Molding Consciousness

Preface

Nothing is harder and more cruel than experiencing subjugation and torment without being able to specify its causes and origins. This feeling of impotence and loss of human dignity arises when the unconscious experience of subjugation makes you feel that not only has the world abandoned you but your very language too has failed in describing and specifying your suffering; it has failed even in crying out . . . a crying out that might be understood and comprehended by a free “other.” Your language has failed in penetrating the media and political fog that might allow your cause as a political prisoner to take its rightful place in media and political agendas and garner the support of human rights committees. To mobilize for this support, you simplify the complexity of your torture such that it appears as ordinary torture, undeserving of concern. Or you might have to resort to exaggeration, making it easy for your jailer to disprove your false claims. Ultimately, your isolation from the world will be renewed, and you will face your suffering alone, leaving you with two choices: either you give up on your subjective being and are transformed entirely into the object of your jailer or you transform yourself into an object of study so as to redefine your suffering and its causes. This is no easy task. For to be both the examining self and the examined self at one and the same time means being both the tortured and those who call out the torture, to be both the scene and its witness, to be both detail and abstraction at the same time.

Palestinian prisoners live in a state of disempowerment in Israeli prisons that stems from their difficulty in describing their conditions of repression, at least since the start of the current [Second] Intifada. For in adapting to the modern discourse of human rights, repression and torture have become much more complex. This discourse and its human rights organizations have great difficulty in proving transgressions, which are often presented by the Israeli judiciary and media as exceptions to its commitment to human and prisoner rights. Disclosure, then, becomes cover-up, transparency occlusion, and facts the concealment of truth.

Contemporary repression is masked, concealed, and presented as a response to human rights. It’s a repression with no visibility, and it cannot be delineated. It is the sum of hundreds of small individual procedures and thousands of details that individually do not reveal themselves as instruments of torture, except when we can comprehend the overall frame and its governing logic. It’s precisely like exploitation in free markets under globalization, always presented as necessary for economic growth. It’s like the exploitation in which the exploiter has no face, no country, and no fixed address; like an octopus, its reach extends into every corner of the earth and to every detail of your life. For you, the exploited worker or consumer, can become a shareholder in the very monopoly that exploits you. It is in this way that the lines between exploiter and exploited disappear, rendering the very concept of exploitation or its definition a very difficult and almost impossible task within contemporary modes of production and the global free market.

The repression and torture in Israeli jails do not resemble what we find in global prison literature. There is no denial of food or medicine, and you won’t find people denied the sun or kept underground. Prisoners are not chained to iron bars all day long, for in the postmodern age, it is not the imprisoned body that is targeted but the mind and soul. Here, we don’t face what [Julius] Fučik under fascism described in Notes from the Gallows; we are not talking about anything resembling Tazmamart prison as it appears in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light; and you won’t find anything like Malika Oufkir’s description of Moroccan prisons. Here we are not in Abu Za’bal, or even in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo. In all these prisons you know your torturer and the forms and instruments of torture; you possess a visceral knowledge of it. But in Israeli prisons you face a form of torture whose effects are stronger because its more “civilized” modality turns your senses and mind into its daily instruments. It comes to you stealthily, without baton or noise. It lives with you in the cell, in time, in the sunny courtyard, and in relative ease.

Though this study is about the prison, this loss of the ability to explain reality and this feeling of impotence do not apply to prisons only and are not the fate of prisoners alone—they are a general Palestinian condition. The overlap of the conditions between the Palestinian citizen and the prisoner is not strictly in the shape of the repression or in the isolation of citizens in segregated geographic enclaves that replicates the isolation of prisoners in wings and sectors, entirely separated but for the will of the jailer. The essential similarity is in the goal of the jailer in both contexts: the remaking of people in the image of an Israeli vision by molding their consciousness. This relates especially to the fighting leadership in prison. To study the life of Palestinian prisoners, then, is to take a microcosm of the life of the subjects of the occupied territories in a way that allows you to form a general picture of the Palestinian scene.

The similarity between the small prison and the big prison of the Palestinian condition does not end here. There is also a similarity in that the conventional approaches to both questions—the Palestinian question and the prisoner question—are incapable of answering the challenge. The paradigms at hand in the literature of the Palestinian political movement, for resisting the occupation or understanding its policies, remain conventional, extensions in both form and content of the literature and experiences of postwar national liberation movements that took shape within the Cold War and in a vastly different historical period. Just as prison literature today cannot reflect its reality, so too political analyses with their existing assumptions cannot treat current political realities. For the past fifteen years, Palestinians have been confronting a condition in which their occupiers draw their ideas, theories, and repressive instruments from a postmodern reality, or, as [Zygmunt] Bauman has it, a “liquid modernity,” while Palestinian political forces appear incapable of characterizing their reality and presenting explanations and solutions capable of mobilizing the masses or at least granting them a sense of certitude, even if this certitude encompasses only explanations of catastrophes suffered.1 Palestinian concepts and methods for liberation have lagged behind reality and have themselves become tools of repression and torture that, despite all the mounting sacrifices, lead to a dead end. We are like someone facing a nuclear catastrophe with a sword, so that a chasm opens up between our approach to changing reality and reality itself—a chasm as big as the distance between history and the future.

This is the condition of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the subject of our study. The prisoners bemoan a condition that does not exist and are incapable of describing what does exist. They face forms of torture that they are incapable of defining. I don’t claim to offer here a comprehensive explanation of the torture. This is only a cry to say: Do something before it’s too late. The task of revealing what goes on in prisons and its exposure to public opinion is the responsibility of human and prisoner rights organizations. But it is first and foremost the task of the Palestinian national and political movements. For this question is not a legal or humanitarian question but a political one.

These writings do not claim to be scientific; they were written in prison with limited access to basic sources. I have had to depend more on my memory, especially when it comes to what happens in Israeli prisons. This is out of necessity as much as anything else: I am imprisoned and have been kept in isolation from the world for close to a quarter of a century. But I have written these papers to show that what happens in the small prison is not simply the confinement and separation of prisoners that pose a “security threat” to Israel. It is, rather, a part of a comprehensive and scientifically planned program that seeks to remold Palestinian consciousness.

The success or failure of this plan hinges primarily on our ability to expose it and study its damning details, far from self-conceit and self-deception. We don’t need impassioned speeches glorifying the prisoners’ struggles and sacrifices. What is needed is clarity and honesty and rigorous study. Study that can answer the questions that I hope to raise in these pages.

Walid Nimr Daqqa

Gilboa Prison

Late July 2009

Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher and currently assistant professor of Middle Eastern and North African studies at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony, forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2025.

May Jayyusi was the executive director of Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, for over twenty years. She writes on philosophy and politics and has translated into English several Arabic novels and collections of poetry, including works by Ibrahim al-Koni, Ghassan Kanafani, Muhammad al-Maghout, and Ibrahim Nasrallah.

Notes

Translated and reprinted with permission from Al Jazeera Center for Studies. Walid Daqqa, Sahr al-Wa’i: Aw fi I’adit Ta’rif al-Ta’dhib [Molding consciousness, or the redefinition of torture] (Al Jazeera Center for Studies, 2010).

1. 1. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Hebrew University Press, 2007), 2–7. Bauman splits modernity into two stages, “solid modernity” and “liquid modernity,” and he rejects the widespread notion of a transition from modernity to postmodernity, as though the two stages were unrelated and separated from one another. Instead, Bauman considers the two stages connected and in dialogue. This definition can give us a deeper understanding of the Israeli occupation after the Oslo Peace Process. Direct occupation represents the stage of solid modernity, whereas the occupation today represents the liquid stage and, in my opinion, is a more comprehensive occupation.