-Caveat Lector-
Maybe the ADL should list them as a Hate Group. This could give
them some new material so they do not have to continue to show the
Texas dragging death commercial every blessed day. So we have
torture and assassination and kidnapping and bulldozing and it is
at least OK if not sanctioned? But if others use only language
that is suspect, they are the Hate Groups??? I am beginning to
understand how it works and think I may have been rather
foolish/idealistic to think we should all play by the same
rules.~Amelia~
Reports of torture by Israelis emerge
Rights groups document police abuses against Palestinians
Palestinian women walk by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in the
West Bank near the Kalandia refugee camp. Israel has recently
tightened security in the West Bank, disrupting normal life for
thousands of Palestinians.
By Lee Hockstader
THE WASHINGTON POST
HUSAN, West Bank, Aug. 18 - It was nearly 1 a.m. on a chilly night
in January when Israeli soldiers pounded on the Zaul family's door
in this scruffy Palestinian village. "Open up, it's the army!" they
shouted.
He was blindfolded and spat upon, cursed and threatened with
death, beaten with fists, truncheons and rifle butts until he
screamed, doused with freezing water and forced to stand upright
with a heavy weight hung excruciatingly from his neck.
THEN THEY RUSHED in and grabbed Ibrahim Zaul, 15, a lanky
boy growing a wispy mustache. Zaul was taken to an Israeli police
station, where for the next eight or nine hours, he said, he was
blindfolded and spat upon, cursed and threatened with death, beaten
with fists, truncheons and rifle butts until he screamed, doused
with freezing water and forced to stand upright with a heavy weight
hung excruciatingly from his neck.
"I would fall to the ground, and whenever I fell, they would
kick me in the back," he said in an interview.
It did not take long for Zaul to break: Later that morning,
he confessed to having thrown stones at Israeli troops and
eventually served four months in prison.
About a dozen teenagers, all minors and most from Husan or
nearby villages south of Jerusalem, have given similar accounts of
arrests, beatings and torture by Israeli police in recent months.
Their stories, which differ only in the harrowing details, have
been recorded by Israeli and Palestinian human rights
organizations, which find them credible.
FRAYING DISCIPLINE
As the Palestinian-Israeli conflict drags through its
bloodiest chapter in a generation, there are signs that fraying
discipline and an atmosphere of permissiveness in the ranks of
Israeli security forces are resulting in violence and abuse
directed at Palestinian civilians. Operating under tense,
occasionally lethal conditions in the West Bank and Gaza
territories they occupy, and sometimes attacked by Palestinian
gunmen and bombers, some Israeli soldiers and police appear to have
taken out their frustrations with their fists and gun butts,
according to human rights groups and spokesmen for the Israeli
army.
Most concern from abroad has focused on Israel's policy of
assassinating Palestinian activists involved in attacks on Israel,
or on the Israeli military's retaliatory attacks on
Palestinian-controlled areas. But the increase in abusive behavior
by the security forces, and the Israeli public's tendency to
overlook it, has led some dovish Israelis - a distinct minority in
the current climate - to warn of what they call a widening
mentality of occupation.
More broadly, it has raised questions about whether Israel
can fulfill its own ambitions to be the Middle East's only
democracy with Western-style rights guarantees in the crucible of
the bloody conflict between Arabs and Jews.
BOASTS AND BRUTAL PRACTICES
Nearly from its inception at mid-century, Israel has boasted
that it alone in the region strives to meet Western human rights
standards. It made that argument even while the late Yitzhak Rabin
encouraged the army to "break their bones" when Palestinians staged
the first intifada, or uprising, in the late 1980s. And for years
the main domestic security service, Shin Bet, regularly tortured
Arab detainees. Moreover, Israel's Arab citizens were denied basic
rights in housing, employment and land ownership.
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that Shin Bet's
torture of prisoners was illegal, and the agency says it has halted
the practice in most cases. Human rights activists and liberals
celebrated the ruling at the time, hailing it as a sign of
enlightenment. But now those same advocates say the current
conflict is leading Israel to use brutal practices in which
beatings and abuse of Palestinians are regarded not only as
necessary, but as acceptable. Some Israelis suggest the practices
also betray a vein of racism.
"All colonial wars have the same inner logic," said Uri
Avnery, a veteran of the frayed Israeli peace movement. "When you
are occupiers subjugating another people, you need some moral
reason for it, and the reason is that they are an inferior race.
You have that mentality here. It's like the old American South: If
the brutal sheriff is the hero and the inferior people are seen as
becoming uppity, as raping our women, then it's okay to be brutal
toward them. It's harder, in fact, not to be brutal."
COERCED CONFESSIONS ALLEGED
One of the more dramatic examples is an allegation that at
least 10 Palestinian teenagers, including Zaul, were tortured into
giving confessions at Israel's Gush Etzion police station in the
southern West Bank. The experience has embittered some of the
youths; one told an Israeli newspaper he was thinking of
retaliating against Israel by becoming a suicide bomber.
Advertisement
There has been a rash of other recent incidents and
allegations involving beatings and abuse by Israeli soldiers and
police, often at checkpoints where they regulate the daily
movements of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Last week, six
Israeli soldiers were arrested on suspicion that they had subjected
a group of West Bank Palestinian taxi passengers to a two-hour
ordeal of beating and humiliation, clubbing one of them into
unconsciousness and forcing others at gunpoint to pair off and beat
each other. The case against one of the soldiers was dropped; the
other five may face courts-martial.
ESCALATING PATTERN OF ABUSE
"We didn't receive cases like that before this" Palestinian
uprising, said Yael Stein, research director for the Israeli human
rights group B'Tselem, referring to the all-night beatings and
forced confessions at the Gush Etzion police station. "There were
cases of beatings before by border police or by soldiers, but this
is different because this is not just cases of sheer brutality.
This is real torture."
As the Israeli media, foreign journalists and human rights
organizations have detailed what seems to be an escalating pattern
of abuse, senior Israeli army officers have expressed alarm, mostly
at the potential damage to the military's image, while saying they
are investigating.
The army said it has launched a campaign of training and
education to dissuade soldiers from abusing Palestinians. Eight
cases of alleged abuse have been investigated by the military
police in the past 10 months of violence, army spokesman Lt. Col.
Olivier Rafowicz said.
"It's not simple, because everywhere in the West Bank we are
facing terror attacks, car bombs, sometimes suicide bombers,
sometimes [seemingly] innocent people with a donkey or a bicycle
who are hiding a bomb," Rafowicz said. "So it's a balance between
security necessities and letting people go about their normal lives
and movements. It can happen that there are some mistakes. If there
are clear instances of misbehavior against the regulations, we are
not waiting for human rights groups in order to have an
investigation."
NO COMPLAINT, NO INVESTIGATION
But in cases involving the police, such as the alleged
pattern of torture at the Gush Etzion police station, officials
said they will only investigate if a Palestinian personally files a
specific complaint with the authorities.
"If we don't have any complaint or evidence, we can't do
anything about it," said Yaacov Gallanti, spokesman for the Justice
Ministry's branch for internal police investigations. In the
instance of the Palestinian teenagers, Gallanti said "only one of
them did bring charges, and charges brought were very partial."
In most instances, Palestinians said they are reluctant to
register a complaint with Israeli authorities, saying either they
doubt it will result in a genuine investigation, or that they are
afraid.
Reports of torture, beatings, abuse and humiliation have not
generated an outcry from the Israeli public. In a new poll
conducted by Tel Aviv University, nearly half the Israelis surveyed
said uniformed soldiers and police should be treated leniently if
they abuse Palestinians, or should not be disciplined at all;
another 10 percent had no opinion.
The poll was taken immediately following reports in the
Israeli media describing instances in which Israeli soldiers have
detained Palestinians at roadblocks, confined them to their cars in
the sun on hot days and extracted small bribes known as "passage
fees" - packs of cigarettes, for example - at army checkpoints.
PAPER: 'THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG'
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, quoting high-ranking army
officers, said the incidents of abuse that have come to light
represent "only the tip of the iceberg in what is actually a much
broader phenomenon."
According to a report by B'Tselem, the gist of which army
spokesmen are not denying, the six soldiers arrested last week had
stopped two Palestinian taxis on July 23 near Hebron, on one of the
many hundreds of roads Palestinians use to bypass Israeli
roadblocks. Nine of the passengers were lined up against a wall.
The soldiers, from the Shimshon Battalion, then beat them with
rifle butts and helmets, according to the report. One of the
Palestinians was knocked unconscious.
"One of the soldiers grabbed me by the neck and pulled me
up," said one of the men, Mohammed Salamin, a 28-year-old taxi
driver. "I tried to turn around to see his face, and then he
slapped me hard and ordered me to walk without looking left or
right. . . . While I was walking, the soldiers kicked and punched
me all over my body."
The other taxi driver, 36-year-old Khaled Rawashdeh,
described how the soldiers forced the men to pair off and beat each
other, and then ordered one young passenger to beat the others. "He
refused, but the soldiers threatened to kill him on the spot. . . .
With tears falling from his eyes, the young man started to beat us
with his fist on our faces and heads. He tried to beat us gently,
but one of the soldiers put his gun to his head and told him to
beat us more seriously. They told him to beat me the most. He
struck my face six or seven times."
When the Israelis finally released their captives after
about two hours, they told them to get lost.
"They added that they wanted us to feel how painful the
stones were when they were thrown at soldiers," Rawashdeh said. "As
we began leaving, some of the soldiers began to stone us. Some of
the stones hit our backs and legs."
� 2001 The Washington Post Company
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