ABSTRACT
In Mandatory Palestine the British built a police station and a detention centre in almost every town and city. In the Palestinian cities, the yellow
buildings stand as signifiers of the seat of political/colonial power. These
buildings were occupied first by the British administration, then successively
by the Egyptians, the Jordanians,1 the Israeli military administration, and
the Palestinian authority, at least for a short while. The architectural design
of the buildings is modern and standardized, rectangular in shape, with
rows and columns of small windows covered with metal bars. The buildings
are generally located in a position that overlooks the city, the Benthamite Panopticon2 for Palestine.3 There is a paucity of academic accounts exam-
ining these processes of colonization in the Middle East as part of a com-
prehensive critique of modernity and its projects. Prominent among the few
such accounts is Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt (1991). Mitchell
describes and analyses the spatial and temporal techniques of power
employed by the British in Egypt through examination of the architecture,
schools, police and texts, among other things, but he does not look into the
prison system as a major focus of these practices of power. The prisons and detention centres that were built by the Israelis to aug-
ment the British ones tend to be cement grey and heavily guarded by
modern technological devices. Together, these two generations of prisons
and detention centres compose the list of prisons used by the Israeli authorities
to incarcerate Palestinians between 1967 and 1993. Geographically, the dis-
tribution of the prisons and detention centres is as follows:4
1 Northern Palestine (a) Shata Prison: near Bysan, south of Lake Tiberias (Sea of Galilee).
