Today, more
than 8,000 Palestinians are locked in Israel's prisons, most without due
process. For the majority, their crime is resisting a nation that violently
stole 90 percent of their parents' and grandparents' land and possessions and
expelled them to wretched detention camps in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
(See, <http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/mideaststrifeexplanation.html>The
Simple Explanation for Mid-East Strife) These sons and grandsons were
imprisoned for crimes ranging from stone-throwing at Israeli tanks to violent
terrorist activity. As prisoners, they have virtually no rights. Many are held
without charge or trial. They can be legally tortured without restraint.
Since at least
1967, the government of Israel has vehemently denied that it uses torture, and
Israel signed the 1987 Landau Agreement banning most forms of torture. 1 But
in 1995 a secret government report (not released until 2000) admitted Israel
does torture. 2 In 1999 Israel's Supreme Court ruled that torture can be
employed as a "necessity" in exceptional cases when officers have reason to
believe they can prevent a crime. This has created a loophole, exempting
interrogators/torturers from punishment as long as they claim they tortured in
the national interest. 3
Since every
Palestinian prisoner may be viewed as possessing information valuable to
preventing terrorist attacks, virtually all have been tortured. The Palestine
Monitor (<http://www.palestinemonitor.org/>www.palestinemonitor.org) reports
that since 1987 the Israeli Security Agency has tortured at least 850
Palestinians a year during interrogations. Since the Supreme Court ruling in
1999, according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselm, 85 percent
of Palestinian prisoners are still subjected to torture. The Monitor asserts
that during the first Intifada (1987-1993), Israeli security "interrogated
approximately 23,000 Palestinians." The Public Committee Against Torture (PCAT)
estimates that almost all suffered some torture during interrogation. 4
The Palestine
Monitor says that methods of interrogation and torture frequently used by
Israeli security service include:
Tying up
detainees in painful positions for hours or days.
Containment in
tiny cramped spaces (for days, prisoners have been stuffed in boxes about 2
feet square and 5 feet high, often with spiked floors).
Prolonged
beatings.
Enclosing the
detainee's head in a sack (often soaked with urine and feces).
Violent
"shaking" (Physicians for Human Rights says this has caused brain damage, even
death). 5
Bending body in
extremely painful positions.
Prolonged
exposure to extreme cold or heat.
Sexual, verbal,
and psychological abuse.
Threats against
the individual's life or family members' lives.
Playing
extremely loud music.
Choking and
pulling out hair (prisoners have been forced to swallow hair).
Intentional
tightening of handcuffs (According to Amnesty International, the handcuffs
used by the Israeli Security forces are in themselves a form of torture, "the
plastic handcuffs tighten on the detainee's wrist, causing intense pain;
former detainees describe their wrists becoming blue as a result of their
tightening and adult men screaming with pain as they begged to be taken off."
Putting head of
prisoner in toilet bowl. 6
Some prisoners
are guilty of terrorist acts, including attempted suicide bombings. As victims
of injustice, they have also committed injustice. Yet international law
forbids torturing prisoners, military or civilian, even to obtain vital
information. The Old Testament, ostensibly respected by Israel's government,
also gives no sanction to torture, even of Israel's bitterest enemies. The
implicit message of the Old Testament is that torture is barbaric, unthinkable
among God's chosen people. 7
Israelis
Criticize Torture
For five months
in 1977, the London Sunday Times investigative team worked inside the West
Bank, Gaza, and surrounding areas to investigate evidence of torture. The team
recorded 110,000 words of testimony and found proof of torture "'through the
ten years of Israeli occupation since 1967'." 8
The Times
presented the cases of 44 tortured Palestinians. Some of these cases are
included in three chapters of the Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, p.
593-672. 9 They confirm that the following forms of torture have existed in
Israel's prison system since 1967.
Prisoners were:
hung by their
wrists for long periods.
beaten
extensively, over periods of days and months.
struck in the
genitals, and testicles twisted, squeezed, and crushed; testicles compressed
around an iron ball placed between them.
sexually abused
- sometimes through "anal assaults," including homosexual rape and pushing of
bottles up rectums.
attacked by
dogs.
beaten on soles
of feet.
hosed with icy
water, forced to sit in blazing sun for hours.
penetrated in
the penis with a ballpoint pen; metal rods up urethra, rupturing it.
exposed,
blindfolded, to the wrath of a raging public, pelted with rocks and bottles at
Israeli football games.
forced to drink
urine and allow soldiers to urinate in their mouth.
forced to grasp
barbed wire and endure electric shock, having electrodes attached to various
parts of the body and enduring shocks so powerful they lift the victim off the
ground; forced to stand in electrically charged water.
hung in
crucified position for up to four days in the scorching sun.
hung by feet
and used as punching bags for boxers.
forced to sit
for up to a week with hands over head.
forced to "run
the gauntlet" of beatings by 8 to 10 soldiers.
laid on the
floor and jumped on by guards.
dragged by rope
around neck.
beaten and
tortured in front of family members, commanded to rape their daughters.
crushed under
bulldozers.
blindfolded and
hung from helicopter.
In addition,
they had:
their teeth
torn out with pliers; false teeth were smashed.
shards of glass
pushed deeply into nostrils.
a tube pushed
up nose with salt water forced into stomach; batons were jammed in mouth,
rupturing throat.
ribs, bones,
and teeth deliberately broken.
Red Cross
Describes Torture
In Prisoners of
Israel, Israeli civil libertarians Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone confirm:
the pattern of
torture repeated by the Sunday Times is similar to that found in the hundreds
of testimonies published by Israeli lawyers, Felicia Langer and Lea Tsemel, by
Palestinian lawyer Walid Fahoum, as the accounts we have heard from former
prisoners.
this pattern is
documented in the West Bank as early as 1968, one year after the occupation
began. Although the International Red Cross does not make public declarations,
it had prepared in 1968 a finding of torture. Its "Report on the Nablus
Prison" concludes:
"A number of
detainees have undergone torture during interrogation by the military police.
According to the evidence, the torture took the following forms:
1. Suspension
of the detainees by the hands and the simultaneous traction of his other
members for hours at a time until he loses consciousness.
2. Burns with
cigarette stubs.
3. Blows with
rods on the genitals.
4. Tying up and
blindfolding for days.
5. Bites by
dogs.
6. Electric
shocks at the temples, the mouth, the chest and testicles." 10
A report by
Amnesty International of August 9, 1982 estimated the number of detainees in
the large prison camp of Ansar at 10,000. According to the Israeli League for
Human and Civil Rights, the total number of prisoners amounted to
approximately 15,000, including children and elderly persons"
As a result,
the Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem tells us "there are many thousands
of Palestinians and Lebanese who are disabled as a result of long years of
imprisonment and torture." (p. 599)
Women Don't
Escape Torture
After 1967, the
number of women incarcerated and tortured grew dramatically.
One such
prisoner, Rasmiya Odeh, says: "The first time they stripped me and threw me on
the floor, the room was full of men -- civilians and soldiers. They laughed at
my nakedness and kicked me, beat me with sticks, punched me all over,
especially on the breasts; my body was covered with bruises. Then they got a
wooden stick, not a smooth one, and pushed it into me to break the hymen. They
brought my father and fiancé to see me. I lost consciousness
One time, an
interrogator, Abu-Hani, sat me on a chair and sat himself opposite. He put his
legs on the chair on either side of me and boxed me on the ears until I
couldn't hear anymore and brought in my father and told him to strip and make
love to me. "She isn't your daughter, she's your wife, go on, sleep with her."
My father screamed and they beat him till he lost consciousness. Blood was
pouring from my mouth and nose and I couldn't hear anymore. They dragged him
unconscious from the room. Another time, they stripped me and took me to a
room where men were suspended from the ceiling. They handcuffed me to the
hooks in the ceiling -- it was a pulley system which could be raised and
lowered- and then chained my feet to the ground, wide apart, and raised me so
only the tips of my toes touched the ground. They said they had been going to
rape me, but I was too dirty for them and they would instead get some
prisoners who hadn't seen a woman for a long time." 11
The
Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem says, "The tortures recounted in this
chapter [such as the above] have been duplicated en masse on thousands of
Palestinian women detainees of all ages." (p. 671)
Isn't it
significant that a number of Israeli torture experts instructed US
interrogators at the US military base of Abu Ghraib in Iraq several years ago?
They taught American soldiers the same torture techniques used in Israeli
prisons. 12 It is also chilling that the Bush administration, allowing
"coercion" torture of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo, uses virtually the same
evasive language as Israel. Bill Quigley, professor of law at Loyola
University in New Orleans, says 44 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan have died
in U.S. captivity, having been hooded, strangled, gagged, or beaten with blunt
objects. 13
All civil
liberties/humanitarian groups that monitor Israeli torture indicate that the
Israeli government at every level, from the premier and Shin Bet (equivalent
to our FBI) down to the military police, colludes with torture. As a result,
Ha'aretz says, "It is no surprise that no Shin Bet interrogators have been
found guilty of torturing a suspect" 14
Why Should We
Care?
In Nazi
Germany, Hitler's SS tortured people "inferior" to the "master race."
Similarly, Israel's torture of Palestinians is fueled by Talmudic teachings
which assert that Gentiles are inferior to the "chosen race" Jews. (See,
<http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/talmudscalpel.html>The Talmud: Scalpel
that Bleeds the Mideast)
Should torture
in Israeli prisons concern us as Americans? What about the millions of
evangelical Christians who staunchly support Israel?
The Bible says
someday Christians will also be incarcerated in Israeli prisons. Describing
the events of the last days before His second coming, Christ said, "They will
lay their hands on you and will persecute you, delivering you to the
synagogues and prisons" (Luke 21:12) During this future worldwide Jewish
persecution of Christians, the same penal hellholes that now muffle the
screams of thousands of tortured Palestinians will also cage Christians.
Why would
Israel imprison Christians?
For
anti-Christian Jewish activists, there is no greater criminal in history than
Jesus Christ. Such Jews believe that, by vilifying the Pharisees (modern
Judaism's greatest guiding lights), Jesus began an evil trend of suspicion
toward Judaism, a movement that New Testament writers and later church fathers
magnified through "anti-Semitic" depiction of Jews as "Christ killers." Many
Jews believe that anti-Semitism comes from Christianity; they believe the New
Testament "blood charge" that Jews had Christ crucified spawned nearly 2000
years of living hell for the Jewish people, culminating in the Holocaust.
(See, <http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/ntantisemitic.html>ADL's Foxman: New
Testament is Anti-Semitic)
When Sarah
Silverman in her film Jesus is Magic said, "I hope the Jews did kill Christ.
I'd f---ing do it again in a second," she expressed a historic Jewish point of
view: If Jesus had been smothered in His cradle, a world of Jewish suffering
would have been avoided. Activist Jews of ADL/B'nai B'rith consider the
accusation that the Jews had Christ murdered so evil they have included it as
one of the 14 criteria of anti-Semitism published by their Office of Global
Anti-Semitism in the US State Department. (See, <http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/gestapobeingcreated.html>Global
Hate Crimes Gestapo Being Created) Such "anti-Semitism" is now a hate crime
punishable by the B'nai B'rith hate laws in Canada with huge fines and even
prison. 15
Already, Jewish
activists in high places can deport and imprison those who offend them. At the
insistence of B'nai B'rith International, historians and Holocaust
reductionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolph were extradited from Canada and
America and imprisoned in Germany for violating Germany's B'nai B'rith-inspired
"anti-hate" laws.
The Knesset can
now demand from any nation extradition of those who publicly question the
accuracy of the six-million figure of the Holocaust. 16 If nations accept this
request and deport citizens to Israel, such victims may be tried there for
"crimes against the Jewish people" and sent to Israeli prisons where they may
be tortured alongside Palestinians.
The Knesset is
also deliberating legislation that would make it a federal crime for visiting
evangelicals, and even resident Jewish Christians, to witness publicly for
Christ in Israel. 17 Penalty: a year in an Israeli prison, again possibly
facing the same tortures meted to Palestinians. In the book of Acts,
Christians who publicly witnessed for Christ in the streets of Jerusalem faced
imprisonment and possible flogging (torture). The same is becoming true today.
Ultimately,
Christians may be "delivered" from the nations to Israel for the "crime" of
supporting those who caused the Holocaust -- Jesus and the New Testament
writers.
Time for
Christians to Suffer
Today, few
evangelical Christians have sympathy for Arab suffering. "Israel first"
evangelicals view Palestinians as Satanically driven opponents to God's chosen
people, Israel. They consider Israel the apple of His eye, blessed and
intimately guided from above, especially in military victories. One pastor
frankly told me God is really interested only in the Jews. "He's pretty much
written off the whole Arab world." Reflecting this mentality, most
evangelicals pledge themselves to unconditionally support Israel.
Yet when
Christ's words are fulfilled and the church suffers imprisonment and torture
at the hands of Jewish leaders, a few believers will suffer with a clear
conscience. They did not assist, but resisted, the rise of the anti-Christ
system that now oppresses them. They had compassion on its first victims, the
Palestinians, as would the gentle Jesus.
Most imprisoned
evangelicals will not have this consolation. They will remember how they and
their fathers blindly encouraged the ascent of the Great Harlot, Israel, and
stopped their ears from hearing the cries of her victims.
The
Palestinians have suffered without mercy or justice from most evangelicals for
at least 60 years. Someday it will be the turn of evangelicals to scream from
undreamed of tortures in Israeli prisons and also be unheard by a hostile and
indifferent world.
Endnotes:
1. In his
50-page report, the UN special investigator on torture, Nigel Rodley said
Israel told him, "that its law forbade all forms of torture or maltreatment
and it was in full conformity with the 1987 Convention Against Torture which
it has ratified." Yet, he goes on to relate how his investigations confirmed
that practices amounting to torture, such as sleep deprivation, hooding, and
violent shaking, were going on at the same time. Reuters, March 23, 1997, "UN
Investigator Says Israel Tortures Palestinians."
3. Human Rights
Watch, <http://www.hrw.org/>www.hrw.org, "Memorandum: Israel's Second Periodic
Report to the Committee Against Torture," May 1998.
4. <http://www.palestinemonitor.org/>www.palestinemonitor.org,
Fact Sheet of Torture of Palestinians, Aug. 17, 2007. The Monitor says,
"According to Amnesty International, since 2001, Israeli authorities '.have
actually continued and intensified implementation of a policy of torture,
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and collective punishment against
Palestinians'"
5. "Israel and
the Occupied Territories: Shaking as a Form of Torture. Death in Custody of
Abdal Al-Samad Harizat. A Medicological Report by Physicians for Human Rights,
October 1995,"
6. <http://www.palestinemonitor.org/>www.palestinemonitor.org,
Fact Sheet of Torture of Palestinians, Aug. 17, 2007.
7. The altruism
of the Old Testament toward one's vanquished enemies is revealed in II Kings
6:22: "Would you kill those you have taken captive? Set bread and water before
them that they may eat and drink and return." As a result of Israel's kindness
to a captured invading foe, "marauding bands of Arameans did not come again
into the land of Israel."
8. Schoenman
and Shone, Prisoners of Israel, Santa Barbara, CA, Veritas Press, 1984, p.13.
9.
Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, Intercontinental Books, Nov. 1991.
Edited by Christian Palestinian lawyer and diplomat Dr. Issa Nakhleh, this
2-volume work is available at most university libraries.
10. Prisoners
of Israel, p. 594.
11.
Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, p. 646.
12. Columnist
Wayne Madsen writes, "According to a political appointee within the Bush
administration and U.S. intelligence sources, the interrogators at Abu Ghraib
included a number of Arabic-speaking Israelis who also helped U.S.
interrogators develop the 'R21' (resistance to interrogation) techniques. Many
of the torture methods were developed by the Israelis over many years of
interrogating Arab prisoners in the occupied West Bank and in Israel itself."
<http://www.counterpunch.org/>www.counterpunch.org, "The Israeli Torture
Template: Rape, Feces and Urine," August 17, 2007.
13. "Priests
Expose Secret Cycle of U.S. Torture," Brenda Norrell, <http://www.counterpunch.org/>www.counterpunch.org,
Aug. 13, 2007.
14. <http://www.haaretz.com/>www.haaretz.com,
"Torture in Israel Has Again Become Routine," Aug. 18, 2003. The Palestine
Committee against Torture concludes, ".not a single GSS interrogator has been
brought to trial since 1994," PCAP, Sept. 2004, cited by the Palestinian
Monitor.
15. I asked a
friend in Toronto what would happen if he publicly stated that the Jews had
Christ killed. "Ted," he replied, "I'd be playing with fire. The police might
come and arrest me."
16. On June 20,
2004 the Jerusalem Post reported that Israel's Knesset empowered the State of
Israel to criminalize anyone in the world who publicly reduces the six-million
figure. The government is now authorized to request extradition to Israel of
such alleged "hate criminals" from any nation. Israel can also seize,
prosecute, and imprison them should they set foot in Israel.
17. Since 1977,
Israel's anti-missionary law has decreed 5 years in prison for any non-Jew who
attempts to convert a Jew from his religion, making use of a material
enticement (tract, cup of coffee, etc.). This law has not been strictly
enforced out of fear of losing evangelical favor and tourist dollars. Israeli
law also requires a 6-month prison term for anyone, Gentile or Jew,
encouraging conversion of a Jewish minor. This spring, the Shas party (equal
in votes to Likud) proposed that attempts to convert a Jew of any age in
Israel should be punished by 1 year in prison. "Shas Seeks Harsher Penalties
for Missionaries," Mar. 14, 2007,