Legal Background

In 1922, the League of Nations officially approved the establishment of a mandate system, in which the territories occupied in the First World War were to be governed by England and France under international supervision. The ultimate goal of the mandate system was to bring the inhabitants to self-rule. The League of Nations entrusted the rule of Palestine to the British government.Footnote ⁶ Article 2 of the charter of the Palestine Mandate provided, inter alia, that the British were required to develop self-governing institutions. A judicial system, police, and prisons were essential to the goal of keeping order. The establishment of a prison system in Palestine even preceded the official formation of the mandate. Shortly after the British conquered the area of Palestine in 1918, they began to regulate the arrest and incarceration of people. The Occupied Enemy Territory Administration promulgated orders and ordinances, including with respect to prisons and detention (Kaspi Reference Kaspi1984, 141–43). The British built a central prison in Jerusalem and used other facilities across the country.

In 1921, while still ruling Palestine as an occupying military force, the British passed the Prison Ordinance regulating the administration of prisons, which enabled the inspector general of police and prisons, with the approval of the high commissioner, to make rules regarding a wide range of matters, including letters, visits to prisoners, and inspection by “visiting authorities.”Footnote ⁷ People who were allowed to visit prisoners under the British legislation can be divided into three categories. The first were those visiting individual prisoners. While awaiting trial, prisoners were allowed to communicate with their legal advisers and have weekly visits from friends and relatives.Footnote ⁸ Convicted prisoners were allowed to receive visits from friends and relatives after the completion of the first three months of their sentence, and every two months thereafter, within the sight and hearing of a prison officer.Footnote ⁹ Consular representatives, however, were allowed to interview foreign prisoners outside the hearing of the prison officers.Footnote ¹⁰ Seriously ill prisoners could receive visits from friends and relatives.Footnote ¹¹ Young offenders detained at a reformatory school could have half-hour weekly visits with their parents, subject to the discretion of the medical officer and at the discretion of the officer in charge.Footnote ¹² All of these visitors could be searched. The second category consisted of religious figures, who could visit prisoners belonging to their religious denomination and hold services.Footnote ¹³ The British sometimes called them “unofficial” visitors to distinguish them from officials. The third category was composed of ex-officio visitors and civilian volunteers who were allowed to visit a group of prisoners rather than particular individuals.Footnote ¹⁴ The first Prison Ordinance in 1921 established a category of “visiting authorities,” which included only ex-officio visitors.Footnote ¹⁵ The district commissioner was entitled to inspect and visit any prison within his district at all times and had free access to every part of the prison and to every prisoner and all records. Any British judge, Jewish and Arab district court judges, and any principal medical or health officer could also visit at any time. These visitors had to inform the inspector general of their visit and could make observations and recommendations if they so wished.

In 1940, a second Prison Ordinance redefined the category of official visitors. Now called “visiting justices,” the category was broadened to include not only ex-officio visitorsFootnote ¹⁶ but also “fit and proper persons” appointed by the high commissioner to individual prisons. The open-ended definition enabled the appointment of lay representatives of the local subjects. In internal correspondence, the British sometimes referred to these civilian volunteers as “unofficial visitors” (which was somewhat misleading terminology, as all visitors had to be officially approved).Footnote ¹⁷ All visiting justices, civilians included, could inspect all books and records as well as each and every ward, yard, and cell, see every prisoner, test the quality of the prisoners’ food, and ascertain adherence to the rules and regulations. At the conclusion of their visits, every visiting justice had to enter any remarks, suggestions, or recommendations in a book kept for this purpose. Only male visiting justices could try prisoners for prison offences, summon witnesses, and administer oaths. Female visitors could be appointed only for the part of the prison in which female prisoners were detained.Footnote ¹⁸ The third Prison Ordinance, which was released in 1946, preserved this arrangement, with a single new limitation that restricted female visitors to areas designated for female prisoners.Footnote ¹⁹

While lay visiting was formally sanctioned by the 1940 Prison Ordinance, this practice was established eleven years earlier at the initiative and with the support of British officials, who not only allowed outsiders to inspect the prisons but also made sure the visitors included the representatives of their local colonial subjects. The following subsection investigates the creation of this institution and discusses the possible ideas and practices that influenced the British choice to adopt this practice.

The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Lay Visiting in Mandate Palestine Prisons

The story of the establishment of the Prison Visiting Committee in 1929, its discontinuation the following year, and its subsequent revival conveys the intricacy of British attitudes toward this practice. At first, the practice emerged as a project of reform. The Mandate officials were aware of the severity of the carceral conditions in Palestine’s prisons. In 1928, the high commissioner asked Margaret Nixon, the government welfare inspector, to write a report on prisons and lockups in Palestine. Before her appointment as government welfare inspector, Nixon had served as the superintendent of all women convicts in Palestine (Rozin Reference Rozin2016, 21). Despite some positive comments and references to the differences between the carceral facilities, Nixon’s report was quite critical of the physical conditions, overcrowding, poor hygiene, lack of running water, poor ventilation, dampness, and other shortcomings of the Palestine prisons.Footnote ²⁰

One of Nixon’s major critiques pertained to visits. Although the 1921 Prison Ordinance set forth that Palestine’s prisons should be inspected by ex-officio visitors, Nixon observed the inadequacy of that practice. For example, she noted that except for police officers and doctors, very few people visited the Central Prison in Jerusalem. Similarly, few officials ever visited the Acre Prison, one “notable exception being the District Officer of Nazareth who visits quite regularly and knows every prisoner. The Officer in charge mentioned the good effect this had on the men.” The situation was no better at the Howard Home, a reformatory institution for boys, where no visits took place except for those by an occasional official visitor and the superintendents. Nixon opined that this lack of visitors made it difficult to find employment “for lads who have no home to which they can return as no one takes any interest in them.” In Nixon’s view, the purpose of the visits by the ex-officio visitors was not rehabilitation. In contrast, in the girls’ home that was managed by Nixon herself, care was taken that each and every girl would return either to her family or to a prearranged job. In addition, “[t]he Social Services Association forms a band of visitors who interest themselves in the welfare of these girls.”Footnote ²¹

Nixon recommended establishing “a panel of responsible voluntary visitors, men and woman” who would be appointed in each large detention center and “would undertake to make regular visits and to interest themselves in the general welfare of the prisoners. This applies very specially to young offenders. … Many of the lads come from very unsatisfactory surroundings and often slip back into the same vicious environment for want of friendly assistance at the time of their release.” She also recommended that the short sentences of young offenders be replaced with a system of probation or a term of a minimum of one to two years in a reformatory.Footnote ²²

As Anne Schwan’s (Reference Schwan2010, 110) research demonstrates, the work of sincerely committed and “progressive” reformers can be entangled with the imperial project. Notwithstanding the genuineness of their advocates, reform projects are also compatible with political goals, such as the civilizing mission and the maintenance of the colonial difference. Nixon was a sincere advocate of penal reform. Nonetheless, her report also supported colonial difference by calling for privileged treatment of “obviously European” prisoners. Nixon opined that standard conditions of imprisonment without beds, chairs, or tables, and with “ordinary prison food,” were unsuitable for such prisoners, as “[t]hese are real hardships to educated men and women used to a European standard of living … no good can possibly accrue from treatment of this sort.”Footnote ²³ In reference to illegal immigrants and communist prisoners, who were most likely Jews of European descent, she wrote: “They have separate quarters in the prison, they wear their own clothes, have books and newspapers, they can study, and do their own needlework, and have excellent European food” (Nixon Reference Nixon1935, 136). The British administration embraced Nixon’s recommendations and took steps to improve the conditions of imprisonment.Footnote ²⁴

One major reform that the British adopted was the formation of a prison visiting system that enabled local subjects, appointed by the high commissioner, to inspect Palestine prisons. This warm welcome suggests that the British saw political advantage in prison visitation policy. Reforms such as these positioned the British as the bearers of progress and humanity to an underdeveloped region and therefore provided cultural and political rationale for their “civilizing mission.” Nevertheless, the new prison visiting policy was a notable departure from existing practices. Unlike modern European prisons, colonial prisons did not rest on social consensus but, rather, attempted to reinforce the rulers’ authority (Gibson Reference Gibson2011, 1053). In other law enforcement-related areas, the British limited the lay involvement of their subjects. They deliberately refrained from transplanting the jury system into Palestine, and, until 1936, the testimony of a single witness did not suffice to serve as a basis for judgment unless it was corroborated (Likhovski Reference Likhovski, Thomas and Hartog2006, 30).Footnote ²⁵ The establishment of a system allowing subalterns to voice criticism of prisons was aberrational in the context of colonial justice.

Pursuant to correspondence between Norman Bentwich, Palestine’s first attorney general, and the commandant of police and prisons, the Prison Visitors’ Committee was formed,Footnote ²⁶ headed by Bentwich himself and including Nixon as a member.Footnote ²⁷ At its first meeting on January 31, 1929, the committee appointed five men as “prison visitors.” Two of them were Arab, Ismail Bey HusseiniFootnote ²⁸ and Ruhi Bey Abdul Hadi;Footnote ²⁹ two were Jewish, Dr. Judah Leib Magnes and J. Meyuhas;Footnote ³⁰ and one was American, Edward Williams Blatchford.Footnote ³¹ The design of imprisonment, which maintained the differences and hierarchies between European and non-European locals, Jews and Arabs, and males and females was reflected in the visiting system. Its design reflected ethno-national considerations and bolstered “the rule of colonial difference.” Arabs were to visit Arabs, Jews to visit Jews, in a divide-and-rule scheme.Footnote ³²

The composition of the visitors panel was also compatible with political ends such as the co-optation and pacification of the locals. The risk that the visiting system would expose the British to criticism by their subjects could be attenuated if the mission was placed on the shoulders of community representatives who the British considered trustworthy. The chosen visitors were leading figures in their community, yet they also moved in high-ranking English circles and were forthcoming in their attitude toward their ethnic counterparts and, therefore, occasional targets of nationalist criticism from within their communities.Footnote ³³ Ruhi Bey Abdul Hadi was even a government employee (an assistant secretary at the Chief Secretary’s Office at the time). By selecting and nominating them, the British signaled the visitor’s esteemed position. However, lay participation in Palestine’s law enforcement was designed to circumvent any actual influence of the subjects on adjudication, the quintessential example being the exclusion of the jury system. Such participation was limited to the protection of the rights of those already incarcerated and detained by the British justice system. Though not a trivial privilege, it was intended to be limited to social, rather than adjudicatory, aspects.

Edwin Samuel, the son of a former high commissioner who was also serving in the Palestine government, was temporarily named honorary secretary and put in charge of informing both the police authorities and the visitors of the visitors’ list of duties and prison regulations, and the superintendent of the Jerusalem Central Prison on whom each visitor would call. Ruhi Bey Abdul Hadi was asked to investigate whether the balance of the Men’s Social Services Association could be handed over to the committee to assist prisoners’ families in case of need. The group decided to hold quarterly meetings and establish a subcommittee (whose members would be Nixon, Blatchford, and Samuel) to work out a system of visiting the Howard Home at Tulkarem. Subsequently, Samuel met with Mr. Frew, the superintendent of the Central Prison, to design the visiting operation.Footnote ³⁴ The meeting seems to have been friendly and cooperative, yet, nonetheless, the agreements narrowed down the visitors’ access and designated a nonpolitical role for them. It was agreed that “[t]he allocation of a number of prisoners to each Visitor is not the best method.” Instead, the superintendent would keep a register of prisoners who were “particularly dejected,” or whose families appeared to be in need, or who were expected to be released shortly after serving a sentence of five years or more and needed help finding employment. This arrangement, which diverged from the English pattern, increased the prison service’s control over which prisoners the visitors could see. The agreed-upon points imply that the committee perceived visitation as a welfare measure, designed to keep the inmates occupied in a positive manner and prepare them for their reentry into society.

The arrangement also reflects the superintendent’s hope of encouraging the visitors to help the prison. Thus, the superintendent raised the issue of the limited space in the prison’s workshops (such as carpentry, ironworks, cobbling, weaving, tailoring, and basket and mat making). He explained that since brush making is an activity that could take place in the prisoners’ own cells, “it would be of great help if the Prison Visitors Committee could make it possible to provide an instructor for say, two hours an afternoon, three times a week” for about fifty prisoners. He also stated that it would be “of great assistance” if the visitors could not only lend books to prisoners but also give books to the prison library. Specifically requested were books in Arabic or Hebrew and illustrated papers “of high standard” for the illiterate prisoners. Books, it was stated, would “also be appreciated in the Wardens’ Mess.” The superintendent’s hope seems to reflect institutional considerations and not merely a reformist ideology. The British attempt to use the volunteering visitors as a resource for prison management in raising funds, donating books, and providing workshop instructors shored up the visitors’ social position, transforming them into benefactors of their rulers.Footnote ³⁵

The British scheme of visits in the prisons of Palestine reflected several themes of the larger penal reform movement of this period. It drew on religious sentiments and highlighted the importance of religious instruction and practice. The 1921 Prison Ordinance sanctioned visits by chaplains of all major denominations.Footnote ³⁶ This arrangement acknowledged the importance of “spiritual maintenance” and the view of religion as a basic human right that persists even under conditions of imprisonment. It is noteworthy that Edward Williams Blatchford, an American evangelist who was appointed the American vice-consul for religious affairs in 1929, was one of the first prison visitors (Kalbian Reference Kalbian2018, 56). In Palestine, however, religion and nationality were intertwined. Judaism is both a nation and a religion, and the visiting rabbis advocated national causes as well. Another source of influence was Howardian reformist humanitarianism, which promoted regular inspections to combat specific abuses. In Nixon’s vision, visitation would serve not only to improve the conditions of imprisonment but also to rehabilitate. Her view of rehabilitation was integrated into a broader professional ethos of advancing welfare, with an emphasis on protecting the vulnerable.

Nixon’s report emphasizes the importance of reaching out to the prisoners and creating contacts that would assist released prisoners upon their reentry into society. However, the British intention to promote the rehabilitation of Palestine’s prisoners through visitation was not backed by institutional arrangements. The Prison Visitors’ Committee created a practice of inspections that did not extend beyond the period of incarceration. The visitors did not deal with the housing or job placement of released prisoners.Footnote ³⁷ The members of the Prison Visitors’ Committee took active part in the visits. Thirty visits were paid to the Jerusalem Central Prison between March and June 1929.Footnote ³⁸ The visitors commented on prisoners’ verbal and physical abuse, raised funds, and assisted prisons with library books and instruction, but they also discussed matters of prison administration and policy, such as the imprisonment of juveniles, the Penal Labour Ordinance, the necessity of salaried probation officers and juvenile courts, the establishment of a Borstal Institution, and separate accommodation for “criminal lunatics.”Footnote ³⁹

The prison visiting institution was established with the support of high-ranking members of the British administration in Mandate Palestine.Footnote ⁴⁰ The visitors enjoyed the cooperation of the police and judges. High-ranking police officer Arthur Tyrell Blackett and the District Judge de Freitas even joined the committee at its second meeting.Footnote ⁴¹ However, not all members of the British administration were supportive, and some even regarded the practice as a threat or nuisance. In addition, if there was ever a hope that the visitors’ project would confine itself to the prisoners’ welfare, the British soon realized this was not the case. In a letter sent to the Colonial Office in 1939, Deputy Chief Secretary of the Government of Palestine Sydney Moody stated that the committee’s “brief, not very happy, career” lasted just one year. He described the committee’s work in an unmistakably resentful tone. Its purpose, Moody claimed, was “organizing sociological work in connection with the inmates of the prisons and their dependents.” The practice soon spilled over into a critique of the Mandate penal system, as the committee “proved unable to resist a tendency not to restrict itself to bona fide sociological work but rather to concern itself with questions of prison administration.”Footnote ⁴²

The next section focuses on an episode that occurred in 1930 at around the time the British put visitations on hold out of fear that visitors were overstepping the role of pure social work. This episode demonstrates the realization of British fears that the practice of visiting could turn out to be politically costly and that, despite their reluctance to empower their subjects to handle matters of prison administration, they sometimes depended on their mediation in volatile political conflicts.

J. L. Magnes, a Prison Visitor in Action

Like the British, the colonized subjects made political use of the visitation system. Prison visitation enabled the colonized to exert agency and gain political achievements, as demonstrated in the following episode. Judah Leib Magnes was born in Oakland, California, in 1878 and received his doctoral degree from Heidelberg University in Germany. He was an American Zionist leader and a Reform rabbi and immigrated to Palestine in 1922. Magnes was among the founders of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served as its chancellor from its establishment in 1925. While serving as chancellor, he refrained from open political activity. Although he sympathized with the ideology of Brit Shalom, a movement that was founded by Zionist intellectuals and promoted binational and equal Jewish-Arab autonomy under the British Mandate, he was never an official member of this group (Barak-Gorodetsky Reference Barak-Gorodetsky2018, 17). Magnes was chosen as a member of the first panel of visitors. In addition to his humanistic worldview and prominent status in the Palestine Jewish community, he was also a personal friend of Norman Bentwich, Palestine’s attorney general and chair of the Prison Visitors Committee. Our focus in this article is on Magnes’s intervention, as a diligent and committed prison visitor, in the 1930 hunger strike of the communist prisoners.

By 1930, the Jewish political prisoners had successfully fought against oppressive practices such as the requirement to bow before police and prison officers and wardens and forced hard labor as punishment. In early 1930, the British reinstated hard labor but only for Arab political prisoners.Footnote ⁴³ Ali Abd Al Halim and Yussef Ahmad Khalaf, both members of the Communist Party, were sent to labor camps after they refused to bow before prison officers and wardens, an event that ignited tense conflict and manifestations of solidarity by the Jewish political prisoners. On May 3, 1930, the prisoners sent an ultimatum to the inspector general of police and prisons and the high commissioner demanding the abolishment of hard labor and a list of other demands.Footnote ⁴⁴ Unless these demands were met by noon of May 5, the ultimatum stated, all political prisoners in Palestine would begin a general hunger strike.

As soon as the hunger strike broke out, the Jerusalem board of the Red Aid notified Magnes. Magnes sent Bentwich a note, asking whether he knew of the strike and the prisoners’ demands. Bentwich replied: “I heard of this and I do not think anything is to be done.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The political pressure exerted by the prisoners reached beyond the borders of Palestine. F. Seymour Cocks, a Labour member of parliament, raised the issue in the House of Commons (Palestine Bulletin 1930, 2). On May 13, 1930, the striking prisoners sent a letter to the Prison Visiting Committee and to Magnes, demanding the abolishment of forced hard labor for all political prisoners and the return of Ali and Yussef from the labor camps.Footnote ⁴⁶ The prisoners reported that extreme measures were being taken against the striking prisoners, including solitary confinement.

The political prisoners attacked the Prison Visiting Committee, criticizing them as a legitimization device for the colonial regime, a “façade” behind which the authorities responsible for the abusive treatment of political prisoners could hide. They demanded the following:

This letter reveals ambivalence toward the prison visiting program. The representatives of the communist prisoners requested the help of the Prison Visiting Committee and insisted that Magnes, one of its members, be personally entrusted with the negotiation (possibly on account of his socialist views). However, they also expressed their suspicion that prison visiting was merely a smokescreen, a means of pacifying the local communities while treating their prisoners inhumanly.

The British authorities authorized Magnes to negotiate between the strikers and prison management.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although some of the British preferred limiting visitors to “social work” practice, in this crisis, they entrusted the task of political negotiation to a prison visitor. Magnes acted promptly. The following day, May 14, he visited the forty-four prisoners and reached an agreement to end their hunger strike. The prisoners declared that they were ending the hunger strike based on Magnes’s statements that Yussef and Ali would be transferred back from the labor camps and that the government would revise the regulations regarding the standards of imprisonment of political prisoners.Footnote ⁴⁹ Magnes reported that he had clarified to the strikers that, while the repeal of forced labor for political prisoners could occur only through legislation, the government would give sympathetic consideration to regulations excepting prisoners who had been sentenced solely for membership in illegal societies, possession of illegal literature, or illegal assembly from forced labor.

Magnes maneuvered diplomatically between the parties. To the British authorities, he reported that he had explained to the strikers that their demands could be met only by legislation, thus assuring them he was preserving their interests. To the commandant of the police, Magnes made a powerful presentation of the rationale behind the prisoners’ demands. From their perspective, Magnes explained, political prisoners cannot be compared to criminals such as thieves or wife beaters:

Magnes also updated the commandant of the police and prisons regarding the concession he had made on behalf of the Mandate authorities—namely, that the “special treatment” of prisoners would be applied “without distinction to creed, nationality or social position.”Footnote ⁵¹ The “special treatment” alluded to the colonial distinction between “natives” and European prisoners. In the colonial framework, only the latter, who were presumably more educated and refined, deserved Westernized imprisonment conditions. The elements of the “special treatment” detailed by Magnes included the timely delivery of censored newspapers and books, materials for the writing of books and essays, chess sets, toilets (non-squatting) and bathing equipment in prison (Jaffa prisoners were taken handcuffed to the sea), and smoking.

As this episode indicates, visitors’ advocacy for prisoners’ welfare cannot be separated from political debates. Political causes were embedded in Magnes’s actions to improve the conditions of incarceration. One goal was the preferential treatment of political prisoners. Another was abolishing discrimination between prisoners. In practice, this meant treating educated Arab political prisoners the same as foreign European citizens. The demand for equal treatment of both Arab and Jewish prisoners went against the colonial “divide and rule” practice, which distinguished and discriminated between colonial subjects on an ethno-national basis. The demand for equality was nevertheless limited, as the struggle was not aimed at equality for all prisoners, political and criminal alike. The strikers implicitly accepted a distinction based on culture and education as justification for differential imprisonment conditions. In accepting this distinction, the striking prisoners were simultaneously defying and advancing the colonial difference.

In his letter to the commandant of the police, Magnes commended the authorities for considering the formation of a “Prisoner Committee” that “might employ a trustworthy man whose duty it would be to visit prisoners, to talk to them, explain things to them and hear what they have to say. I am sure that much trouble could be avoided in this way.”Footnote ⁵² The strikers employed the visiting system to achieve political goals, and Magnes softened the blow for the British authorities by implying that they would also gain politically from the pacifying effect of visiting. Since Magnes already served as a prison visitor, the inference might allude to the administration’s objection to the panel’s continuation. Perhaps the term “employed” hinted at a plan to hire salaried visitors or regular visitors to all of Palestine’s prisons.Footnote ⁵³ The requirement that such visitors should be “trustworthy” alluded to British interests.

Despite the British promise that the high commissioner would seriously consider the terms of the settlement negotiated by Magnes, the prisoners soon reported continued maltreatment.Footnote ⁵⁴ Political prisoners were placed in joint cells with criminal prisoners. Prisoners recovering from the hunger strike were beaten, shackled, and punished with a “bread and water” diet.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Acre Prison, newspapers and books, previously permitted for some of the political prisoners, were now forbidden for all; shaving and haircuts, smoking, and chess were not permitted; the food was of poor quality, and prisoners were not allowed to get food from outside; civilian clothes were not returned to prisoners who refused to wear the humiliating prison uniform, so they remained naked; bowing was reintroduced, and political prisoners were flogged.Footnote ⁵⁶ Ali and Yussef, on whose account the hunger strike had broken out, were returned to prison for only a few days before being transferred again to a labor camp. The Jewish prisoners asked: “Is it because they are Arab workers that they cannot sit in the same cell with the Jewish political prisoners?”Footnote ⁵⁷ The political prisoners demanded better treatment than that accorded to criminal prisoners and vehemently protested against discrimination between Jews and Arabs:

The prisoners reminded the British officials that they had ended the strike because they relied on Dr. Magnes’s promise that the government would revise the law concerning political prisoners. Instead, they found themselves worse off than before, and they announced another hunger strike, first in Acre Prison.Footnote ⁵⁹ The prisoners asserted that the strike would end as soon as the commandant of the police promised that Arab political prisoners in Acre Prison, like their Jewish counterparts, would not need to bow.Footnote ⁶⁰ We have no documentation about the authorities’ response, but the lack of further newspaper reports implies that the hunger strike was soon over. Later in 1930, regulations issued under the Prison Ordinance extended special treatment “to convicted prisoners who by their social status, education and habits of life are accustomed to a superior mode of living, and to any other prisoner to whom the Court in passing sentences directs that the special treatment shall apply.”Footnote ⁶¹ Magnes continued to deal with complaints about the infringement of the revised prison regulations.

This episode demonstrates various ways in which the colonized used the visiting system to exert agency. The communist prisoners used it as a channel for political negotiation, a move that resulted in political victory and the change of prison regulations. The prisoners also used the visiting system to exert agency within the internal politics of the colonized population. They expressed explicit suspicion against the cooperation of the visitors with the authorities. This implies a distinction between the colonized, who were collaborators, and those individuals who were resilient to the colonial rule. Magnes clearly exerted agency. His mediation advanced egalitarian values that were compatible with his worldview. His intervention was deemed necessary by both the prisoners and the British.

Although the British were disinclined to extend the visitors’ mandate beyond pure welfare work, they were willing to use Magnes’s intervention to negotiate a way out of a political crisis and empowered him to make commitments of a clearly political nature on behalf of the British government. The dignified position of the visitors in their community was a political resource in itself, and the visiting can be seen as a mechanism of co-optation, tailored to pacify local subjects and to perpetuate the colonial difference, as reflected in the composition of the first panel of visitors—two Arabs, two Jews, and one American. The combination reflects a careful attempt to create a balance between Jews and Arabs. The fact that all five visitors were well known and respected within their communities may indicate an effort to recruit local leadership into meaningful cooperation. The political prisoners who participated in the 1930 hunger strike explicitly opined that the institution of prison visits was only a humanistic façade veiling oppressive practices.

The visitors represented the prisoners of their local community. This case is especially interesting because the Jewish prisoners involved Magnes, a Jewish prison visitor, in their protest against the transfer of two Arab prisoners, Ali and Yussef, to labor camps. By advocating for the welfare of the political prisoners, Magnes not only acted to supervise and improve the prison administration but also advanced the prisoners’ universalist agenda of solidarity and equity between Arabs and Jews. The political nature of Magnes’s actions as a prison visitor is also apparent in his personal connections with the British leadership. Magnes communicated directly with the top-ranked authority, the commandant of the police, Arthur Stephen Mavrogordato, who delivered his messages directly to the high commissioner and Attorney General Bentwich. Magnes’s status and position made him welcome in British circles, and he fulfilled his role in a manner loyal to the Mandate authorities. He visited the striking prisoners only after receiving official authorization (although he informally brought the matter to Bentwich’s attention beforehand), and he explained the formal British policy to the prisoners.

The role of prison visitor bolstered Magnes’s position as a leader within the Jewish community. The letters political prisoners sent to him—blunt and commanding at first—became gradually more respectful. However, they also conveyed suspicion that the visits camouflaged unjust colonial practices and served to co-opt resistance. This episode exemplifies how the colonized subjects were able to use prison visitation to exert agency over their situation. Like the British, they used it as a political tool, imbuing this practice with various, even contradictory, meanings.

Prison Visiting as a National Tool

Despite the discontinuation of the prison visiting committee early in 1930, the initial arrangements that it designed took root in the years to come. During the 1930s, local communities acted to improve conditions of imprisonment and promoted the welfare of prisoners from their communities, often assisted by visits of attorneys or men of religion. For example, representatives of the Haifa Committee of the Jewish Community visited Acre Prison to lobby for a kosher kitchen and the improvement of the food.Footnote ⁶² The director of the Legal Aid Committee of the Haifa Committee of the Jewish Community was allowed to visit prisoners and assisted them on behalf of the community.Footnote ⁶³

Representatives of local communities wrote letters of complaint pertaining to maltreatment,Footnote ⁶⁴ arrangements to provide legal representation, holiday meals and kosher food, and care for released prisoners and their families.Footnote ⁶⁵ There are also fundraising letters from the community members to finance the expenses, including assistance to released prisoners who were deported without proper clothing or economic means and help to those who were released in Palestine in job searches, transportation, accommodation, and basic support.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ensuring bail for illegal immigrants was also part of the communities’ agenda.Footnote ⁶⁷ Community prisoner rights advocates were especially enthusiastic with respect to political prisoners. Supportive acts included delivering messages to and from members of insurgent organizations through rabbinical visits. The assistance was organized within the ethno-national community. Thus, the Jewish communities’ committees assisted imprisoned illegal immigrants and political prisoners, and Arab aid organizations protested against the maltreatment of Arab prisoners during the Arab revolt.Footnote ⁶⁸

Up until 1940, however, aid to the prisoners was not officially structured as prison visiting. The bitter taste Palestine’s administration felt as result of their subjects’ successful political manoeuvring of the visiting system lingered as late as 1939, when Moody deflected the Colonial Office’s suggestion to reestablish a prison visiting system in Palestine. Grattan Bushe, the Colonial Office’s legal adviser, condoned the Howard League’s initiative for this move and presented it to the reluctant Palestine administration. Moody answered that the time was “inopportune” for an endeavor that was complicated, which it was considering “the peculiar political, religious, racial and linguistic factors.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Although he was averse to visitors’ involvement in matters of prison administration, Moody declared that the Mandate administration intended to revise the Prison Ordinance by adding a category of lay visiting justices whose duties “would not comprise sociological work such as is done by prison visitors” and whose appointment “will ensure that an outside body, unconnected with the administration of the prisons, makes regular visits.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The hope of the British administration, as expressed in Mr. Moody’s letter, was to create an objective, external mechanism through which to inspect and review the prisons. It therefore seems odd that the 1940 Prison Ordinance not only affixes the appointment of “fit and proper” community representatives as prison visitors in legislation but also grants them powers equivalent to those of the ex-officio justices.Footnote ⁷¹

While the “law on the books” transmits the original reformist spirit of independent and muscular inspection, the British anxieties over criticism of Palestine’s prison system by their local subjects were addressed outside official legislation. On behalf of the high commissioner, the chief secretary issued rules for the prison visitors. The rules declared that the visitors were “friends from outside—disinterested, unpaid and without missionary or political aims”; that they “do not constitute a committee” but, rather, form a panel of individuals; that “visitors are not concerned in any way with the administration or management of the prison”; and that their goal is to the raise the prisoners’ thoughts from their prison surroundings and assist them on discharge.Footnote ⁷² The new policy even led to the resignation of one of the old visitors, Dr. Schwabe, who criticized the concept of a panel of individuals with no right to suggest improvements to prison administration. This move demonstrated, Schwabe proclaimed, how the administration deliberately created the false impression of transparency and willingness to submit to public scrutiny, “where the public is blinded. To the outside world they say that the public inspects the operation of the government, but internally they limit public by making its participation worthless.”Footnote ⁷³ Schwabe wryly commented that the right term should now be “caregivers” rather than “visitors.”

Nonetheless, the colonized were still able to exert agency through the visiting system. Community members sometimes collaborated with British authorities in the appointment of prison visitors. A newspaper report from 1941 announced the appointment of Rabbi Kalman Kupfer as a prison visitor in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa District. According to the report, Rabbi Kupfer had been appointed by the chief rabbinate with the approval of the Department of Police and Prisons, “with a view to ministering to the spiritual and religious needs of Jewish prisoners” (Palestine Post 1941, 3).Footnote ⁷⁴ Kupfer offered his services to Tel Aviv’s Municipality Department of Social Services. He presented documentation of his success in the role of prison visitor in Vienna and a detailed memorandum of his vision of the prison visitor’s role.Footnote ⁷⁵

Unlike the members of the first panel of prison visitors, Kupfer was hired on the basis of his professional experience and not on the basis of his ties with the authorities, and he was a salaried employee, not a volunteer, notwithstanding the new British rules. The Tel Aviv municipality agreed to contribute money for his monthly salary and asked other Jewish community councils to chip in so Kupfer could visit other prisons too.Footnote ⁷⁶ Kupfer represents a model of a professional prison visitor chosen and employed by the community’s official bodies. Individual volunteers who requested the municipality’s support were turned down.Footnote ⁷⁷ This small example demonstrates both the community’s agency and an attempt to curb it. It was the community who chose the visitor; the British merely executed the community’s will. Nonetheless, the visitor’s role was narrowly defined, with an emphasis on noncontroversial religious functions.Footnote ⁷⁸ In practice, Kupfer not only saw himself as a spiritual guide (he even signed his reports as “Rabbi Kalman Kupfer, a Guide of Souls”) but also dedicated much time and attention to nonreligious social welfare.

Despite formal obstacles, lay participation in the inspection of the regime’s prison system persisted once the British authorities introduced it. Civilians were granted remarkable access to prisons. Another outstanding feature of the arrangement was the creation of a panel that reflected the ethnic composition and religious denominations of the inmates. This system allowed regular visits to Jewish and Arab prisoners by representatives of their communities, who included lawyers, members of voluntary associations, religious figures, and political activists. The British authorities regarded the creation of a modern penitentiary system in Mandate Palestine as integral to the progress and enlightenment they purported to spread in the territory entrusted to their care. Thus, the local visiting system was part of the colonial civilizing mission. At the same time, the lay visiting system empowered the local subjects with agency. It enabled them to participate in the creation of humanitarian norms, to voice loud criticism of their rulers, and to advance national goals. Moreover, the tensions inherent in the visiting system made it vulnerable to political maneuvers and re-appropriation by the local population in Palestine.