The geographer Ghazi Falah was caught between Israel and the Arab world, John Gravios writes in the American Chronicle of Higher Education.
Falah, with dual Israeli and Canadian citizenship, was held by the Shin Bet allegedly for spying until released after 23 days following a campaign by fellow geographers and other academics.
He felt he was being questioned more about his academic career - and that it was held as an accusation against him - than about any putative spying.
Most of all, the article concludes, Mr. Falah is haunted by the sense that his imprisonment was meant to send a message.
"I feel it was like a punishment," he says, meant to scare him and other Palestinian scholars into self-censorship.
And that's the way of police states, the purpose of interrogation and torture: not solely the punishment of the individual but the breaking of civil society and the crushing of any independence of thought and autonomy of action. If the Palestinians are to be cowed then any who attain prominence of any sort - within or outside the Palestinian territories - become legitimate targets.
And across the world the police seem to go to the same school. Keep interrogation and torture hidden and secret so that no-one can see what is happening, but make sure it's an open secret so that it can terrify the rest of the society. There is nothing so powerfully destructive as a dirty secret that everyone knows.
In the end the use of force is unsustainable - but in the mean time too many are broken and suffer from it.
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