Basil Farraj,.

It’s been over two years now for us in the global pro-Palestine movement—for some of us, well over half a century—and we’re exhausted. We’ve been fighting on the streets, on campuses, in legislatures, at dinner tables, in jail… Still, every hour, the numbers refresh, the media tote up new data on what’s happening to Palestinians: how many dead, how many starving, freezing, sick, tortured. So, even with our (many) faults, our movement continues, despite a cynically engineered “ceasefire” and Donald Trump’s execrable peace plan.1 Now that the media reports of genocide have quieted a bit, we’re hearing more about Israel’s prisons.

“Prisons as a Frontline of Genocide” reads the October 7, 2025, report from Addameer, a Palestinian prisoner support organization in Ramallah.2 It’s one voice among a growing number describing Israeli prisons as torture camps. With an estimated 70 percent of Palestinian families having had at least one member in Israeli custody, prison has come to exemplify what is being done to Palestine.

There are news media reports of Israel’s “iron coffins,” where Palestinian prisoners are held for days inside small cages, unable to speak or move; “disco rooms” blasting music during savage interrogations; sexual violence.3 News of guards gang-raping a Palestinian man last year at the Sde Teiman detention camp has found its way into the mainstream.4 Recently, Ibrahim Salem, a Palestinian who described Sde Teiman guards breaking a chair over his chest and applying electricity to his genitals, was lucky enough to be released alive this August. He told the Middle East Eye:

You stand on one leg for two hours, then they would tell you: “Do you want me to help you?” And when you say yes, they tell you to say, “I am the son of a whore, I am the brother of a whore”…5

In the same article was an account from another former prisoner:

We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me. Then one of the dogs raped me—the dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces…6

I wasn’t sure if I should include that last example; I’m still worried it seems like prison porn. But a couple of good friends—prison abolition activists—said, “No. We have an obligation to see the truth.”

Seeing it, we cannot look away.

But, as we look on, most of us don’t stop to consider how Israel can actually make its treatment of Palestinians legal. After all, says duly elected prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “We are a Nation of Laws.”7

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem analyzes the trial of Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Nazi Holocaust. Although the book was fiercely controversial when it came out, it deserves to be remembered now far beyond its timeworn subtitle, “the banality of evil.” Whether or not Eichmann was doing his job “banally,” it’s the legal structures embedded in jobs like his that need attention. One of Arendt’s efforts to clarify her work was her essay “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in which she writes:

The moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of “genocide” or by counting the many millions of victims.… It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this “new law” consisted of the command “Thou shall kill,” not thy enemy but innocent people.8

Basil Farraj is a professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University in the West Bank. He is currently working on a research project on the global circulation of carceral practices—specifically, Israel’s role in structuring a legal genocide based largely on carceral policy. During the course of Basil’s growing up, his father, Abdul Razeq Farraj, was arrested many times; he is now in prison, where he has remained since his last arrest in 2019. But, since October 7, 2023, when Israel shut down communication between Palestinian prisoners and the outside world, there’s been virtually no word from him.9 This is true for thousands of families with loved ones in Israeli detention.

“My family’s experience is not unique,” Farraj tells me from Jerusalem in a Zoom conversation. “Prison leaves a trace on every Palestinian, so that the cause of political prisoners has formed our national consciousness, our identity, not only because of the high incarceration rate, but also because many Palestinian prisoners are political leaders, unionists, students, academics. The violence and torture inside prison resemble Israeli colonial tactics of control outside the Israeli prison itself.”

Farraj talks about his project, which is to trace how Israel has become “the epitome of carceral logic, so that, through violence, through legalizing torture practices, even its use of walls and the fragmentation of the West Bank—because this carceral logic extends beyond prison—Israel is a pioneer.”

What follows is an interview with Farraj about some of the elements inherent in........

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