From the Language of the File to the Language of the Wound: How to Write the Tragedy of Palestinian Prisoners

Author

Issa Qaraqe

I was drawn to a research paper by researcher and activist Amani Sarahana, published in the sixth issue of the Palestinian Journal of Liberation Studies, titled: "The Loss of Language in the Structure of Violence: Prison as a Model." In it, she addressed the role of legal language in describing crimes, and its use sometimes to cover them up or distort them with a deliberate technique that serves colonial objectives, stripping the victim of their voice as a voice of justice and resistance.

Sarahana's paper reinforced my belief that the legal language used by human rights institutions to describe the conditions of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli occupation prisons remains stereotypical and poor, and is unable to provide a cognitive description of the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster that prisoners are subjected to after October 7, 2023, and during the war on Gaza. I found no indication in the reports of the United Nations and the Human Rights Council, nor in the reports of many human rights organizations, that what is happening in prisons is genocide against a protected group, accompanied by the genocide in Gaza.

Testimonies and incidents inside the prisons reveal that what is happening to the bodies and souls of prisoners is greater than just a war crime or a crime against humanity or arbitrary violations, as described by human rights reports; it is genocide, with deliberate destructive intentions by the Israeli government.

If we return to the definition of genocide in international law, we find that it does not require immediate mass killing, but rather includes, in addition to killing, causing serious physical or mental harm to a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, and deliberately inflicting living conditions intended to destroy the group physically, in whole or in part. Slow death, executions, lethal torture, starvation, rape and sexual assaults, enforced disappearance, denial of medical treatment, and holding prisoners in hellish and coercive conditions—all of this and more is considered a form of genocide, indeed one of the most severe and harshest types of genocide; because it occurs silently behind walls, and because it targets defenseless prisoners who are not in a war zone, and are protected under international law.

The researcher Sarahana, while reading terrifying and horrifying testimonies of prisoners who have been subjected to the most heinous forms of sadistic and retaliatory torture in prisons and camps, questions the reasons behind the inability of the language used to encompass the suffering of the prisoners and reveal the reality of violence and break it with a liberating legal language and an act of resistance.

Perhaps because this language was born primarily from the womb of imperialism and colonial powers that established international law after World War II, it is not a neutral language, but rather a historical product linked to the European colonial project and Western hegemony. It is likely that the vocabulary of the human rights lexicon was born from the experience of the European victim, and was not designed to encompass the suffering of colonized peoples.

The crimes did not stop at the body, but extended to language itself as a tool of concealment; the crime exists, but the prevailing legal language is incapable of naming it as it deserves.

While the Holocaust is described as genocide and an attempt to annihilate an entire people, the crimes against prisoners are described as medical neglect, mistreatment, excessive violence, administrative detention, and 'unlawful combatant', and harsh detention conditions, as if the language itself has been emptied of its capacity to condemn.

Reports have indicated that the punishment system in Israel is no longer a system, but rather a violent, barbaric, and limitless Nazi invasion, invoking the discourse of Jewish exceptionalism in a racist manner, which grants the Jewish victim a unique moral position, while leaving the Palestinian victim in a linguistic gray area that does not reach the level of full humanity.

Here lies the great paradox: the crime itself may be more brutal, yet it finds no language available that does it justice. Rape with tools and trained dogs, starvation, beating, breaking, and death in documented torture camps, all these crimes are still described in wooden and statistical language that conceals the stories of the victims, their names, and their suffering, as if I see it building new prisons of words.

The cell door may be locked with a key, and the body may be chained, but there is another, less visible constraint: the stripping of a person's right to narrative, and the redefinition, engineering, and arrangement of them within the language of the oppressor.

The language of international law concerning Palestinian prisoners is a language of conflict; it is more administrative than liberatory, entrenching control and managing the crisis rather than resolving it. Therefore, in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the prisons, and the lack of language and words to describe the horrors of Israeli brutal practices, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, turned the table on the dictionary of international law language, when she presented a bold critique of what she called the tyranny of the international liberal system based on colonialism and racism, clarifying that human rights discourse is often a mask that conceals the dominance of major powers, and called for the writing of a liberatory international law that transcends the existing liberal structure.

The most dangerous thing that legal language does when it separates from the context of colonialism and occupation is not that it denies the suffering of the prisoner, but that it redefines them: from a resistor in a national liberation movement to a subject of administration and protection, and from a prisoner in the context of a struggle for freedom and the right to self-determination to a detainee within a security system and a file.

Thus, the issue is reduced from the question: Why does a person resist? to the question: How should one be detained? From the question of the legitimacy of occupation and the structure of control to the question of the conditions of detention.

If the legal language merges with the language of prison and enters its alphabet, it creates new constraints that waste the lives of thousands of prisoners between iron and concrete walls, between exile and absence.

As the prisoner Nasser Abu Surour said: 'The harshest thing in prison was the stripping of my language; all the actions of life disappeared from the language of prison, a language that imprisoned me in my body and stripped my linguistic behavior of all actions of identity, until I became without self and without presence, a language that added to place and time the attribute of infinity.'

I agree with Sarahana that language is a cognitive and moral structure, and an essential part of narrative, memory, collective perception, and the production of truth. This is what the prevailing legal language lacks: an administrative language in cold molds, a language of control, that transforms human life into a bare life subject to disposal and exception, concealing the humanity of the victim and reshaping it cognitively so that it becomes invisible.

This calls for the development of an alternative legal language that restores dignity to the Palestinian person. Here lies the academic and moral responsibility to dismantle this language and reveal its colonial structure.