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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Israeli soldiers and their ultranationalist supporters have currently cast themselves as Nazis or certain CIA and US Army personnel in Iraq or, at the very least, George Orwell’s pigs who are more equal than others and above the law.
Nine who now stand accused of “substantial abuse” of a Palestinian detainee, to the point he couldn’t walk and had to be hospitalized, achieved infamy when right-wing protesters with the vocal support of government officials stormed both the detention center where they committed their dastardly deeds and the Beit Lid military base where they were been held.
The Sde Taiman detention center in the Negev desert has been revealed as Israel’s Abu Ghraib.
A report, released Wednesday by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, documents ongoing and egregious abuses by Israeli security forces contrary to the Geneva Convention and basic humanity.
It’s Israel’s version of the Nazi concentration camps or, perhaps, the Bush II “extraordinary rendition” program without bothering to take their victims beyond their own borders.
Abusers have used sexual violence, waterboarding, electric shocks, burned detainees with cigarettes, harassed them with dogs and denied them food, water, sleep, and toilet access.
The report states that at least 53 Palestinian have died in Israeli detention since October, and calls the system “a collectively punitive measure against Palestinians” citing specific torture, including “forced nudity of both men and women; beatings while naked, including on the genitals; electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced to undergo repeated humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and threats of rape; and the inappropriate touching of women by both male and female soldiers... consistent reports [of] inserting objects into detainees' anuses”.
There is also evidence of widespread and deliberate withholding of the necessities of life, of male detainees losing between 55 and 120 pounds.
Sounds right out of the Nazi concentration camp playbook.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's national security minister, who calls Palestinians terrorists who deserve the most “stringent conditions,” along with other government ministers and coalition lawmakers, vociferously defended the unlawful protesters.
Some, including Amihai Ben-Eliyahu, Israel’s far right Minister of Heritage, even joined the break and entry into the Sde Teiman facility.
People like these belong in jail, not paid to govern a country.
There are still those in Israel who support the rule of law and who will hopefully prevail.
Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, called for an “immediate, in-depth, sensitive and responsible investigation into the allegations” of the sodomizing of a Palestinian detainee.
Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, called it “an attempted coup by an armed militia.”
Israeli citizens are clearly conflicted, loyal to their country and its future but expressing increasing displeasure with their blindly anti-Palestinian leaders and neighbors, and fearing the backlash of the world in the wake of Netanyahu’s excesses. Which includes his lack of curbing the excesses of the radical right.
If he can’t stop, if he can’t control them, Netanyahu and acolytes will reap the whirlwind, and the wrath of the world will descend on the tiny country, endangering all its residents and three-quarters of a century of the building of a modern Jewish homeland.
Instead, Netanyahu and co. continue to gleefully build on their violent acts while the government of the United States, which purports to defend democracy and the free world, blithely stands by twiddling its collective thumbs while profiting off of supplying the perpetrators of torture and genocide.
Tuesday Israeli fighter jets struck a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, in revenge for a rocket attack Saturday that murdered a dozen children in the Golan Heights.
Israeli officials reported strategically killing the right-hand man of a senior Hezbollah commander, but their Lebanese counterparts reported 80 injured and dead in the strike on an apartment building in a densely populated neighborhood; the dead included a woman and two more children. Why do the innocent always have to pay?
Since when did two wrongs make a right?
Hours later a senior Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who was playing a key role in the hostage and ceasefire Gaza negotiations, was killed in Tehran in a targeted airstrike early Wednesday morning.
Hamas and Iran both blamed Israel for the killing, with the latter’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reportedly approving in the hours afterwards a direct attack against Israel in the days to come to avenge the assassination in his capital. And for his own country to prepare for a possible retaliatory American strike.
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations advised the U.N. Security Council that the killing “could not have occurred without the authorization and intelligence support of the U.S.”
Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said Haniyeh’s murder has “killed immediate hopes of ending this war before it spirals into a regional conflagration that pulls in the United States,” and called on American leaders to prevent all-out war in the Middle East.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza combined with the loss of a key negotiator carried out in Iran’s capital has spawned mounting anger, provoking many who had otherwise condemned the murders by Hamas on October 7th.
If the Biden government cannot curb Netanyahu’s recklessness and the ongoing torture and genocide in violation of international law, that anger will inevitably spill over onto the those who supply, support and protect the Jewish Hitler – primarily the United States.
And such a war would not stay within the boundaries of the Middle East. Biden’s blind devotion to Netanyahu will almost certainly bring down terrorist attacks within our own borders.
Kamala Harris would do well to use her political smarts to immediately start dialing back American involvement instead of releasing statements potentially escalating the carnage.
Trotting out: “Israel has a right to defend itself and I unequivocally support Israel's right to remain secure and to defend the security of Israel” does little to de-escalate violence or to respect the dead and injured in Beirut, Tehran, the West Bank and Gaza.
She would have been wiser to acknowledge the pain of the victims on both sides and, instead, led off with her more nuanced follow-up: “But all of that being said, we still must work on a diplomatic solution to end these attacks, and we will continue to do that work.”
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
