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Prison is for Men: Remembering Al-Fara’a by Michael Kennedy

AL-FARA’A:

“At that time (1982) you could be sent to prison for 6 months for just owning a Palestinian flag. We began to resist this. The student movement in protest of the occupation really gaining momentum in the early 1980s. We began to organize, to hold demonstrations, sing national songs, raise flags – all of which were illegal. They opened Al Fara’a to crush the youth/student movements resisting the occupation. We were sent there to break our will.”1

The Al-Fara’a compound, located 20 kilometers northeast of the West Bank city of Nablus,

was built by the British in 1932 to serve as a military camp. The facility was utilized for the

same purpose by the Jordanian army until the facility was seized by Israel in the 1967 war.

The facility fell into disrepair until 1982 when then Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense

Forces Rafael Eitan ordered the establishment of a facility to crush growing popular

opposition to Israeli occupation, “even if it does not have the conditions of a normal

prison” (Law in the Service of Man 1984, 4). A “normal” prison is a facility where criminals

are held to complete a sentence after being prosecuted in a court of law. It is staffed by

police and is expected to provide at least minimal standards of food, health and sanitation.

However, as Eitan ordered, Al-Fara’a was not a “normal” prison.

Al-Fara’a was a military base used for detention and torture, staffed by military soldiers

rather than police. Prisoners were not sent there to serve a sentence, but rather to be isolated

from their community, humiliated, tortured – perhaps with the intention of extracting a

confession, which would lead to incarceration in a “normal” prison. In short, Al-Fara’a was a

torture camp for Palestinian youth.

1 The narrative cited here and those in following pages are from interviews with former detainees recorded during my fieldwork at the former Al-Fara’a prison in August and September 2008.

Michael Kennedy is an M.A. s tudent in Anthropology a t The American Universi ty in Cai ro.

For the las t two years , he has also served as regional development coordinator for the

Research Journal ism Ini tia ti ve , an educa tional media NGO tha t provides technical and

conceptual media t raining to Pales tinian s tudents in Nablus , Wes t Bank.

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The establishment of Al-Fara’a should be understood within the context of a regular Israeli

military practice in the early 1980s called “population terture,” Israeli military slang for

operations intended as harassment or semi-torture. Captain Artzi Mordechai explains a

“terture” operation: “In addition to this business where we work to discover the

provocateurs, you terture the population. Population terture does not mean that you punish

those who did something, but you simply round up everyone, just like that” (Law in the

Service of Man 1984, 5). As student demonstrations (which included youth as young as 13)

began to rise in number and force, this practice of population terture became an increasingly

common military response. The most frequent manifestation of terturing practices was the

rounding up groups of Palestinian youths in a neighborhood, humiliating and beating them

publicly, and forcing them to sing the Israeli national anthem or crawl on all fours.2 Al-Fara’a

was a space that institutionalized this practice of population terture, making it routine and

systematized. In 1982, Al-Fara’a was (re)opened to provide a facility for this practice of

population terture, which coincided with a wide increase in home demolitions, curfews and

the withdrawal of basic services from neighborhoods across the Occupied Territories.

Until 1984 Al-Fara’a served as a place where “troublesome” youth were removed from their

communities, isolated and beaten, as a “warning” to Palestinians involved in nationalist

activities. A former prisoner recalls this period:

Sometimes there would be 120 of us there. Back then (1982) they just beat us in Al-Fara’a. Later they developed the torture cells. We were there when it was makeshift structures. We were shitting in holes and ditches. It wasn’t as sophisticated as it became later. For us at our time (1982-83), at the beginning, it was: you put the activist here, you isolate them from the community. And then you beat them, arrest them, humiliate them, stuff like this.

At its inception, Al-Fara’a was terture between walls: little if no interrogation, no advanced

torture techniques, short sentences, “only” beatings and humiliation, all meant as

“preventative detention” in order to discipline teenage boys who resisted the occupation by

organizing parades, displaying Palestinian flags and on occasion throwing rocks and Molotov

cocktails at Israeli soldiers.

However, in early 1984, Al-Fara’a began to evolve from a “preventative detention” site to a

“detention center,” intended to procure confessions to “crimes” such as political affiliation,

student and community organizing and stone throwing. Al-Fara’a ceased to be a place where

teenagers were sent and “merely beaten,” to a place where youth were sent to be tortured. In

2 For a more detailed account of public beatings: Peteet, Julie, “Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence.” American Ethnologist 21(1):31-49. (1994)

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the words of nearly every prisoner from Al-Fara’a I have interviewed, it was a place “to

break our will.”

A report on Al-Fara’a, issued by the Ramallah-based Palestinian human rights organization

Law in the Service of Man, notes that beginning in 1984:

Detainees are no longer detained without charge in the prison, but are interrogated on a number of accounts, usually participating in demonstrations or stone throwing, and are subjected to brutal physical and mental punishment during interrogation, aimed at procuring a confession. Frequently the detainee refuses to confess on a false charge and is later released without trial; at other times he does confess, mainly to avoid further maltreatment, and is usually subsequently convicted and sentenced primarily on the basis of this confession. Many former detainees have stated under oath that they falsely confessed to acts they had not committed in order to stop the punishment. (Law in the Service on Man 1984, 22)

The evolution of this prison, from a relatively crude and disorganized site of beatings and

“preventative detention” to a highly organized facility staffed by trained interrogators,

physicians and military personnel using their professional training toward the torture of

detainees, is, for me, the most startling feature of Al-Fara’a. This transformation is quite

emblematic of the course of Israeli activities in the Occupied Territories to date: ever

growing, from simple to complex, and increasingly employing the expertise of trained

professionals for economic, political and military goals pursued in the name of “security.”

MAKING MEN:

According to Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, 40 percent of the men in

the Occupied Territories have been detained by Israeli security forces, and 86

percent of those have been tortured.3 Because the arrest and detention of Palestinian

youth occurs with such regularity, and at such a massive scale, the

prison/interrogation experience is a defining feature in the youth of nearly half of

Palestinian men. As a collective experience, the carceral exists as a prominent theme

in Palestinian popular discourses, nationalist songs, poetry and literature, placing the

prison experience squarely within the master narrative of Palestinian dispossession.

In her 1976 novel Wild Thorns, Palestinian author and Nablus resident Sahar Khalifeh

narrates the experience of a Nablusi teenager named Basil, moving from his participation in

the national movement to his incarceration and reintegration into his community – his rites

of passage into political agency and manhood. I offer a literary reference here as a

3 This figure comes from an interview with the director of the Trauma Rehabilitation Center in Ramallah. It is a figure often cited in popular discourses related to prison and detention.

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companion to the ethnographic narratives that accompany each photo so as to further

exemplify the relationship of the carceral to Palestinian cultural discourses tied to prison,

masculinity and nationalism.

In Wild Thorns, Basil is arrested in the same manner as many of the youth who were sent to

Al-Fara’a, for participating in public displays of Palestinian nationalism. Basil does not

remember his arrest, an implication that he was beaten and lost consciousness. He regains

consciousness in “The Nablus Prison,” to the cheers of his cellmates:

May you live to get the same again, Basil! Prison’s for men, you know. We’ll have a party for you such as the world’s never seen. Hold your head up high and never let it fall. Prison’s for men, Abu al-Izz! (Khalifeh 1976, 115)

Basil’s fleeting status as hero is confirmed by his wounds, praised by his cellmates as

the “badges of honour he wears on his face and hand” (Khalifeh 1976, 116). Not

only has Basil become a man, he has become a father: Abu al-Izz, “The Father of

Glory.” He is now a symbolic father and protector of the Palestinian motherland. As

a father to a nation, Basil’s duty is to ensure his people’s safety and well being in the

face of imminent oppression by Israeli forces.

After his imprisonment, Basil returns home to his family intoxicated with his perceived

social status. After being teased by his brother about “wasting time in prison,” Basil

retaliates:

Morning and evening, day and night. Always reminding me of prison and its woes. Am I responsible for being put into prison? Or the imprisonment of others like me? No sir! Certainly not! No way am I responsible for the actions and interests of the occupation. And the terrors I witnessed are part of my national duty. Inside they told me that prison was for men. And that those who don’t go to prison, even for a day, will never become real men, even if they grow two moustaches rather than one. (Khalifeh 1976, 149)

In his eyes, it was prison that made Basil a man. He then equates his experience of

imprisonment and torture to his “national duty” as a Palestinian. If national duty and

“becoming a man” are satisfied through the prison experience, the implied message

is that one who has not experienced prison is either not a Palestinian or not a man.

Elaborating on this relationship between masculinity, nationalism and resistance in

Palestine, Joseph Massad writes:

Struggling against the Israeli occupiers and colonizers is not only an affirmation of Palestinian nationalist agency, it is also a masculinizing act

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enabling the concrete pairing of nationalist agency and masculinity (the two being already paired conceptually) and their logical inseparability within the discourse of nationalism. Thus, resisting occupation can be used to stage masculine acts as it performs nationalist ones. Through this national anti-colonial resistance, a new figuration of masculine bodies is mapped out on the terrain of the national struggle, one that becomes the model for Palestinian nationalist agency itself. (Massad 2006, 51, emphasis in original)

The interrogation center/prison is a primary site in which a Palestinian national masculine

identity is constituted. In its entirety, the prison experience (arrest, detention and release) is

an act of “resistance” to the Israeli occupation. These acts of resistance are a simultaneous

staging of masculine and national identities, producing both “men” and “Palestinians.”

AL-FARA’A REVISITED:

After the Oslo Accords, control of the Al Fara’a compound was transferred to the

Palestinian Authority, and it ceased to be a prison. Shortly after, a group of former prisoners

and community leaders recommended to Arafat that the facility be converted into a youth

center. Arafat agreed and the Al Fara’a Prison became the Al Fara’a Center. Since 1995 Al

Fara’a has hosted thousands of youth from across the West Bank each year to participate in

summer camps, leadership conferences and athletics.

The renovations are symbolic: the soldier’s mess hall has been converted into a dining room

for campers; the barracks that once housed the soldiers, interrogators and Palestinian

collaborators responsible for the atrocities committed at Al-Fara’a now host a new

generation of Palestinian youth. However, approximately one fourth of the facility remains

as it was when Al-Fara’a was under Israeli control, in keeping with the hopes of one day

turning Al-Fara’a into a museum. The torture cells and interrogation rooms, although in

disrepair, have not been altered since 1995. It is from this unrenovated section that the

images below were taken. During August and July 2008, I made a number of trips to Al-

Fara’a with former prisoners, many of whom had not been to the facility since the early

1980s. Each image here, and the accompanying narratives, are a result of these interviews.4

In her essay “Language and Body,” anthropologist Veena Das writes: “In repeatedly trying

to write the meaning(s) of violence against women in Indian society, I find that languages of

pain through which social sciences could gaze at, touch or become textual bodies on which

this pain is written often elude me” (Das 1997, 31). I too have had immense difficulty in

locating a “language,” academic or otherwise, with which to discuss the experiences of

torture and suffering at Al-Fara’a. Literary scholar Elaine Scarry argues that physical pain,

unlike other subjective experiences such as love or depression, cannot be written because

4 Two of the captions below were transcribed by my colleague Nora Barrows-Friedman.

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physical pain – “unlike any other state of consciousness – has no referential content. It is not

of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other

phenomenon, resists objectification in language” (Scarry 1995, 5). If Scarry is correct and

pain is the antithesis of language, does any attempt at conveying the pain of another – much

less the memory of pain which is perhaps more elusive – fiction? Perhaps more importantly,

is it necessary, or required of fieldwork, to attempt to relay the experience of pain rather than

analyzing only the narrative(s) of pain in their social/temporal/subjective functioning? Must the

imagination of the reader/viewer be stirred in order to study the pain of another?

Susan Sontag writes, “Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work

of an experienced artificer, its meaning – and the viewer’s response – depends on how the

picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words” (2003, 29). In elaborating on the

relationship between image, text and meaning, she writes, “All photographs wait to be

explained or falsified by their captions” (Sontag 2003, 10). In other words, all images are

ambiguous until defined and (in)validated by text. Instead of writing captions in the tradition

of photojournalism – such as “Holding cell no. 3, where detainees accused of stone throwing

were held” – to define particular spaces and experiences in Al-Fara’a, the images in this essay

are defined through narratives from my interviews with former prisoners, literary references

and legal testimony from Israeli interrogators at the facility.

And so instead of authoring only text to convey the experiences had between the walls of

Al-Fara’a, I opted to create photographs as a type of surface from which the narratives of

the site might be read. This method certainly does not exclude my role as author and the

creator of a particular anthropological object. However, I hope that the pairing of narrative

and image found here might present a different means of bridging the void between

narratives of pain and their visual/textual representation.

References

Das, Veena, ed. “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain.” Social

Suffering. Das, Veena and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

(1997)

Khalifeh, Sahar. Wild Thorns. New York: Interlink Books. (1976)

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Law in the Service of Man. Torture and Intimidation in the West Bank: The Case of Al-Fara’a

Prison. (April 1984)

http://www.alhaq.org/pdfs/Torture and Intimidation in the West Bank.pdf, (last accessed

March 19, 2009)

Massad, Joseph. “Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism.” The

Persistence of Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. New York: Routledge.

(2006)

Peteet, Julie. “Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural

Politics of Violence.” American Ethnologist 21(1):31-49. (1994)

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford

University Press. (1995)

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. (2003)

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“All of my friends went there. Fara’a was like a summer camp for us. Fara’a made us

strong. That kind of experience made us grow up, it made us men. When you get

released from Fara’a, it was something to be proud of.”

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“In 1989 I was sent to Al-Fara’a. The first day I got there, we were collecting our

equipment, and they came up to me and said, ‘Hey, how long are you here for?’ I

said, ‘Thirty days.’ So they said, ‘You want to do something interesting during your

time here?’ I said sure. So they took me over to the interrogation section. It has a big

yard out in front, and behind a wall, the interrogation rooms. They are regular rooms,

in a line, maybe six or seven of them. Behind the rooms are the cells, lots of cells.

Anyways, they took me inside a room, and there was an interrogator there. He was in

army uniform, but he was a Druze. They were all Druze in uniforms. There was a

detainee there, and they told me to hit him. I did. Afterwards, I didn’t like it, I said,

‘Look, this is not for me, thanks a lot, I don’t want to do this.’ So they showed me

the detainee’s file and said, ‘This guy is a terrorist, now you see, we need to do this.’

That’s how they work: they get you all mad at the Arabs, at the terrorists, and then

you are willing to keep doing it. So I kept on going, until the end of my reserve duty.”

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100

“I’d been in Al-Fara’a for six days. He dragged me off to the bathroom and told me

to take my cloths off and go under the water. I did as he said. It was nearly midnight

and the water was extremely cold. After this, he ordered me to masturbate until I

ejaculated. This I refused to do – I couldn’t – and when he insisted, I tried, but wasn’t

able to do it, so he brought an elastic band and began to beat my penis until I

screamed so loudly that he stopped. He told me I had two minutes to get dressed. I

started putting my clothes on and was just getting the last thing on when he said,

‘You’re too late, take your clothes off again.’ It went on like this for more than an

hour, and when it was nearly morning, he left me in the cell.”

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“We sometimes were made to sit on a concrete bench, blindfolded and hands and

feet tied with plastic ties. If you struggled with your hands, the ties would get tighter

and sometimes our wrists bled or the circulation was cut off and our hands would

swell up. We were forced to sit there for days on end. Sometimes the soldiers

guarding the walls from above would throw stones at us or dump buckets of cold

water and urine on us.”

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103

“The x’s are where they put the children in a sort of confinement; they were ‘put

away’ for an indefinite amount of time. We went away and didn’t know when we

were coming back. The x’s are about 12 rooms, each one 4 feet by 12 feet, and a tiny

window. I stayed here, everyone stayed here at some point, for months at a time, with

six to eight, even 15 other boys in one room. No toilet, just a bucket that would

regularly get tripped over and spill its fetid contents. Every day, if we were lucky, we

had one minute to empty the bucket and return back to the x. When a boy would

come back from being tortured, we would crowd to one side of the room so he could

sleep. We could hear the sounds of the generator outside. We could hear the sounds

of the adan [call to prayer] from the local mosque. We were disoriented and couldn’t

breathe in the x’s. There is still the heavy iron door. This sound we still can’t get out

of our heads. This was the sound of the x’s.”

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105

“God release us”

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“Inside they told me that prison was for men. And that those who don’t go to prison, even for a day,

will never become real men, even if they grow two moustaches rather than one”

-- from “Wild Thorns” by Sahar Khalifeh

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“They wanted me to make a stencil, because we were writing on the walls. They were

going to put these instructions in every room, but in Arabic: ‘mamnou3 al kitabah 3ala

el het’ (writing on the walls is forbidden). When they asked me to do this, they gave

me some cigarettes, and I smoked all of them, because I knew they were going to

beat the shit out of me anyways. So he told me, ‘Write this on a piece of cardboard,’

so they could spray paint over it onto the walls. So what did I do? I wrote three

[letter] ‘mim’s’: ‘mou mamnou3 al kitabah 3ala el het’. In Arabic, the first mim negates the

second two mims, so the sign said, ‘Don’t don’t write on the walls.’ And then they put

these instructions in every room, and so people started writing on the walls like crazy.

And people knew that I did it, and I’m glad I left afterward, because he wanted to

beat the shit out of me. Because we put these in EVERY room. And it became very

famous for me when I got out of prison: ‘He’s the guy who painted mamnou3 kitab…’

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“We were put into metal boxes and repeatedly tortured. Three-walled metal cabinets,

about 2 feet by 2 feet and six feet tall, were lined up against this wall. There were

about 15 cabinets. Children were put inside. They scratched their names into the

plaster. They scratched their village or city names into the plaster. Israelis would

enforce sleep deprivation for these kids in the boxes, kicking in the door when the

child tried to sleep or throwing rocks on the top to startle a child. In the blistering

heat and the chilly winter, music was turned up full blast and only 30-second snippets

of a song were played over and over again. Sometimes animal sounds were played.

This is where the will was broke.”

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111

112

“I stood inside the room with the interrogator and the detainee. The interrogator sat

facing me, the detainee with his back to me. And they would talk, in Arabic. I don’t

understand Arabic. And then, when the interrogator didn’t get the answer he wanted,

he made a sign, and I hit the detainee… With a club, my hand, foot, anything… They

would just say, ‘Try not to kill him.’ That’s all. We hit them everywhere – head, face,

mouth, arms, balls. Interrogations were a combination of beatings and questions. I

didn’t understand the questions.”

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“Confession is Betrayal” - “The korsi (chair). Your hands were tied to the ground, and

they put us in a small chair whose back legs were raised higher than the front legs to

cause pain to your back. There was a one-week record for the korsi. Because I was a

child, I was only kept for 5 days. There were days I would scream, ‘Just get me off

this chair, I’ll confess to anything.’ They would take me off, and I was ready to

confess. But then I remembered my mother. When I was arrested my mother hugged

me and said, ‘If you confess to anything, you are not my son.’”

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“Jerusalem is in our eyes, we will perish before it is oppressed”

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“Jerusalem is in our eyes, we will perish before it is oppressed”