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| TORTURE IN ISRAELI PRISONS
Another intimidation tactic consists of arresting Palestinians for no reason or without an arrest warrant, and then taking them into custody and deliberately postponing their court dates. These periods of arrest sometimes last for weeks. An Amnesty International report dated June 14, 2000 provides a striking example. According to the report, a 15-year-old girl named Suad Hilme Gazal was arrested in December 1998 for suspicion of attacking an Israeli, but as of the date of the report's publication, she had yet to be brought before an Israeli court.72 As of August 1999, more than 3,000 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons; 1,400 had been sentenced to death. In addition to these prisoners, new people frequently are taken into custody on the pretext of participating in various events. They are kept in very poor conditions, and sometimes spend years in custody without their cases being adjudicated. This happened to Ahmad Qatamesh who, although he still had not been found guilty after 6 years, was held without bail for the entire 6 years before being released.73 Aside from these prisoners, between 1989 and 1998 another 20,000 Palestinians were held in custody as so-called "administrative detainees." This term designates those individuals who have been arrested by an authorized administrative body without being issued a trial date. Thanks to this practice, Israel is able to arrest Palestinians without just cause and keep them in jail for years without informing them of the charge or bringing them before a judge. During this period, detainees have no right of access to their attornies or their families. The table below provides details of the numbers of Palestinians taken into custody during the al-Aqsa Intifada and the length of incarceration.
Minors in Israel Prisons Service Facilities, 2001
Palestinians are generally kept in inhumane conditions in desert tent prisons. One of these is the Nagev desert prison, where hundreds of Palestinians are detained on such trumped-up charges as "keeping secret files" or "forming private relationships." All of them, even elderly and gravely ill men, are subjected to physical and mental torture. The prison's location and the concomitant transportation difficulties make living conditions worse and also make it exceedingly difficult for the prisoners to receive regular family visits. The tents cannot protect them from either the summer's scorching heat or the winter's freezing cold. Moreover, even after they have served their prison sentences, prisoners are sometimes unable to leave due to a practice known as "repeat of punishment." A person who has completed his sentence and is preparing to leave the prison receives a summons at the last minute, indicating that he now will begin serving a sentence for some past offense.74 Whether during the interrogation period or while in prison, torture is one of the Israeli government's most-used techniques. Israel's horrible torture techniques first came to light as the result of a long study published in London's Sunday Times in 1977. This study provided the first documented cases of torture practiced by the Israeli government. According to the report, unbelievable types of torture were practiced in the prisons of Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, and Gaza, in an interrogation center in Jerusalem known as Moscobiya, and in such special army prisons as Kfar Yonah, al-Ramle, Sarafand, and Nafha. Aside from systematic beatings, other forms of torture involve applying electricity to sexual organs, plunging the naked prisoner into ice water, attacking the blindfolded prisoner with specially trained dogs, putting out cigarettes on various parts of the body, and pulling out nails and healthy teeth. Some prisoners' daughters were arrested and raped in front of their fathers. Some fathers then were forced to have sex with their own daughters.75
Middle East expert Robert Fisk describes the famous Khiam prison and various torture techniques in an article about Israeli prisons: Khiam is an awful place. Electrical wires attached to the penis and feet, constant whipping, cold nights attached to a pole while pails of freezing water are thrown over near-naked bodies… I met one inmate just 10 days after his release, a man who had spent more than a year in Khiam. "When they interrogated me, they hit me on the head, then on the back with a Kalashnikov rifle. I fell down. The man put his boot in my face and broke part of my jaw. I have lost the hearing in part of my right ear. The ear-drum is broken… Now I have bad breathing problems and the doctor says there is no medicine for it. That this problem will stay with me all my life."76
Places known as death camps, where Palestinians are taken after being arrested en masse and before being presented to a judge, have become true torture centers. Author Norman Finkelstein quotes Israeli journalist Ari Shavit's description of a death camp in which many Palestinians are awaiting trial: Among them, here and there, are some boys who are small and appear to be very young... The prison has twelve guard towers… The Shin Bet [an Israeli investigative agency] delivers to the [soldiers] a list with the names of friends of the young men... Then the soldiers ... go out almost every night to the city and ... come back with children of fifteen or sixteen years of age. The children grit their teeth. Their eyes bulge from their sockets. In not a few cases they have already been beaten ... a young man, barefoot, wounded, who looks as if he's having an epileptic fit, who tells you that they beat him just now on the back and stomach and over the heart. There are ugly red marks all over his body. The doctor turns to the young man and shouts at him. In a loud, raging voice he says: "May you die!" And then he turns to me with a laugh: "May they all die!"77
One of the reasons why torture is so frequent and common is that Shin Bet, the internal security agency, until recently was permitted by Israeli law to torture during interrogations. Thus Shin Bet officials could treat prisoners however they liked, and could force them to confess to imaginary crimes under the pretense of obtaining confessions. Following these torture-assisted interrogations, long prison sentences awaited those who "confessed" to crimes. Gideon Levy, an anti-Zionist Israeli author, wrote the following after visiting a Palestinian who had been tortured by Shin Bet and spent years in prison: Omar Ranimat has trouble sitting down. He also finds it difficult to stand, walk or climb stairs. When I met him just a few weeks ago, two and a half years after his interrogation by the Shin Bet, which lasted 45 days and nights, he was a wreck… Ranimat and Ahmed, like thousands of other Palestinians, underwent routine Shin Bet treatment - the "shabah," the "gift," the "frog," sleep deprivation, ear-splitting non-stop music, a stinking sack over the head, a foot on the testicles and abrasive handcuffs on the writs and ankles. Most had no connection whatever with ticking bombs.78 Economic Siege One technique used to intimidate the Palestinians, particularly in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is to keep them under pressure and economically dependent so that they cannot stand on their own two feet and live decently. Zionist ideology asserts that the Palestinians are a people sentenced to live in poverty and primitive conditions, and thus their needs mean nothing to Israel. The fact that no money has been spent on their behalf in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and that the Jewish settlers in those areas have been provided with the means to live luxuriously, is just one sign of this situation. For example, the settlements in Gaza occupy a large strip of the coast and cover the most valuable land. These settlements, surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences, are covered with trees and vegetation, and benefit from public buildings and commercial activities. On the other hand, the scenes at the nearby Palestinian refugee camps are heartbreaking. Some 4,000 Jewish settlers use most of this desert region's restricted water for agriculture and for such beneits as as a huge artificial lake in front of a luxury hotel, while the Palestinians are permitted only to scavenge what water they can from the nearly dry wells.79
Israeli journalist and military correspondent Ze'ev Schiff described Israel's Gaza Strip policy in March 1993: We have continued to steal the Strip's water, even though its quality deteriorated from year to year, to steal the Strip's tiny land resources, in order to found there more and more [Jewish] settlements, as if we deliberately wanted to make the inhabitants despair, and in their despair think in terms of having nothing to lose.80 Another Israeli strategy to force the Palestinians into a corner is to take away their agricultural capabilities by building settlements on the most fertile land. In this way, the Israeli government hampers Palestinian efforts to continue their already-difficult agricultural activities, thus depriving them of their livelihood. An example of this is the prohibition on fishing, which represented the only source of income for many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, widespread attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers on Palestinian farms contribute to lower rates of production and income. New regulatory measures, such as mandating the use of Israeli middlemen to sell all produce in Israel or only allowing Israeli firms to export produce, also create enormous economic strains. For example, Palestinian producers can no longer sell their products directly to consumers. In Gaza, for example, the severe restrictions placed on the export of oranges, a main source of income, means that more than half of the producers' crops now simply rots and must be destroyed. As Danny Rubinstein, a veteran Israeli journalist who writes for Ha'aretz, reports, "With fishing barred and Arab fruit and citrus cultivation dwindling, the population of the Gaza Strip was compelled to rely on work under intolerable conditions at miserable pay in Israel or subcontracting for Israeli industries by women and children at home, as in the early days of the industrial revolution."81
Quoting from Sara Roy, a Gaza researcher, Noam Chomsky describes the main purpose of Israel's policy: The goal, Roy and other observers conclude, is to turn parts of Gaza into a "branch plant" economy designed "to serve Israeli interests . . . primarily," with Israel retaining control over land, zoning, water, and any development that may take place in the areas released to local self-administration.82
Given that factories in the Gaza Strip and cantons in the West Bank offer an easily exploitable and very cheap labor force, keeping these areas economically dependent on Israel is an important component of Israel's policy. The Palestinian economy has suffered greatly due to the curfews and blockades in the camps imposed by the Israelis since the earliest days of the al-Aqsa Intifada. According to a UN report published on December 5, 2000, Israel's prohibition on the movement of Palestinian workers and goods did more than $500 million of damage to the Palestinian economy. Another fact not cited in the report is that Palestine's agricultural sector lost an additional $120 million because Israeli soldiers would not allow Palestinian farmers to harvest and sell their crops. The Palestinians are being oppressed by military force on the one hand, while being refused the right to live by economic pressure on the other. The Burning of Olive Groves For many centuries, olive groves have comprised one of the Palestinians' principal sources of income. But just as they have had to leave behind their homes and everything else they own, they also have been forced to leave their olive groves behind and migrate elsewhere. Many of these groves, which contain trees dating from the nineteenth century, and some even much earlier, have been ruined. The few small farms that the Palestinians still own are subjected to frequent attacks by settlers, who burn and cut down all the trees they can find. The situation was described in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine: Thousands of olive trees were also destroyed. Palestinians who relied for their livelihood on orchards their families had tended for many generations saw them cut down in an afternoon by Israeli soldiers and settlers armed with chain saws.83
During the first Intifada, between 1988 and 1992, the Israeli army cut down 90,000 olive trees on the pretext that stone-throwing children were hiding in them. Between 1993 and August 2001, the State of Israel has uprooted 280,000 fruit and olive trees belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank alone. In 2001 alone, the State of Israel uprooted 23,551 fruit and olive trees.84
Moreover, olive groves workers, who are usually women and children, often are fired upon by Israeli helicopter gunships. Most Palestinians who have been beaten while trying to harvest olives no longer visit their groves. The soldiers who fired upon these workers had no valid reason to do so, for they were neither throwing stones at Israeli soldiers nor participating in a demonstration. They were simply trying to make a living by working the small plots of land that they still owned. For some reason, the Israeli administration will not allow even this. Just as they do in every aspect of their social lives, Palestinians face almost insurmountable obstacles in their economic lives as well - they are not permitted even to raise their own crops. If one thinks about the broader picture, it becomes clear that destroying olive groves or other agricultural areas is not a random affair, but rather part of a comprehensive Israeli strategy, for it takes 6 to 7 years for a new tree to bear olives. And, many Palestinians derive their families' livelihoods through olives or other crops. Those whose crops are constantly being destroyed, however, eventually will be unable to make a living and, rather than dealing with agriculture, will begin to look for work as day laborers. In this way, Palestinian villages are being transformed from productive agricultural units into a source of cheap labor for Israeli industry. Throughout history, authoritarian and oppressive leaders have practiced such types of oppression and cruelty on other peoples. Just like today's cruel dictators, oppressive despots, and racist leaders, those people practiced violence, torture, and oppression on those under their command. And as God states, once these "sowers of discord" are in power, they continue to inflict physical violence upon their subjects and make a special effort to wipe out their "animals and crops." In other words, just as the current Israeli administration has done, they systematically used every technique in their attempt to destroy a people. This method is described in the Qur'an: Whenever he holds the upper hand, he goes about the Earth corrupting it, destroying (people's) crops and animals. God does not love corruption. (Qur'an, 2:205) These very techniques are seen today in the most profound way in Palestine. The Israeli administration is conducting a systematic program of ethnic cleansing and, at the same time, undermining all of the Palestinians' agricultural activities. In such an environment, where peace and security cannot exist, barrenness can only become more widespread. However, God does not love corruption and He invites all people to "enter absolutely into peace" (Qur'an, 2:208). Demolition of Houses
Now 58 years old, Mohana lives alone in a broken bus surrounded by a mesh of barbed wire, among new neighbors who still don't know his name. In 1984, when Gilo extension called Metzpe Bethlehem was underway, Mohana returned from the Bethlehem market with his father, a tailor named Salman, to find a bulldozer on its way to remove his two story stone house. By that time most of Mohana's land was in the process of being mysteriously expropriated by the Israeli Municipality even while he still maintained ownership by showing his Ottoman and Jordanian land documents in Israeli courts. The Israeli Municipality later apologized for the demolition saying it was a mistake, but compensated Mohana only with a broken bus and prohibited him from building anything more than a wooden shed which he currently uses for storage and an outdoor bathroom.85 The excerpt quoted above is just one of the possibly hundreds of incidents experienced on Palestinian lands. For that matter, most of the hundreds of Palestinians who return home from the markets to discover that their homes and all of their possessions have been destroyed are not lucky enough to acquire a broken-down bus. The Israeli government does not stop at merely demolishing houses through an expropriation order while its residents are not at home. Many Palestinians' houses are bombed and razed to the ground with their residents still inside.
According to an Amnesty International report published on June 14, 2000, during early 1987 to January 1999, 2,650 houses belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem were destroyed, rendering 16,800 people (7,300 of them children) homeless. According to this report, this practice was not curtailed even after the Oslo Accords were signed by the Palestinian Authority and Israel.86 It is worth noting that Israel gives no advance warning before demolishing a Palestinian family's home. First, the home to be destroyed is surrounded by bulldozers and Israeli soldiers equipped with modern weapons. Then, the homeowners are given 15 minutes to collect their belongings. After this, the soldiers go inside and throw all of the remaining things into the street and then destroy the house with bulldozers. If the homeowners offer any resistance, they are beaten severely and sometimes even fired upon by Israeli soldiers. For example, in January 1999, when some Palestinians in Eizriya, a village near Jerusalem, protested the demolition of their home, Israeli soldiers fired upon them. Zaki Ubeyd, a 28-year-old man, was killed. According to Amnesty International's report, he was killed by a shot to the back of the head at close range. This shows that this killing was no accident; rather, it was done deliberately and consciously. Another Israeli practice is to grant temporary settlement papers to Palestinians, especially those living in East Jerusalem, and then making it difficult for them to renew their papers once they expire. In this way, Palestinians are removed from their property one section at a time. Those who lose their settlement rights also lose their social security, and thus are sentenced to a type of exile. Information obtained from Israel's Interior Ministry shows that in 1996 alone, 1,641 Palestinians and their families lost the right to live in Jerusalem.87 In 2001, Israel's activities designed to remove Palestinians from their homes and lands continued at a rapid pace. In his article "Easter in the Holy Land: Families Watch as Their Homes are Destroyed," Robert Fisk describes developments that occurred during April 2001: On one of the holiest days in the Middle East, how does one write about this wanton Israeli destruction of homes in Gaza?.. Not to mention the 35 wounded, the boy with his leg chopped off by an Israeli shell, the teenager with sharpnel nudging at his shoulder bone and no feeling in his left hand, flapping it uselessly towards me from his hospital bed. Is this a tragedy or a war crime, this deliberate attack on the homes of civilians?… The first big lie of the weekend, however, came from the Israeli army, which blandly announced that the destruction of the Palestinian homes in Rafah was no more than "engineering activity" and that in any case the houses that their tanks and bulldozers turned into rubble were unoccupied. This was totally untrue as the Israelis, who inhabit a massive block-house above the shacks, knew very well. When the first tanks burst through the dividing wall before dusk on Saturday, firing anti-armour missiles into the nearest apartment blocks even though a small market was open 300 metres away where hundreds of men, women and children ran screaming into the neighbouring streets… The Western media were hard at work belittling the event… All of this, according to the Israelis like the destruction of more than 30 homes in Khan Younis last week, was in the name of "security."88 All of the above incidents and information point to one clear fact: The main target of all of this cruelty is the Palestinian people. And the vast majority of Palestinians are being driven from their homes merely because they are of another faith or ethnicity. And again for this reason, Israel is trying to destroy them. All that the Palestinians have done in the face of this is to try and protect the holy lands that have belonged to them for thousands of years, and which have been bequeathed to the entire Muslim world. Moreover, all Muslims are obliged to shoulder this task. All people of conscience who see what is happening here, but in particular Muslims who know and follow the Qur'an's ethics, have great responsibilities. This systematic cruelty, although taking place before the eyes of the world, only can be ended by sincere Muslims and the spiritual values that bind them to this place. The Bias Among the Western Media Why can't the Israeli policies of occupation and depopulation be stopped? Why doesn't the international community use its power to persuade Israel to adopt a humane and just policy? The answer has several dimensions, one of which is the bias in some parts of the Western media against the Palestinian cause. As Edward Said explained well in Covering Islam, most of the Western journalists and commentators see the Middle East through streotypes in which "terrorism" is always associated with the Arab Muslim world and never linked with Israel. This misconception is so obvious that some news agencies reporting on events in Palestine have adopted a style and vocabulary favorable to Israel. For example, when following news reports about Palestine, you seldom encounter the phrases "the territories occupied by Israel" or "the Occupied Territories." Likewise, in news reports that mention Israeli attacks, the words "Israel's retaliation" are used as a matter of course. This gives readers the following message: "First the Palestinians attacked; Israel counterattacked only to defend itself." One of the most frequently encountered sentences in the Western media describes instances of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian children: "A Palestinian child died during an exchange of gunfire." This carries the message: "If Palestinians had not engaged in aggressive conduct, these children would not have died." In fact, The Independent newspaper's Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk emphasizes what is meant by "crossfire" where Israel is concerned: "When I read the word 'crossfire', I reach for my pen. In the Middle East, it almost always means that the Israelis have killed an innocent person."89 As far as the Western media is concerned, Palestinians always die in "crossfire." The intention here is to hide the fact that Israeli sharpshooters take aim at Palestinians and shoot with the intention to kill. This influence is described today by many political scientists and Middle East experts. This attitude, which ignores Palestinian suffering and Israeli brutality and tries to make Israel look innocent, prevails in almost every country, particularly in America. Fisk discusses this in his article "I Am Being Vilified for Telling the Truth About Palestinians": But the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at any one academic, analyst, reporter who dares to criticise Israel (or dares to tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching McCarthyite proportions. Take Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian academic who is a professor at Columbia University.
He has been facing unprecedented abuse from the Zionist Organisation of America, which last year demanded that he be fired from the Modern Language Association and which now demands on an almost daily basis his dismissal from his professorship at Columbia solely because he points out, with clinical ferocity and painful accuracy, the historical tragedy of Palestinian dispossession, the brutality of Israel's continued occupation and the bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement… Too true. Noam Chomsky, himself Jewish, is one of the most profound philosophers of our age, but his scathing reviews of the Israeli occupation and America's blind, unquestioning support for Israel now earn him ever more ruthless abuse... Ignorance of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered to in the US that only a few tiny newspapers report anything other than Israel's point of view. You won't find Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put very well by Charlie Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel, note the boondocks location, when he wrote that "Palestinians won't get their independence until Americans get theirs". But the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is now international. We must say that Israel is under siege by Palestinians (rather than occupying Palestinian land), that Palestinians are responsible for the violence (even though Palestinians are the principal victims), that Arafat turned down a good deal at Camp David (though he was offered just over 60 per cent of his land, not 94 per cent), and that Palestinians indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why the Israeli troops have shot so many Palestinian children).90 As Fisk describes, most Western media outlets do not hesitate to report false news when the subject is Israel. The facts are carefully hidden. Israel's operations, murders, slaughters, bombings, occupations, exilings, and hundreds of other types of cruelty either are ignored in Western media outlets or reported in such a way as to make Israel appear blameless. Israel is still an aggressor state occupying lands that do not belong to it, in direct contravention of UN mandates. Yet it is presented to the world as the "representative of peace and stability in the Middle East." When faced with the false news reports and misinformation of the al-Aqsa Intifada's early days, Fisk could not help asking: "Why do we always get taken in by the same lies? Don't reporters carry history books, even a cuttings file, to remind them of what they wrote in the last Arab-Israeli war? Even the quotes - the meretricious, cliché-soaked statements - are the same."91 Even when Israel intensifies its use of violence and terror, the Western press takes a clear pro-Israel stance, failing to find the inhumane slaughters of civilians newsworthy. In fact, some newspapers even act as spokesman for Israel, offering those who personally perpetrated the massacres to write columns, hence publishing a purely slanted version of events. Noam Chomsky describes how, in 1986, The New York Times presented Ariel Sharon, a future Prime Minister of Israel and known as "The Butcher of Lebanon," as its "terror expert": The New York Times called upon an expert on terrorism to offer his thoughts on how to counter the plague… The Times editors gave his [the expert's] article the title: "It's Past Time to Crush The Terrorist Monster," and they highlighted the words: "Stop the slaughter of innocents [Israelis]." They identify the author solely as "Israel's Minister of Trade and Industry." His name is Ariel Sharon. His terrorist career, dating back to the early 1950s, includes the slaughter of 69 villagers in Qibya and 20 at the al-Bureig refugee camp in 1953; terrorist operations in the Gaza region and northeastern Sinai in the early 1970s including the expulsion of some ten thousand farmers into the desert, their homes bulldozed and farmlands destroyed in preparation for Jewish settlement; the invasion of Lebanon undertaken in an effort - as now widely conceded - to overcome the threat of PLO diplomacy; the subsequent massacre at Sabra and Shatilla; and others… In a moral and intellectual climate such as this, it may well be appropriate for the world's greatest newspaper to select Ariel Sharon as our tutor on the evils of terrorism and how to combat it.92 Most Western media outlets apply a very simple technique when reporting on Palestine: They take Israel's official statement, make room for the Prime Minister's comments, and dress up the piece with footage from Israeli news sources. Grace Halsell, President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary for almost 3 years, was an internationally recognized columnist and Middle East expert. In one article, she describes how the Western media report on events in Israel: Police, said the Israelis, used live ammunition on the Palestinians only after the Palestinians began an assault on Jewish worshippers. Without exception, the Western media initially reported this "official" Israeli explanation.
Now, however, eyewitness accounts, reports from four Palestinian and Jewish human rights groups, as well as three videotapes, reveal the Israeli version is false. All available evidence supports Arab charges that Israeli police initiated the conflict and then shot Palestinians in cold blood. On Nov. 9, after UN Security Council representatives viewed one of the videotapes, the Soviet ambassador, Yuli M. Vorontsov, said the filmed document undermines Israel's claim that Palestinians incited the violence… A three-man Israeli commission then issued a report upholding the "official" Israeli line that Palestinians had started the conflict… Among others, the commission criticized Aryeh Bibi, in charge at the scene of the killings… Shortly thereafter, Israeli officials called in Bibi and said he was being promoted to full commander of the Israeli Police Manpower Division. Whatever the motivation, his promotion, carrying not only an increase in rank but also in pay, will signal other police that, officially, it "pays" to shoot Palestinians… Moreover, the US media, which has several dozen writers stationed in Israel, makes little or no attempt to understand and report on the meaning of these assaults. They do little or no investigative reporting, but rather too readily accept "official" explanations of events provided them by the Israelis.93 But we must remember that the responsibility for the cruelty occuring in Palestine is not reserved only for those who actually inflict it, but also for those who endorse it with their silence and support it indirectly. As we read, "... (Those who) cause corruption in the Earth, the curse will be upon them. They will have the Evil Abode." (Qur'an, 13:25), God warns us that those who sow discord will be condemned on Judgment Day.
72- "Israel,
The Occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Palestinian Authority Territories,"
Human Right Watch, World Report 1999. |
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