ABSTRACT
“I don’t think about the future. Maybe one or at the most two days ahead. That is all I can think of”. Yasmin’s husband is serving a life sentence in a prison in Israel. He belongs to a political faction that can only be described as ‘extremist’, and has been convicted of activities that place him in the category of ‘security detainee’. This category is defined by the Israel Prison Service as “a prisoner who was convicted and sentenced for committing a crime, or who is imprisoned on suspicion of committing a crime, which due to its nature or circumstances was defined as a security offense or whose motive was nationalistic” (Baker and Matar 2011, vii). Because of this classification, Yasmin has not been allowed to visit him during the four years of his imprisonment. She is thirty-one, was married at fourteen, and lives with her six children in the top flat of her mother-in-law’s mansion in an upmarket district of a Palestinian city in the West Bank. There is little chance that Yasmin will be able to visit her husband in the foreseeable future, but in order to feel that she is still part of a conjugal relationship, she has to keep applying for a permit, despite the fact that she knows it is in vain.
