From Jonathan Cook:
Masterminding this strategy is the Israeli secret police, the Shin Bet, which has recently turned its attention to sick Gazans and their relatives who need to leave the Strip. With hospitals and medicines in short supply, some patients have little hope of recovery without treatment abroad or in Israel.
According to the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, the Shin Bet is exploiting the distress of these families to pressure them to agree to collaborate in return for an exit permit.
Last month, the group released details of 32 cases in which sick Gazans admitted they were denied permits after refusing to become informants.
One is Shaban Abu Obeid, 38, whose pacemaker was installed at an Israeli hospital and needs intermittent maintenance by Israeli doctors. Another, Bassam Waheidi, 28, has gone blind in one eye after he refused to co-operate and was denied a permit. […]
As with other occupation regimes, Israel has long relied on the most traditional way of recruiting collaborators: torture. While a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 banned torture, the evidence suggests the Shin Bet simply ignored the ruling.
So what happens once a Palestinian has been forced to collaborate with the human rights abusers ruling their lives? They then get killed by the other set of human rights abusers ruling their lives. From Global Investment Watch:
As Amnesty International reported in its paper, “Hamas’ Deadly Campaign in the Shadow of the War in Gaza,” dozens of Palestinians have been killed or badly beaten and tortured by Hamas in the days surrounding the Israeli assault on Gaza. Hamas’ disregard for the rule of law and human rights demonstrate its inability to function as a legitimate governing body and its failure to serve the Palestinian people.
As noted in the AI report, Hamas targets include former detainees accused of “collaborating” with the Israeli army who escaped from Gaza’s central prison when it was bombed by Israeli forces on 28 December 2008. Other targets included former members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces and other activists of the Fatah party.
Most of the victims were taken from their homes and killed by the Hamas militia. For those victims not summarily executed by gunshots to the head and chest, victims were often kneecapped, severely beaten or otherwise permanently disabled by their attackers. On some occasions, the killings took place in hospitals in the presence of uniformed Hamas officials. […]
Should an informant fail in his duties, all Shin Bet needs to do is to let it be known that the informant “was” a spy for Israel. Hamas will then take care of the problem created by its enemy across the border.
Well, now I’m horrified in a whole new way.
Now, does it say something about how horribly jaded I am that my next thought is “holy crap, that would make an _awesome_ movie”.
Now, does it say something about how horribly jaded I am that my next thought is “holy crap, that would make an _awesome_ movie”.
Yes.
Since you bring it up, SiF, I admit that one of my first thoughts was that it could make a devastating novel, if Kafka was alive and writing about Palestine/Israel. Or maybe Joseph Heller. Or Coetze (sp?).
That is horrible.
BTW, other evidence that I have read suggests to me that the Israeli security system DOES use torture (pre-Guantanamo I believe they were much much harsher than we were, now I’m not sure) so i’m not implying that Shin Bet doesn’t torture folks.
Semantically speaking, though, denying someone entry to a country, even if that is linked to their desire for medical care and/or a demand that they do something really bad, is a human rights issue but not torture. Not that it’s really any better merely by using a different word–dead either way–and I don’t know the word for it.
SM, I think the article is saying that the methods of recruitment include both torture of prisoners and withholding entry.
I read the article as implying that the torture is (theoretically) for information gathering or punishment, but that the recruitment is entry denial. But in either case, I don’t think we’re in disagreement here, either about the facts or the amorality of it.
I’m kind of reminded of the Joker telling Batman “I think you and I are destined to do this forever.”
Israel uses Hamas as enforcers (not formal cooperation, just knowing that it can reveal folks as informers and Hamas will predictably torture and/or execute them) to insure its informants cooperate (I very much believe the SB uses torture even in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling). Hamas uses Israel as an excuse to execute folks it dislikes as informants (it went on a spree after the Gaza campaign to try and knee-cap Fatah and prevent it from retaking the strip, accusing its rivals top operatives of being informants), knowing that Israel really doesn’t care about intra-Palestinian bloodshed.
And round and round they go. Each party knows the other too well for their own good.
What must it be like to think like that? To see other people as objects you can cut up for your own ends.
I almost pity them.
Them= Shin Bet and Hamas, just in cas that’s not clear.
that’s messed up, really sad
Yes, Shin Bet uses torture. Isn’t it even still legal in Israel, so long as it’s “mild”? I think the “best” you can say is that they’ve used torture on settler extremists, too.