‘Black websites’ are about reminding those that have been colonised and enslaved of a easy lesson: resistance is futile
On a misty November morning 21 years in the past, I used to be desperately attempting to stay camouflaged. Hid within the foliage of an orange grove in Israel’s rural Galilee, I hurriedly took photographs of a colorless concrete constructing not marked on any map.
Even the unique highway signal figuring out the location as Facility 1391 had been eliminated after a neighborhood Haaretz newspaper investigation revealed it housed a secret jail.
I used to be the primary international journalist to trace down Facility 1391, most of it hidden inside a closely fortified complicated constructed within the Thirties to suppress resistance to British rule in Palestine.
For many years, Israel had secretly held principally Arab international nationals captive on the website, unknown to the Israeli courts, the Pink Cross and human rights teams. Many have been Lebanese residents kidnapped throughout Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. However there have been additionally Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians and Iranians.
This website would quickly be referred to as a “black website”, a time period popularised by Washington’s invasion of Iraq that 12 months. Drawing on strategies refined by Israel at Facility 1391, the US would, within the coming months and years, torture Iraqis and others at Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo.
Nobody knew what number of captives have been held in Israel’s Facility 1391, how lengthy that they had been there or if there have been extra such prisons.
Nonetheless, the primary testimonies from inmates revealed horrifying situations. For more often than not, they have been stored in a state of sensory deprivation, made to put on blacked-out goggles, aside from when being tortured. In a single case that later got here to court docket, a Lebanese captive had been sodomised with a baton by “Main George”, the power’s torturer-in-chief.
Main George would go on to turn into head of Israeli police relations with the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem.
One other secret jail
It was tough to not recall Facility 1391 this month, as CNN printed an investigation into a brand new Israeli secret jail, Sde Teiman.
This jail was arrange months in the past to course of not international nationals however 1000’s of Palestinian males and boys, victims of Israel’s occupation, seized from the streets of Gaza and the West Financial institution since Hamas carried out a one-day assault on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis have been killed and 250 have been dragged again into Gaza as hostages.
As with Facility 1391, revelations of the horrors going down at Israel’s new black website have garnered barely any consideration from the western media institution.
CNN, identified for excising Israeli atrocities from its protection on the orders of executives, ought to be applauded for lastly doing what western media usually falsely claims is its position: holding energy to account.
Headlined “Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers”, the prolonged article particulars the degrading, brutal situations Palestinians kidnapped from Gaza and the West Financial institution are being subjected to.
The variety of Palestinians passing by way of the secretive detention camp, situated within the Negev desert, is unknown. However satellite tv for pc photographs present the location is quickly increasing, presumably to accommodate ever extra “prisoners”.
Some Palestinians who’ve emerged, completely damaged from this incarceration system – the place the world noticed males and boys being paraded zip-tied, near-naked and blindfolded in Gaza’s streets and stadiums again in November and December – started telling of their experiences months in the past.
Predictably, the western media largely ignored the testimonies.
Even when workers from Sde Teiman began coming ahead weeks in the past to disclose horror tales, western retailers collectively yawned – aside from CNN.
Sample of media failure
This sample of failure has been famous within the pages of Center East Eye for months.
For instance, the western media institution has studiously averted their gaze from Israeli reviews {that a} proportion of these killed on 7 October weren’t victims of Hamas however of the Israeli military’s infamous “Hannibal process”, a protocol to kill fellow Israelis fairly than allow them to be taken captive.
Western journalists nonetheless principally keep away from highlighting the truth that Israel is actively ravenous the whole inhabitants of Gaza of meals and water, an unquestionable crime towards humanity. As a substitute, journalists echo their very own governments by labelling this Israeli-induced famine a “humanitarian disaster”, as if it have been an unlucky pure catastrophe.
The media additionally obscures the truth that western powers, particularly the US and UK, are straight helping Israel in its mass hunger of Gaza’s inhabitants – each by denying funding to the UN’s major aid company, Unrwa, and by refusing to place any vital strain on Israel to permit in assist.
Echoing the Biden administration, the media nonetheless hesitates to name Israel’s actions in Gaza what they’re, preferring an occasional mealy-mouthed evaluation that Israel “could also be in danger” of committing struggle crimes. None level to the larger image that each one of those particular person “doable” struggle crimes indisputably quantity to genocide.
That obfuscation has turn into even tougher to keep up with the prosecutor of the Worldwide Legal Court docket (ICC) making use of this week for arrest warrants for suspected struggle crimes and crimes towards humanity dedicated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, together with three Hamas leaders.
Nonetheless, the media have pressured Israel’s and the Biden administration’s indignation on the court docket fairly than the substance of its prices, together with the allegation that Israel is exterminating Palestinians in Gaza by way of deliberate hunger.
The media avoids readability on these matters as a result of readability can be inconvenient. Why? As a result of, as we will see, the western media’s function is to create a story that serves western governments in pursuing their overarching international coverage objectives within the oil-rich Center East, not ending the boundless struggling in Gaza or holding Israel to account for its crimes.
Used as lab rats
As a handful of whistleblowers revealed to CNN, Palestinians are incarcerated for weeks on finish in Sde Teiman as they’re tortured – each by way of formal interrogations and thru the situations they’re held in.
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They’re pressured to take a seat blindfolded outside on a skinny mattress by way of the desert warmth of the day and sleep within the chilly of the desert evening. Repeatedly cuffed, they’re pressured to stay immobile and silent. At evening, canines are set on them. Anybody who speaks or strikes dangers being savagely overwhelmed until bones are damaged.
Individuals’s arms and legs are tightly zip-tied for therefore lengthy that, in keeping with the report, some have wanted limbs amputated.
As one Israeli whistleblower recounted to CNN, none of those abuses are about intelligence gathering. “They have been carried out out of revenge,” he admitted. The inmates are punching luggage for the Israeli troopers and guards.
However that is about greater than easy vengeance. Understanding what is occurring at Sde Teiman offers a clearer image of what’s taking place on a far larger, much more industrial scale in Gaza.
Particularly revealing are the situations in a discipline hospital on the detention camp, housing Palestinians both maimed in Israel’s savage destruction of Gaza or injured by beatings from Israeli troopers.
They’re handcuffed to gurneys in row after row, blindfolded and bare aside from an grownup nappy. They aren’t allowed to talk.
There they lie day after day, evening after evening, in a state of utter sensory deprivation, with nothing to distract from their wounds and ache. Within the midst of this, Israeli medical interns can use their uncovered, weak flesh as a canvas for experimentation.
In line with one whistleblower, the detention centre has shortly gained a fame for being “a paradise for interns”.
There, they’re allowed to make use of Palestinians as little greater than lab rats and inspired to hold out medical procedures they aren’t certified to carry out.
A whistleblower informed CNN: “I used to be requested to learn to do issues on the sufferers, performing minor medical procedures which might be completely exterior my experience.”
Such procedures have been incessantly carried out with out anaesthesia. Not like medical doctors in Gaza, Israeli medical doctors have prepared entry to painkillers. It’s a alternative to not use them.
Medical workers lacking
With western media so readily colluding within the dehumanisation of Palestinians, you will need to bear in mind who these “prisoners” are.
Israel needs us to imagine it’s focusing on Hamas and people it “arrests” – the extensively accepted euphemism, utilized by CNN on this article, for these Israel takes hostage – are Palestinians suspected of ties to the militant group.
Nonetheless, some of the vital testimonies of abuse from Sde Teiman reported by CNN comes from Dr Mohammed al-Ran, the grey-haired head of surgical procedure at Gaza’s now-destroyed Indonesian hospital.
He was “arrested” – kidnapped – by Israel in December and brought to Sde Teiman. There isn’t any suggestion al-Ran was engaged in armed fight towards invading Israeli troops or was related to Hamas in some other approach. He was seized, together with different medical workers, whereas working a three-day shift at one other medical centre, the al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist Hospital.
He had been pressured to flee the Indonesian hospital after it was bombed by Israel and workers there have been severely overwhelmed.
Untold numbers of medical personnel have been murdered or disappeared by Israel throughout its systematic assaults on Gaza’s hospitals. The destruction of the enclave’s well being sector is one other obvious crime towards humanity the western media has fastidiously averted figuring out.
The distinction with the media’s unrelenting certainty about Russia’s struggle crimes in Ukraine a short while in the past is stark certainly.
Human rights teams are desperately attempting to trace down these Palestinian hostages with habeas corpus writs, simply as they earlier tried to search out the international nationals held captive in Facility 1391. The Israeli courts have been wilfully obstructive.
In a single check case, the Israeli human rights group HaMoked, which was central to figuring out Facility 1391, has been petitioning Israel’s supreme court docket – whose judges embody some residing in unlawful Jewish settlements within the West Financial institution – to discover a Palestinian X-ray technician lacking since February.
He was seized by Israeli troops at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. The suspicion is that he’s being held in Sde Teiman.
In line with HaMoked, greater than 1,300 Palestinians from Gaza are lacking, presumed to be in Israeli detention, together with 29 girls.
One other surgeon, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, is thought to be amongst greater than two dozen Palestinians who’ve died in mysterious circumstances in Israeli captivity. He was more than likely tortured to demise or probably killed in a failed medical process.
‘Unprecedented’ abuses
In additional proof that this wave of violence towards prisoners is fully unrelated to suspicions that they belong to Hamas or participated within the 7 October assault, particulars emerged final weekend of relentless and savage abuses of essentially the most outstanding Palestinian prisoner held by Israel.
Marwan Barghouti, from the Palestinian Nationwide Liberation Motion led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas – Hamas’s arch-opponents – has been locked up for the previous 22 years. Generally known as the “Palestinian Mandela”, Barghouti is taken into account a possible future chief of the Palestinian individuals.
In line with fellow inmates and human rights teams, Barghouti is barely recognisable after a collection of beatings, certainly one of which has left him struggling to see out of his proper eye.
He’s reported to be in fixed ache from a suspected dislocated shoulder ensuing from one assault, an damage that has not been handled.
In line with his Israeli lawyer, he has been dragged throughout the ground handcuffed and bare in entrance of different inmates at Ayalon Jail.
Barghouti has misplaced vital weight as a result of extreme meals restrictions imposed on all Palestinian prisoners since October and has been denied entry to books, newspapers and tv.
Tal Steiner, of the Israeli human rights group the Public Committee In opposition to Torture in Israel, informed the Guardian that Barghouti was being subjected to “unprecedented” abuses and that such torture had turn into “normal” for the 8,750 Palestinians identified to have been jailed since October.
The federal government minister overseeing Israel’s jail service, Itamar Ben Gvir, belongs to the avowedly fascist get together Jewish Energy, whose ideological roots in Kahanism explicitly regard Palestinians as little greater than vermin.
Bargaining chips
The western media have targeted endlessly on the struggling of the 100 or extra Israeli hostages nonetheless held in Gaza, although it stays unmentioned that a lot of that struggling derives from Israel’s actions.
The hostages, just like the Palestinians of Gaza, are underneath Israel’s rain of bombs. And like Palestinians, they face sustained meals shortages brought on by Israel’s assist blockade. The indiscriminate violence towards Gaza impacts each hostages and Palestinians alike.
However primarily based on reviews by CNN and Israeli media, it appears doubtless that lots of the 1000’s of Palestinians kidnapped by Israel since October are going through a far crueller destiny than the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hamas is invested in conserving the Israeli hostages as protected as doable as a result of they’re worthwhile bargaining chips for getting the Israeli military out of Gaza and releasing Palestinians from torture websites like Sde Teiman.
Israel faces no such pressures. Because the occupying energy and Washington’s favorite shopper state, it may well inflict any punishment it chooses on Palestinians with little repercussion.
That’s one other aspect of the previous seven months that the media refuse to acknowledge.
Destroying assist
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In the meantime, western publics are smeared in the event that they attempt to identify Israel’s crimes as genocide or articulate how the genocide is unfolding. This echoes the suspicions of an awesome majority of judges on the Worldwide Court docket of Justice (ICJ) again in January and is implied by the ICC chief prosecutor’s software for arrest warrants this week.
The West’s current, perverse and self-serving redefinition of antisemitism – a victory for pro-Israel foyer teams – equates Jew hatred with criticism of Israel extra so than really hating Jews.
Below the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition, it’s antisemitic to attract a parallel between Israel’s actions and the genocide with which westerners are most acquainted: the Holocaust.
Conveniently for Israel, western institutions can now disavow an all-too-obvious lesson of historical past and human psychology: the victims of abuse are fairly able to committing such abuses themselves.
CNN’s reconstruction of the sector hospital at Sde Teiman exhibits dehumanised Palestinians – sure, blindfolded and bare – in rows of gurneys able to be experimented on. Why would that not evoke, for western audiences, reminiscences of Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi physician who considered focus camp inmates as lower than human, mere fodder for his experiments?
What echoes ought to westerners really feel watching Jewish extremists from Israel’s unlawful settlements ambush assist vans heading to Gaza, smash up the provides desperately wanted by a ravenous inhabitants, burn the vans and beat the drivers – all whereas Israeli troopers and police stand by, permitting the destruction to happen?
Israeli settlers didn’t solely block assist vans heading to Gaza, in addition they vandalized it… all whereas Israeli forces current on the Tarqumya checkpoint west of Hebron seemed on, with out stopping them, witnesses stated. pic.twitter.com/MzvxXkYKBS
— Rania Zabaneh (@RZabaneh) Could 13, 2024
How would possibly it’s improper – antisemitic, no much less – to ponder whether or not the same brutal, genocidal racism drove extremists in Germany in 1938 once they rampaged towards Jews on Kristallnacht?
And what about those that have in contrast tiny Gaza to a focus camp throughout Israel’s 17-year siege by land, air and water, with encaged Palestinians disadvantaged of primary freedoms and the necessities of life? Or those that now name Gaza a demise camp as Israel starves the inhabitants?
Are such assessments actually proof of Jew hatred? Or are they proof that these observers have understood nicely the teachings of historical past and the Holocaust? The systematic degrading and abuse of a individuals ought to all the time be considered as a criminal offense towards our shared humanity.
The ethical responsibility going through us all is to cease such atrocities, to not withhold judgement and mutely watch them play out to their logical conclusion.
Torture chambers
The present horrors Israel is inflicting on the inmates of Sde Teiman and, on an excellent larger scale, on the Palestinians within the Gaza demise camp, are about way more than easy vengeance for 7 October.
Sde Teiman is the small torture chamber, mirroring the a lot larger torture chamber of Gaza itself, the place bombs and hunger are attaining exactly the identical ends.
Till seven months in the past, Israel’s objective was to maintain the Palestinians a subjugated, enslaved, hopeless individuals, confined to a collection of focus camps in Gaza, the West Financial institution and East Jerusalem. They have been anticipated to stay mute of their struggling and invisible to the skin world.
Over the long run, it was assumed that Palestinians would favor to flee their immiseration in these completely occupied, colonised lands.
The slave revolt of seven October – brutal and ugly as such revolts have been all through historical past – was a devastating shock. Not simply to an Israel wedded to its racist, hands-on colonial challenge of subjugating the Palestinian individuals. It was additionally a shock to the West’s wider colonial challenge, into which Israel is so tightly built-in.
In Washington’s “rules-based order”, the one significant rule is that what Washington and its shoppers need, they get. The planet, its sources and peoples are considered as little greater than playthings by the world’s superpower-in-chief.
Revolts to this order – whether or not superior by Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran – can’t be allowed to turn into a mannequin. The “rules-based order” should be restored with a savagery essential to show the the colonised and enslaved their place.
That was the message of Washington’s personal black websites wanted in its futile “struggle on terror”, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo – websites that drew on Israel’s experiences of “breaking” inmates at Facility 1391.
The complicity of western institutions in Israel’s present genocide is just not an anomaly. It doesn’t derive from a misunderstanding or confusion. The western political and media class see the genocide in Gaza as clearly as the remainder of us. However for them, it’s justified, required even. The colonised and oppressed should be taught that resistance is futile.
Sde Teiman, just like the Gaza demise camp, is serving its function. It’s there to interrupt the human spirit. It’s there to show the Palestinians into keen collaborators in their very own destruction as a individuals, in their very own ethnic cleaning.
And a subliminal message is being directed on the western public on the identical time: this is also your destiny if you don’t take part cheerleading Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
