‘Israel wants to take revenge in the West Bank’ says Palestinian
Israeli forces swept into the West Bank in Palestine earlier this week, escalating its brutal ethnic cleansing and genocide. A Palestinian living near Jerusalem spoke to Socialist Worker about life under occupation and their experiences of Israeli horror.
Israel bulldozes a house in the West Bank (Picture: Eidu Suleman)
By Arthur Townend
Friday 30 August 2024
Friday 30 August 2024
SOCIALIST WORKER Issue 2920
Palestine 2023-24
My cousin, who was 11 years old, was killed by the Israeli army when our family was protesting against one of the Israeli settlements.
When you put people under pressure, when you put people on a complete apartheid system, military control, what exactly do you think their reaction will be?
I can’t call it a war because we can see military operations against civilians who have nothing to protect themselves.
Israel’s recent assault on the West Bank is trying to get Israel a victory after they failed to take the Gaza Strip.
Israel has injured thousands of people, and now they want more revenge on the civilian societies in the West Bank.
The Israeli government decided to annex the West Bank. It wants to go on taking over our land, so they sectioned 60 percent of the West Bank right away and put it under their direct control. And they continue to attack other areas with complete silence from the Palestinian Authority.
Now they are focusing on the refugee camps—their existence means Palestinian people still have an opportunity to return.
Israel is preparing to delete a generation’s memory of the Nakba. By destroying and evacuating the refugee camps, they destroy the symbol of the people, of their right to return back.
So they still keep going inside the city and the refugee camps, where they completely destroy all the means of life. No place is safe inside Gaza.
But this punishment started earlier than the assaults we’ve faced since 7 October. We were the victims from the beginning, and the West Bank was the target from the beginning.
As Palestinians, we found ourselves under this regime without any guilt, without any action from our side. And the restrictions and the taking of our lands keeps on going.
The whole of humanity is witnessing a situation where human beings are treated like what’s happening inside Israeli jails. But instead of being inside jail, they brought the jail to us.
Israel has restricted the movement of millions of Palestinians with the fact that we are living inside a military camp.
The restrictions on movement sometimes mean there are curfews in all areas—people to move to look for basic supplies and immediately return back.
Settlers in Israel and inside the illegal settlements in the West Bank are leading this whole project.
The Israeli army’s role is to protect these settlers and to help them commit more violence against the Palestinian civilians.
But I don’t think that Israel in 1967 decided to take over what remained of Palestine for any other reason than to extend their own settler colonial project.
We are 57 years after the start of occupation of the West Bank. The facts show you that Israel doesn’t need a reason, because this project was created to take more and more land and put more and more controls on peoples’ lives.
I don’t think there is any excuse that can give a right for anybody in this world to destroy a whole community and take it over in such a painful way.
The West Bank before 1967 had had no Israelis inside it. But we now have more than 700,000 Israeli settlers—700,000 people came illegally by force.
They live in the occupied territories, taking over more than 40 percent of our land and deciding that the rest of it will be under military force.
They built on our land without considering any effects, thinking that since they have the power, they have the right.
Thousands of people have been forced to leave their houses and properties to look for safety elsewhere. Israel cut electricity and water supplies so we’re deprived of the minimal resources to live.
The whole West Bank is facing a disaster in relation to water. Every morning you have to try hard to provide some water for your family. Then we see Israeli settlers in their swimming pools and in our lands using our water.
In the West Bank we are practising our right to the ownership of our lands. It’s the minimum we can do. It’s not even safe to express what we are facing under this occupation.
But we can see criminals live on the TV and nobody even is bothered. Sadly, the whole world is silent and we can feel that we are neglected. Some European countries, and even some of the Arab countries, are encouraging Israel to keep going.
Some of the Bedouin villages were actually evacuated, and the Jordan Valley is in the same position. Israel is evacuating these villages and is replacing them with some huge farms for the settlers and for their protection.
I don’t think we have choices, and I don’t think that we have many choices to even think about.
For us, it’s just to keep going, to keep our lives and to raise our families. We try as much as we can just to provide sources of life
My cousin, who was 11 years old, was killed by the Israeli army when our family was protesting against one of the Israeli settlements.
When you put people under pressure, when you put people on a complete apartheid system, military control, what exactly do you think their reaction will be?
I can’t call it a war because we can see military operations against civilians who have nothing to protect themselves.
Israel’s recent assault on the West Bank is trying to get Israel a victory after they failed to take the Gaza Strip.
Israel has injured thousands of people, and now they want more revenge on the civilian societies in the West Bank.
The Israeli government decided to annex the West Bank. It wants to go on taking over our land, so they sectioned 60 percent of the West Bank right away and put it under their direct control. And they continue to attack other areas with complete silence from the Palestinian Authority.
Now they are focusing on the refugee camps—their existence means Palestinian people still have an opportunity to return.
Israel is preparing to delete a generation’s memory of the Nakba. By destroying and evacuating the refugee camps, they destroy the symbol of the people, of their right to return back.
So they still keep going inside the city and the refugee camps, where they completely destroy all the means of life. No place is safe inside Gaza.
But this punishment started earlier than the assaults we’ve faced since 7 October. We were the victims from the beginning, and the West Bank was the target from the beginning.
As Palestinians, we found ourselves under this regime without any guilt, without any action from our side. And the restrictions and the taking of our lands keeps on going.
The whole of humanity is witnessing a situation where human beings are treated like what’s happening inside Israeli jails. But instead of being inside jail, they brought the jail to us.
Israel has restricted the movement of millions of Palestinians with the fact that we are living inside a military camp.
The restrictions on movement sometimes mean there are curfews in all areas—people to move to look for basic supplies and immediately return back.
Settlers in Israel and inside the illegal settlements in the West Bank are leading this whole project.
The Israeli army’s role is to protect these settlers and to help them commit more violence against the Palestinian civilians.
But I don’t think that Israel in 1967 decided to take over what remained of Palestine for any other reason than to extend their own settler colonial project.
We are 57 years after the start of occupation of the West Bank. The facts show you that Israel doesn’t need a reason, because this project was created to take more and more land and put more and more controls on peoples’ lives.
I don’t think there is any excuse that can give a right for anybody in this world to destroy a whole community and take it over in such a painful way.
The West Bank before 1967 had had no Israelis inside it. But we now have more than 700,000 Israeli settlers—700,000 people came illegally by force.
They live in the occupied territories, taking over more than 40 percent of our land and deciding that the rest of it will be under military force.
They built on our land without considering any effects, thinking that since they have the power, they have the right.
Thousands of people have been forced to leave their houses and properties to look for safety elsewhere. Israel cut electricity and water supplies so we’re deprived of the minimal resources to live.
The whole West Bank is facing a disaster in relation to water. Every morning you have to try hard to provide some water for your family. Then we see Israeli settlers in their swimming pools and in our lands using our water.
In the West Bank we are practising our right to the ownership of our lands. It’s the minimum we can do. It’s not even safe to express what we are facing under this occupation.
But we can see criminals live on the TV and nobody even is bothered. Sadly, the whole world is silent and we can feel that we are neglected. Some European countries, and even some of the Arab countries, are encouraging Israel to keep going.
Some of the Bedouin villages were actually evacuated, and the Jordan Valley is in the same position. Israel is evacuating these villages and is replacing them with some huge farms for the settlers and for their protection.
I don’t think we have choices, and I don’t think that we have many choices to even think about.
For us, it’s just to keep going, to keep our lives and to raise our families. We try as much as we can just to provide sources of life
Israel’s policy of abuse towards Palestinian prisoners
The systematic abuse behind prison bars is an integral part of the Zionist state to stop Palestinians from resisting its barbaric regime
Israeli prison in the West Bank (Picture: Christopher Michel)
Israel purposefully tortures, abuses and violates anyone it can get its hands on, from children and the elderly to civilians and paramedics. It held an estimated 9,623 Palestinians as of July 2024 in detention facilities—double the amount from before October.
Naji Abbas, director of the prisoners department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel said, “Today we are not speaking about individual cases, every Palestinian under custody is facing abuse and violations of their rights.
“In the first weeks after 7 October we thought it was about revenge, but we are still hearing about these actions after nine months. That’s why we think it is official policy.”
In August at the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert in Israel, ten soldiers were accused of raping a detainee. Five have already been released. Israel converted three military bases into prisons so it can hold Palestinians as prisoners of war without charge or legal counsel.
But that’s a similar story for everyone Israel holds. Stripped, blind folded and rounded up, Israel’s prison system is designed to dehumanise Palestinians.
Israeli soldiers and prison officers routinely punish detainees, deny them medical treatment and shackle prisoners to beds causing injuries to severe that doctors have to amputate their limbs. They sexually assault, burn with cigarettes, attack with police dogs, beat, mutilate and kill Palestinian detainees.
And they keep prisoners dangerously malnourished and unable to wash their filthy cells. Conditions in Israeli military camps are compared to Abu Ghraib—the United States’ torture base in Iraq.
The Israeli army said it “rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees in the Sde Teiman detention facility”. Yet its soldiers lied on polygraph tests about the abuse they carried out.
The story sparked widespread protest in Israel. Not because of the inhumane treatment by the soldiers—but because protesters said they should have the right to abuse Palestinian prisoners.
The latest report into the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli jails by Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights warned of “grave violations against Palestinian prisoners in the Zionist regime’s jails”. Based on a recent visit to the Naqab Prison in southern Israel it said torture and abuse were not confined to Sde Teiman.
“Palestinian residents of Gaza are treated as ‘human animals’, demonstrating that the dehumanising and genocidal rhetoric employed by the highest levels of the Israeli leadership,” it said. Human Rights Watch also interviewed eight Palestinian doctors, nurses and paramedics.
They described experiencing and witnessing humiliation, beatings, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing and blindfolding and denial of medical care. Soldiers pressured them to confess to being members of Hamas with threats of indefinite detention, rape and killing their families.
One paramedic said that at the Sde Teiman detention facility Israeli soldiers suspended him and a dozen of other detainees from the ceiling of a warehouse by chains and beat them.
“It was so degrading, it was unbelievable,” he said. “I was helping people as a paramedic, I never expected something like this.”
Another detained paramedic held at al-Naqab prison said he saw a man “bleeding from his bottom”. The man revealed to the paramedic that before he was placed in detention, “three soldiers took turns raping him with an M16 (assault rifle)”.
The systematic abuse behind prison bars is an integral part of the Zionist state to stop Palestinians from resisting its barbaric regime.
Meanwhile the West ignores the violence—and ploughs evermore funding and arms into Israel so it can kill and torture as it likes.
Isreal’s policy of abuse
A 118-page report named Welcome to Hell also published in August by rights group B’Tselem accused the Israeli regime of conducting a systematic policy of institutionalised abuse and torture against detainees.
In one instance, a detainee asked another detainee to swap his yogurt because the expiration date had passed. Israeli soldiers punished all the inmates in the cell, they set dogs on them, beat them with clubs, dragged them to the bathroom and beat them up some more.
These stories aren’t new. The Israeli courts, politicians, medical practitioners and prisons both cover-up and even gloat about the abuse that has been taking place since Israel’s creation.
Since 1967 40 percent of all men and 20 percent of Palestinians have arbitrarily been kept in Israel’s deadly prisons. Yet nothing is done.
National security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir even said, “I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law.”
“These are extremely concerning reports,” is all a British foreign office spokesperson could tell the i News website.
Israeli prison in the West Bank (Picture: Christopher Michel)
By Isabel Ringrose
Friday 30 August 2024
SOCIALIST WORKER
Naji Abbas, director of the prisoners department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel said, “Today we are not speaking about individual cases, every Palestinian under custody is facing abuse and violations of their rights.
“In the first weeks after 7 October we thought it was about revenge, but we are still hearing about these actions after nine months. That’s why we think it is official policy.”
In August at the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert in Israel, ten soldiers were accused of raping a detainee. Five have already been released. Israel converted three military bases into prisons so it can hold Palestinians as prisoners of war without charge or legal counsel.
But that’s a similar story for everyone Israel holds. Stripped, blind folded and rounded up, Israel’s prison system is designed to dehumanise Palestinians.
Israeli soldiers and prison officers routinely punish detainees, deny them medical treatment and shackle prisoners to beds causing injuries to severe that doctors have to amputate their limbs. They sexually assault, burn with cigarettes, attack with police dogs, beat, mutilate and kill Palestinian detainees.
And they keep prisoners dangerously malnourished and unable to wash their filthy cells. Conditions in Israeli military camps are compared to Abu Ghraib—the United States’ torture base in Iraq.
The Israeli army said it “rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees in the Sde Teiman detention facility”. Yet its soldiers lied on polygraph tests about the abuse they carried out.
The story sparked widespread protest in Israel. Not because of the inhumane treatment by the soldiers—but because protesters said they should have the right to abuse Palestinian prisoners.
The latest report into the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli jails by Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights warned of “grave violations against Palestinian prisoners in the Zionist regime’s jails”. Based on a recent visit to the Naqab Prison in southern Israel it said torture and abuse were not confined to Sde Teiman.
“Palestinian residents of Gaza are treated as ‘human animals’, demonstrating that the dehumanising and genocidal rhetoric employed by the highest levels of the Israeli leadership,” it said. Human Rights Watch also interviewed eight Palestinian doctors, nurses and paramedics.
They described experiencing and witnessing humiliation, beatings, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing and blindfolding and denial of medical care. Soldiers pressured them to confess to being members of Hamas with threats of indefinite detention, rape and killing their families.
One paramedic said that at the Sde Teiman detention facility Israeli soldiers suspended him and a dozen of other detainees from the ceiling of a warehouse by chains and beat them.
“It was so degrading, it was unbelievable,” he said. “I was helping people as a paramedic, I never expected something like this.”
Another detained paramedic held at al-Naqab prison said he saw a man “bleeding from his bottom”. The man revealed to the paramedic that before he was placed in detention, “three soldiers took turns raping him with an M16 (assault rifle)”.
The systematic abuse behind prison bars is an integral part of the Zionist state to stop Palestinians from resisting its barbaric regime.
Meanwhile the West ignores the violence—and ploughs evermore funding and arms into Israel so it can kill and torture as it likes.
Isreal’s policy of abuse
A 118-page report named Welcome to Hell also published in August by rights group B’Tselem accused the Israeli regime of conducting a systematic policy of institutionalised abuse and torture against detainees.
In one instance, a detainee asked another detainee to swap his yogurt because the expiration date had passed. Israeli soldiers punished all the inmates in the cell, they set dogs on them, beat them with clubs, dragged them to the bathroom and beat them up some more.
These stories aren’t new. The Israeli courts, politicians, medical practitioners and prisons both cover-up and even gloat about the abuse that has been taking place since Israel’s creation.
Since 1967 40 percent of all men and 20 percent of Palestinians have arbitrarily been kept in Israel’s deadly prisons. Yet nothing is done.
National security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir even said, “I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law.”
“These are extremely concerning reports,” is all a British foreign office spokesperson could tell the i News website.
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