Guardian readers: torture in Israeli prisons is state policy, not aberration

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Gwyn Daniel and Phil Gaunt respond to an article by Nesrine Malik about the horrors taking place in Israel’s prisons

Nesrine Malik’s incisive piece ( In Israel’s prisons, torture and death have become a norm that it barely tries to hide, 13 July ) lays bare the fact that all the illegal detentions, deaths, torture and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons are not aberrations from a legal system, but deeply embedded in the practices and intentions of the state. She mentions the psychological dimension to deliberately eroding the capacity of Palestinian civil society to exert any kind of autonomy.

As mental health practitioners, working alongside our Palestinian co-professionals, we have long recorded the ways in which practices of degradation, humiliation and debilitation constitute attacks on minds and relationships as well as bodies. They are designed to undermine the fabric of family, social and community life, and to destroy those systems of connectivity upon which all citizens, especially children, are dependent if they are to flourish. The carceral system is part of a set of state interventions which not only detain, murder, maim and mutilate Palestinian bodies, but also conduct an unrelenting assault on their growth, dignity, personhood and identity.

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