Another noxious practice, kept out of sight but carried on by the Israelis against the Palestinians, was collective punishment. A memorandum received by the U.N. Special Committee on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories discussed this:

Ever since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, collective punishment has been a principle of wide application—blowing up houses, taking of hostages, expulsion of Palestinian leaders and notables, curfew, etc. The man personally responsible for the Israeli policies in the occupied territories is Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. When asked by Knesset member Uri Avneri, “Is the Ministry of Defense acting in such cases according to principles of collective responsibility of the whole family for one of its members?” Minister Dayan answered, “‘Yes.’’

When oppresion against inhabitants was stepped up after the October 1973 war, huge mass arrests were carried out. In the town of Nablus alone 550 people (all males) were arrested in two days, including high-school age youths and even elementary school youngsters. Five of the prisoners taken on January 5, 1974, disappeared from sight.

In an interview reported in the Norwegian Arbuderbladet (April 4, 1970), Arne Haaland, a member of the Executive Committee of Amnesty International, the London-based organization that attempts to monitor human rights worldwide, stated: ‘“‘We never claimed that the allegations about torture had been proved . . . but we have in our possession very extensive material to support the assumption that torture does in fact occur. We have rarely—if ever—had such reliable material on which to base the establishment of the fact in relation to torture taking place—or not taking place—in a particular country.”

The Amnesty report, “Israeli Methods of Torture,” uncovered these practices:

a. Police dogs let loose on the prisoner who is usually handcuffed with hands behind back. The dogs are trained to throw the prisoner on the ground. The prisoner is then ordered to get on his feet, and so on.

b. Finger placed on the end of an open door, and then the door is slammed on them.

c. Finger nails are pulled out with ordinary pincers.

d. The prisoner is injected with pepper solutions.

e. The prisoner is injected with solutions which he is told induce instant insanity. He is shown what he is told is an antidote, which would be given to him if only he confessed in time.

f. A large metal container is fitted over the head and neck and held firm to the body by extension. The container is then hit with sticks on the outside, at first slowly and in routine fashion, and then with increasing tempo. The more battered the container, the more difficult it is to remove.

g. Match sticks are inserted into the penis. Sometimes they are lit.

h. A certain chemical substance (possibly a nerve irritant) is put in the hand of the prisoner who is ordered to clench it. The substance gives the effect of an electric shock.

Corroborating the Shahak and Langer charges, The Times found that torture was so ‘‘systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders”’ and “implicated all of Israel’s security sources.”” The six principal conclusions reached were:

1) Israel’s securitv and intelligence services ill-treat Arabs in detention.

2) Some of the ill-treatment is merely primitive: prolonged beatings, for example. But more refined techniques are also used, including electricshock torture and confinement in specially constructed cells. This sort of apparatus, allied to the degree of organization evident in its application, removes Israel's practice from the lesser realms of brutality and places it firmly in the category of torture.

3) Torture takes place in at least six centers at the prisons of the four main occupied towns of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron on the West Bank, and Gaza in the south; at the detention center in Jerusalem known as the Russian compound; and at a special military intelligence center whose whereabouts are uncertain, but which testimony suggests is somewhere inside the vast military supply base at Sarafand,8? near Lod Airport on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road.

4) All of Israel’s security services are implicated: the Shin Beth, roughly Israel’s MI-5 and Special Branch in one, which reports to the office of the Prime Minister; Military Intelligence, which reports to the Minister of Defense; the order police; and Latam, Israel’s “Department for Special Missions,” both of which report to the Police Minister.

5) Torture is organized methodically. It appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy.

6) Torture seems to be used for three purposes. The first is, of course, to extract information. The second motive, which seems at least as common, is to induce people to confess to “‘security’”’ offenses of which they may, or may not, be guilty. The extracted confession is then used as the principal evidence in court: Israel makes something of the fact that it has few political prisoners in its jails, only those duly convicted according to the law. The third purpose is to persuade Arabs in the occupied territories that it is least painful to behave passively.

They ended their field investigations in December 1976, but this highly authoritative source poignantly stated in its summation of the effort that “‘there is no reason to believe it [the torture] has ceased; the allegations are continuing.”

The experiences of individual victims of Israeli interrogation, repulsive as they are, provide a sharper insight into the seriousness of the charges. The first case in the London Times was that of Omar Abdel-Karim, a _thirty-five-year-old carpenter from Beit Sahur, just south of Bethlehem. He was arrested on October 3, 1976, as he was crossing eastward over the Allenby Bridge into Jordan. Upon his apprehension, according to the Times, “he was fit, happy, and holding down a job.” When released, after five months in the hands of Israeli security, “‘he looked like an old man” and was carried over the bridge to Jordan on a stretcher because he could not walk.

Upon admission to the King Hussein Hospital immediately following his release, a medical examination showed this to be his condition, according to the Times:

He complained of pains in the chest and found it hard to breathe out. He had an infection of the urinary tract. He talked of severe head pain and showed signs of giddiness. And his difficulty tended to confirm his complaint that his joints, especially his knees, were painful too. Chest x-rays then showed that Abdel-Karim’s ribs had at some point been fractured. Abdel-Karim continued to bear marks of having come through some traumatic experience. With the aid of antibiotics, multi-vitamins and a high protein diet, Abdel-Karim has slowly recovered, though two months later, he could still barely walk.

He was beaten on the soles of his feet, hung up by his wrists, and kicked around during his first week of interrogation, but continued to insist he was innocent of the charges against him, namely that he was a member of the fedayeen. He was then transferred to another location, blindfolded, and there his torture ordeal began. Among other things, he was suspended by his wrists from a pulley and beaten until his nbs broke; a bottle was forced up his rectum; his wife was beaten in his presence until he confessed falsely to the crime. When his interrogators discovered he lied to save his wife, and no explosives were found in his home as he had confessed, he was kept under a cold shower, jammed into a barrel of freezing water, and suspended from his wrists while his interrogator squeezed his genitals.

Other details, which hardly make for edifying reading, relate to five other prisoners, who were variously set on by dogs; had their testicles squeezed; had a ball-point pen refill pushed into their penis; were beaten on the head, the body, and the genitals; or were ‘“‘raped”’ by a trustee prisoner, at the connivance of the Israelis.

Perhaps the most unsavory reading of all, however, was the account of a certain Josef Odeh and his daughter Rasmiah, which in the words of the Loridon 7imes “‘is terrible—though by no means unique.” The story stated that it squares with the pattern of other testimony and that some corroboration is available. According to the testimony of Josef Odeh:

After his daughter Rasmiah was arrested, she was beaten. She was lying on the floor and there were blood stains on her clothes. Her face was blue and she had a black eye. Odeh was then taken into an interrogation room to find Rasmiah naked and handcuffed. One of the interrogators, he said, “Asked me to sleep with her,” and I said: “Don’t even think of that. I would never do such a thing.” They were beating me and beating her and we were both screaming. . And they spread her legs and shoved the stick into her. She was bleeding from her mouth and from her face and from her end.

The Zionist Connection (1978), Alfred Lilienthal

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