Former Israeli military commander Efran Efrati recently testified to the BBC that Palestinian children are 'routinely ill-treated' by Israeli soldiers:
"You take the kid, you blindfold him, you handcuff him, he's really shaking... Sometimes you cuff his legs too. Sometimes it cuts off the circulation.
"He doesn't understand a word of what's going on around him. He doesn't know what you're going to do with him. He just knows we are soldiers with guns. That we kill people. Maybe they think we're going to kill him."
[quote continues overleaf...]
"A lot of the time they're peeing their pants, just sit there peeing their pants, crying. But usually they're very quiet...
"When the kid is sitting there in the base, I didn't do it, but nobody is thinking of him as a kid, you know - if there is someone blindfolded and handcuffed, he's probably done something really bad. It's OK to slap him, it's OK to spit on him, it's OK to kick him sometimes. It doesn't really matter.''
Efrati describes a typical 'arrest':
"Their faces were painted when they came for him. It was frightening. All those soldiers for one boy. They put iron weights on his back in the jeep and beat him all the way to jail. He couldn't get up for a week.''
Efrati's testimony is far from isolated. Earlier this year, for example, Col. Itai Virob explained before a court that during a mission "aggressiveness towards every one of the residents in the village is common", including slaps, beatings and kickings (Virob added that "almost all" the victims of such tactics were people who were "not involved"). Another officer described how soldiers "just knee [Palestinians] because it’s boring, because you stand there 10 hours, you’re not doing anything, so they beat people up".
Testimonies like this corroborate allegations made by human rights organisations like Defence for Children International, which has documented "widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force" (the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel has similarly emphasised the "the exceedingly bureaucratic way in which torture is carried out, in an organized, almost blasé manner", while Physicians for Human Rights - Israel recent condemned the Israeli Medical Association's "years of turning a blind eye to torture and physicians' involvement in it" [.pdf]).
The accounts of IDF brutality coming from Israeli soldiers are a huge annoyance for the Israeli government, because they can't be dismissed as "antisemitic" or "anti-Israel" or "Hamas propaganda". Particularly embarrassing was the publication by Breaking the Silence, an organisation of veteran Israeli soldiers, of over 50 testimonies from IDF soldiers attesting to widespread criminality perpetrated during the 'Cast Lead' massacre, which made a mockery of the official whitewash.
The government has responded to the Breaking the Silence publications by waging what Israeli human rights organisations describe as "a frontal assault on the organization through the publication of baseless accusations meant to challenge the authenticity of the organization and the report’s findings". Netanyahu has asked Spain, Britain and the Netherlands to stop funding the organisation, and is reportedly contemplating legislation that would ban all foreign funding to civil society groups on the grounds that "it is unacceptable for the Europeans to support local NGOs opposed to the policies of Israel's democratically elected government." This is taking place in the context of a broader offensive against human rights organisations, which began with a coordinated attack on Human Rights Watch in July. This attempted crackdown is a sign of desperation - the Israeli government is losing the war for public opinion, and it knows it. As one Israeli activist writes,
"[F]or years the Jewish communities of North America, for example, have supported Israeli policy at times without question, allowing Israel's flawed vision of its actions to become hegemonic. Today there is a counter voice among Jews in the Diaspora and in Israel yet our legitimacy is questioned and our motives distorted by those whose core goal is to preserve the occupation. Recent efforts to gag opposition voices are evidence of this intolerable anti-democratic trend."
Further reading:
- Defence for Children International
submission to the UN Human Rights Committee
- Defence for Children International:
Palestinian Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalised ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities [.pdf]
- Mondoweiss has a series of posts discussing the state harassment and intimidation of
New Profile, a feminist peace group campaigning against the militarisation of Israeli society - see
here,
here and
here.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander