Lori A. Allen

2 6 February, 1999

Torture Conference, Relativity Panel

Comments welcome: l-allen@uchicago.edu

According to the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, "shabeh," the Arabic word for "position abuse," can have the following meanings: nightmare; blurred, indistinct shape; apparition; phantom; ghost; specter; its plural, "ashbah" indicates the shape or outward appearance of someone. Besides denoting "position abuse," the term most commonly means "nightmare" in regular colloquial usage.

So the question I ask today is, why is this particular nightmare of position abuse visited upon Palestinians? What accounts for its haunting recurrence, its frequency and intensity? The answer lies not in some description of Israeli or Palestinian "culture," but rather in some complex intersection of Israeli colonial practices, of the Orientalist projections onto Palestinians that are part of that colonial project, imaginings which presume essentially Arab qualities of honor, shame and family to be crucial to Palestinian society, and in how these intersect with the social networks, political projects, and history of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

First, some background: During the intifada, one out of every hundred Palestinians in the Israeli Occupied Territories was incarcerated--that is, arrested, or tried and imprisoned, or administratively detained without trial--in Israeli jails. It is estimated (by Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem) that 85% of all those are tortured as part of this process. While a variety of torture techniques are employed, position abuse is the most common form of torture.

Briefly put, shabeh is a form of torture that uses time and the prisoner's own body, shackled and bound, as the primary weapons. (I do NOT mean this in the way that people like Elaine Scarry and Alan Feldman make claims, seemingly based on a psychological understanding of dissociation, that the torture victim's body becomes its own worst enemy. Rather, it is to point out that physically invasive torture tools are not part of the torture.) In position abuse, prisoners are tied up in painful positions, shackled to walls or small chairs that force them to contort and cramp their bodies for extended periods of time--each passing moment heightens the pain of stillness. I will describe in more detail some of the salient features of the technique later. Suffice it to say that all those who are tortured, including those who are electrically shocked or physically brutalized in any other way, are also subject to position abuse.

In a population of only about 2 1/2 million within the Territories, this one per cent rate of incarceration and torture, a level rivaled only by Apartheid South Africa, is a significant social and political phenomenon, recognized as such by the local population and analysts of Palestine.

As my co-panelist, Lisa Hajjar, has remarked:

absences and reunions… (Hajjar 1995: 690).

I will return to what I think are some of the implications of this density of torture victims within a single population. I raise the issue now only to prove the breadth of this phenomenon.

There are several reasons for attempting this kind of anthropological analysis of torture in context, for examining the "relativity" of torture: Most basically, it helps us answer the question of why different torture techniques are employed in different geographical locations, historical moments, and political situations, thus enabling us to recognize that torture--and violence more broadly--are not 'transhistorical' categories, as some others on this panel have noted. Understanding torture through its cultural specificity provides a way in to the problem of how torture is effective, and highlights the ways in which state torture practices are deeply embedded in complicated systems of governance and political oppression--multi-level systems which operate not only through the powerful mobilization of international political machinery, but also through the minute and cloying tendrils of what Foucault has called "governmentality."

What I argue more generally, then, is that torture can best be understood as part of--and perhaps it is a metonymic part of--a larger repertoire of governance. If we widen our purview to include the entire interrogation process that begins not in the torture room, but in the prisoner's family's home, and follow it through the experience of imprisonment and into the conflict as a whole, we see a striking recursivity of techniques and effects (cf. Gal 1995). Torture can be read as a sort of diagnostic, illuminating some of the social effects wrought by Israeli practices outside the prison, such as house demolitions, deportations and the construction of bypass roads. Thus, understanding the specifics of position abuse and the colonial regime together illuminates both forms of power and abuse.

A key aspect of the interrogation process is how routine it is--or, we might say, ritualized. Palestinian political detainees incarcerated by Israel routinely pass through procedures of interrogation which have a standard pattern and regular structure. This process has five stages: beginning with arrest, then transfer to the incarceration site, confinement, interrogation, and imprisonment. What this paper will demonstrate is the cultural-political logic behind this process of incarceration and deployment of this particular form of position abuse--that is, the ways it makes sense as a symbolically powerful and practically useful tactic used by the Israeli state in its attempt to subdue a rebellious population, and, I argue, in its attempts at creating a certain kind of subject. In this case, it is a literally minimized and figuratively belittled subject population, a sometimes infantalized, and dehumanized population. The physical constraints of this form of torture which literally reduce the prisoner's body and confine it within a delimited amount of space, mirror the socio-political processes to which Palestinians are subjected, as they are corralled into every more tightly bounded swatches of territory. The reduction of the person and the attempt to atomize the individual from his or her social network, attempts which occur at every stage in this incarceration process, also occur on an even wider scale. The social and territorial divisions effected by settlements, bypass roads, closures, and a number of other Israeli governmental policies produce the same sorts of fissures and reductions on the land and throughout the population as those processes of truncation and atomization that obtain during interrogation. The connection between what happens to the body in position abuse and what happens to Palestinians' houses is perhaps the clearest instance of this recursivity.

1. Arrest/Removal from Home: Palestinians suspected of committing security violations are usually arrested in their homes in the middle of the night (HRW/ME 1994:15), as Israeli soldiers forcibly enter the home, conduct a 'search' during which contents of the home are upset and family members are threatened and verbally abused. This verbal abuse is often sexualized and directed particularly towards women (Al-Haq 1988:40-41). A Palestinian who was arrested from the home describes the scene: "[Israeli soldiers] came at about eleven at night. They started breaking the closets, the windows, the doors. The children were crying…" (HRW/ME 1994:90, my emphasis). The capture of suspects directly from their homes and in the presence of their families makes the process of their incarceration all the more abrupt and disorienting. It is a stark disruption emphasizing in action the vast power differential between the incarcerator and captive. Note that all those implements of domestic enclosure, security, regulation and possession--closets, windows, doors--are the focus of this army's destructive force. Even domestic space that is usually considered a safe-haven, a private realm, a respite from the insecurities of life in the streets, is politicized and disrupted, forced open to an external (state) power. Here the issue is houses, and the form by which power invades it--a theme which reappears in the specifics of position abuse and the process of house demolitions.

2. Transfer: Once apprehended, the suspect often has his or her identity card taken. He or she is hooded, handcuffed, and placed into a military van, usually made to sit on the floor, sometimes beaten, and transported to an interrogation center. Families are most often not told where their relative has been imprisoned. This phase continues the process of isolation and disorientation of the prisoner which had begun in the home, intensified now by the prisoner's knowledge that his or her family might not be able to track them down. Forcing the prisoner to wear a hood and sit on the floor of the vehicle exacerbates their enclosedness, preventing their visual contact with those on the street. The prisoner will encounter the degradation and discomfort of the ground, as well as the occlusion of sight, throughout his or her incarceration. As Jean Comaroff has noted, "the raising and lowering of the body in relation to the usual level of social intercourse tends to convey super- or sub-social being" (1985a:549). Whether they are dispatched to the ground, fed and led like animals, or positioned as children to be disciplined, Palestinian prisoners throughout their incarceration are denied the status of fully socialized human adult. Imprisonment and interrogation denies the Palestinians all those elements which signify civilized personhood (cf. Elias 1994).

It is striking the number of elements of this detention process that are similar to more commonly anthropologized rites of passage (cf. Van Gennep, Asad, Feldman). Taking away the prisoner's identity card, removing her from social view, extracting her from the security of the normal social order, as well as her subjection to physical and psychological belittlements, all suggest that the prisoner is being forced into a liminal space. The dissipation of categories of the former identity in the liminal period allows for the reformulation of the ritual subject into a newly-formed and socially conforming being, subject to the guidelines and privileged with the knowledge of her new social category (Turner 1967:93-111)--in this case, it is a category of torturable being.

3. Confinement: The prisoner is usually placed in a dirty, foul-smelling solitary confinement cell (180 cm by 150 cm [Al-Aker 1995:64]), the floor of which may be wet or covered in human excrement. Many prisoners report being confined in what is known as a "cupboard," a cell of sixty by sixty centimeters (AI 1989:28). The cell may either be almost completely devoid of light, or have the light on at all times; prisoners are prevented from sleeping by guards. Allen Feldman calls this technique "the voiding of time" and he sees its use against Irish political prisoners in British jails as reinforcing "the sense that there is no outside and no exits...or distancing from the absolute spatial power of interrogation" (1991:126). In that way, Feldman sees it as an effort to increase in the prisoner his sense of being immobilized which is, again, a key feature of position abuse.

Prisoners are kept awake for several days, deprived of food, not given access to a toilet, nor a change of clothes. Female prisoners are often denied products of feminine hygiene. Prisoners interpret this treatment as de-humanizing: "At night, you lie in the cells like animals . The mattresses and blankets are filthy, and they stink. There is no sun or air...When in interrogation you feel destroyed psychologically. For example, when they give you the same cup to drink from and to wash your behind with after defecating. It's disgusting. This is the atmosphere there all the time" (HRW/ME 1994:22). The entire environment surrounding the prisoner becomes saturated with a dense and repulsive physicality. One detainee described the experience as "putting the air in a state of war with me" (Pacheco 1996:25). Bodily substances, odors and sights normally dispensed with quickly and then forgotten, here fill the prisoner's space and senses. Again, the breaking down of normal, socialized senses of self and body

echoes the ritual process, in which the habitual form of physicality is disrupted prior to reformulation.

During interrogation the victim is often blindfolded, tied up, and beaten. Prisoners are usually hooded with a heavy canvas sack wrapped tightly over the entire head. This hood smells of sweat, vomit, urine or feces. The hood enforces a continuously crossed bodily boundary by forcing contact between face and 'lower order functions.' Some prisoners told of soldiers who threw their hoods to the wet and dirty ground of the lavatory before making them wear it (HRW/ME 1994:161). This is one more way in which the prisoner, previously thrust down in the military vehicle and often beaten to the floor during interrogation, is forced to maintain contact with the ground as a reminder of their status as sub-social being.

Another instance of forced pollution occurs when prisoners are given a break from 'position abuse' and allowed two minutes, only once or twice a day, to eat and use the toilet at the same time (HRW/ME 1994:180). Bodily processes, ingestion and its excesses, products which emerge from inner to outer, are normally regulated in private and at the individual's will (cf.Devisch 1985:595). Prisoners, however, are forced to relinquish bodily control to their captors, equally an expression of their loss of social control more generally (cf. Douglas 1982:70).

Just as the breaking of the closets, windows and doors of the family home destroyed the house's capacity to regulate inner from outer, a dramatic display of the family's lack of safety, so too the malevolent apprehension of physical apertures reduces the body's regulatory capacities, thereby damaging the prisoner's social and moral integrity, an aspect of her or his own sense of personal security. The "uncontrolled orifices of childhood and senility, and the unmediated flow of menstrual blood...are widespread indices...of the less than optimal containment of the person within his/her bodily margins" (Comaroff 1985a:545-546). The painful disorder imposed in prison, however, is not caused primarily by unregulated self-expansion. It is rather a result of the person's orifices and products having been made to fold back in on themselves in a tightening knot of bodiliness, compressing the body in yet one more way. That which normally must be expelled from the body and put at a distance from it (in a sense, its allowable expansiveness when performed in the culturally prescribed and regulated manner) is forced to remain in physical contact with the body. This treatment follows the logic of condensation evident in phase one of the incarceration process in which the prisoner begins to be diminished through his or her separation from the family and removal from social sight.

4. Position Abuse: Prisoners are tied up in extremely painful positions, shackled to walls or small chairs that force them to contort their bodies, left in the same position for hours or days. The initial discomfort quickly turns to pain and grows more intense as time passes "due to restricted circulation, straining of limbs, cramps, numbing, itching, and the friction of chains, handcuffs or legcuffs" (HRW/ME 1994:111). The foul smelling canvas hood is still tied tightly around the prisoner's head.

One ex-prisoner described his time being shackled by his hands to a metal: the pipe was behind him protruding from a wall which forced him to hunch forward with his head at waist level. He told HRW: "It was a continual rotation between the interrogations, the pipe and, at night, the cell" (HRW/ME 1994:144, 300). The prisoner is passed with regularity along this kind of assembly line of pain. Because abuses are systematic (HRW/ME 1994b:xi) we can know that the treatment of this particular prisoner is typical of the treatment of most prisoners. "After day twelve [of interrogation], they tied me to one of the pipes every day except Saturday." The torturers are workers like any other worker in Israel, given Saturday as a day of rest, making even more literal Feldman's metaphor that likens the tortured prisoner to a product.

"When they first tie you to the pipe, you are in real pain. One minute is like a year" (my emphasis, HRW/ME 1994:144, 300). While the body is constrained and compressed, time slows and unfolds, taking on grotesque proportions in inverse relation to the tightening and squeezing down of the body. By constricting the body in a particular limited realm of space, through immobilization that effectively circumscribes the person within her or his body boundaries, time and the body itself are made an instrument of the body's own pain.

In all illustrations of the bodily positions prisoners are forced to hold, the head is shown covered with a hood and pointed to the ground (HRW/ME 1994:117, 125, 133, 141). A man in Al-Fara'a prison said the guard "threatened that if I didn't keep to the prison rules -- to put my hands behind my back and lower my head whenever I saw a soldier -- he'd throw me in the [solitary confinement] cells" (LSM 1984:19). The prisoner continues to be literally oppressed and belittled with this downward directing of his shrunken spatial field.

One commonly discussed form of position abuse is the shackling of detainees to what they call the "kindergarten chair ," to which they are tied for days at a time. One prisoner recalls being tied into one of these chairs: "During the first two weeks, my legs were shackled to the

chair. I had a constant gash on the back of my legs from the seat of the chair. You are so filthy, the salt from your sweat gets into your wounds. It hurts so much that you think you will never be able to keep sitting. The shabeh [position abuse] is the worst part" (HRW/ME 1994:290). Again, the body and its natural processes, in unnatural conditions, is made to hurt itself. And once again, a domestic object becomes a means of violation.

These kindergarten chairs are undersized chairs which sometimes have shortened front legs. This causes the prisoner to slope forward, again, with head directed towards the ground, and increases the strain on the prisoner's legs and wrists (HRW/ME 1994:114-122; cf. Schmemann 1997:A-14). The infantalization caused by this treatment is exacerbated by the classroom symbolics employed. In some interrogation facilities, the "kindergarten chairs" are lined up in a long indoor corridor outside the interrogation rooms. "There can be up to thirty persons shackled to 'kindergarten chairs' at one time. They are forbidden to talk with one another. In the Gaza interrogation wing, the corridor, called 'the Bus' by detainees, contains three separate rows of chairs stretching the length of the corridor" (121). The detainees are arranged as students waiting to be taught the lessons of state power. Palestinians are to be resocialized as uncivilized individuals, forced to be unworthy of a citizenship the state refuses to confer upon them anyway. Perhaps one Israeli interrogator has provided the most revealing clue as to what the purpose of the interrogation ritual and the meaning of this torture-lesson might be: the interrogator told his prisoner, "Here, a good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian" (B'Tselem 1992:50). What the Palestinians are being taught is how to disappear.

5. Imprisonment: Imprisonment and sentencing are formal extensions of all that I have already described; although, even the formality is dispensed with in the case of administrative detainees who are imprisoned without trial or charge, indefinitely. The ease with which initial incarceration expands into indefinite periods of imprisonment indicates the centrality of the interrogation process.

As Lisa Hajjar has described it, interrogation is the most significant stage in defendants' experiences of the 'military court system.' Prisoners describe interrogation as "'the real trial. What goes on in the courts is just theater.'" (p.615). Interrogation, and the confessions that sometimes result, are the primary means by which Palestinians are convicted.

As should be clear by now, some common tactics, images and themes appear throughout the incarceration process. And they reappear, in starkly homologous form, within Israeli policies aimed at the Palestinian population at large. Remember that I began with the process of arrest, noting the emphasis that is placed on the domestic realm, the disruption of privacy. Family homes are a favored focus and arena for the display of power by the occupation authorities. There has been, especially since the beginning of the intifada, a "massive increase in the number of houses demolished and sealed by the Israeli authorities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" (Al-Haq 1993:3) , which continues apace in spite of the Oslo accords. "Orders for house demolition or sealing are imposed in addition to any sentence that a military court may later pass on the person accused" (6). The Israeli government has demolished 2,000 Palestinian homes in the West Bank in the last ten years (Palviews 02/096). (In contrast to the increase in the rate of Palestinian home demolitions, Israeli housing and settlement construction is intensifying throughout the West Bank, most notably in Jerusalem.)

Families are often notified in the middle of the night, that they have thirty minutes to an hour in which to remove all of their belongings before the house is destroyed. This emphasis on the disruption of domestic space is a significant manipulation of familial ties. It is a technique of intimidation repeated at many levels of Palestinian-Israeli confrontation. Palestinians are almost always denied building permits (a practice which has become especially intense since Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister), even though such permits are required by Israeli law before any Palestinian may begin construction or expand on an existing house. Those who build without a permit, which any newly established or growing family is more or less forced to do, run the risk of having their houses demolished.

In her study of the Tshidi of Southern Africa, Jean Comaroff (1985b), following Bourdieu, has emphasized the significance of the space of the home and the actions within it to the processes of "socialization, which invisibly tun[e] the minds and bodies of those who people them to their inner logic" (54). The material, spatio-temporal form of the house is a medium of enculturation guiding the body's movement within it as within the social structure, non-discursively and unconsciously imbuing the body, its movements and postures, with social significance. For the Tshidi under colonialism the house emerged "as the primary social and symbolic unit" which became "the focus of efforts to recenter a dislocated world and to resist the forces of domination" (57).

In contradistinction, for Palestinians the house, now that it has come under Israeli attack through all these modalities, is yet one more medium of disorientation. The destruction of the house is both symbol and practice of the Israeli government's systematic control over their lives. The occupying force persists in the investiture of the Palestinian's bodies and homes with a logic of shame and insecurity. If nation-hood implies a bounded 'home'-land in which the state can ensure the domiciles of its citizens, then the violent invasion and destruction of the Palestinian's actual homes is an apt metonymic enactment of their nation-less state. Any structure of encompassment that might afford a person some modicum of protection, security and privacy, be it a house, body, or nation-state, has become for the Palestinians a forcibly appropriated arena whose disintegrated boundaries now attests to their shrinking freedom. No border within which a Palestinian might seek comfort--whether t be a corporeal, material, or territorial border--is inviolable. Writing about torture scenes in general, Elaine Scarry has noted that the reduction of the victim's secure social spaces exists in inverse proportion to the state's growing power (1985:36-38). Indeed, Scarry's metaphoric formulation finds literal expression in the case at hand. The rate of actual territorial expansion of the Israeli state has increased especially since the 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles. In the proliferation and expansion of settlements that has occurred, Palestinians are squeezed into ever more tightly bounded and fragmented areas of land. The Israeli-settled lands are then obsessively guarded and clung to as a means to "state security."

There is yet another tactic by which Israel targets families as the focus of Israeli repression: Once suspects have been removed from their houses, interrogators might attempt to force confessions of male detainees by threatening to rape the detainee's female kin. They might also insult the sexual integrity of the detainee's mothers and sisters. Female detainees are regularly sexually threatened, harassed, fondled or raped. Interrogators also often try to pressure detainees who are mothers by berating them for leaving their children unattended, or by calling their children in their presence, an act which is understood by the detainee as a display of the Israelis' insidious knowledge of their no longer private, family life (see Thornhill 1992) .

The brutalization of families, destruction of domestic spaces, and the desecration of Palestinian reproductive capacities all point to an Israeli attempt to threaten, if not thwart completely, Palestinian social reproduction. While such tactics are common in coercive situations around the world, this pattern of sexualized assault and intimidation indicates a possible Israeli conception of Arab culture according to which they devise techniques thought to be most painful and terrifying to Palestinians, both physically and psychologically. Their manipulation of family ties and the sexualized idiom through which interrogators apply pressure reflects Israeli beliefs about Palestinian society as being dominated by an "honor and shame complex" (cf. Peristany, Herzfeld), and by conceptions of gendered personhood. While it is the case that many Palestinians do hold that women must be virgins until they are married, and that a girl's reputation is in part determined by her interactions with men (and with unrelated males, she should not have much contact at all), there is a good deal of variation in these attitudes, often differentiated by class lines and religious orientation. Those with formal political training often understand the Israeli threats and practices as tactics contrived to play upon particular social and personal sensitivities, and therefore have inverted, at least in discourse, the "traditional" notion of honor. For many of these women and men, honor is not about maintaining sexual "purity." It is instead acquired through bravely enduring confrontations with their Israeli enemies. One woman described her interrogation as involving repeated threats of rape from her interrogators. She said, "They use this. I said to them, 'Sure, go ahead, do whatever you want. It is not a matter of honor. I'll have more honor if you do it because you force me to do it, I didn't ask for it.'" This is a typical account of sexual threat and defiance given by women prisoners who refuse to adhere to the Israeli script that would have them succumb to the interrogator on account of their own supposed cultural mores. Could it be that honor has emerged as such only through this colonial confrontation? Honor is now a social category and political trope, presumed and defined by the Israelis, taken up and redefined by the Palestinians, and made central to the conflictual definition of personhood, originating from an Orientalist projection by the Israelis onto the Palestinians, and their assumed cultural difference.

We see, then, how the private space of the (sexual) body and the house meant to shelter it has become a primary locus of Israeli attempts to control and obstruct Palestinian population expansion, and in response it has become a theater of war and resistance for Palestinians. Now let us turn to the problem of immobility. Position abuse is metonymic of what the Israeli state seeks to impress upon the population at large. Through curfews, road blocks, checkpoints, village closures, deportations, bypass roads, and by the countless required--but nearly impossible to obtain--"permits" for work and home construction, the state imposes upon the Palestinians severe restrictions on space and time, immobilizing their bodies and paralyzing their economic growth and expansion of population. What one Palestinian human rights group called a "super blockade" that closed the Territories in September of 1998 left 50,000 Palestinian laborers employed in Israel unable to go to work. Israel thus imposes restrictive policies against the Palestinians which are the absolute inverse of what the state does to foster its productive citizens and the absolute parallel of what is done to the torture victim's body. Position abuse not only shrinks the body, as it is folded into small spaces and bound tightly to itself, it also immobilizes it to the point of agony. The sexualized threats and sexual assaults also attempt to atomize that individual, to eclipse the possibility of that person's resocialization and reproduction after being released.

The "judaization" of Jerusalem is just one more example of the ways in which Palestinians are being squeezed off of the land and into ever smaller "bantustans," as they are commonly called by analysts of the situation, or out of the territory completely. Taking the issue of Jerusalem, we see that Israeli policies are explicitly intended to increase the number of Jews in East Jerusalem and increase the difficulty of living there as a Palestinian. An Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, has described the methods as follows: "Systematic and deliberate discrimination against Palestinians in land expropriation, planning, and building, while building and investing extensively in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. The result is a shortage of thousands of apartments for the Palestinians, leaving many residents no option but to leave the city to solve their housing problems… The refusal, prior to 1994, to process family unification requests submitted by female Jerusalem residents for their non-resident husbands. As a result, in order to live with their husbands, many women have been compelled to leave the city" (1998: 5). It hardly need be pointed out the gendered nature by which population excision is being effected here in yet another arena. The continued construction of settlements atop Jebel Abu Ghneim (Har Homa) has completed the settlement ring enclosing Jerusalem that prevents Palestinian expansion.

In addition to the various practices that serve to minimize the person and the population, this notion of reduction runs throughout discourses about Israel on the part of political analysts and social critics. Consider Edward Said's description of Zionism:

Thus Zionism initially portrayed itself as a movement bringing civilization to a barbaric and/or empty locale, and indeed from 1880 to 1918 the movement marketed itself to the Ottoman and British Empires as advancing their schemes for Palestine. Later, of course, Zionism transformed itself into a movement bringing Western democracy to the East...Zionists set out systematically either to reduce the Palestinians to a nonexistent population or to strip down those who remained to the status of a silent coolie class" (1997:17-18; my emphasis).

Zionist efforts to remove and reduce the Palestinians have continued unabated in many forms since (and before) Israel's "War of Independence" that established the state. The 1948 war, known by the Palestinians as "The Disaster" [al-Nakba], created some 760,000 Palestinian refugees (out of a total of 1.3 million Arabs in Palestine) dispersed among the surrounding Arab countries (Morris 1987:1,8, 298). In 1967 the Six-Day War between Israel and four Arab countries created another 400,000 Palestinian refugees, and placed the rest of the Palestinian residents of historic Palestine under subjection of Israel in the military occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Farsoun & Zacharia 1997:134, 181). An important point to be made here is that Palestinians of the Occupied Territories, from which most of those tortured by the Israeli state come, have never been considered citizens of Israel. They have been, and many argue that they continue to be, colonized subjects living under the arbitrary power of a Zionist settler state, a power that works to dispossess Palestinians of their lands and eclipse the potential for viability on that land. As Said remarks, however, Zionist colonialism, unlike most other nineteenth-century European powers, did not have as its goal the redemption and civilizing transformation of the "natives." Instead, the colonialists' purpose was the creation of a Jewish National Home which, for the Zionists, required the negation, disappearance, or subordination of the resident Arabic population, their culture and language (Said 1997:24, 31). Position abuse and house demolitions are two key tools for subordinating and disappearing the Palestinian population.

In addition to Edward Said, many have written on the ways in which Israeli propaganda, political speech, education, media and other state institutions, try to "disappear" the Palestinians. Nadia Abu El-Haj (n.d.) and Ted Swedenburg (1995) have shown how Israeli archeology and

museums rename and re-present the landscape in an effort to create an "inherent" connection between ancient and modern Israelis, and in the process omit any admission of an Arab presence in that land. The torture of position abuse is thus a technique of reduction and erasure among many.

The imbrication of torture within a systematic multitude of governing techniques as I have described it, might lead us to the question of what distinct sorts of political and legal tools and popular efforts should be brought to bear upon distinct torturing regimes. It is likely that eradicating Israeli torture of Palestinians would require the dismantling of certain key aspects of Israel's political, legal, and ideological infrastructure. The definition and rights of "citizens" and "residents" being a key example; Orientalist conceptions of Arabs' relationship to violence being another (Violence is the only language they speak, and it is the only language they understand--so the spurious justification goes). Understanding torture, understanding its sources of support and legitimization, recognizing its usefulness within the broad and entrenched political goals of the Israeli nation-state/colonial regime, showing just how brutally logical the techniques are, all of this indicates that eliminating torture in Israel is a significantly more daunting task than can be accomplished by publishing scores of human rights reports and press releases, as each of the 40-some-odd human rights and prisoner support organizations in Palestine/Israel do with such tenacity. My point is, arguments and actions against torture must be tailored to the specific arguments and actions used by the state perpetrator, and an anthropological approach that attends to the minutiae of bodies and pain, politics and power, both the productivity and destruction wrought by that congerie, can help us understand the reasons for torture and the means to its eradication. A question that might here be raised, and to which I do not have an answer, is: If people recognized the specifics of torture here, what efforts-- beyond what is already being done--could be implemented?

Attention to the specific experiences and techniques of torture also helps complicate, and sometimes contradict, prevailing theories about torture in the modern age. As a final comment, I would like to suggest that Foucault's contention that power has become reclusive and subtle

is belied by the Palestinian case. According to Foucault, "the public performativity so crucial to the 'ceremony by which power [was] manifested" (Foucault 1979:47) does not exist in the same way as it did in classical times. To an extent, thanks to human rights groups and other resistance activists (often motivated and sustained by those very humanist sympathies and sensibilities that Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish), and through the technologies of print and electronic media, torture is documented, publicized and railed against in many parts of the globe. Consider a statistic I mentioned above, that over 40 human rights and prisoner support organizations exist in the West Bank and Gaza, (over 20 in Jerusalem and Ramallah alone) which dedicate themselves to documenting and publicizing the abuses experienced by Palestinians in Israeli jails--and after Oslo in Palestinian jails as well. These organizations are a response to the infusion into the society of a large number of those who have been arrested and tortured. According to one Palestinian human rights group, between 1967 and 1987 the Israeli occupation authorities arrested about 535,000 Palestinians, and 175,000 were incarcerated during the seven years of the intifada (from 1987-1994) (Palviews 02/080). All of this complicates considerably the distinction between public and private displays of state power and violence. Israeli methods of interrogation and torture are widely known and, especially during the intifada, were widely discussed. There is little to suggest that the occupation authorities tried to hide their brutalities from the Palestinians. Given the amount of time and energy invested by Israeli "security" forces in quelling the rebellion by means of searches, curfews, beatings, arrests, torture and sometimes killing all categories of Palestinians, from children to old women as well as the shebab (youth), and considering the relentlessness with which they tried to disrupt even the most banal activities of Palestinians' everyday life--such as selling vegetables or shopping at market--it seems likely that state power was--and continues to be--explicitly intended to be widely known, seen, and felt. Saturating the Palestinian population with arrested and tortured persons means that torture IS public, if not in its initial enactment, then in its re-enactment through memory, narrative and commemorative ceremony. And it IS visible: through the bodies of the dead, paraded through the streets as martyrs, in the demolished remnants of prisoners' houses, in the thousands of individuals unable to live productively because of severe physical injuries and psychological damage, and in the numerous institutions established to help defend and recuperate these victims, torture is obvious and everywhere. While the power of the classical sovereign which Foucault describes was purposefully displayed at the behest of the state, here it is also the subject population that publicizes the punishment. Foucault, in asserting the post-Enlightenment replacement of torture with discipline, seems to have mistakenly collapsed the ideology (the ideology of humanism) with actual political practice (which continues in its public barbarism).

So, a set of questions emerge from this: What is the significance of the publicity of torture? As a critique of Foucault? And for our understandings of power, especially as it works through the colonial- or nation-state? Again, I have no ready answers.