Exporting Genocide

Basil Farraj: Any Palestinian is a subject who warrants arrest as a threat to public security or to public order. It’s a racial system that justifies all forms of violence. What Israel has created is this category of security prisoner, which is actually codified in law and legal practice. This distinguishes between Palestinian and Jewish prisoners, who are almost always classified as criminal when they’re sent to prison.

A Jewish person might be prosecuted, convicted, but as a prisoner is entitled to rights like furlough, visitation, conjugal visits. The war [on Gaza] has not affected them in any way. But the state does not grant Palestinians rights. Of course, there might be some Palestinians who are perhaps classified [by the Israeli penal code] as criminal. But Palestinians are still treated as security prisoners. So if you’re in the West Bank and you’re arrested, you would be subject to military law, military orders.

Two Legal Systems

susie day: In the United States, when people are sent to prison, they’re considered criminals, whether they’ve been convicted under civil or criminal law. How does military law work?

BF: Israel has created two legal systems. One in Palestine and one in areas like [air quotes] “Israel” and Jerusalem, which Palestinians refer to as “1948.” The first, in the Occupied Territories, is the military court system, where the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are subject to military laws and orders. The second system is Israeli civilian law, which is supposedly used to deal with Israeli settlers. It is these two sets of laws that are the basis for designating Palestinians as a threat to Israeli society.

The military system is built on the premise that Palestinians will be detained in front of judges who are military officials, as are the court transcribers, the prosecutors, the translators. In a sense, it’s the entire military industry that prosecutes Palestinians. And, in this Israeli military system, there’s a conviction rate of almost 99.9 percent.

Now, if you’re a Palestinian from 1948, that’s a different characterization. There are numerous categories that Israel has created, not only to detain Palestinians, but also to detain Arabs and other nationalities. In the eyes of the Israeli state, they all pose a threat.

sd: How have Palestinian prisoners reacted to this?

BF: There’s a long history of resistance inside Israeli prisons. Palestinians demanded authorities grant them visitation rights and books, and some sort of communication with the outside world. Historically, they went on numerous hunger strikes, in addition to other forms of resistance, to demand these rights. But over the past two-plus years, Israel unleashed a war. Obviously, there was a war unfolding in the Gaza Strip, but it was also in Israeli prisons, where the authorities rid prisoners of all of the rights they earned through decades of struggle.

Prisoners have no communication with the outside world, and the Israeli authorities engage in systematic starvation campaigns, continuously denying medical care. People are intentionally murdered inside Israeli prisons because of Israeli carceral policies. So, yes, we could say that what’s happening now is unparalleled. We’re talking about the deaths of at least one hundred Palestinian prisoners over the past two years. Most of those prisoners’ bodies are kept by the Israeli authorities; they refuse to hand them over to their families for burial.

Violent Documents

sd: After you become a security prisoner, where can it go from there?

BF: Understand that this is not simply locking up someone. There’s another face of Israel, the layers of carceral processes, the architecture of the military courts and orders to enable forms of violence and torture and the taming of Palestinian prisoners. We can begin, for instance, with a vast set of laws and over one thousand military orders that Israel has put in place since 1967.¹⁰“Israeli Military Orders in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Applied Research Institute—Jerusalem, accessed January 10, 2026, orders.arij.org. These laws allow early morning raids of Palestinian homes, the arrest of children.¹¹“Palestinian Officials Confirm Israel Imprisoned over 600 Children in 2025,” The Cradle, January 9, 2026, thecradle.co/articles/palestinian-officials-confirm-israel-imprisoned-over-600-children-in-2025. They detail interrogation practices, which can be brutal. They detail what form of punishment Palestinians should receive.

For example, military order 1651.¹²Israel Ministry of Defense, Order Regarding Security Directives [Consolidated Version](Judea and Samaria) (No. 1651), 2009 (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 2009), available at militarycourtwatch.org/files/server/military_order_1651.pdf. It’s bureaucratic, of course, and a very violent document, but it’s interesting. One of its segments says that a Palestinian who throws a stone at a military vehicle will be sentenced for up to ten years. It details how many days, how many months, a Palestinian should stay [in prison] or be interrogated without seeing a lawyer.

If you’re subject to military law, you can be arrested under the policy of administrative detention, which dates back to the early British colonial mandate.¹³“Administrative Detention,” B’tselem, accessed January 10, 2026, btselem.org/administrative_detention. If you’re administratively detained, they don’t have to tell you what your charges are; you can be denied legal counsel, held for indefinite periods of time. What I’m trying to say is that the law is used not to mitigate harm, but to enable violence, to enable torture.¹⁴The policy of designating “unlawful combatants” also permits someone charged with armed resistance—for example, membership in Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad—to be administratively detained without protection under the Geneva Conventions.

For instance, the 1999 Israeli High Court ruling allows the Israeli regime, in cases that the Israeli intelligence agency would describe as a “ticking bomb” scenario, to torture Palestinians outright.¹⁵Public Committee Against Torture v. Israel, HCJ 5100/94, High Court Ruling, September 6, 1999, available at btselem.org/sites/default/files2/hc5100_94_19990906_torture_ruling_eng.pdf. Very similar logic to CIA tactics, it’s a way of legalizing violence when the officer believes that there’s an imminent threat that must be resolved.

There are codes not only to detain Palestinians, but to allow for their continuous monitoring and surveillance. This logic of surveillance is not simply inside the prisons. Israel wants Palestinians to think and feel that they’re continuously being surveilled. Israel exports this surveillance because it prides itself on its surveillance security industry inside a homeland state.

sd: Isn’t there a Knesset bill that would legalize the execution of Palestinians, but not Jewish settlers?

BF: It passed its first reading.¹⁶“Israel Parliament Passes First Reading of Death Penalty for ‘Terrorism’ Law,” Al Jazeera, November 11, 2025, aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/11/israeli-parliament-nods-to-bill-to-introduce-death-penalty-for. So, it’s important to look at the broader logic; you can only understand it through these sets of laws. The idea of a law effectively directed against Palestinians is a racial law, right? [Since this interview, there are news reports of Israeli ministers sporting little noose pins resembling yellow lapel ribbons in support of the bill.]¹⁷Sharon Zhang, “Israeli Ministers Wear Noose Pins to Symbolize Support for Killing Palestinians,” Truthout, December 8, 2025, truthout.org/articles/israeli-ministers-wear-noose-pins-to-symbolize-support-for-killing-palestinians.

These laws, these legal codes, this Israeli technology, also allow for Palestinian displacement, for settlers to live on Palestinian stolen land. They have allowed a genocide to unfold for over two years. This is a carceral logic that penalizes any form of dissent and political mobilization in or out of prison. This is what I’m arguing—this logic has become mobile.

“US Carceral Logic Does Not Fit Here”

sd: How do we in the United States understand this? Here, in this system, there are laws that punish a person for alleged crimes. But, at least in theory, there’s also the prospect of “rehabilitation.” Is there anything like that for a Palestinian?

BF: The short answer is no; US carceral logic does not fit here. Parole is not granted to Palestinians. I’m sure, in the United States, there are cases where the prison system does not grant parole, but in the Israeli state, it’s across the board. Also, Israel hands down life sentences—many Palestinians have been in prison for over thirty-five years.

There have been Palestinian prisoners who have petitioned for release after passing two-thirds of a prison term, but in all these cases, Israel has denied any possibility of parole. The logic is always that these prisoners cannot be rehabilitated because they’re threats, inside and outside prison. Israel also does not have institutions to rehabilitate Palestinian prisoners because they were not arrested for a crime; they were arrested for resisting military law. That’s a very different kind of logic.

There are political prisoners whom Israel tries to deeply depoliticize, although Israel never recognizes them as political prisoners. Many prisoners, even before the war, were killed inside Israeli prisons for many reasons—Israel denied them medical care, for instance—and these prisoners actually petitioned for early release. There were campaigns outside the prison for release [notably, Walid Daqqah’s recent campaign], but Israel continuously denied them.¹⁸Dalia Taha and Waliq Daqqah, “‘We Call it a Policy of Slow Killing’: Why so Many Called for the Release of Waliq Daqqah,” In These Times, October 12, 2023, inthesetimes.com/article/palestinian-political-prisoner-walid-daqqah.

And why would Israel starve its Palestinian prison population? To break them, physically, psychologically, emotionally. I mean, not granting people the right to communicate with their families for over two years, not allowing them to leave their prison cells for long periods of time, that tells us the location of human rights in this Zionist regime. This regime wants to imprison Palestinians and recreate them as depoliticized subjects, removed not just of any will to resist, but of any desire to live.