Carcerality, Borders, Management, and Politics in Palestine/Israel

This paper deals with the development of the carceral system since the occupation of the Palestinian Territories in 1967, focusing mainly on the post-Oslo period. Since then, besides territorial control devices, non-territorial mechanisms, durable and having a highly structuring effect have been enforced and become more sophisticated, such as the permit system gradually implemented since 1991, and the renewal of a politics of mass arrest and incarceration - inaugurated during the 1^st Intifada (1987-1993) - that has intensified a prison web over the Territories and turned prison into a population management mode. A prison web, which I define and which has been deployed as both a reality and a virtuality, that is, the possibility to arrest and detain a large number of people from the age of twelve: a sort of suspended detention. Carcerality and the penal system targeting Palestinians has become a main control device contributing to the functioning of a bordering system anchored on a specific mobility regime, i.e. to manage non-linear borders of the nation that have been multiplied, are partly dematerialized, mobile, “networked” and became both individualized and endless. Besides, for some, the grip of the prison web extends post-mortem. Since the 1960s, some bodies of deceased fedayeen, those of perpetrators of attacks, and sometimes of people mistakenly killed by the Israeli army, have been kept in the “Cemeteries of numbers”, and recently at the Abu Kabir morgue. The modalities of detention of these corpses by the Israeli authorities and the conditions of their release are pursuing such a bordering policy. Based on an approach centered on carceral interactions and between Inside and Outside prison, I will tackle the carceral management of Palestinians as politics addressing both the transformations of the Israeli prison management of detainees, the detention of the corpses’ policy and Palestinian carceralism.