The systematic torture of Arabs by the PA makes the term 'human rights' antithetical to the idea of a Palestinian state.
During recent months slow steps are being taken in the legal process that will ultimately end with the Palestinian Authority paying hundreds of millions of shekels in damages to 52 collaborators or those suspected of collaboration with Israel.
The legal decision, stating that the PA’s brutal security apparatus arrested and tortured people illegally and contrary to all norms, was taken in the first half of the year 2017. Recently, Attys. Barak Kedem and Aryeh Arbus, the attorneys for the tortured people (some of them tortured nearly to death), succeeded to compel the state's enforcement authorities to transfer slightly more than NIS 1 million from the PA's tax money as an initial payment to compensate for the legal costs of those who were tortured by the PA.
The next payment of damages to those poor people depends on a long legal process that will determine the amount of damages deserved by each person for each incident of torture that he underwent, for each confiscation and theft that he suffered, by the official authorities of the PA and the like.
As part of my work as a reporter for Besheva newspaper, I was sent to interview some of these Arabs that were tortured so brutally by Jibril Rajoub’s people. It was a long and difficult interview, and it is especially difficult to convey to the readers. Because how can one describe the tears in the eyes of someone about fifty years of age who shows the red marks on his arms from the rubber pipes used by the PA’s torturers and how is it possible to convey the scars remaining on the legs of someone who managed to escape his oppressors by the skin of his teeth. Nevertheless, I tried, and in a long article, I laid out the hidden story of the basic ethical illusion inherent in the Left’s idea of establishing a state for the PA Arabs. One would have to be heartless or ruthless to allow the Arabs of Judea and Samaria to be delivered into the hands of Abu Mazen and the rest of his cruel thugs in the leadership.
To illustrate the point, I bring here a few of the testimonies that I encountered during that interview, which were published in the newspaper Besheva. It seems clear that after the revelation of these things, someone would have to explain himself if he wanted to continue to call himself an advocate for human rights while also supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Caution: The things described below, which did not happen during the inquisition, but in our own times, make for difficult reading:
Asad’s story (the name is fictitious):
…Asad entered the car that was waiting outside and within seconds began the journey that was to prove to be the beginning of the worst experience of his life.
At a certain point in the middle of the way, a little while after leaving the village, one of the four men took out a jute sack and told Asad to put the sack on his head for his own safety, since if anyone saw him together with them, who were members of the Muhabarat (intelligence officers), they might suspect that he had collaborated with Israel and it would be a shame, too bad for him…
Asad did not try to argue since he understood that there was no point. The jute sack was placed on his head and he tried, in the darkness, to guess and to calculate the direction in which the car was carrying him. When he sensed that the car was making frequent turns, he understood that the car had entered into some village. The car stopped and the four men pushed him out, leading him into a building while, his head still covered, he felt the first blows, but this was just the start of unending torture that still haunts him, even years afterward.
“From the moment when we entered this building everyone who was there beat me. I felt the blows from all directions. They were murderous blows. I yelled to them ‘But why?’ They continued to beat me and just ordered me to shut up. The blows, the fists and the kicks continued for about an hour and in the end, they threw me into a small space under a staircase. I remained there without moving until someone took me out and said that now we would begin. He yelled at me ‘Who are you working with?’ I said that I don’t understand the question and he yelled again, showed me a sheet of paper and ordered me to write down who I know. I told him that I don’t understand the question and that he should ask about specific people and I would answer him. My answer only made him more angry. ‘Write’, he yelled, and continued to beat me as hard as he could. I took the sheet of paper and wrote everything that I had done since my childhood. He looked at the paper and was not pleased. ‘Not this. Write!’ “I said that that was the information that I had - that is what I know. He kept beating me. I fell down because of the beating”.
The interrogator was not especially bothered by Asad’s collapse. When he saw that the blows were not effective, he moved on to the use of torture. “There were plastic boxes, turned over. The bottom of the boxes was made of sharp plastic strips. They placed me on them without shoes on one foot. Every time I asked to put my foot down, I received more blows, until I fell. The plastic strips cut into the flesh of my foot”, Asad recalls, or perhaps it is more correct to say that he finds it difficult to forget. “Afterward he hung me handcuffed with only my toes touching the floor, and as I hung in this position I was beaten with fists and kicks from every direction all over my body”.
Something that was supposed to be a five-minute discussion became a year and a half of torture, outside of any legal framework. Asad was held with about sixty other people in a big, old, isolated building at the edge of an Arab village in Samaria. Again and again, he was called for interrogation after interrogation and cruel blows became the routine day and night, a routine that was interrupted only in order to add other forms of torture. “They would wrap a rope around my whole body so that I could not move, only stand. They would tie me to a toilet. It got to the point where I tried to drink water from the toilet… in the winter they would tie us naked to a metal pipe in the wind and rain”.
One day, he says, six people were taken from the building. An officer of the Muhabarat said that they were going to work in a hospital. Those six people never returned from “work”. Eventually, their burnt bodies were found in a water hole about eight meters deep in the heart of Givat Terashim, with a huge burnt tire on top of them.
Abed’s story (the name is fictitious):
He was arrested and imprisoned for throwing rocks during the first Intifada, where he met someone who, a short time after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, became an officer of the PA’s security apparatus. This acquaintance did not help him when he returned from one of his visits to Jordan. On the Allenby Bridge, he recognized the person who had been imprisoned with him in an Israeli jail and even from the first glance, understood that no great friendship had taken root during that time. The Palestinian officer took his passport from him and ordered him to get on a bus. After a few minutes into the journey, a sack was placed on his head and he was led to a building of the regional administration, where they carried out a meticulous search of him and his possessions. Immediately afterward, he was led to a large door that opened into a huge hall in the center of which was a long table. At the edge of the table, Jibril Rajoub, head of Preventive Security at the time, was bent over a pile of papers.
Abed stood without moving at the long table waiting for Rajoub, who was involved in leafing through the pages and writing notes, to relate to him. After some seconds of suspense, Rajoub gave the anxious Abed a quick glance and as if incidentally, threw a question into the air: ‘What is your number?’ Abed did not understand which number he was talking about and when he tried to clarify it, Rajoub muttered to him in a hoarse voice ‘Stop it – don’t make problems because it will be a shame, I might change your face…’, and immediately added the question ‘Where were you in Jordan?’. Abed answered in a trembling voice that he had gone to visit his uncle. ‘What is your number?’ asked Rajoub, and continued: ‘You will go with the guys and you will admit everything. It’s a shame to play games’.
Abed was taken to the PA’s military police, the Istikbarat, where they took off his shoes and he was immediately put into solitary confinement, and no one talked to him. After about four hours he was brought out and placed into an interrogation room, where he again was asked when he began to work with the Israeli Shabak (Israeli Security Agency). When he claimed that he had never worked with the Israelis the old man instructed that he be returned to solitary confinement, where he remained until morning, and then the torture began.
They took me, with a sack on my head, to mutaba’a, the slaughterhouse, tied my hands behind me and passed the rope through a high hook where they hang animals after slaughter and began to pull hard. My hands were pulled back and my body was pulled up to the point where my feet barely touched the ground and this entire time they beat me all over for two hours. Afterward they took me down and threw me into a cement closet with an iron door. Inside the closet there were iron shelves all over, that were like knives. You could not stand, bend or sit in there, because the sharp shelves would cut you all over. I stayed that way for 24 hours until they took me out for interrogation again. They had another torture method, they would stick pickle cans behind your knees and pull back hard on your legs so that your knee joints felt like they were about to burst open”.
Abed does not know exactly how long he was held in this situation of torture punctuated by interrogations. He estimates that it was approximately forty days and finally you begin to talk about things that you did not do and admit things that were not true. The more you talk, the more they want. They poured boiling plastic on my feet”, he says, taking his shoes off to show the signs of deep burns that remain even now. Afterward they took me to Aman Jihaz, which is the body that oversees the interrogators, to make sure that they did “good work” on me, they laid me down on the floor and stepped on my face”, he says, pointing to the distortion of his facial features that have remained, many years later.
Part of Omer’s story (the name is fictitious):
…”They put a sack on my head and began to beat me with all their strength. The transferred me to the interrogation facility called “the slaughterhouse” and beat me until I lost consciousness. They wanted to put me in jail but the one in charge there said that he did not want to take dead bodies. It was clear to him that I would not last long. He said that I could come only after I was treated in the hospital. I woke up the next morning. All of my bones were broken, my feet were swollen, there were burn marks from cigarettes that they had extinguished on me and on my feet, there are still holes where they put nails into me. They took me to the hospital where they operated on my liver, which they had wounded, and from the hospital I was taken back to the interrogations”.
The term “interrogations”, which Omer uses, is a euphemism for inquisition-style torture: “I was hung up with handcuffs to a metal pipe with loudspeakers constantly blaring and they beat me all over my body”, he says. “The Red Cross came, but our interrogators were with us the entire time, so it was clear to us that anyone who talked would be punished as soon as the visit was over”.
After 18 months of torture and interrogations, which brought him to the brink of death (“The jail’s cook could not believe that I was still alive and standing. He said that he found me dead and thrown on the jail’s garbage heap…” Omer’s jail cell was opened. Someone, they told him, had confessed to the act that he was suspected of.
These terrible stories represent only a small part of what was experienced by three out of the 52 torture victims whose claims against the PA were accepted. If this is the usual behavior of the PA’s “security” apparatus, I find it difficult to understand how the Israeli Left can view the idea of a Palestinian state as being at all consistent with the concept of human rights…