Thread by @MouinRabbani

THREAD: I’m interrupting my review of Arab-Israeli wars, which I will resume next week, to comment on a current development:

On the morning of Monday 29 July, a contingent of Israel’s military police – the agency responsible for policing the security forces – showed up at Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base in the Negev Desert that now serves as a prison camp for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

The military police had come to arrest nine of the soldiers – apparently all reservists – who serve at the camp. They were wanted for their involvement in the gang rape of a prisoner who was subsequently taken to the camp’s infirmary with severe rectal injuries.

(Normally I would add something about innocent until proven guilty, but on those exceedingly rare occasions when the Israeli authorities arrest an Israeli in uniform for offences against Palestinians, this can be considered incontrovertible proof they are guilty as sin).

The soldiers resisted arrest, and a stand-off between them and the military police contingent erupted. Almost immediately, Israeli politicians took to the airwaves to denounce the arrest operation,

proclaiming the rapists to be heroes – precisely because they had gang-raped a Palestinian prisoner – and called upon their supporters to flood Sde Teiman to prevent the soldiers from being taken into custody.

After protracted negotiations the soldiers agreed to be led away by the military police and were transported to the Beit Lid detention facility near Tulkarm in the northern West Bank.

But no sooner had the military police and their detainees left than a mob broke into the prison camp to protest the arrests. Not just any mob, but one that included government ministers, members of parliament, soldiers in uniform, and various others.

Later that day similar scenes were repeated at the Beit Lid prison. Although breaking into or out of a prison is considered a serious violation of the law, thus far not a single individual has been arrested.

The Sde Teiman prison camp has elements of both Abu Ghraib, the US torture center in Iraq, and a Gestapo interrogation center. Among the documented abuses, based on testimonies of both former prisoners and prison staff,

are torture, including electric shocks, severe beatings, and various forms of disorientation; severe malnutrition and dehydration; amputations after the very prolonged use of zip-ties that have been deliberately tightened to block circulation to hands and feet;

denial of basic medical care; denial of toilet facilities; surgeries without anaesthetic; surgeries performed by unqualified medical students to gain experience; and very much else.

You may have read the highly credible accounts emanating from Sde Teiman or seen images/videos of former prisoners incarcerated there. Several dozen Palestinians have been killed at the camp, through torture or denial of basic needs.

It bears recollection that the war crime of torture is considered a legal practice in Israel, and has been confirmed as such by its supreme court, most notably in 1987.

Secondly, Israel considers Palestinians to be unlawful combatants who are not entitled to the protections offered by customary law on such matters.

And additionally, Israel’s most senior leaders have engaged in a systematic campaign of demonization and dehumanization of Palestinians, and of those suspected of membership in Hamas in particular, which amounts to a license to torture, rape, and kill.

The arrested soldiers were essentially told to do as they please with Palestinians and assured that, per standard practice, there would be no consequences of any sort.

At one level one can therefore understand the astonished response of the rapists when told they would be arrested for conduct that has been officially sanctioned on a systematic basis.

The case also reflects deeper changes within Israel. Its military has, to put it mildly, admittedly never had a reputation for discipline, but it functioned as the central institution of Israeli state and society.

Israel has on this basis been described as an army with a state rather than a state with a military. But that is beginning to change. As Geoffrey Aronson has argued, recent years have seen the emergence of a new class of Israeli politicians,

most notably National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who in contrast to many of their predecessors did not enter and succeed in politics on the strength of a military career,

but rather built successful careers through opposition to and delegitimization of Israel’s security establishment. Their preferred armed force is not a regular army, but rather militias and mobs of brownshirts. And that’s what we saw on 29 July.

It’s not so much a turning point as visible evidence that the process is alive, well, and rapidly gaining momentum. That it should burst onto the scene in defense of gang rape should therefore not come as a particular surprise.

There are many other notable elements to this issue, not least of which would be the observation that every accusation is a confession. Another would be that Government ministers and members of parliament rank somewhat higher in the pecking order than falsely-accused UNRWA staff.

Yet one angle that is particularly interesting has to do with Israel’s concerns about sustaining its impunity with respect to its dealings with the Palestinian people.

As @reider has pointed out, Israel’s Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, in his condemnation of the riots asserted that military police investigations are essential to protect Israeli soldiers “at home and abroad”.

@reider “Abroad”, @reider points out, “obviously meaning The Hague” where the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) are based.

@reider Thanks to efforts initiated by the United Kingdom, which argued that the ICC should only prosecute Palestinians, the Court is now permitting multiple challenges to its jurisdiction over Israeli crimes perpetrated in the occupied Palestinian territories.

@reider A particularly specious set of arguments has been put forth by Germany, arguably the most experienced state when it comes to the crimes enumerated in the Rome Statute.

@reider One of Berlin’s arguments is that the ICC should not pursue arrest warrants until Israel has completed the commission of its crimes against the Palestinian people and considers its business concluded.

@reider The other argument concerns “complementarity”, the principle according to which the ICC can and will only pursue prosecutions where national judiciaries fail to conduct such procedures themselves.

@reider In its paeans to Israel’s judiciary, Berlin conveniently neglects that every independent study of Israel’s judiciary with respect to crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinians has concluded that the primary role of this apparatus has been to enable, legitimize,

@reider and whitewash the crimes concerned. Even were this not the case, the way ICC complementarity works is that the national judiciary would have to credibly investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute and convict the same individuals for the same crimes they stand accused of by ICC.

@reider In other words, Germany’s desperately furious efforts to defend that other genocidal regime will prove of little use to Netanyahu and Gallant.

@reider But Halevi, a representative of Israel’s traditional military elite – let’s call him an Israeli Prussian – sees the writing on the wall, and he and his fellow officers don’t want to share Netanyahu and Gallant’s fate. So they are creating an argument for complementarity.

@reider In a rational society Halevi would be hailed for his foresight and criticized for waiting so long to act.

@reider But a society where government ministers, members of parliament, uniformed soldiers, and a mob of brownshirts riot at two separate locations on a single day in defense of gang rape cannot be considered rational. END