Haaretz January 26, 2016
What Can Be Learned From a Lone Wolf in Chains?
Israeli
military interviews with Palestinian attackers were conducted within an
unequal power relationship that is unethical and of dubious value.
Amira Hass |
Border Police troops secure the location of a 'lone wolf' stabbing in East Jerusalem, May 20, 2015.Credit: Tali Meyer
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Senior IDF officers visit Palestinian terrorists in jail in effort to understand their motives
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'Dying for nothing': Palestinian authorities at a loss trying to stop youths from attacking Israelis
Prison
wardens were dispatched to conduct applied, goal-oriented scientific
research on their prisoners. That was one of the interesting news
reports last week. We first read about it in Amos Harel’s column in
Haaretz on January 15: “Senior IDF officers visit Palestinian terrorists
in jail in effort to understand their motives,” after which other
journalists reported on it.
IDF
commanders and intelligence officers, as well as officers from the
office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories,
met in prison with Palestinians who had carried out lone-wolf attacks
and survived. (According to the IDF Spokesman in the West Bank, 88 such
attackers have been killed and 40 arrested during the current wave of
violence. The police spokesman’s office said it did not have the
parallel data regarding the fate of attackers in Israel and East
Jerusalem.)
The
reports show impressive willingness on the part of the investigators to
give up their prior assumptions. (They found, for example, that neither
religiosity nor incitement on social networks motivated the young
people, though broadcasts by Hamas and Islamic Jihad did have an
influence on them.)
An
Army Radio report presented, among others, the following findings: The
young men feel a deep alienation from sources of authority. Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas was not mentioned in the conversations. They
have no organizational affiliation, but they share a feeling of national
unity. They are alienated from their parents, with stories of violence
within the family. They come from normative families and they are not
marginal youths. Their ideology is abbreviated, like headlines, and
shallow. The majority don’t even know what Israel is. Their only contact
with Israelis is with soldiers at checkpoints.
This
profile of young Palestinians is not made up. Indeed, one doesn’t need
to travel as far as a prison to sketch it. But, according to the media
reports, something basic is missing from the officers’ analysis.
The
reports did not tell us how many of the detainees met with the
investigators, how many of them were wounded during capture, where the
meetings were held - in cells or prison administration offices. And, if
in offices, were the detainees led to them with chains on their legs?
The reports don’t say if there were detainees who refused to speak, and
if so how many. Nor what happened when they refused, whether the
investigators came wearing uniforms and identified themselves by their
full names or whether the prisoners were wearing Israel Prisons Service
uniforms.
These
details remind us that the research was conducted within a double
framework of unequal power relations - inside both the envelope of
prison and the envelope of enforced Israeli rule.
Research
under unequal power relations is unethical, even if it leads to
conclusions that are not incorrect. Palestinian political prisoners have
always been an enticing target for official researchers – psychologists
in the service of the security services and ex-Mossad employees who
smoothly landed at university security research institutes.
A
Palestinian legal expert assumes that the detainees viewed the talks
with the officers of COGAT and the army as a continuation of the Shin
Bet and police investigations and it never occurred to them that they
could refuse. But the truth is that even prisoners with a high level of
political awareness have agreed in the past to be interviewed by Israeli
researchers and journalists.
An oxymoron
The
combination of “ethics” and “Israeli” in any case sounds like an
oxymoron to them, so they assumed the investigators would not understand
their opposition to being interviewed. Maybe they wanted to break their
prison routine, maybe they were flattered that they were being listened
to, or maybe they were promised lenient treatment. Maybe they hoped
that this time they would succeed in convincing an establishment
researcher that the problem is in him and the regime he represents.
From
the press reports on the findings of the research, it appears that the
investigator-warders ignored the fact that all Palestinians are
prisoners in one type of Israeli prison or another - Ofer and Nafha, the
giant concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip, the enclaves of the
West Bank, intentionally neglected neighborhoods in Jerusalem,
unrecognized villages. What is certain is that the researchers do not
recognize that they are jailers.
And
according to the reports in the press, the investigators avoided the
reason of all reasons. Yes, the occupation. Fathers smack their sons in
every society, but the young man who lives in choked-off and crowded
Isawiyah and passes through the green, spacious French Hill receives a
daily slap in the face from the Israeli authorities, who tell him he is
inferior.
True,
the family is falling apart as a source of authority. Which is not
surprising, given that Israel steals the land, water and homes of
Palestinian families, puts limitations on movement that cause fathers to
lose their jobs, hits and arrests adults in front of their children.
Ideological shallowness is common these days. But the steadfastness in
the face of oppression, banishment and humiliation enriches the
observational and cognitive abilities of every Palestinian. Their words
are not polished and their thoughts are phrased as slogans, but the
depth is there, and there is wisdom in the depths of desperation.
Whoever embarked on such applied research, knowing in advance that the
essence could not be touched, is a prisoner and not just a jailer.
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