Sexual abuse revelations might bring outcry but little change

A group of masked and armed people pose with two Israeli legislators — Limor Son Har-Melech (right) and Yitzhak Kroizer (in white), both legislators from Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Jewish Power party, pose with masked and armed reservists protesting the detention of 9 soldiers suspected of the sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners at the Sde Teiman military base.
Matan Golan SIPA USA

Sde Teiman, a military base in the Naqab desert, has risen to global infamy after revelations that it was turned into a torture camp for Palestinian detainees.

An investigation released by the Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, as well as reports in CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and others reveal a routine of torture and inhumane conditions at what became a detention center after 7 October.

According to Amnesty International, 36 detainees had died there by June.

The revelations have also laid bare the growing support for and normalization in Israeli society of the worst human rights abuses, with riots even breaking out demanding that those guilty of sexual torture escape punishment.

Some of the accused have become minor celebrities, and senior politicians have been vocal in defending such abuses as legitimate.

None of this is new. Israel has long been understood to torture Palestinian detainees, and the British colonial-era practice of administrative detention without charge or trial has been used for decades.

Nevertheless, abuses have spiraled since last October, when Israel classified all prisoners from Gaza as “unlawful combatants” rather than prisoners of war, a classification previously employed by the US during the so-called “war on terror” declared by former US president George W. Bush.

That leaves any individual so classified as a legitimate target at any time, and allows for their indefinite detention with neither charge nor trial, thus preventing them obtaining legal representation or any other assertion of rights.

Routine abuse

Sde Teiman is divided into two sections: areas for detention, which in photos look just like large cages, and a field hospital. Out of each, horrific incidents have been exposed.

Prisoners are kept blindfolded and handcuffed, and are neither allowed to speak nor move. Those who fail to follow these restrictions are punished with beatings and forced to raise their hands for an hour.

Some are zip-tied to fences. Some have guard dogs set on them. In what some detainees described as “nightly torture,” prisoners are woken up with sound grenades and interrogations.

A typical daily diet consists of a cucumber, an apple and some slices of bread.

Sexual abuse has been widespread. The New York Times reported testimonies about injuries to the rectum caused by penetration with electrified metal sticks, as well as the use of a chair wired to give electric shocks.

Minors are not free from abuse. Amnesty International published details of the case of a 14-year-old who was blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten and burned with cigarettes.

In the field hospital, a group of tents located in another section of the facility, inmates related their experience of being handcuffed to beds, forced to wear diapers and fed through straws.

Cases of amputations due handcuff injuries are common. Surgical procedures are often done without anesthesia or adequate pain killers. Some are performed by unqualified medics, leading a whistleblower to call it “paradise for interns.”

Sanctioning inhumane treatment

In October 2023, the Israeli parliament passed an amendment to a prisons law to worsen prison conditions for so-called security prisoners, invariably Palestinians.

The amendment allowed far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir to declare a “prison emergency” and restrict prisoners’ rights to the bare minimum, confining detainees to mattresses rather than beds, for instance, reducing their living space and restricting access to public phones and electronic equipment.

Prisons were already overcrowded before 7 October. The sharp increase in the number of detainees since – from just over 5,000 to 9,900 today – has left cells overcrowded and conditions increasingly unsanitary.

Israeli Channel 13 was given access inside Ketziot Prison, Israel’s largest detention facility with many Palestinian prisoners. Masked prison guards with dogs were seen on video entering overcrowded cells, where the inmates are forced to kneel on the floor and keep their heads down.

The beds are without mattresses, the toilets are a hole in the ground, and inmates are held in darkness for most of the day and are handcuffed by the legs and to each other all the time.

Their diet is basic and rations are minimal. Nationalist Israeli songs accompany the guards when entering the cells, which some might consider a form of psychological torture.

According to B’Tselem, at least 60 Palestinians have died in detention since October 2023.

Whitewash?

On 29 July, after news of the inhumane conditions suffered by Palestinian prisoners leaked, Israeli military police raided Sde Teiman and arrested nine reserve soldiers suspected of sexual abuse of a single Palestinian detainee.

The arrests sparked a national outcry with many politicians expressing support for the detained soldiers, Haaretz reported.

Within an hour, dozens of protesters arrived at the scene, among them prominent Israeli far-right ministers and politicians, including Zvi Sukkot, a lawmaker, heritage minster Amichay Eliyahu, and lawmaker Nissim Vaturi to protest the arrests.

The protesters broke into Sde Teiman and later also to Beit Lid, the military base where the nine arrested soldiers were being held. The police, according to reports, did little to stem the riot and only arrived in numbers after a long delay.

No arrests were made.

Nevertheless, with international scrutiny sharpening, the government decided to open its own investigation into the Sde Teiman situation. Military justice officials estimate that hundreds of suspects will be required to testify.

Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said the investigations were a “duty.”

“It is precisely these investigations that protect our soldiers in Israel and around the world and preserve the values of the [Israeli military],” he said.

But Israeli military investigations are notorious dead ends. The Israeli rights group Yesh Din refers to them as a “whitewashing mechanism.”

As an example, Yesh Din pointed out that of 664 complaints of military abuses from 2014 – the last most devastating Israeli aggression on Gaza during which the Israeli military killed over 1,450 civilians in the territory – 81.6 percent were dismissed without investigation and only 41 – 6 percent – were taken further.

While a few complaints are still in review, so far, just 0.1 percent (one complaint) led to criminal indictment.

The courts, in other words, really serve as a tool to prevent soldiers who commit war crimes from getting Israel in trouble with international law. If Israel looks like it is investigating its own bad actors no outside probes are needed.

Everything is allowed

And courts are there to enforce laws made in parliament, a parliament that has plenty of people who support the torture of Palestinian detainees.

Hanoch Milwidsky, a legislator from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, is on record to say that it is permissible to sexually abuse Hamas detainees. In response to a question about whether it was legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum,” he replied in the affirmative.

“If he is Nukhba [a Hamas fighter] everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, said he was alarmed. Not at the abuses, but that they were leaked to the media. He called for the full force of law to be brought against the leakers for doing “tremendous damage to Israel in the world.”

This, of course, is the same Smotrich who in a speech on 5 August said that it “may be just and moral” to starve 2 million people in Gaza.

Outside of parliament, Yehuda Schlesinger, a journalist with Israel Hayom newspaper, lamented on Israeli TV that the sexual abuse was not better organized.

Such opinions have become fully mainstream. The dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli discourse has become so acceptable that people are mobilized to riot in support of torture and sexual abuse and break into military bases, without fearing consequences.

One of the soldiers at the heart of the rape case was so confident that he would escape any punishment that he identified himself on social media and soon became a minor celebrity, appearing on mainstream Israeli TV shows.

Logical necessity

There was criticism of the rioters, including from Yoav Gallant, the defense minister. But that criticism was strictly about the behavior of rioters breaking into military bases, not about their support for the sexual abuse and torture of detainees.

Even during times of anger, Gallant said, “the laws bind everyone — do not break into IDF [Israeli military] bases and do not violate the laws of the State of Israel.”

This is, therefore, another manifestation of the divisions within the different wings of the Israeli ruling elite over the current management of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.

It is between those who see it as a strategic necessity to follow the liberal logic of the “rule of law” in order to preserve stability and international legitimacy, and those who do not.

Neither side, it must be noted, is opposed to torture or genocide. Their division is merely over the correct reaction to being exposed.

It is absolutely crucial for Israel to appear as a liberal democracy with a strong rule of law to ensure both market and political stability and to stay on good terms with its Western sponsors.

Hence the massive resources the state expends on its hasbara (propaganda) campaigns, not least since 7 October.

Show trials might deflect attention for a while, but support for torture and the complete dehumanization of the Palestinian people will continue to mainstream. They are a feature of the Israeli system, not a bug.

Rioting in favor of allowing prison guards to rape inmates is a manifestation – along with ethnic cleansing and genocide – of Zionist logic, a supremacist ideology of hate that is predicated on the complete denial of the humanity and hence rights of the Palestinian people.

Mati Yanikov is a Haifa-based anti-colonial activist.