This is a powerful expose of the prevalence of torture in Israel's treatment of its Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. Abu Ghraib really pales in comparison to what has gone one for decades in the prisons and streets of the West Bank. When people hear "torture", they think of extracting information, but actually torture is the worst method to getting valuable information. The real impetus behind Israel's systematic and widespread torture practices is to psychologically crush Palestinians as a people. I will add a few notes, if you don't mind:
1. The British practiced public hangings extensively in Palestine as policy to crush the 1936 Revolt. Some Israelis practices, and the oppressive legal framework that permits them, were inherited from the British colonial government.
2. During the early months of the First Intifada (1987-1993), Rabin as defense minister instituted a "broken-bones" policy against Palestinian children caught throwing stones. Tens of thousands of children suffered such beatings, usually immediately after getting caught in the aftermath of a protest. There was no trial or defense of any sort, the soldiers were fully armed so you fight them back at the penalty of death.
https://www.wrmea.org/1988-february/torture-perjury-and-palestinian-children.html
3. During the First Intifada, Israeli soldiers could stop us at any time to ask for ID, make us stand facing a wall, frisk us, shake their guns behind our ears to threaten us …
4. The hooding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation have been well-documented and go back decades. I remember reading in the 1990s about such torture techniques. I don't think the labour governments should be immune from criticism. What has happened is that the Israeli high court, in 2018, expanded the torture powers of the Shin Beth (Israel's internal secret police).
5. Israeli interrogators often made threats, such as demolishing your parents' family home or violating your sister. Imagine your teen child being told to confess to something under such duress. "Mild psychological pressure" is what they called it.
6. Every Palestinian traveling abroad from the West Bank in the 1970s and early 1980s, upon re-entry was subjected to an invasive strip search really meant to psychologically dominate us. I document this experience, which I must have endured some 15 times before turning 8, in Chapter 5 of Fugitive Dreams.
7. The behavior of Israeli trolls on social media remind me very much of Israeli interrogation techniques and the "psychological pressure". They pounce on our stories not to dispute our arguments in any logical way, but to taunt us, make us lose hope, and crush us psychologically. My policy now is to hide their comments and block them.
