Garrison Payne, the U.S. Navy's First Black Commissioned Officer

USS SC 83 underway. Lt. j.g. Payne was awarded the Navy Cross for his service as commanding officer. (Photo: National WWI Museum via subchaser.org.)

Published Nov 10, 2024 7:40 PM by CIMSEC

 

 

[By Reuben Keith Green]

The hidden story of the U.S. Navy’s first Black commissioned officer spans five decades, three continents, two world wars, two wives from different countries, and one hell of a journey for an Indiana farm boy. For mutual convenience, both he and the United States Navy pretended that he wasn’t Black. This story had almost been erased from history until the determined efforts of one of his extended relatives, Jeff Giltz of Hobart, Indiana, brought it to light.1

From before World War I until after World War II, leaders in the U. S. government and Navy would make decisions affecting the composition of enlisted ranks for more than a century and that still echo in officer demographics today. Memories of maelstroms past reverberate in today’s discussions regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), affirmative action in the military academies, meritocracy over so-called “DEI Hires,” who is and is not Black, and in renaming – or not – bases and ships that honor relics of America’s discriminatory and exclusionary past.

Before Doris “Dorie” Miller received the Navy Cross for his actions on December 7th, 1941, and long before the Navy commissioned the Golden Thirteen in 1945, Lieutenant (junior grade) William Lloyd Garrison Payne was awarded the Navy Cross for the hazardous duty of commanding the submarine chaser USS SC-83 in 1918. While his Navy Cross citation is sparse, the hazards of hunting submarines from a 110-foot wooden ship were considerable. His personal and professional history, still emerging though it may be, reveals much about the nation and Navy he served and deserves to be revealed in full. Understanding the racial and political climate during which he received his commission is crucial to understanding the importance of his place in Navy history.Quietly Breaking Barriers

William Lloyd Garrison Payne was born on Christmas day in 1881 to a White Indiana woman and a Black man, and completed forty years of military service by 1940 – before volunteering for more service in World War II. Garrison Payne’s virtual anonymity, despite his groundbreaking status as the first Black naval officer and a Navy Cross recipient, stemmed from pervasive racial discrimination, manifested in political and public opposition (notably by white supremacist politicians like James K. Varner and John C. Stennis), and internal resistance within the Navy. His long anonymity exemplifies a failure to learn from the past.2

Fig. 02. Ensign Payne (seated), in command of USS SC-83. (Photo credit: subchasers.org.)

Garrison Payne, or W.G. Payne, served in or commanded several vessels and had multiple shore assignments during his five-decade career. His officer assignments include commanding the aforementioned USS SC-83 and serving aboard the minesweeper USS Teal (AD-23), the collier USS Neptune (AC-8), submarine chasers Eagle 19 and Eagle 31, which he may have also commanded, and troop ship USS Zeppelin. He had a lengthy record as a Chief Boatswain’s Mate (Chief Bos’n).

Fig. 03: 1917 North Carolina Service Card, thirty-three year-old Chief Boatswain’s Mate Garrison Payne was discharged from the Navy and immediately “Appointed Officer” (Commissioned) on 15 December 1917 while assigned to the USS Neptune (AC-8) at Naval Base, Plymouth, England. (Credit: Public record in the public domain.)

After his commissioning in Plymouth, he presumably stayed in England and later took command of the USS SC-83 after she transited from New London, Connecticut to Plymouth, England in May 1918.

Garrison Payne took Rosa Manning, a widow with a young daughter, as his first wife in 1916. The 1910 North Carolina Census records indicate that she was the daughter of Sami and Annie Hall, both listed as Black in the census records. Later census records list Rosa Payne as White, and using her mother’s maiden name (Manning), as she did on their 1916 marriage license. His race was also indicated as White on the license, and his parents listed as Jackson Payne and Ruth Myers (Payne), his maternal grandparents.

Fig. 04: Garrison Payne and an unidentified woman, possibly his second wife Mary Margaret Payne, presumably taken in the later 1920s, location unknown. Courtesy of Jeff Giltz.

In the photo above, Payne, wearing the rank of lieutenant, stands beside an unidentified Black woman, who may be his wife. He brought back Mary Margaret Duffy from duty in Plymouth, England on the USS Zeppelin, a troop transport, in 1919, listing her on ship documents as his wife. He used various first names and initials to apparently help obscure his identity.

Jeff Giltz of Hobart, Indiana is the great grandson of Gertrude “Gertie” Giltz, Garrison’s half-sister by the same mother, Mary Alice Payne. She was unmarried at the time of his birth in 1881. Her father, Jack Payne was the son of a Robert Henley Payne, who traveled first from Virginia to Kentucky, and then settled in Indiana, may have been mixed race. During the U.S. Census, census takers wrote down the race of household occupants as described by the head of the household. Many light-skinned Blacks thereby entered into White society by “turning White” during a census year. It is unknown when Garrison made his “transition” from Black or “Mulatto” to White.

None of Garrison’s half-siblings, who were born to his mother after she married Lemuel Ball, share his dark complexion. When she married, Garrison was sent to live nearby with his uncle, William C. Payne, whose wife was of mixed race. In the 1900 Census, Garrison is listed as a servant in his uncle’s household, not his nephew.

Taken together – Garrison Payne’s dark skin, the fact that the identity of his father was never publicly revealed and that he was born out of wedlock with no birth certificate issued, that he was named for a famous White Boston abolitionist and newspaper publisher,3 that his White mother gave him her last name instead of his father’s, that he was sent away after his mother married, and the oral history of his family – all point to the likelihood that Garrison Payne was Black.

In the turn of the century Navy, individuals were sometimes identified as “dark” or “dark complexion” with no racial category assigned. Payne self-identified as White on both of his known marriage licenses. According to Jeff Giltz, there are many references to Garrison Payne in online genealogy, military records and newspaper sites, but none appear on the Navy Historical and Heritage Command (NHHC) website. His military service likely began in 1900.

Rolling Back Racial Progress during Modernization

In his 1978 book Manning the Navy: The Development of a Modern Naval Enlisted Force, 1898-1940, former U.S. Naval Academy Associate Professor Frederick S. Harrod discusses several of the policies enacted during that period that helped shaped today’s Navy.4 He describes how the famously progressive Secretary of the Navy (1913-1919) Josephus Daniels, otherwise notorious for banning alcohol from ships, brought Jim Crow policies to a previously partially integrated Navy (enlisted ranks only) and banned the first term enlistment of Negro personnel in 1919, a ban that would last until 1933. No official announcement of the unofficial ban was made, but Prof. Harrod asserts that it was instituted by an internal Navy Memorandum from Commander Randall Jacobs, who later issued the Guide to Command of Negro Personnel, NAVPERS-15092, in 1945. President Woodrow Wilson and Daniels were both staunch segregationists and White supremacists. The Navy became more rather than less racially restrictive during the Progressive Era because of the lasting effects of both Secretary Daniels and President Wilson.

The number of Negro personnel dropped from a high of 5,668 in June of 1919 – 2.26% of the total enlisted force – to 411 in June of 1933, a total of 0.55% of the total force of 81,120 enlisted men. Most of the Black sailors were in the Stewards Branch, and most were low ranking with no authority over White sailors, despite their many years of service and experience. Those very few “old salts” outside that branch, like Payne, were difficult to assign, as the Navy did not want them supervising White sailors, despite their expertise and seniority.

Following his temporary promotion to the commissioned officer ranks – rising as far as lieutenant on 01 July 1919 – Garrison Payne was eventually reverted to Chief Bos’n, until he was given an honorific, or “tombstone”, promotion to the permanent grade of lieutenant in June of 1940, just before his retirement. Payne died on 14 October 1952 in a Naval Hospital in San Diego California, and was interred in nearby Fort Rosacrans National Cemetery on 20 October 1952, in Section P, Plot P 0 2765 – not in the Officer’s Sections A or B, despite being identified as a lieutenant on his headstone. Garrison Payne’s hometown newspaper’s death notice indicates that he was the grandson of Jack Payne, with no mention of his parents. A handwritten notation on his Internment Control Form indicates that he enlisted on 31 March 1943, making him a veteran of both world wars, as also reflected on his headstone. His service in World War II – as a volunteer 62-year-old retiree – deserves further investigation.

Fig. 05: Garrison Payne’s final resting place, in Section P, Plot P 0 2765 of Fort Rosacrans National Cemetery. Courtesy of U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Veteran’s Legacy Memorial.

The Navy reluctantly commissioned the Golden Thirteen in 1945 only because of political pressure from the White House and from civil rights organizations like the NAACP, led by Walter F. White, the light-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Atlanta Georgia native who embraced his Black heritage. Unlike Walter White, though, Garrison Payne likely hid his mixed-race heritage to protect his life, his family, and his career. When he married Mary Margaret Duffy in 1937, at the age of 54, he travelled more than 170 miles from San Diego, California to Yuma, Arizona to do so. Why? His new wife, Mary Margaret Duffy, was 37, and an immigrant from Ireland. He had previously listed her as his wife when he transported her to America in 1919. Are there records of this marriage overseas? Would that interracial marriage have been recognized, given that interracial marriage would remain illegal in both states for years to come? On their marriage certificate, as with Payne’s first marriage certificate, both spouses are listed as White.

The Navy’s Circular Letter 48-46, dated 27 February 1946, officially lifted “all restrictions governing the types of assignments for which Negro naval personnel are eligible.” Despite that edict, and President Truman’s Executive Order desegregating the armed forces in 1948, it would be decades before the Navy’s officer ranks would include more than fifty Blacks.

The stories of several early Black chief petty officers are missing from the Navy’s Historical and Heritage Command’s website, though it does include the story of a contemporary of Payne’s, Chief Boatswain’s Mate John Henry “Dick” Turpin, a Black man. That Payne, a commissioned officer, is absent and unrecognized can be attributed to at least five possible reasons.

The first is that the Navy didn’t know of his existence, significance, or accomplishments. Table 5 in Professor Harrods’s book is titled “The Color of the Enlisted Forces, 1906 – 1940,” and is compiled from the Annual Reports of the Chief of Navigation for those years, with eleven different racial categories, including “other.” Where Garrison Payne fell in those figures during his enlisted service is uncertain, but he was present in the Navy for each of those year’s reports.

The second is that Payne had no direct survivors to tell his story, and no one may have asked him to tell it. He and his first wife Rosa likely divorced sometime after the death of their only child. It is unknown if his Irish-born wife Mary Margaret produced any children by Garrison.

The third reason could be that the Navy may have kept his story quiet for his own protection, and that of the Woodrow Wilson administration and the Indiana political leadership. Garrison Payne was commissioned by the same President Woodrow Wilson who screened the movie Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915, re-segregated the federal government offices in Washington DC, refused to publicly condemn the racial violence and lynching during the “Red Summer” of 1919, and whose Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, was one of the masterminds behind the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection, which violently overthrew an elected integrated government in Wilmington, North Carolina. Acknowledging Payne as a decorated and successful Black naval officer would have been an embarrassment to Wilson, Daniels, and undercut their political and racist agendas.

Black veterans were specifically targeted after both world wars, by both civilians and military personnel, to reassert White supremacy. Payne was from Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan was revived in 1915 and became a very powerful organization in the 1920s. Such organizations may have sought out and harassed Payne and his family, had they known that this Black Indiana farm boy, born to a White mother, had not only received a commission in the U.S. Navy but had commanded White men in combat.

The fourth reason is that the Navy may have wanted to hide his racial identity. His record of accomplishment as a Navy Cross recipient and ship’s C.O. would have undermined the widespread belief that Black men could not perform successfully as leaders, much less decorated military officers. He was not commissioned as part of some social experiment or social engineering, but because the Navy needed experienced, reliable men to man a rapidly-expanding fleet and train inexperienced crews. Garrison Payne did just that, during years of dangerous duty at sea.

The fifth reason may be that Payne recognized the benefits of passing for White to his life and career, which may have compelled him to do so. He was raised in a largely white society, by white-appearing relatives. Had he not successfully “passed,” he likely would not have been commissioned.

Regardless of the reasons in the past, it is now time to herald the brave naval service of Garrison Payne. The Navy Historical and Heritage Command, the Smithsonian Institution, the Indiana Historical Society, the Hampton Roads Navy Museum, and others should work together to bring his amazing story out of the shadows.

Why Garrison Payne’s Story Matters

For years, many Black naval officers have searched in vain for stories of their heroic forebearers. Actions taken by politicians regarding nominations to military academies for much of the 20th century helped ensure that Black military officers remained a rarity, particularly those hailing from Southern states.5 The life story of Lieutenant Garrison Payne needs to be thoroughly documented and publicized because representation matters.

On a personal note, knowing of his story while I was serving as one of the few Black officers in the Navy would have inspired me immensely. Garrison Payne served as likely the only Black officer in the Navy for his entire career. He showed what was possible. Heralding his trailblazing career can only positively impact the discussions about the future composition of the U.S. Navy’s officer corps as it inspires generations of sailors. Historians and researchers should continue the work of archival research to gain a fuller understanding of his story and significance. My hope is that veteran’s organizations and national institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution begin the effort to flesh out the story of Lieutenant Garrison Payne.

This article appears courtesy of CIMSEC and may be found in its original form here. 

Reuben Keith Green, Lieutenant Commander, USN (ret) served 22 years in the Atlantic Fleet (1975-1997). After nine years in the enlisted ranks as a Mineman, Yeoman, and Equal Opportunity Program Specialist, he graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1984 and then served four consecutive sea tours. Both a steam and gas turbine qualified engineer officer of the watch (EOOW), he served as a Tactical Action Officer (TAO) in the Persian Gulf, and as executive officer in a Navy hydrofoil, USS Gemini (PHM-6). He holds a Master’s degree from Webster University in Human Resources Development, and is the author of Black Officer, White Navy – A Memoir, recently published by University Press of Kentucky.

Endnotes

1. Except as otherwise cited, research in this article is based on documents in the author’s possession and oral history interviews with Mr. Jeff Giltz.

2. War and Race: The Black Officer in the American Military. 1915-1941, 1981, Gerald W. Patton, Greenwood Press

3. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, 2008, Henry Mayer, W. W. Norton and Company

4. Manning the New Navy: The Development of a Modern Naval Enlisted Force, 1899-1940, 1978, Frederick S. Harrod, Greenwood Press.

5. The Tragedy of the Lost Generation, Proceedings, August 2024, VOL 150/8/1458, John P. Cordle, Reuben Keith Green, U.S. Naval Institute.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

5.9 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Turkey, Tremors Felt In Syria

A moderately strong earthquake struck eastern Turkiye on Wednesday, causing widespread panic, officials said. There were no immediate reports of any serious injury or damage.

Associated Press
Updated on: 16 October 2024

5.9 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Turkey, Tremors Felt In Syria Photo: | File Pic

A moderately strong earthquake struck eastern Turkiye on Wednesday, causing widespread panic, officials said. There were no immediate reports of any serious injury or damage.

The earthquake with a magnitude 5.9 struck the town of Kale in Malatya province at 10.46 am (07.46 GMT), according to the government-run Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, or AFAD. It was felt in the nearby cities of Diyarbakir, Elazig, Erzincan and Tunceli, HaberTurk television reported.

“We have not received any reports of any problems so far,” Malatya Mayor Sami Er told the state-run Anadolu Agency, adding that officials were still assessing possible damage in more remote areas.

People rushed out of homes and offices in panic throughout the region, HaberTurk reported. Many were waiting in the streets and parks, reluctant to return indoors. Schools were ordered closed in Elazig.

Malatya was one 11 provinces that was devastated by a powerful earthquake that hit struck parts of Turkiye and northern Syria last year. More than 53,000 people were killed in Turkiye

 

Workers of the Earth, unite!: An interview with Stefania Barca

By Stefania Barca & Dan Boscov-Ellen

Published 10 October, 2024

First published at Spectre.

Labor’s uneasy relationship with popular environmental movements presents a serious challenge for ecosocialist organizing. In light of this, some have argued that the environmental left should remedy its perceived neglect of class by abandoning “lifestyle environmentalism” in favor of union-friendly policy reforms, especially in the energy and transportation sectors. In her new book Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change (Pluto Press, 2024), Stefania Barca affirms the need for a working-class ecopolitics while challenging the narrow understandings of class struggle and material interest that suffuse much of the current discourse. Dan Boscov-Ellen interviews Barca about how a better grasp of working-class environmental history and the theoretical insights of materialist ecofeminism can help to shift the debate.

Stefania Barca is Distinguished Researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela/CISPAC (Spain), where she teaches environmental and gender history. Her previous work includes Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counterhegemonic Anthropocene (Cambridge UP, 2020).

Your book makes important interventions on several fronts, but perhaps the most central is how it mobilizes a materialist ecofeminist analysis against a more conventional vision of working-class environmental politics. This vision, if I can paint with a broad brush, is primarily focused on appealing to the material interests of (often male) formal-sector industrial and utility workers as part of a reformist electoral political strategy. What, in your view, are some of the problems with this understanding of working-class ecopolitics, and how can materialist ecofeminism help us to do better?

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood called Gianturco, in the industrial area of East Naples, Italy, during the 1970s; there I experienced firsthand the ugliness and risks of urban working-class life. The streets I walked through to get to my school were full of big noisy trucks and their fumes, and car repair shops full of men in blue overalls. The place looked like a big open-air factory; I do not remember any women or kids crossing those streets. I hated living there, and I was very happy when we finally moved out. Later, I learned that that was the end of a century-old era of industrial growth for my city, beyond which there remained poverty, emigration, Camorra, and urban decay (I mean, this is what remained for the once numerous and combative Neapolitan working class. Elsewhere, the bourgeoisie was still having its terrace parties with a view on the gulf).

This brief personal life sketch might give you a sense of where my views on working-class ecopolitics come from, my sense of the contradictions that lay within it: the reality of living amidst exhaust fumes, and side by side with giant petrol tanks, and the nostalgia for a glorious past that I, as a young girl, had not shared and never could have because my existence was tangential, even irrelevant to it. In fact, what strikes me most, in my memories of Gianturco, is the invisibility of working-class women — where were they? Most likely, busy with housework and social reproduction work in their own and other places: making the next generation of industrial and domestic workers and servicing society in essential, though mostly invisible, forms. But their work, their lives even, did not seem to count for anyone. All I read and heard around me was about the industrial jobs lost and the political consequences of a declining industrial base for the Neapolitan left.

Then I went on with my studies and discovered political ecology, environmental justice, ecosocialism; further on, I learned about materialist ecofeminism. I started to see working-class ecopolitics as necessarily having to do with the production of both life and commodities as regulated by capital, and the potential subject of ecological revolution as the workers in both spheres. I was never convinced that “consumers,” “citizens,” or “scientists” could make the ecological revolution; only workers can — provided that the right conditions are in place, and that they achieve unity in struggle. Unity among the various sectors of the working classes — waged and unwaged — is key. This is what ecofeminism adds to working-class politics, in my view.

The materialist ecofeminist perspective that you articulate here poses a powerful challenge to overly restrictive understandings of work and class, but as you acknowledge, it developed “as an outsider to the traditional labor movement, and has remained so to this day.” A partisan of the conventional view might respond by arguing that although materialist ecofeminism is theoretically illuminating, it is not capable of mobilizing large numbers of workers to achieve political victories. They might typically also suggest that this is because formal-sector “productive” workers are more easily organized and better positioned to exert their collective power, and that the social value of unpaid or semi-formal social reproductive labor does not easily translate into political efficacy. How would you respond to this sort of objection?

Well, the histories of the Alliance of Forest People in the Brazilian Amazon and of the working-class women of Bristol and of Manfredonia struggling against nuclear power and petrochemical industries — which I tell in fourth, second, and third chapters of Workers of the Earth — suggest otherwise. Subsistence and domestic workers have made the history and politics of the environment as much as blue-collar workers. The entire environmental justice movement could be seen as a way for the unwaged to organize themselves and fight in defense of life against capital in all its forms — including the state, the military, the mafias, and so on. These movements are typically organized around positions and perspectives that are not represented by traditional trade unions. Nevertheless, they do have the power of organizing, and to strike the system from their unique position in social reproduction. Just think of the La Via Campesina movement — to mention only one macro example, which, while not touched upon in the book, is of enormous relevance to climate and biosphere struggles. A feminist ecosocialist perspective allows us to see the working class, Indigenous and peasant women, and people of all genders who do the work of (re)producing life and organize to protect it. It is high time to take that agency into account when thinking about how to pull the brake on the capitalist train and give people a chance to board other trains.

True, organized wage labor has demonstrated great capacity for social change over the industrial era, including significant environmental actions. I greatly admire visionary labor leaders of the 1970s and 1980s like Tony Mazzocchi in the United States, or Jack Mundey in Australia, who showed the way for industrial workers to pull the brake on the Great Acceleration (that is the exponential increase in the exhaustion of human and nonhuman natures in the post-World War Two era).1 However, this has not been enough to prevent the catastrophic crisis we are in. Something was missing from that kind of labor environmentalism, and that something — as shown in my sixth chapter — was a structural, noncontingent alliance with unwaged workers and their struggles. So what I am advocating for is a working-class ecopolitics capable of uniting waged and unwaged labor in the struggle for systemic change.

I do see hope in the politics of Just Transition (JT), a concept and praxis that comes from the history of the labor movement resisting pollution and a variety of hazards. I see the JT strategy as a tool for radical realism, that is developing concrete alternatives for people to struggle for a better, less exhausted life — which is what radical climate politics is all about (a point convincingly made also by Ajay Singh Chaudhary in The Exhausted of the Earth). I completely agree with Kai Heron and Jodi Dean’s claim that what we most need at this point in the planetary crisis is “a politics of revolutionary transition.”2 But I also think that the JT strategy must be revised with a view to include caring and subsistence work — a vision which is starting to gain traction.3 In the book’s epilogue, I offer concrete suggestions on how the Global Climate Jobs campaign could evolve in that direction. The way I see it, centering JT around life-making work would definitely help in moving beyond the value form (rather than subjecting more life-making to it, as many have been fearing). Massive public funding in domestic and community care, subsistence, healthcare, earthcare, and education would empower the millions of carers that are needed to fulfill the unmet human and nonhuman needs of our burning world, responding to the call to “invest in caring, not killing” that the Wages for Housework/Global Women’s Strike movement has been shouting for the past fifty years. This empowerment would allow many others to join a socially valued and politically strong army of care workers, enabling them to lead the transition into an ecosocialist revolution. This is what I see as a radical realist plan — one which starts from the realm of the possible (the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that states can radically reorient financial and monetary politics if they have to) and necessary (fulfilling the most essential needs for the majority of people in all societies) to empower revolutionary subjects. Demanding clean tech jobs, or even allowing women to access those jobs, are of course necessary, but also utterly insufficient steps in the direction of a better life for all. We need much more ambitious goals, and those can only be envisioned by rethinking labor as something bigger and more powerful than commodity-making.

Before delving into these contemporary political debates, the first half of the book explores a number of remarkable case studies in the history of workers’ environmental struggles, ranging from militant Italian factory workers and scientists organizing for safe working environments in the late ’60s to the radical coalitional politics of the Brazilian rubber tappers’ movement in the ’80s. Why did you feel that it was important to begin with these histories, even if our current context may be different in important respects?

I believe in the power of narratives — for good and for bad. For neoliberal subjects like myself and most people in my world who have socialized in the neoliberal TINA narrative, it is very difficult to imagine that we­­­ — the workers of the earth — have some kind of collective power, and that we can use that power to tackle something as gigantic as the climate crisis. And since every good fight starts with a good story, digging out histories of workers’ power is a good place to start from. Learning about a world where blue-collar workers can demand direct control over environmental health and safety, and win; or working-class women bring their case against the state before the European court for human rights and win; or a trade union ally itself with Indigenous people to fight for forest conservation and again, win….Even though these victories are hardly permanent ones, what I find most important is that they show us that there are indeed alternatives, and that what makes these alternatives possible is workers’ organizing and struggling with all the social allies that they can make.

Now, of course, we live in a different world than those of my stories, but that does not mean that things were easier before. All the struggles I talk about in the first part of the book were waged against all odds and against powerful forces. People still fight today, of course. You only need to take a look at the Environmental Justice Atlas to get some sense of what is going on on the ground, who is really fighting the fight against climate change and earth system degradation.4 What we are missing, I believe, even among ecosocialists, is a sense of how these are all not just anticapitalist or survival struggles: they are workers’ struggles, fought by the waged and the unwaged of the earth against the squeezing grip of capital, and if organized as such they have a much better chance of winning.

So, it is not only science fiction that can give us hope, but history too, although of a different kind, because it is founded upon the real life experiences of real people, struggling against the very same enemies that we still face today, though in different contexts and conditions. Analyzing their successes and their failures can give us tremendous power of vision and strategy; most of all, it can give us back something that has been denied for too long — the sense of workers’ power. In short, we need all the good stories we can get, and we need radical-realist analysis of our past strengths and weaknesses to make us stronger.

One interesting moment in this transnational history involved the Wages for Housework campaign’s antinuclear advocacy, which you note helped to tally the true costs of the industry on unpaid workers and marginalized communities in and beyond the United Kingdom. As you discuss, these organizers pushed back against the sexist “contempt with which the…nuclear industry treated women, ridiculing their opposition as a manifestation of ‘poor education.’” Much of the contemporary ecomodernist left has adopted an aggressively pronuclear stance, often using similar language to describe its critics. What do you make of this trend?

The fact that ecomodernists love nuclear energy is not surprising, given their obsession with abundance and with technology, but it also confirms a longer historical trend in the labor movements of the West, which I analyze in sixth chapter — that is, the tendency to identify the socialist cause with all things industrial (to put it simply), while disregarding the perspective of reproductive work as represented by the ecofeminist, peasant, antiextractivist and global justice movements that represent the majority of the world. This is the main reason why, in my opinion, ecomodernists end up on the wrong side of history.

In any case, the argument of “lack of knowledge,” which is often employed by nuclear power supporters against the “right to say no,” simply does not stand because experts themselves have always been divided about the safety and efficiency of nuclear power. Historically, the antinuclear movement has been supported or even initiated by many scientists. Generally speaking, antiextractivist and environmental justice movements are not against science and technology per se — they have always found their best allies in those “experts” that speak truth to power and that take their concerns seriously. This also applies to workers’ struggles against industrial hazards, as I show in the book’s second chapter, which tells the story of how militant doctors in Italy successfully changed the dominant conceptions of workplace health and safety by acknowledging the validity of workers’ direct knowledge of the work environment. Similarly, many scientists have taken women’s concerns with radiation risk seriously.

But what fascinated me about the Wages for Housework mobilization against Hinkely C was the originality of their profoundly materialist argument: that is, they pointed to the devaluation of domestic work and care in general, which was taken for granted and overlooked by governments when evaluating pros and cons to energy choices, and which was greatly affected by radiation risk — especially in low-income and racialized communities living along the extraction, production, transportation, and disposal chain of nuclear energy. This kind of argument is hard to find in the usually heated debates about nuclear energy that have divided both the ecologist camp and the left since the beginning.Radiation risk is of course one among many factors considered, but not associated (to the best of my knowledge) with the work of preventing the damage, protecting children and other dependents, or taking care of those who have been contaminated. This perspective resonates a lot with that of environmental justice, and with the myriad struggles of working-class and racialized people who lay on the frontlines of uranium extraction and disposal, and/or around nuclear facilities.

Women’s movements, and particularly the ecofeminist movement, have been historically vocal against nuclear energy in connection with their opposition to the nuclear arms race. I believe this has to do with the fact that, in the heteropatriarchal order, women are almost universally socialized into the role of caretakers, so it is rather obvious that they are more concerned with the hidden costs of nuclear power in terms of human health and safety. Even in socialist states, starting with the former Soviet Union, care work has continued to be largely seen as a women’s affair. This is why working-class ecopolitics must take antipatriarchal struggles seriously — which is not the case with ecomodernism, not even the leftist kind, as far as I can see.

Another central contrast with ecomodernist labor politics emerges in your exploration of how the Alliance of Forest Peoples helped workers come to “understand labor as an interspecies act.” You suggest that although that coalition developed in a specific time and place, “the Indigenous call for interspecies commoning coming from different places worldwide, has resonated with other anti-master subjects across the colonial divide,” and that this resonance “speaks to today’s labor environmentalism in important ways.” I would love to hear you say a bit more about this. Are there specific sites of struggle and subjectivation that seem like fertile terrain for “non-extractive ontologies and relations” to grow and thrive? What kind of political programs could help to move us beyond the dichotomy of anthropocentric working-class ecomodernism vs. upper-middle class lifestyle environmentalism, creating space for humans and nonhumans to live and work together in a range of contexts?

Interspecies commoning is a concept that I develop in Workers of the Earth‘s fourth chapter, based on the experience of nut collectors in the Amazon forest, as described by themselves. I connect it to a longer history of struggles against capitalist extraction beginning with Chico Mendes’s rubber-tappers in the mid-1970s and culminating with new conservation institutions called extractive reserves created via federal law in 1990. It is a truly unique story, whose relevance is at once material and symbolic. First, because it has allowed the preservation of millions of acres of forest and other local biomes throughout Brazil precisely by recognizing the importance of human communities and their subsistence work. In fact, the term extractive reserve means a different kind of extraction: not the capitalist type, which is aimed at maximizing profit, but the subsistence type, which is aimed at maximizing the re/productivity of human and nonhuman life in a symbiotic relation. (The re/productivity concept comes from western ecofeminist scholarship, but it perfectly encapsulates what the Resex is all about). People take from — and give back to — nonhuman nature what they need for their subsistence and cultural development, through circular metabolic relations.

Obviously, this is completely different from wilderness conservation or from deep ecology approaches, which deepen — rather than bridge — the separation between humans and nature. In this model, nature is no “other” elsewhere to keep intact while we enjoy the comforts of urban industrial lifestyles, but it is what people depend upon, materially and symbolically, for their daily subsistence and development. Preservation it is not an act of “altruism” but of self-care. The symbolic importance of all this lay in what this unique, specific story tells us about labor and about humanity. I have written about this at length in my previous book, Forces of Reproduction. It tells us that humanity is not one but multiple, and capitalism does not represent it. And it tells us that human labor is not the enemy of nature; in fact it can be its ally against capitalist extraction, or, as Marx brilliantly put it, capital’s power of exhausting both the soil and the laborer.

Now, what keeps extractive reserves alive still today in their permanent struggle for survival within a highly globalized capitalist economy is the legal recognition and technical support of state institutions, not least through the labor of workers in conservation agencies who assist with the management of the reserves and protect them from external threats, and of academic researchers who record the system’s re/productivity and resilience. In short, interspecies commoning is a collaborative endeavor involving waged and unwaged workers in subsistence and knowledge sectors, Indigenous peoples, nonhuman nature, and the State.

So this, I believe, is a clear example of a successful political program, promoted by a form of labor environmentalism radically different from both the ecomodernist and from the lifestyle ones.

The example of extractive reserves could be used to inspire similar programs, adapted to local contexts and histories. Over the past few years, I have been interested in what is happening in rural Europe, where small farmers and fishers are being strangled by big agribusiness and agricultural policies, but also increasingly by droughts, floods, and other plagues associated with climate change. Throughout the Great Acceleration era, the European countryside has lost significant population. Today, it struggles with the problem of generational renewal and rural abandonment. At the same time, it has received a new inflow of migrant workers from the European peripheries and from other parts of the world. Landless farm workers — migrant or not — are experiencing forms of exhaustion, abuse, and violence similar to those experienced by the Amazon rubber tappers of the 1970s, with an increasing number of workers dying every summer from excessive heat and the lack of any elementary protection against exploitation. I think all this makes for a potentially revolutionary situation.

The diffusion of rural organizations which promote agroecology, permaculture, or food sovereignty testifies to widespread and radicalized rural malcontent versus a food system which has clearly failed both producers and the environment. It also speaks to the resistance of modes of re/production and ontologies, which are never entirely conquered, to capitalist extractivism. Of course, not all rural politics are ecosocialist or even compatible with a global environmental justice agenda. But as peasant farmers and fishers increasingly experience the climate and biodiversity crises on their own skin, I believe the conditions are in place for them to connect the dots between environmental and labor struggles and ally with Indigenous peoples (for example, the Sami herders of the Arctic regions), mountain and island communities, and migrant workers, in order to demand some kind of “extractive reserve” (or similar institution) that could regenerate both rural ecosystems and the people who live and work in them.

Agroecology is increasingly recognized as a necessity to preserve the soil (broadly construed) and the workers that produce food in today’s world, but the shift to it will not happen naturally or by market laws — not the least because agroecology is not just a farming technique but a mode of relation between human and nonhuman nature which is fundamentally alien to capitalist agribusiness. So, if we are serious about the need to move towards agroecological food systems and relational ontologies, then we need to support those food producers that are resisting capitalist exhaustion — as my friends of the common ecologies network have been doing over the past few years—and promote the kind of ecopolitics that is capable of empowering them so that they can lead the agroecology transition.5 

As you suggest, these historical examples help show that other kinds of class-based environmental politics are not only necessary but possible. However, you are also clear about the many constraints and contradictions of organizing within the system of wage labor and the messiness of real-world political alliances. You note, for instance, that “being locked in the growth society…working-class people have a limited ability to make sense of and struggle against the current organization of social metabolism.” What do you view as the greatest challenge for an attempt to develop a “global political alliance of anti-master subjects,” and how should we approach that challenge?

That idea of antimaster subjects is a concept I have more fully developed in my previous book Forces of Reproduction. By this concept I mean all those workers (both waged and unwaged) who, in one way or another, resist capitalist industrial modernity and struggle for alternative modernities which require neither their exhaustion, nor that of other beings, nor that of the earth. It is a very broad concept, which may sound vague — or at least vaguer than simply talking about wage labor. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is necessary to enlarge our conceptions of the revolutionary subject to include unwaged workers, who still represent around 45 percent of all labor on a global level according to ILO 2018 data and who, in many cases, have demonstrated greater revolutionary potential in ecological terms than waged workers. So, a vision of the revolutionary subject that excludes them is simply wrong and doomed to failure.

Antimaster alliances between unions and other social movements have happened in the past and are happening today, even if not enough. There is still too much competition for hegemony between organizations (and individual leaderships), and there are still multiple forms of exclusion and oppression within the organizations themselves, which weaken and divide them. These are problems that need to be urgently dealt with as they are great obstacles to a coordinated struggle of all the forces of reproduction.

However, what I see as the greatest challenge is the lack of antimaster vision on the part of (the largest part of) organized labor. In times of extreme danger like the one we are living, we would need workers’ organizations with revolutionary vision and strategy and the audacity of leadership to pull the brake of the capitalist locomotive, while also demanding, practicing, and supporting system-changing actions wherever possible. We would need workers’ power at its highest capacity, this is, organized and coordinated actions of strike, resistance, sabotaging, counterplanning, reclaiming, and remaking everything; we would need waged and unwaged workers taking responsibility for their destiny and that of the entire planet. Trade unions have been greatly weakened and delegitimated over the neoliberal era, but the planetary polycrisis we are living through requires nothing less than a remaking of labor’s vision and strategy as one of universal salvation. This is why I believe our duty as ecosocialists is precisely that of pushing for and contributing to creating this new vision for labor struggles everywhere and in all areas of work. Ecosocialism has offered a broad and inclusive vision of the revolutionary forces over the past decades — I have taken part in various international ecosocialist meetings that testify to that. But the time has come now to reclaim the trade-union movement itself — because the global capitalist system can only be dismantled by the allied forces of waged and unwaged workers.

Dan Boscov-Ellen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and is currently working on a book manuscript (provisionally) entitled Critical Climate Ethics: Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis. He is an associate web editor for Spectre.

• 1

  “Tony Mazzochi,” Tony Mazzochi Center, accessed September 29, 2024, https://uswtmc.org/about-us/tony-mazzocchi; Kurt Iveson, “The Sydney ‘Green Bans’ Show How We Can Transform Our City,” Jacobin, July 10, 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/07/australia-sydney-urbanism-construction-builders-labourers-federation-nsw-green-labor-militancy

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  Kai Heron and Jodi Dean, “Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition: Organization and Anti-Imperialism in Catastrophic Times,” Spectre, June 26, 2022, https://spectrejournal.com/climate-leninism-and-revolutionary-transition/.

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  Just Transition and Care Network, Care Work in the Just Transition: Providing for People and the Planet (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Research and Social Development, 2024), https://www.unrisd.org/en/library/publications/care-work-in-the-just-transition-providing-for-p

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  “Homepage,” Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, accessed September 29, 2024, https://ejatlas.org/.

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  “Homepage,” Common Ecologies, accessed September 29, 2024, https://commonecologies.net/.

Lebanon showdown and risk of wider conflict overshadowing Gaza war a year on

Contrary to what Hamas seems to have expected, there has been no reversal of Arab policies towards Israel.

Saturday 05/10/2024

Palestinian children gather at a destroyed vehicle, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. REUTERS

GAZA/ BEIRUT –

Palestinians fear the crisis in Lebanon is diverting the world’s attention from Gaza and diminishing already dim prospects for a ceasefire a year into a war that has shattered the enclave.

An escalation in the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah over the past two weeks, including the assassination of the militant group’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, has led to intensifying clashes between Israeli and Hezbollah forces inside Lebanon and fuelled fears of a wider regional war.

When Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel late on Tuesday, provoking an Israeli promise of a “painful” response, some Gazans welcomed the salvo visible in the skies overhead as a sign Tehran was fighting for their cause.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, said prospects for a Gaza ceasefire deal, which would see the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza and Palestinians jailed by Israel, were distant before the escalation in Lebanon. A regional conflagration could lead to pressure on Israel to strike a deal in Gaza, he thought.

But with attention swinging to Lebanon, the war in Gaza risked being prolonged, said Ashraf Abouelhoul, managing editor of state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram in Egypt, whose government has helped mediate months of ceasefire negotiations.

“The most dangerous thing isn’t that the media attention is going somewhere else, it is the fact that no one in the world is now talking about a deal or a ceasefire, and that frees Israel’s hand to continue its military offensive and plans in Gaza,” he said.

Inside Gaza there has been no sign of a let-up in Israel’s offensive against Hamas. On Thursday, local medics reported at least 99 Palestinian deaths in the past 24 hours.

Egypt, which has been alarmed by the Israeli offensive on the other side of its border with Gaza and has lost billions of dollars in Suez Canal revenues during the war, is frustrated that its mediation efforts have failed to secure a truce.

US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that the US remained focused on securing a ceasefire though Hamas had for weeks “refused to engage.”

Hamas officials and Western diplomats said in August that negotiations had stalled due to new Israeli demands to keep troops in Gaza.

“Whereas Israel has been saying since October 7 that military force and putting pressure on Hamas and Hezbollah will help to bring the hostages home we have seen that the exact opposite is true,” said Nomi Bar-Yaacov, an expert on Middle East diplomacy at London-based think-tank Chatham House.

Israel’s escalated campaign against Hezbollah “is putting the ceasefire in Gaza on the back burner, given that the focus is now on trying to dismantle as much of Hezbollah’s military arsenal as possible,” she said.

The showdown in Lebanon has sparked fears of a wider war between Iran and a US-backed Israel.

An official briefed on the Gaza ceasefire talks told Reuters nothing would happen until after the US presidential election on November 5, “because nobody can effectively pressure (Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin) Netanyahu, which is the key impediment to a Gaza ceasefire deal.”

Israel’s killing of Nasrallah last week complicated chances for mediation, two Egyptian security sources said. Egypt’s efforts became limited to containing any further escalation, the sources said.

In Lebanon, nearly 1,900 people have been killed and more than 9,000 wounded in nearly a year of cross-border fighting, with most of the deaths occurring in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese government statistics.

More than a million Lebanese have been forced to flee their homes.

The casualty figures are still a fraction of those in Gaza, where the health ministry says at least 41,788 Palestinians have been killed and 96,794 wounded since October 7 last year.

The Gaza war began after Hamas led a shock incursion into Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Contrary to what Hamas seems to have expected, there has been no reversal of Arab policies towards Israel.

While they routinely condemn Israel’s invasion, triggered by Hamas’ unprecedented October 7 attack, Arab nations with diplomatic ties to Israel have yet to make major policy changes.

None of the countries which recognised Israel under the US-brokered Abraham Accords of 2020, has rescinded their peace pacts.

Egypt and Jordan, which signed the peace deals with Israel in 1979 and 1994 respectively, have not reconsidered those agreements, despite accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza.

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said the agreement was “covered with dust,” but questioned whether scrapping it would help the kingdom or Palestinians.

Only Saudi Arabia has publicly shifted, halting normalisation talks with Israel unless a Palestinian state is recognised.

Israel’s Gaza offensive has sparked rare protests in a region where autocratic governments usually suppress dissent.

Arab governments that have moved closer to Israel have “their own reasons … which are all still applicable,” said Hussein Ibish, an analyst at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“None of them are considering reneging on that based on the wars,” he said.


A young Palestinian man sits next to a mural that he painted on the rooftop of a destroyed house in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, to show his solidarity with the people of Gaza and Lebanon. AFP

Lebanon hospitals close as Israeli strikes hit health facilities

Joel Gunter
Reporting from Beirut

At least four hospitals in Lebanon announced on Friday that they were suspending work because of Israeli strikes, while a Hezbollah-affiliated health organisation said that 11 paramedics had been killed in the past 24 hours.

The four closures capped two weeks of Israeli strikes on hospitals and healthcare workers in Lebanon that have shuttered at least 37 facilities and killed dozens of medical staff, according to the World Health Organisation.

Late on Friday night, the Israeli army issued a statement alleging that Hezbollah was using medical vehicles to transport fighters and weapons, warning that it would strike any vehicle it suspected of being used for military purposes.

Hospital staff in southern Lebanon told the BBC that health facilities treating wounded civilians had been hit with direct Israeli strikes. The BBC has approached the IDF for comment.


'Beirut is now a war zone': More Israeli strikes hit Hezbollah area in Lebanese capital

Israel-Hezbollah conflict in maps: Where is fighting happening in Lebanon?


Dr Mounes Kalakish, director of the Marjayoun governmental hospital in southern Lebanon, told the BBC that the hospital had no choice but to close on Friday after an airstrike hit two ambulances at the hospital’s entrance way on Friday, killing seven paramedics.

“The nurses and doctors were terrified,” he said. “We tried to calm them and carry on working, but it was not possible.”

The emergency director of the hospital, Dr Shoshana Mazraani, said she was sitting at the front of the building when the strike happened. She said that she heard the cries of the paramedics who were hit and ran towards the damaged ambulances, but was warned to stay back by colleagues fearful of a follow up strike.

The Marjayoun hospital had already been hanging on by a thread, Dr Mazraani said, with a core team of just 20 doctors remaining from the centre’s usual 120 staff. The closure on Friday was a “tragedy for the region”, she said.

“We serve a huge population here, many villages. We had 45 inpatient beds, all now empty. We were the only hospital providing dialysis in the region, for example. We have had to turn away emergency patients and tell others to leave.”

Rita Suleiman, the nursing director at the Saint Therese hospital, on the edge of Beirut’s southern suburbs, told the BBC that the hospital had also struggled on after being badly damaged by a strike on Friday but was later forced to suspend all services.

Other hospitals were carrying on with severely limited services. Dr Mohammed Hamadeh, director of the Tebnine hospital, told the BBC on Friday a nearby strike had rocked the building.

“The blast was very close,” he said. “We are still trying to operate but we cannot leave the confines of the hospital because it is too dangerous.”


A healthcare centre in central Beirut was hit on Thursday


Late on Friday night, the Salah Ghandour hospital in Bint Jbeil announced it had closed after being “violently shelled”, following an order from the Israeli army to evacuate.

The Israeli army said it was targeting a mosque adjacent to the hospital which it claimed was being used by Hezbollah fighters.

The strikes on healthcare facilities have not been limited to the south of Lebanon. Israel hit a medical centre in central Beirut on Thursday belonging to the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Organisation, killing nine and wounding 14. The Israeli army said the strike targeted "terror assets".

The Lebanese Red Cross said on Thursday that four of its paramedics were wounded in a strike on a convoy evacuating patients, despite the organisation co-ordinating with the Israeli army.

Gabriel Karlsson, country manager in Beirut for the British Red Cross, told the BBC: "Health and aid workers must be able to help those in need without fearing for their own safety. Teams from the Red Cross and Red Crescent are a lifeline, supporting communities tirelessly - they must be protected.”

World Health Organisation director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday that 28 healthcare workers had been killed in Lebanon over the previous 24 hours, and many other healthcare staff were no longer reporting for work because of the strikes.

Dr Kalakish, the director of the Marjayoun hospital, told the BBC that prior to the strike that closed his hospital it was already operating with no anaesthesiologist or other specialists.

Some staff had fled the bombardment for their own safety, he said, while others had been prevented from reaching the hospital because of air strikes on nearby roads.

Lebanon's Health Minister Firass Abiad said on Thursday that 97 rescue workers had been killed since Hezbollah and Israel began fighting last October.

More than 40 of those – paramedics and firefighters – were in just three days this past week, he said.

Rape, torture and murder: Inside Israel’s concentration camps

Tamara Nassar The Electronic Intifada 13 September 2024
Palestinians released from Israeli detentions are taken for medical examination at al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah on 17 July 2024. Ali HamadAPA images

When Israelis rioted in July in support of 10 soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner, there was disgust and shock around the world.

But the horrifying sexual attack was far from an aberration.

Firsthand testimonies reveal that Israeli personnel are systematically inflicting rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and cruel abuse on thousands of Palestinians held in a network of prison camps.

While Israel has perpetrated these kinds of attacks on Palestinians in its prisons for decades, they have increased dramatically in quantity and intensity since 7 October, amid an atmosphere of state-sanctioned and directed revenge.

B’Tselem is aware of at least 60 Palestinians deaths in Israeli detention since 7 October, though the figure could be higher.

And while Israel’s claims of rapes and sexual assaults by Palestinians on 7 October lack even a single identified victim or firsthand testimony, any forensic evidence or credible eyewitnesses, the rapes and other sexual attacks on Palestinians are documented with a large and growing body of horrifying and consistent victim accounts and witness statements.

In the case that prompted the so-called “right to rape” riots, a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman concentration camp in the Negev desert, east of the Gaza Strip, had been gang-raped and severely injured by a group of Israeli soldiers.

Ten soldiers were initially arrested on suspicion of participating in the assault. Five of them have been released. Five are in home detention.
Ruptured bowel, broken ribs

The Palestinian detainee, who has not been identified, is from Gaza.

He had “suffered from a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs,” Tel Aviv daily Haaretz reproted, citing information it had obtained.

The doctor who treated the detainee, Yoel Donchin, “confirmed that something round had been inserted deep into the detainee’s rectum,” according to The Times of Israel.

The prosecutor in the case said that two reservists and their commander woke the detainee up from sleep and beat him for at least 15 minutes before dragging him across the floor.

The detainee was electrocuted with a taser, according to Haaretz.

One of the soldiers then inserted an object into his rectum. Haaretz said 100 different testimonies contributed to the evidence.

This appears consistent with leaked surveillance footage from Sde Teiman shows over 30 people lying face down, some shirtless, in what appears to be a warehouse-like area surrounded by barbed wire. Their hands appear restrained behind their heads.

Two Israeli soldiers lift one of the men lying face-down and move him to another side of the room, where other soldiers are holding transparent anti-riot shields. Another camera angle shows at least five soldiers, three of them holding shields, doing something to the man, though exactly what is unclear as the video is blurred.

The video is said to show the rape of the Palestinian detainee.

The arrest of the soldiers ignited protests at the Beit Lid military base where they were held for questioning. Lawmakers and members of the public rallied to defend the accused soldiers and their right to rape and torture Palestinians.

Far from representing only an extreme fringe, in Israel’s already radically anti-Palestinian society, the protests represent broader public sentiment among Israeli Jews that abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity, including sexual assault, is justified, or at least excusable.

Two-thirds of Israeli Jews believe that the soldiers should only be disciplined at the military command level, not criminally prosecuted, even if there is strong evidence of their guilt, according to a poll published by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University on 18 August.

Israelis, including masked reservists, hold signs reading, “The hero soldiers should be released,” as they rally in support of soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian detainee, at Beit Lid military base, 30 July 2024. Matan GolanSIPA USA

One of the Israeli rape suspects went on live national television to defend his actions. He was wearing his military uniform and a mask showing only his eyes.

He then posted a video online proudly revealing his face to the world.

“Welcome to hell”

As noted, this case is far from unique.

Israeli guards repeatedly inflicted sexual violence on detainees, according to a number of testimonies since 7 October. Though they echo previous allegations as well.

This includes blows to the genitals and bodies of naked prisoners, including with metal tools and batons, photographing them naked, grabbing genitals and performing strip searches “for the sake of humiliation and degradation,” B’Tselem found in its report, titled “Welcome to Hell.”

The report’s title is derived from a remark made by an Israeli soldier to a Palestinian prisoner upon his arrival at Megiddo prison. The same phrase was also posted on a sign at the entrance of a wing at Ketziot prison, according to another testimony.
Testimonies also detailed gang sexual violence and assault against prisoners by guards or soldiers.



In multiple cases, as per firshand and witness testimonies, Israeli authorities attempted to, or did in fact, rape detainees using different objects.

The many testimonies documenting torture and sexual violence at Sde Teiman reveal a “grim pattern of abuse,” Palestinian prisons group Addameer said.

One 41-year-old man told of his sexual assault by Israeli personnel to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA.

“They made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire – I have burns [in the anus],” he told UNRWA under the condition of anonymity.

“They asked us to drink from the toilet and made the dogs attack us,” he added.

“There were people who were detained and killed – maybe nine of them. One of them died after they put the electric stick up his [anus]. He got so sick; we saw worms coming out of his body and then he died.”

The man featured in a now infamous picture published by CNN told reporters he had also been raped by his Israeli captors at Sde Teiman.

Ibrahim Atif Salem said female soldiers touched his private parts, according to Middle East Eye, and he had objects inserted into his rectum.

Salem said this was not uncommon, but that it was tough for Palestinians to speak about this – as it would be for anyone – especially when detainees were raped by female Israeli soldiers, often teenagers.

Israeli female personnel participate in sexual attacks

Salem told the story of a fellow prisoner in his forties who opened up to him about his own rape by a female Israeli soldier.

“It was common practice for soldiers to strip detainees naked, insert objects into their rectum and grab their genitals aggressively when they changed,” MEE reported.

“He told me he was raped by a female soldier,” Salem told MEE.

The prisoner told Salem that he would be handcuffed and bent over a desk. A female Israeli soldier would insert her fingers and other objects into his rectum in the presence of another soldier.

A Palestinian resident of Hebron who had been detained since April 2022 told B’Tselem how his Israeli captors tried to rape him with a carrot.



Identified as A.H., the husband and father had been held in Ketziot prison in the southern Naqab region. He described an incident on 29 October 2023 when a special Israeli prison force raided his wing.

He said prisoners had poured water on the floor of the cell to mop, but Israeli forces assumed they had done so in order that guards would slip. They dragged detainees out of the cell and beat them.

“Two of them stripped me like the other prisoners, and then threw me on top of the other prisoners. One of them brought a carrot and tried to shove it in my anus,” A.H. told his B’Tselem interviewer.

“While he was trying to shove the carrot in, some of the others filmed me on their cell phones. I screamed in pain and terror. It went on like that for about three minutes.”

Buried deep in a New York Times report is a firsthand testimony describing a female soldier ordering a metal rod to be inserted into the rectum of a Palestinian detainee.

Younis al-Hamlawi, 39, a senior nurse abducted by Israeli forces in November after leaving al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told the Times how he was raped by his Israeli captors

A female Israeli officer ordered two soldiers to lift al-Hamlawi and “press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground,” The New York Times reported.

“Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with ‘unbearable pain.’”
Systemic abuse

Since 7 October, Israeli authorities converted “more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, both military and civilian” into a “network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates,” B’Tselem said.

While extensive reports highlighted abuse at Sde Teiman, the B’Tselem report reveals that a similar pattern of abuse was widespread in Israeli detention centers across historic Palestine.

Testimonies by former detainees “uncover a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners.”

Prisoners are “treated as a homogenous, faceless mass,” whether they are doctors, teenagers or members of the armed wing of a Palestinian group.

“All are deemed ‘human animals’ and ‘terrorists’ simply because they are behind bars, whether their detention was justified or arbitrary, lawful or not. This is how abuse, degradation and the violation of rights becomes permissible,” B’Tselem wrote.
It is “worst time in the history of Palestinians in Israeli prisons,” said Sami Khalil, a 41-year-old resident of Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank who had been imprisoned since 2003. He was held in the Ketziot prison in the southern Naqab region.



The abuse consistently described “is so systemic, that there is no room to doubt an organized, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities,” B’Tselem said.

After 7 October, “the prison administration collectively punished us on a regular basis,” S.B., a resident from Jerusalem, told B’Tselem.

Detainees are held in severely overcrowded cells and rarely let out to shower. They are denied access to the yard, some “for their entire incarceration, which sometimes lasted six months or more,” B’Tselem reported.

“For 191 days, I didn’t see the sun,” Thaer Halahleh, a 45-year-old father of four from Kharas, near Hebron in the West Bank, told B’Tselem.

Increasingly frequent roll calls and searches provide guards an opportunity to carry out beatings. But guards need no excuse to abuse prisoners.
“Prisoners are brutally attacked at every stage of detention and incarceration,” B’Tselem found.



Israeli soldiers, prison guards and prison special forces all participated in this violence, beating prisoners with clubs, metal batons, gun barrels, brass knuckles and sticks. They punched, kicked and set dogs on prisoners. These attacks caused severe injuries, including loss of consciousness, broken bones and death.

A 53-year-old father of five from Hebron, Ashraf al-Muhtaseb, described an attack by members of a special unit under the pretext of searching the cell for a radio.

“I couldn’t move or breathe for half an hour. Everyone around me was screaming in pain, and some inmates were crying. Most were bleeding. It was a nightmare beyond words,” he told B’Tselem.

A 30-year-old father of two from Gaza City, said he was electrocuted in the neck by a female soldier during interrogation.

Israel used sleep deprivation, a form of torture, as part of the routine abuse of Palestinians as well. Prison authorities also established an environment of systemic abuse by isolating Palestinian prisoners from the outside world.

Family visits were barred, access to lawyers was restricted and media coverage was effectively prohibited, leaving prisoners with almost no external contact.

This created a climate of isolation: prisoners received minimal news of the outside world, often relying on newly detained Palestinians for updates.

At the same time, the isolation created a blackout: Conditions inside Israeli detention centers were largely hidden from external observation, enabling prison authorities to mistreat, torture and abuse detainees with minimal oversight and maximum impunity.

“Prisoners seem to vanish off the face of the earth once taken into custody,” B’Tselem said.
As hearings were primarily conducted remotely, Israeli judges were seldom exposed to signs of abuse on Palestinian prisoners. In the rare instances when prisoners dared to tell the judges, Israeli guards beat them in revenge, testimonies given to B’Tselem document.



Before 7 October, there were nearly 5,200 Palestinians in Israeli detention.

By last month, the number of Palestinians in Israeli captivity exceeded 9,600 Palestinians, with almost half held without charges, without trial, without being informed of the evidence or allegations against them and without access to legal defense.

Israel in recent months “disappeared thousands of Palestinians,” B’Tselem said, and “many of them are still missing at the time of publication.”
The struggle of prisoners

In July, Israel’s high court issued a conditional order to shutter the Sde Teiman camp in connection with another lawsuit.

The state reportedly responded to the high court by saying there were now only 28 Paletinians remaining at the Sde Teiman camp.
The terrible reality endured by Palestinian prisoners underscores why Hamas insists on securing the release of a number of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli custody in exchange with Israeli captives taken on 7 October.



“The prison system is one of the most violent and oppressive state mechanisms that the Israeli regime uses to uphold Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” B’Tselem said.

The numbers speak for themselves.

“Since 1967, Israel has imprisoned over 800,000 Palestinian men and women from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, which accounts for about 20 percent of the total population and about 40 percent of all Palestinian men,” B’Tselem stated.

Independent UN human rights experts said in August that “most Palestinian detainees are de facto hostages of an awful occupation,” referring to the legal opinion of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s occupation.

Israel’s policy of mass detentions since 7 October has undoubtedly been partly spurred by a desire to increase the number of prisoners to use in any exchange.

Indeed, “an amiable police officer” admitted as much during a briefing to recruited Israeli soldiers, according to a female reservist who spoke to Haaretz on condition of anonymity.

“It’s important for you to understand, for the return of the hostages we need to return prisoners, so we’re holding them for the deals. At the moment, they are a strategic asset of the [Israeli military],’” she recalled the officer saying.

Tamara Nassar is associate editor of The Electronic Intifada.