“Half of the Israeli public is no longer in favor of the war,” one friend told me Saturday night as we witnessed thousands of Israelis take to the streets to protest the Israeli government under the slogan, “Elections Now.” “Yes, but the other half is all-in, and REALLY in favor,” responded his wife. “And they are the more powerful group.”
She, of course, is right. For months, reports of torture and rape have emerged from Israel’s military base turned torture camp, Sde Teiman, where Israel has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians without charge. I wrote about it in a previous diary earlier this month. Palestinians who have emerged from this torture camp refer to it as the “slaughterhouse” with horrendous tales of torture, rape, abuse, and sleep deprivation being meted out by Israeli prison guards. Nearly 30 Palestinians have died while in Sde Teiman and other prisons, according to the information provided to date.
And while the precise chain of events is unclear, what we do know is that the Israeli military advocate general decided to dispatch the military police to question nine Israeli soldiers on suspicion of gang-raping and sodomizing a Palestinian man from Gaza at Sde Teiman. The man was rushed to the hospital where he exhibited signs of rape, including a ruptured bowel and broken ribs. It would be a mistake to simply think that Israel’s actions in prisons like Sde Teiman came only after October. Since becoming Israel’s national security minister in 2022, ultranationalist Itamar Ben Gvir has made prisons his target, with him authorizing abuse against Palestinians. He has also called for the death penalty to solve problems of overcrowding.
When I first heard about the riots I was thinking “finally, they’re reacting to something as egregious as rape”… you can only imagine the whiplash heartbreak I had when I found out they were rioting for it.
Agreed.
It's tragedy with compounding interest, and as an American, I'm more than a little ashamed that my country is aiding and abetting it.
This whole thing has been so mask-off for Israel. I used to think that BDS was a distraction, that "Israel has right to defend itself" that "it's the only real democracy in the middle east" etc. Now I know there is no space between Israel and Putin's Russia. These are the bad guys. Full stop.
Agreed.
Israel is a democracy in the American sense, meaning we'll bring you freedom at the end of a nuclear warhead.
And what about the people that have been lying to you about it since at least the 70s?
It's only a crime if you are not white