Carceral Subjectivity and the Exercise of Freedom in Israel-Palestine A

Carceral Subjectivity and the Exercise of Freedom in Israel-Palestine A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the University of Minnesota In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Shai Gortler Advisor: Nancy Luxon February 2020 © 2020 Shai Gortler All rights reserved. Acknowledgements Many years in the making, this project has accrued a long list of thanks. Several teachers are owed special gratitude for their contributions for shaping me as a scholar. Nancy Luxon, the dissertation advisor, has supported this project in every step of the way. Her insight and rigor have improved it immensely and were a pleasure to witness. Bernard Harcourt offered knowledge and advice, and was crucial for focusing the dissertation. His hospitality at Columbia is much appreciated. Joan Tronto offered close guidance and poignant advice on political theory and the academic world. Raymond Duvall was true mentor and friend. Robert Nichols was a source of inspiration and offered critical guidance. I am heavily indebted to all of them. Other scholars offered advice and contributed to shaping my ideas. To Elizabeth Beaumont, Banu Bargu, Karen Brown, Fran Buntman, Hillel Cohen, Henriette Dahan Kalev, Andrew Dilts, Jason Frank, Michael Goodhart, Jane Gordon, Neve Gordon, Lisa Guenther, Joshua Guetzkow, Ayten Gündoğdu, Heidi Grunebaum, Orazio Irrera, Colin Koopman, Hagar Kotef, Barbara Kruickshank, Premesh Lalu, Jeanne Morefield, Himadeep Muppidi, Judith Revel, and Michael Tonry I owe many thanks. I was fortunate to have a unique cohort at the University of Minnesota who has taken an important part in my intellectual formation. I thank Tracey Blasenheim, Elena Gambino, Samarjit Ghosh, Elif Kalaycioglu for their friendship. Alongside the company of these friends and that of Misha Hadar, Maria Jose Mendez Gutierrez, and Quỳnh Phạm our relations have provided an intellectually vibrant core that promise to withhold the whirlwinds of our worlds. The political theory community at the University of Minnesota i has always been the most challenging and supportive environment for my project. I thank Charmaine Chua, Adam Dahl, Chase Hobbs-Morgan, Garrett Johnson, and David Temin for their camaraderie. My second intellectual home at the University of Minnesota has been the community of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and I thank Beverly Fok and Tia Gardner for their companionship. Noga Rotem, my most persistent interlocuter and friend, is beyond thanks. During the different stages of this study I benefitted from the analyses, thoughts, time, and generosity of many. I Thank my interviewees for the trust they put in me even if confidentiality prevents me from mentioning their names. Walid Daka granted me permission to read and cite his unpublished texts and I am deeply indebted to him. Sana’a Salame Daka, Asad Daka, and Anat Matar were extremely generous in offering their time and support. I thank Daniel Defert and François Ewald for their time and insights. Special thanks are due to the countless archival officials who assisted this project, among them Laurence Le Bras (BnF), Yves Chevrefils Desbiolles, Marjorie Delabarre, Julie Le Men, Elisa Martos (IMEC), Cyril Burté (BDIC), Fabrizio Bensi (ICRCA), Limor Itzhak (IDFA), Efrat Shir (PCATI), and Dean Smith (Bancroft Library). Kadura Faris (Prisoners’ Club, El Bira) offered valuable assistance and Leah Tzemel shared important advice and documents. I thank them all. My work was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, University of Minnesota Political Science Department, the Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change, the Graduate School, and Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. I have benefited from the Edward W. and Jean B. Weidner Graduate Research Fellowship, ii Andrew Dickinson Memorial Fellowship, Asher N. Christensen Memorial Fellowship and Efimenco Fellowship. I thank them all. Shahar Globerman made this work possible. My gratitude to and for him is infinite. All the shortcomings of the work are my own and do not implicate any of the names above. iii To Tania, Grisha, and Milad iv Abstract What do 20th century attempts of Israelis, Palestinians, and Humanitarians to affect subject formation in Israeli prisons reveal about the relation between domination and freedom? Literatures of carceral subject formation regard prisons as sites where subjectivity is either irrelevant (Wallace 2015, Guenther 2013), liberatory (Nashif 2008, Bargu 2014, Dilts 2014), or manipulated (Daka 2011). The resulting analyses of these approaches regard Israeli incarceration of Palestinians as a site of “neutral and objective” humanitarian work by the Red Cross, purely liberatory political action by Palestinian prisoners, or an all-catching Israeli top-down apparatus that is able to harness every attempt of Palestinian political action to its own benefit. To offer a competing approach, my dissertation builds on newly exposed archival materials from Israeli, Palestinian, and Red Cross archives on Israeli prisons between the arrest of the first self-proclaimed Palestinian political prisoner in 1965 and 2019. With and against contemporary political and social theorists such as Michel Foucault, Iris Young, and Walid Daka the dissertation traces how the Israeli Prison Service attempted to use the prisoners’ actions—such as their leadership structures, hunger strikes, demands for improved material conditions, and inner-relations—to amplify Israeli interests. It further traces how the Red Cross’s “neutral” humanitarian work participated in the constitution of the prisoners as individualized consumers and limited the prisoners’ ability to act collectively. Last, it traces how the prisoners were nevertheless able to change their reality by cultivating alternative kinships, textures of collectivity, and senses of selves. The result is a differentiation between practices where the Palestinian prisoners were only able to act v according to definitions set by others and those rare moments when they were able to participate in defining the structure of their participation. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements i List of Tables viii Chapter 1 1 Introduction: Tracing hints of counter-subjectivation in a play of subjectification with scenes of subjection Chapter 2 50 Friends of Prisoners: The GIP’s Exercise of Counter-subjectivation Chapter 3 87 Protected Persons: ICRC’s Humanitarian Action Chapter 4 125 Security Prisoners: Democratic Inclusion as Political Subjectification Chapter 5 161 Captives: The Prisoners’ Movement and Possibilities of Resistance Chapter 6 201 “The Internal Sumud:” Walid Daka’s Decarceration Theory Conclusion: Politicians of Freedom 238 Bibliography 249 vii List of Tables Table 1: 60 Chancellor Séguier at the Entry of Louis XIV into Paris Table 2: 104 1980 Hunger Strike of Palestinian Prisoners in the Newly Opened Nafha Prison Table 3: 113 Fatah Members are Put to Work in Producing Camouflage Nets in Prison viii Chapter 1: Introduction Tracing hints of counter-subjectivation in a play of subjectification with scenes of subjection On August 31 1973 Omar elShalabi, a Palestinian political prisoner, trespassed into an Ashkelon Prison workshop to break prisoner-manufactured iron-sets.1 Ashkelon’s prison guards beat him and he would soon die on his hospital bed. In May 1980 prisoners Rasem Halaweh and Ali elJa’afari, having participated in a hunger strike for their dignity in the newly opened Nafha Prison, were sent to be force-fed in a hospital. The feeding tube went to the struggling prisoners’ lungs instead of their stomach, and they suffocated to death.2 These cases exemplify some of the interplays between prison conditions, prison administrator aspirations, and prisoners’ actions. The Israeli incarceration of Palestinian political prisoners from 1965 to the present included many such scenes. To use the language of literary scholar Saidiya Hartman, they are “scenes of subjection.”3 Yet they are not solely so. Scenes of subjection can be part of a play whose main storyline is different. Philosopher Michel Foucault understands modern prisons to operate under a logic of what he calls 1 While elsewhere I agree with the motivations of contemporary discussions of incarceration that avoid describing incarcerated people as “prisoners” which reduces a person’s existence to the fact that they are or were imprisoned, here I follow the Palestinian reclaiming of the word “prisoner.” From its side, the Israeli Prison Service considers these prisoners as “security prisoners.” For a discussion of these categories see Maya Rosenfeld, “The Centrality of the Prisoners’ Movement to the Palestinian Struggle against the Israeli Occupation: A Historical Perspective,” in Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel, ed. Abeer Baker and Anat Matar (London: Pluto press, 2011), 3–24. 2 A third prisoner, Ishaq elMaragha, was injured while force-fed during the Nafha strike and died three and a half years later in Beer Sheva Prison on November 16, 1983. 3 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 1 “subjectification” (assujettissement) that is distinct from subjection (sujétion).4 Subjection, such as in most cases of slavery, is a modality of power where the subject’s actions are severely limited. When thinking of how institutions try to shape behavior, situations of strict force are of little interest to Foucault. He says:5 What does it mean to exercise power? It does not mean picking up this tape recorder and throwing it on the ground. I have the capacity to do so—materially, physically, sportively. But I would not be exercising power if I did that. However, if I take this tape recorder and throw it on the ground in order to make you mad, or so that you can’t repeat what I’ve said, or to put pressure on you so that you’ll behave in such and such a way, or to intimidate you—well, what I’ve done, by shaping your behavior through certain means, that is power. As a modality based on force, subjection by itself is less relevant to cases of subject formation, Foucault’s—and this study’s—main interest.

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