The photo was taken in Gaza's cold of early December. Surrounded by Israeli soldiers, the detainees had been rousted from their homes or apprehended as they attempted to flee with their families.
Wrong photo. (More on this later.) These are the Palestinian detainees.
This was what you might say was the pleasant part of the prisoners' week, or weeks.
"Palestinian detainees from Gaza have been stripped, beaten, interrogated and held incommunicado over the past three months," writes The Times. Accounts of mistreatment have been reported by the prisoners themselves, their relatives, Palestinian prisoner advocacy groups, the United Nations human rights office and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Hisham Mhanna of the Red Cross said he receives reports each day from detainees' families who say their relative "had vanished" β "nearly half believed to be detained by the Israeli military." The Red Cross now has 4,000 cases of disappearance.
The U.N. human rights office says the Israeli Defense Force's handling of detainees might transcend abuse, into torture. Thousands have been held in "horrific" conditions, says the office. In some instances they're released wearing only diapers. Says the IDF, almost comically: "Detainees are given back their clothes when itβs possible."
The IDF defends its mass detentions by saying the prisoners had been ordered to leave evacuation areas and were warned of consequences if they refused. The IDF's warning was that, should the Gazan men remain, they "may be considered a partner in a terrorist organization."
No explanation was provided about arrests occurring as the men attempted to flee with families in tow. Any such explanation, however, might be an irrelevance, in that the United Nations' special reporter for Palestinian territories has noted "that designating civilians who did not evacuate as accomplices to terrorism was not only a threat of collective punishment, but could constitute ethnic cleansing."
Who are some of these villainous detainees? One recalled that while sitting on the street, virtually naked in the freezing air, a soldier yelled "Is that what you wanted? You want Hamas with you? Donβt tell me youβre not Hamas." Replied the "villain": "Iβm a day laborer."
Another is a retired civil servant and middle-aged father of four, a gentleman rather unlikely to be planting IEDs or hurling molotov cocktails. He was detained for 40 days with restraints cutting into his wrists throughout most of the time. "All the while, your hands are tied and your eyes are blindfolded and you are on your knees," he said. "And youβre not allowed to move right or left.β
Some might think my above photo presentation is far too much, even downright inexcusable. In no way, they would say, can the Israeli army's mass arrests and detention of Palestinian men be compared to the S.S. and Wehrmacht's brutal roundup of Jews. But as the above reports relate, that denial would be manifestly wrong.
I would also answer that in no way do I suggest that the long-term fate of these Palestinian men is equivalent to the ghastly, concentration-camp fate of Jewish prisoners. I write only of the initial stage of their "detention," a somewhat anodyne word that subdues its reality of being "stripped, beaten, interrogated and held incommunicado."
I posted the possibly offending photo not only to show its historical similarity to what's happening in Gaza, the Warsaw Ghetto of our times. I also posted it to dramatize what millions of world citizens are justifiably thinking but are too hesitant to articulate for fear of being called antisemitic. To wit,
Under the authoritarian thumb of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right colleagues, the Israeli government β not most Israelis β is ever-so inexorably creeping toward the very fascism that once criminally strove to ethnically cleanse Europe of all Jewry.
Finally, my fundamental purpose in publicizing this grim reality is that if more world citizens would just say that, if they would publicly concede what's happening right before their eyes, perhaps most Israelis would then say, Enough is enough, Netanyahu has got to go, as do his bloodthirsty, genocidal colleagues.