This issue goes to press as many the world over live in a pandemic-induced state of the permanent temporary: stricken by widespread economic and social distress and unclear as to what the future holds; suspended in time without an end in sight and uncertain about what the “normal” we return to will be. For some, this condition of cyclical and ongoing crisis is a rupture. For many, and particularly for Palestine and the Palestinians, it is a way of life. Violent upheaval, collective trauma, confinement, and dispossession are not exceptional interruptions but rather markers of the temporal and spatial suspension that constitute everyday life.
One such poignant marker is Israel's vast carceral system of surveillance, arbitrary detention, and imprisonment. Since 1967, over 20 percent of Palestinians in the occupied territories have been detained in this system.1 Today, there are at least 4,300 Palestinian so-called security detainees and prisoners...
University of California Press