September 8,
2024
For many years I
lived just up the road from Megiddo prison in northern Israel, where new film
of Israeli guards torturing Palestinians en masse has been published by
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. I drove past Megiddo prison on hundreds of
occasions. Over time I came to barely notice the squat grey buildings,
surrounded by watch towers and razor wire.
There are
several large prisons like Megiddo in Israel’s north. It is where Palestinians
end up after they have been seized from their homes, often in the middle of the
night. Israel, and the western media, say these Palestinians have been
“arrested”, as though Israel is enforcing some kind of legitimate legal
procedure over oppressed subjects – or rather objects – of its occupation. In
truth, these Palestinians have been kidnapped.
The prisons are
invariably located close to major roads in Israel, presumably because Israelis
find it reassuring to know Palestinians are being locked up in such large
numbers. (As an aside, I should mention that transferring prisoners out of
occupied territory into the occupier’s territory is a war crime. But let that
pass.)
Even before the
mass round-ups of the past 11 months, the Palestinian Authority estimated that
800,000 Palestinians – or 40 per cent of the male population – had spent time
in an Israeli prison. Many had never been charged with any crime and had never
received a trial. Not that that would make any difference – the conviction rate
of Palestinians in Israel’s military courts is near 100 per cent. There is no
such thing as an innocent Palestinian, it seems.
Rather,
imprisonment is a kind of terrifying rite of passage that has been endured by
generations of Palestinians, one required of them by the bureaucracy managing
Israel’s apartheid-occupation system.
Torture, even of
children, has been routine in these prisons since the occupation began nearly
60 years ago, as Israeli human rights groups have been regularly documenting.
The imprisonment
and torture of Palestinians serve several goals for Israel. It crushes the
spirit of Palestinians individually and collectively. It traumatises generation
after generation, creating fear and suspicion. And it helps to recruit a large
class of Palestinian informants and collaborators who secretly work with
Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, to foil Palestinian resistance operations
against Israel’s illegal occupation forces.
This kind of
Palestinian resistance, we should note, is specifically permitted in
international law. In other words, what the West denounces as “terrorism” is
actually legal under the principles the West established after the Second World
War. Paradoxical, to put it mildly.
The humiliation
and trauma systematically inflicted on these hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians and the wider Palestinian society – and the complete lack of
concern from the so-called “international community”, or, worse, its complicity
– have inevitably fed into growing religious extremism among parts of a
Palestinian society that was once largely secular.
If there is no
justice, no redress to be offered by the international institutions created by
a West that both trumpets its secularism while also flaunting its Christian
values, then, Palestinians conclude, maybe they can find justice – or at least
retribution – not through futile, rigged “negotiations” but through greater
commitment to violent resistance carried out in the name of Islam.
That explains
the emergence of the group Hamas in the late 1980s and its relentless growth in
popularity. Hamas’ unapologetic Islamic militancy contrasted with the more
accommodationist secular nationalism of Fatah, long led by Mahmoud Abbas.
Support for Hamas was something Israel was only too happy to cultivate. It
understood that Islamism would discredit the Palestinian cause in the eyes of
westerners and further bond the West to Israel.
But Israel’s
system of torture – whether in “normal” prisons like Megiddo or in the giant
open-air prison that Israel made of Gaza – also led to an ever greater
determination among groups like Hamas to liberate themselves through violence.
If Israel could not be reasoned with, if it only understood the sword, then
that was the language Palestinians would speak to Israel. This was precisely
the rationale for the atrocities of October 7.
If you were
horrified by October 7, but are not more horrified by what Israel has been
doing to Palestinians for more than half a century in its prisons, then you are
either in a state of deep ignorance – hardly surprising given the lack of media
coverage of Israel’s despotic rule over Palestinians – or in deep denial.
If you cannot
see the causal connection between the barbaric abuses of Palestinians
generation after generation and the crimes committed on October 7, then you
have no understanding of human nature. You have no inner awareness of how you
would act had you, your father and your grandfather been tortured in an Israeli
prison, a trauma passed down through families little differently than hair
colour or build.
On
a misty November morning 21 years ago, I was desperately trying to remain
camouflaged. Concealed in the foliage of an orange grove in Israel’s rural
Galilee, I hurriedly took photos of a drab concrete building not marked on any
map.
Even
the original road sign identifying the site as Facility 1391 had been removed
after a local Haaretz newspaper investigation revealed it housed a secret
prison.
I
was the first foreign journalist to track down Facility 1391, most of it hidden
within a heavily fortified complex built in the 1930s to suppress resistance to
British rule in Palestine.
For
decades, Israel had secretly held mostly Arab foreign nationals captive at the
site, unknown to the Israeli courts, the Red Cross and human rights groups.
Many were Lebanese citizens kidnapped during Israel’s 18-year occupation of
southern Lebanon. But there were also Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians and
Iranians.
This
site would soon be known as a “black site”, a term popularised by Washington's
invasion of Iraq that year. Drawing on techniques refined by Israel at Facility
1391, the US would, in the coming months and years, torture Iraqis and others
at Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo.
No
one knew how many captives were held in Israel’s Facility 1391, how long they
had been there or if there were more such prisons.
However,
the first testimonies from inmates revealed horrifying conditions. For most of
the time, they were kept in a state of sensory deprivation, made to wear
blacked-out goggles, except for when being tortured. In one case that later
came to court, a Lebanese captive had been sodomised with a baton by “Major
George”, the facility’s torturer-in-chief.
Major
George would go on to become head of Israeli police relations with the
Palestinian population of Jerusalem.
Another
secret prison
It
was difficult not to recall Facility 1391 this month, as CNN published an
investigation into a new Israeli secret prison, Sde Teiman.
This
prison was set up months ago to process not foreign nationals but thousands of
Palestinian men and boys, victims of Israel’s occupation, seized from the
streets of Gaza and the West Bank since Hamas carried out a one-day attack on 7
October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed and 250 were dragged back into Gaza as
hostages.
As
with Facility 1391, revelations of the horrors taking place at Israel’s new
black site have garnered barely any attention from the western media
establishment.
CNN,
known for excising Israeli atrocities from its coverage on the orders of
executives, should be applauded for finally doing what western media often
falsely claims is its role: holding power to account.
Headlined
“Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers”, the lengthy article details the
degrading, brutal conditions Palestinians kidnapped from Gaza and the West Bank
are being subjected to.
The
number of Palestinians passing through the secretive detention camp, located in
the Negev desert, is unknown. But satellite photos show the site is rapidly
expanding, presumably to accommodate ever more “prisoners”.
Some
Palestinians who have emerged, utterly broken from this incarceration system -
where the world saw men and boys being paraded zip-tied, near-naked and
blindfolded in Gaza’s streets and stadiums back in November and December -
began telling of their experiences months ago.
Predictably,
the western media largely ignored the testimonies.
Even
when staff from Sde Teiman started coming forward weeks ago to divulge horror
stories, western outlets collectively yawned - apart from CNN.
Pattern
of media failure
This
pattern of failure has been noted in the pages of Middle East Eye for months.
For
example, the western media establishment has studiously averted their gaze from
Israeli reports that a proportion of those killed on 7 October were not victims
of Hamas but of the Israeli army’s notorious “Hannibal procedure”, a protocol
to kill fellow Israelis rather than let them be taken captive.
Western
journalists still mostly avoid highlighting the fact that Israel is actively
starving the entire population of Gaza of food and water, an unquestionable
crime against humanity. Instead, journalists echo their own governments by
labelling this Israeli-induced famine a “humanitarian crisis”, as if it were an
unfortunate natural disaster.
The
media also obscures the fact that western powers, especially the US and UK, are
directly assisting Israel in its mass starvation of Gaza’s population - both by
denying funding to the UN’s main relief agency, Unrwa, and by refusing to put
any significant pressure on Israel to allow in aid.
Echoing
the Biden administration, the media still hesitates to call Israel’s actions in
Gaza what they are, preferring an occasional mealy-mouthed assessment that
Israel “may be at risk” of committing war crimes. None point to the bigger
picture that all of these individual “possible” war crimes indisputably amount
to genocide.
That
obfuscation has become even harder to maintain with the prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court (ICC) applying this week for arrest warrants for
suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three
Hamas leaders.
Nonetheless,
the media have stressed Israel's and the Biden administration's indignation at
the court rather than the substance of its charges, including the allegation
that Israel is exterminating Palestinians in Gaza through planned starvation.
The
media avoids clarity on these topics because clarity would be inconvenient.
Why? Because, as we shall see, the western media’s purpose is to create a
narrative that serves western governments in pursuing their overarching foreign
policy goals in the oil-rich Middle East, not ending the boundless suffering in
Gaza or holding Israel to account for its crimes.
Used
as lab rats
As
a handful of whistleblowers revealed to CNN, Palestinians are incarcerated for
weeks on end in Sde Teiman as they are tortured - both through formal
interrogations and through the conditions they are held in.
They
are forced to sit blindfolded outdoors on a thin mattress through the desert
heat of the day and sleep in the cold of the desert night. Continuously cuffed,
they are forced to remain motionless and silent. At night, dogs are set on
them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks being savagely beaten till bones are
broken.
People’s
hands and legs are tightly zip-tied for so long that, according to the report,
some have needed limbs amputated.
As
one Israeli whistleblower recounted to CNN, none of these abuses are about
intelligence gathering. “They were done out of revenge,” he admitted. The
inmates are punching bags for the Israeli soldiers and guards.
But
this is about more than simple vengeance. Understanding what is happening at
Sde Teiman provides a clearer picture of what is happening on a far bigger,
even more industrial scale in Gaza.
Especially
revealing are the conditions in a field hospital at the detention camp, housing
Palestinians either maimed in Israel’s savage destruction of Gaza or injured by
beatings from Israeli soldiers.
They
are handcuffed to gurneys in row after row, blindfolded and naked apart from an
adult nappy. They are not allowed to speak.
There
they lie day after day, night after night, in a state of utter sensory
deprivation, with nothing to distract from their wounds and pain. In the midst
of this, Israeli medical interns can use their exposed, vulnerable flesh as a
canvas for experimentation.
According
to one whistleblower, the detention centre has quickly gained a reputation for
being “a paradise for interns”.
There,
they are allowed to use Palestinians as little more than lab rats and
encouraged to carry out medical procedures they are not qualified to perform.
A
whistleblower told CNN: “I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients,
performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise.”
Such
procedures were frequently done without anaesthesia. Unlike doctors in Gaza,
Israeli doctors have ready access to painkillers. It is a choice not to use
them.
Medical
staff missing
With
western media so readily colluding in the dehumanisation of Palestinians, it is
important to remember who these “prisoners” are.
Israel
wishes us to believe it is targeting Hamas and those it “arrests” - the widely
accepted euphemism, used by CNN in this article, for those Israel takes hostage
- are Palestinians suspected of ties to the militant group.
However,
one of the most significant testimonies of abuse from Sde Teiman reported by
CNN comes from Dr Mohammed al-Ran, the grey-haired head of surgery at Gaza’s
now-destroyed Indonesian hospital.
He
was “arrested” - kidnapped - by Israel in December and taken to Sde Teiman.
There is no suggestion al-Ran was engaged in armed combat against invading
Israeli troops or was associated with Hamas in any other way. He was seized,
along with other medical staff, while working a three-day shift at another
medical centre, the al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist Hospital.
He
had been forced to flee the Indonesian hospital after it was bombed by Israel
and staff there were severely beaten.
Untold
numbers of medical personnel have been murdered or disappeared by Israel during
its systematic attacks on Gaza’s hospitals. The destruction of the enclave’s
health sector is another glaring crime against humanity the western media has
carefully avoided identifying.
The
contrast with the media’s unrelenting certainty about Russia’s war crimes in
Ukraine a short time ago is stark indeed.
Human
rights groups are desperately trying to track down these Palestinian hostages
with habeas corpus writs, just as they earlier tried to find the foreign
nationals held captive in Facility 1391. The Israeli courts have been wilfully
obstructive.
In
one test case, the Israeli human rights group HaMoked, which was central to
identifying Facility 1391, has been petitioning Israel’s supreme court - whose
judges include some living in illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank - to
find a Palestinian X-ray technician missing since February.
He
was seized by Israeli troops at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. The suspicion
is that he is being held in Sde Teiman.
According
to HaMoked, more than 1,300 Palestinians from Gaza are missing, presumed to be
in Israeli detention, including 29 women.
Another
surgeon, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, is known to be among more than two dozen
Palestinians who have died in mysterious circumstances in Israeli captivity. He
was most likely tortured to death or possibly killed in a failed medical
procedure.
‘Unprecedented’
abuses
In
further proof that this wave of violence against prisoners is entirely
unrelated to suspicions that they belong to Hamas or participated in the 7
October attack, details emerged over the weekend of relentless and savage
abuses of the most prominent Palestinian prisoner held by Israel.
Marwan
Barghouti, from the Palestinian National Liberation Movement led by Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas - Hamas’s arch-opponents - has been locked up for the
past 22 years. Sometimes referred to as the “Palestinian Mandela”, Barghouti is
considered a potential future leader of the Palestinian people.
According
to fellow inmates and human rights groups, Barghouti is barely recognisable
after a series of beatings, one of which has left him struggling to see out of
his right eye.
He
is reported to be in constant pain from a suspected dislocated shoulder
resulting from one assault, an injury that has not been treated.
According
to his Israeli lawyer, he has been dragged across the floor handcuffed and
naked in front of other inmates at Ayalon Prison.
Barghouti
has lost significant weight due to the severe food restrictions imposed on all
Palestinian prisoners since October and has been denied access to books,
newspapers and television.
Tal
Steiner of the Israeli human rights group the Public Committee Against Torture
in Israel told the Guardian that Barghouti was being subjected to
“unprecedented” abuses and that such torture had become “standard” for the
8,750 Palestinians known to have been jailed since October.
The
government minister overseeing Israel’s prison service, Itamar Ben Gvir,
belongs to the avowedly fascist party Jewish Power, whose ideological roots in
Kahanism explicitly regard Palestinians as little more than vermin.
Bargaining
chips
The
western media have focused endlessly on the suffering of the 100 or more
Israeli hostages still held in Gaza, though it remains unmentioned that much of
that suffering derives from Israel’s actions.
The
hostages, like the Palestinians of Gaza, are under Israel’s rain of bombs. And
like Palestinians, they face sustained food shortages caused by Israel’s aid
blockade. The indiscriminate violence against Gaza affects both hostages and
Palestinians alike.
But
based on reports by CNN and Israeli media, it seems likely that many of the
thousands of Palestinians kidnapped by Israel since October are facing a far
crueller fate than the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hamas
is invested in keeping the Israeli hostages as safe as possible because they
are valuable bargaining chips for getting the Israeli army out of Gaza and
freeing Palestinians from torture sites like Sde Teiman.
Israel
faces no such pressures. As the occupying power and Washington’s favourite
client state, it can inflict any punishment it chooses on Palestinians with
little repercussion.
That
is another facet of the past seven months that the media refuse to acknowledge.
Destroying
aid
Meanwhile,
western publics are smeared if they try to name Israel’s crimes as genocide or
articulate how the genocide is unfolding. This echoes the suspicions of an
overwhelming majority of judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ)
back in January and is implied by the ICC chief prosecutor’s application for
arrest warrants this week.
The
West’s recent, perverse and self-serving redefinition of antisemitism - a
victory for pro-Israel lobby groups - equates Jew hatred with criticism of
Israel more so than actually hating Jews.
Under
the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition, it is
antisemitic to draw a parallel between Israel’s actions and the genocide with
which westerners are most familiar: the Holocaust.
Conveniently
for Israel, western establishments can now disavow an all-too-obvious lesson of
history and human psychology: the victims of abuse are quite capable of
committing such abuses themselves.
CNN’s
reconstruction of the field hospital at Sde Teiman shows dehumanised
Palestinians - bound, blindfolded and naked - in rows of gurneys ready to be
experimented on. Why would that not evoke, for western audiences, memories of
Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who viewed concentration camp inmates
as less than human, mere fodder for his experiments?
What
echoes should westerners feel watching Jewish extremists from Israel’s illegal
settlements ambush aid trucks heading to Gaza, smash up the supplies
desperately needed by a starving population, burn the trucks and beat the
drivers - all while Israeli soldiers and police stand by, allowing the
destruction to take place?
How
might it be wrong - antisemitic, no less - to ponder whether a similar brutal,
genocidal racism drove extremists in Germany in 1938 when they rampaged against
Jews on Kristallnacht?
And
what about those who have compared tiny Gaza to a concentration camp during
Israel’s 17-year siege by land, air and water, with encaged Palestinians
deprived of basic freedoms and the essentials of life? Or those who now call
Gaza a death camp as Israel starves the population?
Are
such assessments really evidence of Jew hatred? Or are they proof that these
observers have understood well the lessons of history and the Holocaust? The
systematic degrading and abuse of a people should always be viewed as a crime
against our shared humanity.
The
moral duty facing us all is to stop such atrocities, not to withhold judgement
and mutely watch them play out to their logical conclusion.
Torture
chambers
The
current horrors Israel is inflicting on the inmates of Sde Teiman and, on an
even bigger scale, on the Palestinians in the Gaza death camp, are about much
more than simple vengeance for 7 October.
Sde
Teiman is the small torture chamber, mirroring the much bigger torture chamber
of Gaza itself, where bombs and starvation are achieving precisely the same
ends.
Until
seven months ago, Israel’s goal was to keep the Palestinians a subjugated,
enslaved, hopeless people, confined to a series of concentration camps in Gaza,
the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They were expected to remain mute in their
suffering and invisible to the outside world.
Over
the long term, it was assumed that Palestinians would prefer to flee their
immiseration in these permanently occupied, colonised lands.
The
slave revolt of 7 October - brutal and ugly as such revolts have been
throughout history - was a devastating shock. Not just to an Israel wedded to
its racist, hands-on colonial project of subjugating the Palestinian people. It
was also a shock to the West’s wider colonial project, into which Israel is so
tightly integrated.
In
Washington’s “rules-based order”, the only meaningful rule is that what
Washington and its clients want, they get. The planet, its resources and
peoples are viewed as little more than playthings by the world’s
superpower-in-chief.
Revolts
to this order - whether advanced by Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the
Houthis in Yemen or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran - cannot be
allowed to become a model. The “rules-based order” must be restored with a
savagery necessary to teach the the colonised and enslaved their place.
That
was the message of Washington’s own black sites needed in its futile “war on
terror” from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo - sites that drew on Israel’s experiences
of “breaking” inmates at Facility 1391.
The
complicity of western establishments in Israel’s current genocide is not an
anomaly. It does not derive from a misunderstanding or confusion. The western
political and media class see the genocide in Gaza as clearly as the rest of
us. But for them, it is justified, required even. The colonised and oppressed
must be taught that resistance is futile.
Sde
Teiman, like the Gaza death camp, is serving its purpose. It is there to break
the human spirit. It is there to turn the Palestinians into willing
collaborators in their own destruction as a people, in their own ethnic
cleansing.
And
a subliminal message is being directed at the western public at the same time:
this could also be your fate if you do not join in cheerleading Israel’s
atrocities in Gaza.
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