The Civil Infrastructure of Torture. Administrating Violence in Israel/Palestine
Hagar Kotef;Merav Amir
Synopsis "The Civil Infrastructure of Torture. Administrating Violence in Israel/Palestine"
This book asks how an entire society becomes complicit in torture. It reveals how torture is sustained through the work of everyday institutions, from judicial bodies to hospital ethics committees. Focusing on Israel, it uncovers how civilian institutions enable and normalize torture through routine procedures, documentation, and bureaucratic pract
How does an entire society become complicit in torture? The Civil Infrastructure of Torture traces the bureaucratic life of torture, examining the institutions and administrative processes that sustain torture over time—from courts and oversight bodies to ethics committees in public hospitals. Focusing on Israel—and written during a period in which the state's rationale for violence has dramatically shifted—it shows how these institutions have been shaped and adapted to allow torture not only to persist but also to intensify.
Drawing on the archive of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, the book analyzes thousands of documents—victims' depositions, medical records, official correspondence, and committee briefings—to explore the banal paperwork through which brutality is normalized and torture is sustained. Alongside dozens of interviews with human rights practitioners, activists, interrogators, torture survivors, and Israeli officials, these materials reveal torture as a political technology. Torture is not merely a technique of information extraction and is not confined to the interrogation chamber in moments of emergency as it is often imagined. Nor are its effects limited to the individual body and psyche. Rather, torture works politically. It targets (post/colonized) societies as a whole, working to undermine resistance. The book further demonstrates how civil infrastructures that are often imagined as safeguards enable the proliferation and facilitate of torture: hospitals, complaint procedures, and oversight systems do not merely fail to stop torture; they actively help reproduce and legitimize it. Ultimately, torture becomes woven into the state's legal structures, its institutional practices, and, eventually, its ethos and self-image.
