israeli prisons. Carceral regimes are an assertion of power over Palestinian past, present and future.

Renowned Palestinian prisoner, Walid Daqqa, who was killed inside Israeli prisons due to denial of medical care, continuously talked about the logic of the small and large prison and the ways in which carcerality functioned to capture time. ¹ The large prison: the legal and political geography itself of the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza and the 1948 areas.  And then there is the small prison where one is subjected to various tactics that serve the same function: to convince the population - or at least attempt to convince them - that it’s not worth it to resist occupation. ²

There is a lot to be said as well of the role of the Palestinian Authority within this carceral landscape. Carceral tactics are central to the way the PA functions, as it constantly arrests Palestinian activists, dissidents and militants, all while having no real sovereignty over any parts of the Palestinian territories. Still it attempts to behave as a ‘state.’ 

Prison as Site for Value-Generation 

LEK: Let us try to tap into the relationship between this political project of carcerality and the broader financial question of capital interests. There are two questions embedded in this. The first is the way in which the prison functions also as a site for developing technologies, surveillance infrastructure, etc. that are sold and generate an economic infrastructure. But the second question wants to think about the ways in which prisoners are subjected to value-generating tactics: for example, is their labour part of the prison economy and Israeli economy more broadly? 

BF: I will start by reiterating that since October 7 the context of imprisonment has changed. One example is the canteen, where prisoners used to buy their basic needs.  The canteen was shut down across all prisons since October 7, within the context of a broader attack on Palestinian prisoners which has transformed the entire space of the prison into an even more fortified space of confinement. Prisoners have been cut off from the outside world, provided with minimum food, tortured, and granted limited access to water and electricity. There’s a systematic starvation campaign and denial of medical care. So this current moment – in the words of prisoners and the released amongst them – is unparalleled. 

But to understand Israeli prisons on economic grounds,  we can return to before October 7. The occupation was benefitting from the prison system itself – somehow similar to how the prison-industrial complex in the US is value-generating albeit via different mechanisms and scales. This was established through privatising the prison system and founding the Israel Prison Service (IPS), which after the year 2000 took control of most of Israeli prison facilities. The canteen was also taken over as a privatised infrastructure. Decades prior to this move, the occupying forces had to provide prisoners with their food, cigarettes and other needs or do it via the International Committee for the Red Cross. The move to privatise services meant that Palestinian prisoners would have to pay extremely high prices for basic commodities, for which their families would send them money. Receiving this financial support to their canteen accounts via the post office, prisoners would use these resources–either collectively or individually–to cover their needs. 

In a sense – and this is what Walid Daqqa describes in Consciousness Molded or the Re-identification of Torture³ – the prison provided an illusion of autonomy to prisoners as they were able to buy their own products. But at the same time entire families and social networks became the providers of continuous economic support for prisoners to have access to the most basic forms of sustenance and livelihood. In that sense, the Israeli regime’s incarceration extended to entrapping wider social webs through ensuring that the prison’s political purpose also extends to producing lasting economic consequences for both incarcerated prisoners and their families “on the outside.”

LEK: Were other profitable models in place before the move to privatisation? What about the question of prison labour?

BF:  Starting in 1948, Palestinians imprisoned in internment camps were forced to work, making clothes or sewing certain items for the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), amongst other tasks. But the prisoners revolted against this because, as part of this trajectory of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, there were continuous revolts and protests against any form of exploiting Palestinian labour.   

A second phase can be mapped between 1967 and the early 1970s, where prisoners were subjected to forced and unwaged labour with a focus on producing military equipment for the IOF and prison maintenance. From the 1970s onwards, and following hunger strikes, the exploitation of Palestinian prison labour would slowly decrease and come to mostly a halt by 1980. Replacing this reliance on the labour system, the canteen system took a more pertinent economic role with it solely serving prisoner needs from the 1990s onwards. ⁴

Globalizing the Prison and Carceral Methods

LEK: Maybe we can look at this other aspect of the economic function of the prison, which is also what connects the industries of Israeli carceral regimes to other contexts. So I’m thinking here with these technologies of surveillance, technologies of security, which are then sold or forms of training that are exported or exchanged.

How are these carceral regimes profitable, but also how do they function as nodes in global capital? 

BF: Israel has been continuously described as a surveillance state or a security state that produces surveillance technologies, security knowledge, and weapons. The global status of Israel as a security state is attested to through the profits it has been making from exporting weapons and technologies, including for instance the Pegasus spyware program. This status is earned through the conversion of the Palestinian population, and their land, into a location where technologies are tested and subsequently sold as ‘reliable.’ The Israeli regime has expanded to numerous parts of the world, selling its products and technologies to Latin America, India and the United States amongst other places. The military relationship between the United Arab Emirates and the Israeli regime continues to grow and expand, and the UAE continues to provide the Israeli regime a space for showcasing its weapons and technologies at different security exhibitions.⁵ But this is not only a recent phenomenon. A declassified Central Intelligence Agency document directly alludes to Israel’s role in transferring weapons to Augusto Pinochet’s violent regime in Chile, for example.⁶   

Alongside the weapons industry, Israel has also trained paramilitaries in Colombia. The United States has learned from Israel as it conducted its so-called war on terror. In Iraq, for instance, they transformed different areas into blocked and separated zones that mirror what Israel has been doing in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This is why addressing the political economy of Israel’s violent and war-making machines is important. Israeli weapons and technologies, but also strategies and policies, are continuously made mobile to oppressive states and groups around the world.  

LEK: It’s quite poignant how you speak about the mobility of such models. For prisoners in the US–especially black prisoners–the relation between incarceration and war is an obvious one. Orisanmi Burton argues – via his mapping of the Attica prison revolt – that “prison is war.”⁷ We can argue that the inseparability of these two industries is perhaps most obviously visible in settler colonial contexts, but carcerality as such, I think, is always a flip side of war machines. 

Mapping Resistance in Prisons

LEK:.  Prisoners have used different tactics to counter the different scales and modes of the prison system. Can we map a kind of history of resistance that develops in parallel to the shifting modalities of imprisonment and carceral tactics?

BF: So resistance practices have continuously emerged and mirrored the reality of confinement. In the 70s, Palestinian prisoners were actually forced to address their jailer by saying, “yes, sir” and to put their heads down while walking. Palestinian prisoners in the Asqalan prison revolted against these inhumane conditions in July 1970 and went on a hunger strike. During that same hunger strike, they also demanded access to books, pens, pencils, and newspapers. And they went on multiple hunger strikes, again in 1973 and 1976 to, above all, assert their agency and the political nature of their imprisonment. The Israeli authorities attempted to suppress these practices with unrestrained violence. One critical case is that of Gazan Abdul Qader Abu al-Fahem who was killed by force-feeding during the hunger strike of 1970 – the first Palestinian prisoner to die following a hunger strike.⁸  

The struggle inside the prisons continued to evolve over time in response to shifting conditions, including revolts against limitations on prison visitations, denial of communication with family members, and arbitrary forms of detention. Hunger strikes, in addition to other forms of insurgency, enable Palestinian prisoners to re-enter the sphere of politics and assert collective agency, which the Israeli regime has continuously sought to negate. Against their labeling as ‘security prisoners’ there is an insistence on upholding the political nature of their detention.

LEK:  What about these modes of resistance today? What forms of organising persist?

BF: Since the start of the genocide, Israel has transformed the prisons into another war zone. At least 58 Palestinian prisoners have been killed⁹ inside Israeli prisons, due to torture and medical negligence. One of the prisoners in Naqab prison, Thaer Abu Asab, was beaten and killed¹⁰ by 19 Israeli guards after he had asked if a ceasefire was on the horizon. Other prisoners were killed by being left out in the sun. Some prisoners had their limbs amputated because of the poor quality or actually lack of medical care provided to them. 

I say all this and provide these details to come to the question of organising. Resistance within prisons now is not as it was in the past and this is due to two main reasons: first, prisoners realize that at this current moment any attempt to organise themselves is difficult given current prison conditions. The second reason is that prisoners sense, or believe, that their liberation is near. Many are clinging to this hope of being released during any potential ceasefire or prisoner swap agreement. We have already seen images of Palestinians being liberated as part of the ceasefire agreement. 

This does not take away from the fact that I have also been hearing from released prisoners an insistence on devising ways to subvert the carceral authority. I think this is constant. 

LEK: I just want to reiterate here: The history of Israeli prisons is one of annihilation at the level of life, livelihood, and political subjectivity. But it is also a tradition of resistance passed on and carried through the various lives and networks that are subjected to its mechanisms. And so organisation is always a threat as the prison seeks to create an environment that isolates and fragments collectivity. To think this, I am drawn to the words of Layan Kayed who was re-arrested in June 2023: ¹¹ “The prison wants to isolate you from your people and your homeland, just as it wants to estrange you from your dream of believing ‘imprisonment’ to be the resort of dreamers. It likewise wants to alienate you from fellow prisoners and their legacy by claiming that the withdrawal of any privilege is the result of other prisoners’ misuse of it. But you, enormously grateful, know that without the years of struggle and sacrifice, prison life would have never been bearable.”¹²

Solidarity: On the Cultivation of Palestinian Political Subjectivity Elsewhere 

LEK: An interesting point to raise here would be the sort of global expansion of criminalisation around Palestine that now extends to imprisonment, and threats of incarceration, in relation to Palestine solidarity movements. This seems to extend as part of the project of annihilating Palestinian political subjectivity (whether in Palestine itself or elsewhere). Yet forms of solidarity persist. 

It could be helpful here to touch on certain examples from the past or present where a global movement (intervening on an economic level – thinking here with strategies of exerting pressure to divest etc.) have had an effect on interrupting prison infrastructures or technologies. One example that comes to mind here is the STOP G4S campaign which was launched in 2012 in parallel and in response to a hunger strike launched by Palestinian prisoners. The campaign sought to pressure the security company G4S, one of the largest in the world, to cut its ties to Israeli prison and police infrastructures. Connecting directly to the practices of prisoners on the inside, the campaign mobilised various businesses to divest from G4S leading to the company selling its Israeli subsidiary in 2016. It still partially owns Israel’s National Police Academy and provides training to Israeli police, yet the global STOP G4S campaign remains a crucial example of a global interruption and a historic link between the political agency of those incarcerated in collaboration with those in solidarity.

BF: I also want to highlight other portraits of solidarity that function on different levels.  During the famous 2014 hunger strikes, there was this growing global sense and understanding of the struggles of Palestinian prisoners. The fact that this is a political struggle for liberation brought forth connections to other intersecting struggles, which Palestinians continue to reference.This includes, for instance, the 1981 Irish hunger strike that inspired Palestinian prisoners and their hunger striking tactics. Just to share an anecdote: a book written by one of the prisoners who survived the 1981 Irish hunger strike found its way into one of the Israeli prisons. It was later translated into Arabic, and used as educational material on how to effectively organise a hunger strike and how to learn from the Irish experience.

Persisting Horizons of Abolition?

LEK: A few months ago, various Palestinian prisoners were released via exchange deals which did, or continues to, open up a horizon of abolition. As you also mentioned, many prisoners continue to cling on to that hope. I’m just thinking about where these releases sit within a broader project of abolition and if this is also something in the consciousness of prisoners themselves, because you were mentioning that many prisoners were looking forward to their freedom that they felt was near.

BF:  The prisoner exchange that took place in November 2023 is giving all Palestinian prisoners hope that they will be free. The Israeli regime has already been forced to release hundreds of prisoners, many of whom were serving life sentences.¹³

There’s a history to this. Over the last decades thousands of Palestinian prisoners were released through prisoner exchanges and swap agreements. Since 1948, there have been at least 40 prisoner swaps including the most recent with over 30,000 Palestinian prisoners released.¹⁴ What we are witnessing today, and the prospect for future swaps, might be the largest in Palestinian history. 

To understand this, we must look at the ways in which Israel hands down extremely heavy sentences–unjustly, of course. These include multiple life sentences. There are some who were arrested before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Walid Daqqa is one example –he spent over 38 years in captivity before being killed by the Israeli carceral regime. 

I think the idea of abolishing prisons, of liberating all prisoners, is fully present today. But again, I think this can only be done once the Zionist regime is dismantled. Carceral logics would most certainly persist with the continued existence  of the settler colonial regime as they are central to its operation. Prison abolition in the context of Palestine necessitates the abolition of settler colonial structures and logics in their entirety.