Zed Books, USA, 1995
INTRODUCTION
In the beginning of 1988, as a reaction to the ever growing rumors of atrocities and brutal acts perpetrated by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians, I organized a group of twelve fellow physicians, and we drove down to Gaza to see what was going on there.
We visited "Shifa" governmental hospital where we saw people with multiple fractures of their arms and legs. We saw a thirteen year old boy whose hand was broken in three places. I asked him what had happened to him, and he raised his hand with the cast in a defensive motion. His father told me that the boy's hand had been broken when he tried to defend himself against blows directed to his head. We saw people whose bodies were riddled by bullets which exploded inside and caused injuries to kidneys, liver, and intestines. We saw people in prolonged comas after being beaten on their heads.
"Shifa" hospital reeked from overflowing toilets, accumulated filth, stained bandages with blood and pus, and leaking, moldy walls. Israeli hospitals are so different from what we encountered at "Shifa", that it was hard for us to imagine that this stinking, leaky, overcrowded place was indeed a hospital.
We heard stories, and we saw more than we could take in. After the visit, we sat at a gas station in the Israeli side of the border and discussed our reaction to the visit. There, at the gas station at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, we came to the joint conclusion that we could no longer keep silent in the face of such brutality. That was the inception of the group that later came to be known as the Association if Israeli-Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights.
At the beginning of 1992, I was called upon to examine a Palestinian prisoner released on probation. I met a young man who looked like a boy sitting in a wheel chair. His left hand was held close to his chest in a strange position, motionless. His left leg, too, was motionless. On his chest were marks of burns in the shape of parallel stripes caused by an electric heater pressed against his body and on his hands were circular burns. His face looked serene and he kept smiling all the time. Lamia Jaber, then twenty five, had been brutally tortured for months in an Israeli prison. As a result he suffered from hysterical paralysis in his hand and leg.
Seeing Lamia gave me a tremendous shock. This was my first encounter with someone who had undergone torture. My shock and horror intensified upon hearing the reactions of people with whom I discussed Lamia Jaber's torture: "This is an exceptional case; there's no torture in Israel."
"An exception to the rule" is an expression commonly used to lull public opinion. Even when the public is informed of a blatant instance of human rights violation, such as breaking arms and legs, poisoning wheat fields, the death of a detainee under interrogation, the official line is always: this is not the accepted norm of behavior; this is an exception. Our collective political, military and personal behavior is unobjectionable.
The term "occupation" operates in a similar way to the term "exception to the rule", except that its target audience is different. The "exception to the rule" is the sop used by the "nationalist camp" and the larger segment of the population which constitutes the "middle ground" – those who are not politically aware. The term "occupation", however, is a sop used by the left wing Zionist camp. The evils we witness and create are supposedly the result of the occupation. The occupation is presented as a kind of a mystical law, inevitability: everything is the fault of the occupation. If only the occupation were done away with, all other evils, brutality, folly and malice would disappear. This line of thinking is prevalent and strongly adhered to in the liberal respectable segment of the Israeli society. It prevents one from seeing the wider, deeper context of our life here in Israel. The "exception to the rule" and the "occupation", each in its way, and with its specific audience, enable many well meaning Israelis to exempt themselves from the responsibility of maintaining human rights.
However, the most discouraging reaction was that of total disbelief: I am lying, Lamia is faking. I even heard the claim that Lamia had caused his own burns. Still, the most common reaction was outright denial: there is no torture in Israel. A glaring example of this attitude is the comment of the IDF commander of the Northern sector who appeared on a television talk show with me and with a catatonic Palestinian, a torture victim. We were all sitting in the same room, the Television cameras focusing on tortured person, his blank eyes staring into space. And the commander pronounced: "I cannot accept the claim that there is torture in the State of Israel." The studio audience clapped.
Coming face to face with Lamia's pain, suffering, mental distress, loneliness, and helplessness on the one hand, and with the Israeli society's denial, self-deception, and cover-up of atrocities on the other, evoked in me the same feelings of pain and disillusionment I had experienced many years earlier.
Like most of my contemporaries, I was brought up to believe in several myths: equality, "purity of weapons", moral Jewish superiority; the myth that we risk total annihilation and the myth of an empty desert which the Zionists redeemed and turned into a blooming garden. I believed in these myths with mind and heart. I internalized them and made them part of my personality and the basis of my Weltanschauung. Those myths, and what they entailed, were agents of socialization, the building clocks that created our sense of belonging.
In 1956, I was serving in the communication platoon of a combat unit in the IDF, as part of my military duty. During the Sinai War (which was called "Operation Kadesh"), I saw Egyptian soldiers, barefoot, helpless, weaponless, coming down the scorching dunes of the Sinai desert, their hands held up, their tongues blackened from thirst. I watched how soldiers in my regiment forced them to drink urine and crawl on all fours toward the water canteens, then shoot them "like dogs". I saw violence and death become a pastime. Those were reserve soldiers, veterans of the "Palmach" and the "Hagana" (pre-state paramilitary organizations), upon which the myth of high moral standards and purity of weapons was erected. The myth shattered before my eyes.
Another myth, the one claiming that we fight only to defend ourselves against enemies intent on our annihilation, disintegrated when I realized that the Sinai War was not a defensive war but the result of an Israeli-Western initiative, motivated by political interests. In Israel there was no public debate about such matters, and the national myth producing mechanism appropriated that war as a defensive war.
Confronted with these evils, I felt mute and isolated. I was confused and perplexed and, above all, I needed friends with whom I could thing, discuss, clarify to myself what was right and wrong, and decide what course of action to take.
Years passed. Thoughts and feelings were slowly taking shape. I found friends who shared my convictions. They were few, outsiders mostly, who helped me break the silence, develop ideas and critical thinking. The overpowering loneliness and confusion I experienced at the beginning of my political involvement also taught me the strength and the comfort that affinity group can bestow on each other.
Having seen Lamia, I realized that merely tending to his tortured body and soul could not make up for the anger and shame that I felt for being part of such a society. Thus the need arose to publicly expose the systematic – not the "exception to the rule" – torture routinely carried out in the interrogation facilities of the SHABAK (General Security Services) and of the army: to openly and publicly campaign torture.
I brought this suggestion before PHR. The entire staff of the organization mobilized and for many months worked on preparing a public conference in Israel. The idea holding a conference of Torture in Israel is the need to change the prevailing psycho-political perception in the common Israeli-Zionist society that maintains that protecting the "insider" requires the elimination of the "outsider".
Freud once said: "men talk in order not to kill". For many years the State of Israel declared that it would not talk with Palestinians, which is this context is tantamount to saying: They must be killed; we must use organized violence to suppress them.
The torture that the state uses against Palestinian "outsiders" is a kind of mental superstructure of violence. The declared purpose of using torture is to force the enemy, the outsider, to talk and reveal secrets. This revelation is supposed to forestall the killing of insiders, members of the group. This way of reasoning is so facile and simplistic that it is readily and uncritically accepted. Presenting the issues in this manner provides validity and justification to torture.
But further examination of torture beyond this simplistic presentation exposes its speciousness. The victim's confession is useless. The torturer knows that the victim's words are worthless. A tormented person will tell the torturers what they want to hear; empty, mute speech, which does not accomplish the declared purpose of revealing secrets. In fact, the real purpose of torture is silence. Silence induces by fear. Fear is contagious and spreads to the other members of the oppressed group, to silence and paralyze them. Imposing silence through violence is the torture's real purpose, in the most profound and fundamental sense.
The task of those who fight torture and organized violence is to speak for those who are silenced, to give voice to the muted shouts of fear and pain, to speak out and break down the walls of deafness that shield the tormentors and their collaborators.
While organizing the conference and deciding on its basic conception, we were beset by many question and dilemmas, such as: Where should we hold the conference? In the Occupied Territories? In Israel? If in Israel, should it be in Jerusalem which is burdened with religious and political conflicts? Of perhaps in Tel Aviv, The most "Israeli" city, the pulsating heart of the Israeli-Zionist society? Who is our target audience? Physicians? Human rights organizations? The general public?
Should we invite speakers who will argue for the need for torture? Is there justification, from our point of view, in allowing them to bring their case before the public? Should we invite members of the Knesset (parliament)? And if so, should they be representatives of the Right, the Left, of perhaps the Center?
Should we publicly expose and condemn individual physicians whom we knew had given medical statements so as to cover the infliction of torture practiced by Israeli interrogators? Or would it be both fairer and more effective to address the fundamental issue of doctors' collaboration if acts of torture – collaboration that stems mostly from political obtuseness and unwillingness to understand the consequences of their acts, but also from the fact that there are no existing, accessible mechanism for them to report instances of torture which come to their attention or which they themselves treat.
The answers to these questions are found in this book.
The struggle is by nature long and continuous. Campaigning against torture in a place like Israel must entail more than condemnation and exposure. In order for it to be effective, we must strive to create a cohesive public position which will counterbalance the primal myths of the group. In a society where camaraderie among soldiers is of paramount importance, to talk of torture is tantamount to state treason. The campaign against torture in Israel must, therefore, strive to create a different kind of cohesive force, one based on respect for the human spirit, and for moral values which transcend those of the tribe.
People over the world who fight against torture and other forms of organized violence – Human Rights organizations in Israel and elsewhere – they are the answer, the source of support and encouragement for men and women who feel shame and anger at the sight of torture.
It is my hope that this volume will contribute to the struggle against torture.
Ruchama Marton, MD
Tel Aviv, August, 1994