Orchestrated Life: Subjectification in 1948 Israeli POW Camps

• In Event: Truth and Force

Abstract

Between 1948 and 1950, the newfound State of Israel held around eight-thousand Palestinians captive in Prisoner of War camps. In contrast to objectification literatures that view POW camps as mere hangers for storing humans or understand prisons mostly as sites of death and attrition, these camps demonstrate otherwise. The POW camps were also sites for attempts at subject formation. Israeli officials, archival evidence reveals, asked to constitute the POWs as loyal workers who have internalized their defeat and have accepted Israel as an established fact. With these attempts, even if unsuccessful, the POW camps point political theorists towards the productive aspects of relations of power and demonstrate the work of subjectification as a process of binding to a certain truth.

Author

• Shai Gortler, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville