Criminalities and attacks against Gazan Palestinians, portrayed in the destruction of space, land, and the dispossession of life and livelihood were acknowledged by many internationally renowned entities, including the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Save the Children and others; some international actors criticized and even condemned Israeli criminalities against Gaza (e.g., Goldstone Report UN 2009; UN 2014).

Yet Israeli state criminalities against Gazans and Gaza are inflected by a sacralized, state-organized and racialized economy of dispossession (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a; Ward 2014), and discursive histories that supersede the narrative of the colonized (Johnson 2010).

Israeli state criminalities in Gaza, which include, as we have highlighted, a demoni- zation of space, a politics of asphyxiation and overkilling (geopolitical, biopolitical and necropolitical modes of governance), are made possible by Israel’s racialization of Palestinians as non-human Others. This violent racialization emanates from Israel’s settler colonial structure, which produces Palestinians in general and Gazan Palestinians in particular as what we term “living/dead no-bodies”, a native group that is “inherently erasable” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014a, 2015a, 2015b).

...

Thus, examining the past to understand the present politics and criminalities of settler colonial Israel informed our analyses. We suggest that criminologists and others looking to understand Israeli policies against Gazan Palestinians should carefully read the state’s visible and invisible acts of violence – including the hypervisible maiming and killing of bodies during established periods of “war” and those everyday biopolitical policies aimed at managing the population and maintaining them in conditions of “living death”.

The data shared and criminalities analysed in this article are evidence that theologized, racialized state-organized crime can be visible at times but can also be hidden in the microspaces of the everyday.

Done by 🇮🇱 uni

🇮🇱: We are innocent.

Still interesting that prisoners are increasing ...

Human rights organizations claim that Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, who are in prisons and detention centres in Israel itself, are being held in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Israel consistently maintains that this constitutes a legitimate exercise of its legal rights as the Occupying Power under the Convention.

For example, in 1977 a few hundred Palestinian prisoners were released on the occasion of religious festivals, and in 1985 some 1500 Palestinian political prisoners were released in exchange for three Israeli soldiers held by the PFLP (Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command) of Ahmad Jibril.

Indeed, during certain periods, the numbers of Palestinians held in custody by the Israeli Army were much higher than those held in civil custody. For example, in 1989, during the peak year of the Intifada, some 4000 Palestinian prisoners were held in the IPS prisons and nearly 9000 were imprisoned in various army prisons and detention centres (Cohen, 1989: 194).

An examination of the breakdown of Palestinian security prisoners accord- ing to a more detailed classification of offences shows that in 1993, 56.7 per cent were convicted for terrorist/hostile activity, 27.5 per cent were convicted for violations involving membership in an illegal organization, 5.2 per cent were convicted for production, possession or throwing an explosive, a grenade or a Molotov cocktail and 3.8 per cent were convicted for causing death. No corresponding data have been published for later years.

Palestinian sources provide much higher numbers. For exam- ple, The Palestinian Prisoner Society reported that upwards of 10,000 Palestinians were arrested throughout the course of the military reoccupation of Palestinian cities in April 2002, 5000 of whom remained in detention centres.

Done by 🇮🇱 Bar-Ilan University