"The North Korean regime in the â50s developed a series of remarkably effective torture techniques, techniques that were so effective, in fact, that they were able to make captured American airmen admit to all sorts of atrocities they had not in fact committed, all the time, being convinced they had not, actually, been tortured. The techniques were quite simple. Just make the victim do something mildly uncomfortableâsit on the edge of chair, for example, or lean against a wall in a slightly awkward positionâonly, make them do it for an extremely long period of time. After eight hours the victim would be willing to do virtually anything to make it stop. But try going to the International Court of Justice at The Hague and tell them youâve been made to sit on the edge of a chair all day. Even the victims were unwilling to describe their captors as torturers. When the CIA learned about these techniquesâaccording to Korean friends of mine, theyâre actually just particularly sadistic versions of classic Korean ways of punishing small childrenâthey were intrigued, and, apparently, conducted extensive research on how they could be adopted for their own detention centers.
Again, sometimes, in Palestine, one feels one is in an entire country thatâs being treated this way. Obviously, there is also outright torture, people who are actually being shot, beaten, tortured, or violently abused. But Iâm speaking here even of the ones that arenât. For most, itâs as if the very texture of everyday life has been designed to be intolerableâonly, in a way that you can never quite say is exactly a human rights violation. Thereâs never enough water. Showering requires almost military discipline. You canât get a permit. Youâre always standing in line. If something breaks itâs impossible to get permission to fix it. Or else you canât get spare parts. There are four different bodies of law that might apply to any legal situation (Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli), itâs anyoneâs guess which court will say what applies where, or what document is required, or acceptable. Most rules are not even supposed to make sense. It can take eight hours to drive 20 kilometers to see your girlfriend, and doing so will almost certainly mean having machine guns waved in your faces and being shouted at in a language you half understand by people who think youâre subhuman. So you do most of your dalliance by phone. When you can afford the minutes. There are endless traffic jams before and after checkpoints and drivers bicker and curse and try not to take it out on one another. Everyone lives no more than 12 or 15 miles from the Mediterranean but even on the hottest day, itâs absolutely impossible to get to the beach. Unless you climb the wall, there are places you can do that; but then you can expect to be hunted every moment by security patrols. Of course teenagers do it anyway. But it means swimming is always accompanied by the fear of being shot. If youâre a trader, or a laborer, or a driver, or a tobacco farmer, or clerk, the very process of subsistence is continual stream of minor humiliations. Your tomatoes are held and left two days to rot while someone grins at you. You have to beg to get your child out of detention. And if you do go to beseech the guards, those same guards might arbitrarily decide to hold you to pressure him to confess to rock-throwing, and suddenly you are in a concrete cell without cigarettes. Your toilet backs up. And you realize: youâre going to have to live like this forever. There is no âpolitical process.â It will never end. Barring some kind of divine intervention, you can expect to be facing exactly this sort of terror and absurdity for the rest of your natural life."
