In December 2013, The Holot detention center was opened in the Negev. During its five years of activity, approximately 13 thousand men from Sudan and Eritrea were imprisoned there for periods of a year or more. This essay seeks to give testimony on this formative event, that with the rate of unfolding events in Israel will be forgotten over the years as if it never happened, but for those who were imprisoned in Holot, will be imprinted in body and mind forever. The testimony regarding Holot is intertwined with the personal story of Adham, a black Sudanese man who sought refuge in Israel and was imprisoned in the facility, as well as with the writer’s personal narrative – a white Israeli activist who transitioned from social activism to academic writing as a result of her encounter with discriminatory state violence. Examining the incarceration policy in Holot from an Afro-pessimist perspective, the essay uncovers the dialectical hierarchical relations constructed through violence that separates the black and the human. Thinking with the writings of William Du Bois and Saidiya Hartman, we become aware of separate worlds that coexist throughout history, shaped through ostracism and the pushing of the black man out of the realm of human existence. The practice of incarceration in the desert was the state’s physical and tangible way of alienating the black other, who does not have the right to exist within its borders as an equal human being. Gradual processes of dehumanization preceded imprisonment and qualified these actions and perceptions. In Israel, we have gained experience in establishing methods of exclusion, intimidation, criminalization, and contempt stemming from a selective narrative of belonging, which places the “other” outside of our world and erases them in the process. Combining the personal narrative and theoretical discourse on the subject allows reflection on the specific positions and social relations surrounding the writing on local blackness and whiteness. These are personal and political positions and relationships characterized by deep inequality within the framework of the racialized power relations from which they emerged – between white and black people, between Ashkenazi Jews and others, between the researcher and the asylum seeker, between friendship and the differentiating social reality surrounding it. Through personal and theoretical reflection, and in a manner that consciously acknowledges the locally prevailing power relations and their influence, the essay outlines action and writing concerning exclusion and marginalized populations. Responsible action and writing do not rely on external binary categories. They are shaped in opposition to a specific environment and take on a local form based on its unique nuances.
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