In his report to the United Nations, Judge Richard Goldstone described the actions of the Israeli state as "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population." He was writing, of course, about Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day Israeli assault that pulverized the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009. But I've often thought about how perfectly those words describe so many things that Israel does.
The Israeli repressive machinery has had a long time to develop--over sixty years--and consequently it is very finely tuned. There are many states that treat the populations under their control with just as much violence as Israel does, but few that do it with such precise, intentional, and coldly calculated sadism.
The latest example comes to me thanks to the excellent reporting of Joseph Dana, writing on the left-wing Israeli blog +972 Magazine. Dana travels frequently throughout the West Bank to document Palestinians' nonviolent struggles and their repression. Lately the village of Nabi Saleh has been the site of the following scene:
Heavily armed Israeli soldiers enter the village at two or three in the morning. They surround the houses and wake everyone up. What are they doing in the village at three in the morning? They are photographing children--all the male children of the village. They have a list. Why are they doing this? So that when they arrest the boys, they'll know who's who. Why is the Israeli army arresting teen and pre-teen boys? So they can torture them into implicating their parents and their parents' friends, who are organizing nonviolent resistance in the village.
But they don't just go about their torture of children willy-nilly. No. They pre-screen. Children arrested the first time are given a brief "interview" and released after an hour or two. Based on these interviews, the Shabak (secret police) decide which of the children are weakest and most likely to "confess" that certain adults are the leaders of the village popular committees that organize the demonstrations. These kids are then arrested again and tortured. One of the unlucky boys in Nabi Saleh was Islam Tamimi, age 14. Apparently whatever he said after a terrifying late-night arrest, hours of questioning, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and exposure to nighttime cold was not good enough, because his 11-year-old brother was arrested the next day.
I have heard many stories of Palestinian children being arrested in the West Bank. But for some reason no one ever really explained the full horror of it. It's something about the two-step process that gets me. This isn't random harassment or reactionary violence. It's targeted, deliberate, premeditated. Someone planned it. They sat down and thought: What is the most efficient way to traumatize children? How can I do this in a way that will inflict the most fear, pain and suffering on the greatest number of people? The boy, subjected to an adult-sized dose of repression. His parents and siblings, who often don't know where he's been taken but certainly know what is happening to him. The village activists, painfully aware that this is retaliation for their organizing. The whole village, subjected to collective punishment for its resistance.
The final cruelty is that the confessions that these children almost always sign after hours or days of suffering and terror are completely superfluous. Israel doesn't need an excuse to arrest anyone in the West Bank. They charged Bil'in activist Abdallah Abu Rahmah with weapons possession for having a peace sign made of spent tear gas canisters in his yard. He is still in prison. And it's not as if the popular committees and their leaders are underground or secret. They have websites and Facebook pages. They host internationals and Israelis in their homes every Friday. Everyone in the village knows who they are.
So, you might ask, what is the point? To deliberately scar the next generation, by giving young boys the experience of being broken under torture before they reach puberty? To make children feel the overwhelming power of the Israeli state from a young age? To teach them, at 10 or 12 or 14, what it feels like to be made to denounce someone you know and trust and care about, to watch them be dragged off to prison, possibly for years, because of a piece of paper you signed despite the fact it was most likely written in a language you cannot read?
One of the hardest things to explain to people who are not familiar with the Occupied Territories is the sheer number of things Israeli soldiers and police do just because they can, for no reason other than to prove their power over the civilian Palestinian population. Sometimes the dominance is banal--a long line or a petty humiliation at a checkpoint. Sometimes it's a surgical strike: resist and we will take your children away in the night and hurt them. While the Arab world burns with revolution, the machinery of Israeli colonialism grinds on, cold, implacable, and thoroughly planned.
This is why certain famous people glibly condemning the "nihilism on both sides of the conflict" sends me into apoplectic fits on the internet. Because anyone who actually bothers to look can quite easily see a different reality in Palestine: on one side, a vicious colonial state armed to the teeth by the US, and on the other, a 14-year-old boy, waking up at two in the morning to find soldiers around his bed. That people continue to resist under such conditions, with whatever means are available to them, is not nihilism. It's a demonstration of unbelievable courage.
The Israeli repressive machinery has had a long time to develop--over sixty years--and consequently it is very finely tuned. There are many states that treat the populations under their control with just as much violence as Israel does, but few that do it with such precise, intentional, and coldly calculated sadism.
The latest example comes to me thanks to the excellent reporting of Joseph Dana, writing on the left-wing Israeli blog +972 Magazine. Dana travels frequently throughout the West Bank to document Palestinians' nonviolent struggles and their repression. Lately the village of Nabi Saleh has been the site of the following scene:
Heavily armed Israeli soldiers enter the village at two or three in the morning. They surround the houses and wake everyone up. What are they doing in the village at three in the morning? They are photographing children--all the male children of the village. They have a list. Why are they doing this? So that when they arrest the boys, they'll know who's who. Why is the Israeli army arresting teen and pre-teen boys? So they can torture them into implicating their parents and their parents' friends, who are organizing nonviolent resistance in the village.
But they don't just go about their torture of children willy-nilly. No. They pre-screen. Children arrested the first time are given a brief "interview" and released after an hour or two. Based on these interviews, the Shabak (secret police) decide which of the children are weakest and most likely to "confess" that certain adults are the leaders of the village popular committees that organize the demonstrations. These kids are then arrested again and tortured. One of the unlucky boys in Nabi Saleh was Islam Tamimi, age 14. Apparently whatever he said after a terrifying late-night arrest, hours of questioning, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and exposure to nighttime cold was not good enough, because his 11-year-old brother was arrested the next day.
I have heard many stories of Palestinian children being arrested in the West Bank. But for some reason no one ever really explained the full horror of it. It's something about the two-step process that gets me. This isn't random harassment or reactionary violence. It's targeted, deliberate, premeditated. Someone planned it. They sat down and thought: What is the most efficient way to traumatize children? How can I do this in a way that will inflict the most fear, pain and suffering on the greatest number of people? The boy, subjected to an adult-sized dose of repression. His parents and siblings, who often don't know where he's been taken but certainly know what is happening to him. The village activists, painfully aware that this is retaliation for their organizing. The whole village, subjected to collective punishment for its resistance.
The final cruelty is that the confessions that these children almost always sign after hours or days of suffering and terror are completely superfluous. Israel doesn't need an excuse to arrest anyone in the West Bank. They charged Bil'in activist Abdallah Abu Rahmah with weapons possession for having a peace sign made of spent tear gas canisters in his yard. He is still in prison. And it's not as if the popular committees and their leaders are underground or secret. They have websites and Facebook pages. They host internationals and Israelis in their homes every Friday. Everyone in the village knows who they are.
So, you might ask, what is the point? To deliberately scar the next generation, by giving young boys the experience of being broken under torture before they reach puberty? To make children feel the overwhelming power of the Israeli state from a young age? To teach them, at 10 or 12 or 14, what it feels like to be made to denounce someone you know and trust and care about, to watch them be dragged off to prison, possibly for years, because of a piece of paper you signed despite the fact it was most likely written in a language you cannot read?
One of the hardest things to explain to people who are not familiar with the Occupied Territories is the sheer number of things Israeli soldiers and police do just because they can, for no reason other than to prove their power over the civilian Palestinian population. Sometimes the dominance is banal--a long line or a petty humiliation at a checkpoint. Sometimes it's a surgical strike: resist and we will take your children away in the night and hurt them. While the Arab world burns with revolution, the machinery of Israeli colonialism grinds on, cold, implacable, and thoroughly planned.
This is why certain famous people glibly condemning the "nihilism on both sides of the conflict" sends me into apoplectic fits on the internet. Because anyone who actually bothers to look can quite easily see a different reality in Palestine: on one side, a vicious colonial state armed to the teeth by the US, and on the other, a 14-year-old boy, waking up at two in the morning to find soldiers around his bed. That people continue to resist under such conditions, with whatever means are available to them, is not nihilism. It's a demonstration of unbelievable courage.
Nice timing!
ReplyDeleteCare to retract anything?
Haha. No.
ReplyDelete