The Carceral State in Conflict: Between Reconciliation and Radicalization

Smadar Ben-Natan, University of Washington

Research Grant, 2020

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This study uses the concept of the carceral state as a key to understanding national and colonial conflict by unraveling the connections between the management of conflict and the management of prisons. Ever since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel has mass-arrested Palestinians, while also agreeing on mass releases as part of peace negotiations. However, the year 2000 marked a watershed moment when the peace negotiations were forsaken and the second Palestinian uprising (“intifada”) broke out. Driven by Israel’s new position that the conflict should be managed and contained rather than resolved, Israel’s control of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) shifted from temporary occupation to a one-state paradigm.

This has also been a watershed moment for Israeli carceral policies, as this research reveals by analyzing a broad range of legal and administrative documents; a database of 170 Supreme Court decisions; previously classified archival documents, media coverage; and in-depth interviews with former prisoners, prison staff, and government officials.

Both carceral policies and prisoners’ agency are affected by in-prison encounters, and policymakers can shape those encounters to either encourage reconciliation or foster radicalization.

Before 2000, under the paradigm of occupation, Israel operated a military carceral system alongside the civilian carceral system and assigned Palestinian prisoners to either of them. Carceral policies allowed spaces for encounter between Palestinian prisoners and Israeli prisoners, professionals, and prison staff, and allowed access to education and media. These resources were used by Palestinian prisoners to develop an intimate knowledge of Israeli society and politics. Consequently, the Palestinian prisoners’ movement became instrumental in reconciliation processes leading to the 1993 Oslo Accords. However, after 2000, a reorganization of the carceral state dismantled all military prisons and transferred all Palestinian prisoners into Israel and under the tighter control of the civilian prison service, which was rebranded the “national prison authority.”

New policies shrunk spaces for encounters, minimized prisoners’ communications with the outside world, banned education and rehabilitation opportunities, and harshened living conditions, while seeking open conflict with the prisoners’ collective. This new “state-induced radicalization” sought to maintain prisoners as dangerous enemies to justify the protracted conflict. Paradoxically, the transfer of prisoners into Israel also constituted “exclusionary inclusion” of noncitizen Palestinian prisoners into state institutions of both coercion and care, which enabled prisoners to claim rights that were intended for citizens and to engage in a negotiation over their “carceral citizenship.” The reorganization of the “one carceral state” thus changed the citizenship regime in Israel/Palestine.

Current literature on political prisoners is dominated by a conflict framework of state oppression and prisoners’ resistance, which treats the state and the prisoners as constant opposites who struggle from a distance over control and political power. Conversely, this study develops a relational approach to prisons as sites of encounter where prisoners, prison staff, professionals, and government officials interact. Both carceral policies and prisoners’ agency are affected by in-prison encounters, and policymakers can shape those encounters to either encourage reconciliation or foster radicalization.

Going beyond oppression and resistance, this study posits reconciliation and radicalization as competing carceral paradigms that can be pursued both by prisoners and by the state. This framework highlights the potential role of prisoners in transitional justice and reconciliation, the possible role of the state in conflict escalation and radicalization, and the effects of the carceral state on conflict transformation and an emerging citizenship regime.