A History of Confinement in Palestine: The Prison Web

“There is not one page in this stunningly researched book that is not worth reading; no one has revealed so profoundly how the prison Israel has built has sought to crush Palestinian lives—far beyond the concrete walls of detention.”

—Ann Stoler, The New School for Social Research, New York, USA
 
“A penetrating and at times, poignant examination of the critical yet often overlooked role of incarceration in determining and shaping individual and collective lives.”

—Sara Roy, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, USA

“This is an urgently necessary and important, if harrowing, book. Deeply researched, lucidly argued, and historically comprehensive in its approach, it will be an indispensable resource for studying Palestine, and global carcerality more generally.”
 
—Laleh Khalili, Queen Mary University of London, UK

“In a nutshell, this book is an essential reference for understanding Palestinian society.”

—Abaher El Sakka, Birzeit University, Palestin

This book deals with the contemporary history of the imprisonment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons since 1967, and, since the 2000s, in Palestinian facilities. Widely shared in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, incarceration endurably marks personal and collective stories, and has spun a prison web, a kind of suspended detention. Approximately 40 percent of the male population has been to prison. This book shows how the judicial and prison practices applied to Palestinian residents of the OPT are major fractal devices of control contributing to the management of Israeli borders, and shape a specific bordering system based on a mobility regime. This history of confinement is that of the prison web, and of the in-between political, social, and personal spaces people weave between Inside and Outside prison. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, archives, and extensive institutional documentation, this political anthropology book deals with carceral citizenships and subjectivities; masculinities, femininities, gender relations, parentality, and intimacy. Woven like a web, this story is built around places, moments, people, and their testimonies.

Stéphanie Latte Abdallah is CNRS researcher at CERI-Sciences Po, France, specialized in Middle East Studies.