From: wmuhanna@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Waleed A Muhanna)
Subject: Torture in Israel (was Re: The Hadith about...)
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 19:44:00 GMT

In article <1992Dec23.174634.13539@colorado.edu> perlman@qso.Colorado.EDU (Eric S. Perlman) writes:
>In article <1992Dec23.152007.966@cbfsb.cb.att.com> mmdh@cbnewsf.cb.att.com (Mazen Mokhtar) writes:
>>Eric S. Perlman writes:
>>
>>>The situation of Palestinians may not be the best,
>>
>>  That is for sure.
>>
>>>but if you want to use the comparison then answer me these questions: where
>>>are the gas chambers?
>>
>>  Instead, we have people burried alive by buldozers and houses of people who
>>are not even suspect destroyed. People are expelled out of their country and
>>their land and property is given to foreigners.
>...
>>
>>  In the Negev desert among other places are camps where innocent people are
>>incarcerated for extended periods of time without even a charge. They are
>>subjected to torture from which they frequently die.
>
>and aunts who still bear the scars as survivors.  Second of all the 
>charges of torture are way overblown.  The US's reports on human rights 
>show this clearly. 

Care to show which US human rights report "SHOWS CLEARLY" that the charges 
of torture are "WAY OVERBLOWN"?  Or is this another of your gems?

The 1991 (the most recent) US State Department report on human rights
practices in "Israel and the occupied territories", which I have in 
front of me, says:

      ``In 1991 interntional, Israeli, and Palestinian human rights
	groups published detailed credible reports of torture, abuse,
	and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees in prisons and 
	detention centers.  The practices reportedly included hooding;
	deprivation of food, sleep, and sanitary facilities; forced
	standing; confinement in a narrow, small space; slaps, blows
	and beatings; and threats against the detainee or his family.
	Most such abuses take place immediately after arrest and during
	the first few days of detention and interrogation when detainees
	are denied access for family members, attornies, and the
	International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  The ICRC cites
	this isolation period as an issue of great concern.

	Aside from these forms of abuse, a Palestinian human rights
	organization reported in detail eight credible cases of
	electric-shock torture in the Hebron military headquarters
	between April and September 1991.  Other allegations of the use
	of electric shock in Hebron, bethlehem, and Ramallah (possibly
	involving the same group of interrogators) were under
	investigation at year's end.''


Here is also a relevant article which I posted earlier this year.

The following is from Ari Shavit's essay "On the Gaza Beach" which
appeared in the _New York Review of Books_, 18 July 1991.  Shavit is
an Israeli journalist who did reserve duty as a guard in Gaza Beach,
"one of the best" Israeli internment camps for the Palestinians under
occupation.

 Most [Palestinians] are awaiting trial; most were arrested because they
 were throwing stones or were said to be members of illegal organizations.
 Many are in their teens.  Among them, here and there, are some boys who
 are small and appear to be very young.... The prison has 12 guard towers.
 Some Israeli soldiers are struck - and deeply shaken - by the similarity
 between these and certain other towers, about which they have learned at
 school.... [T]he unjust analogy with those other camps of fifty years
 ago won't go away....  And I, too, who have always abhorred this analogy,
 who have always argued bitterly with anyone who so much as hints at it, I
 can no longer stop myself.  The associations are too strong.... Like a
 believer whose faith is cracking, I go over and over in my mind the long
 list of arguments, the list of differences.... but then I realize that
 the problem is not in the similarity - for no one can seriously think
 that there is a real similarity - but that there isn't enough lack of
 similarity.  The problem is that the lack of similarity isn't strong
 enough to silence once and for all the evil echoes, the accusing images.
 
 Maybe the Shin Beth is to blame for this - for the arrests it makes and
 what it does to those arrested.  For almost every night, after it has
 managed in its interrogations, to "break" a certain number of young men,
 the Shin Beth delivers to the [soldiers] a list with the names of the
 friends of the young men... [and I watch as] the soldiers...go out
 almost every night to the city and ...come back with children of 15 or
 16.  The children grit their teeth.  Their eyes bulge from their
 sockets.  In not a few cases they have already been beaten....
 And soldiers crowd together in the "reception room" to look at them as 
 they undress.  To look at them in their underwear, to look at them as
 they tremble in fear.  And sometimes they kick them - one kick more,
 before they put on their new prison clothes....
 Or maybe the doctor is to blame.  You wake him up in the middle of the
 night to treat one of those just brought in - a young man, barefoot,
 wounded, who looks as if he's having epileptic fit, who tells you that
 they beat him just now on the back and the stomach and over the heart.
 There are ugly red marks all over his body.  The doctor turns to the
 young man and shouts at him.  In a loud, raging voice he says: May you die.
 And then turns to me with a laugh: May they all die!  
 Or maybe the screems are to blame.  At the end of the watch..., you
 sometimes hear horrible screams...from the other side of the...fence
 of the interrogation section..., hair-raising human screems. Literally
 hair-raising....  In Gaza our General Security Service therefore amount
 to a Secret Police, our internment facilities are cleanly-run Gulags.
 Our soldiers are jailers, our interrogators torturers.  In Gaza it's all
 straightforward and clear.  There's no place to hide.
 
 I am here doing my annual reserve service, like any other Israeli
 man....  What is happening here is that an entire population of our
 reservists - bank clerks, insurance agents, electronic engineers,
 technicians, retailers, students - carriers out the task of imprisoning
 another entire population theirs - tile layers, plasterers, lab workers, 
 journalists, clergy, students.  This is something without parallel in any
 part of the world today that is thought to be decent.  And you are a
 partner in it.  You comply.... Only one out of 60 of us refuse to do
 guard duty in the interrogation section.  Only four or five look
 troubled.  Most of the rest get accustomed to it very quickly....
 And these people, your friends, ordinary Israelis...., these good people
 who are solid citizens...undergo here, without their slightest
 difficulty, the silent metamorphosis that is required of them....
 I make a quick calculation.  I estimate that several hundred young men
 at least must do reserve duty in this internment camp each year.  So in
 all camps of this type, the number of reservists each year must amount
 to several thousands.  Thus in the 40 months of the intifada, more than
 10,000 Israeli citizens in unifrom have walked between the fences, have
 heard the screams, have seen the young being led in and out.  One out
 of every hundred Israeli men has been here (or maybe one out of 70, or
 one out of 50).  And the country has been quiet.  Has flourished....
 10,000 (if not 15,000, if not 20,000) Israeli have done their work
 faithfully - have opened the heavy iron doors of the isolation cells and
 then closed it.   Have led the man from the interrogation chamber to the
 clinic back to the interrogation chamber.  They have looked close up at
 people shitting in terror, pissing in fear.  And not one among them has 
 begun a hunger strike in front of the house of the prime minister.  
 Not one among them that I know of has said, This will not happen.  
 Not in a Jewish state.

-=-
"the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny"
			Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate.
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