by Noam Chomsky
Dr. Shafiqul-Islam from Bangladesh, who was on the staff of the Palestinian hospital in Sidon, reports that he was arrested by the IDF while operating on a 12-year-old Palestinian boy with severe internal shrapnel injuries. He was not permitted to complete the operation, but was arrested, beaten mercilessly, forbidden to ask for food or water for 4 days, denied drugs or dressings for other prisoners on the grounds that they were “all terrorists,” and so on.145
The treatment of prisoners gives a certain insight into the nature of the conquering army and the political leadership that guides it, as does the very fact that it was considered legitimate to round up all teen-age and adult males and to ship them off to concentration camps after they were identified as “terrorists” by hooded informants. Similarly, the fact that all of this was generally regarded as quite unremarkable here— search New York Times editorials, for example, for a protest—gives a certain insight into the society that was funding this operation, the paymasters and coterie of apologists.
Little is known about the fate of those who were imprisoned, in part, because Israel has blocked access to the camps. For over a month, Israel refused even to permit the Red Cross to visit the camps, prompting unaccustomed protest by the ICRC, which later suspended its visits in apparent protest against what it had found within (as a matter of policy, the ICRC refrains from public criticisms). Five months after the war’s end, Israel was still refusing to permit reporters to visit the Ansar camp in Lebanon, as was discovered by one of the rare journalists (William Farrell) who tried to do so on the strength of the statement in an official IDF publication that “the camp is open to visiting journalists throughout the day and newsmen may interview detainees on camp grounds.”146 He was told (“politely”): “You may not enter.”* More than
*Possibly in response to Farrell’s article, Israel then allowed two reporters to enter the camps. Edward Walsh reports that prisoners continue to be brought to half of the estimated 15,000 prisoners were reported to be in prisons or camps in Israel, where the Red Cross stated that it was still denied any access to them, many months after the war ended (see section 5.1 and chapter 6, section 6.5).147
Some information has come from released prisoners, and more from Israeli sources to which we turn directly. The few released prisoners interviewed by the press report “sardine-like” overcrowding, with prisoners required to lie on the ground day and night. Some report that they were required to hold their hands over their heads and forced to “bark like the dogs you are” and shout “Long live Begin, long live Sharon.” Jonathan Randal, who reports these facts, states that “there appear to be virtually no Palestinian men between the ages of 16 to 60 free in southern Lebanon,” an observation confirmed by other reporters and visitors. Released prisoners allege that many prisoners died of torture. One, who was in Ansar for 155 days, reported in an interview with Liberation (Paris) that prisoners were laid “on special tables that have holds for legs and arms,” then beaten with sticks and iron rods. He claims to have seen deaths as the result of torture. A London Times inquiry reported in Yediot Ahronot led to the discovery of 7 young men apparently killed in an Israeli detention camp near Sidon in the early weeks of the invasion, their bodies found with hands tied and signs of
Ansar, sometimes as many as 20 a week. The head of the prisoners’ committee says: “At first this place was hell. Then there were improvements... I will not say that this is Auschwitz, but it is a concentration camp.” He also says that “There is no torture now in Ansar.” See also Uri Avneri’s report on the Ansar “concentration camp,” including interviews with guards who regard the prisoners as “subhuman,” etc.; and Mary Arias, reporting degrading conditions, electric torture, efforts to induce psychological disorientation by various measures, etc.147
severe beatings. Independent Lebanese witnesses gave similar accounts; one claimed to have seen one prisoner beaten to death by an Israeli guard. Israeli authorities first denied the allegations, then confirmed that the bodies had been found and that an investigation was proceeding. One died from a heart attack, they claimed. The Times reports that five were Lebanese citizens of Palestinian origin, one was a Palestinian refugee, and one an Egyptian.
A lengthy account of the experiences of one prisoner in Israel and in Ansar appears in the German periodical Der Spiegel. This man, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim (the largest religious group in Lebanon), was taken prisoner on July 2, when his village was officially “liberated” by the IDF. At 4:30 AM the village was awakened by loudspeakers announcing that all inhabitants from ages 15 to 75 were to gather in the village center at 5 AM. IDF troops with tanks and armored personnel carriers surrounded the village while, to the amazement of the villagers, a network of collaborators within the village, clearly established in advance, appeared with IDF uniforms and weapons, prepared for their task, which was to select the victims. Each person received a notice, “guilty” or “innocent”; this man was “guilty,” with a written statement describing his “crime”— in Hebrew, so he never did find out what it was. The guilty were blindfolded and taken to a camp in southern Lebanon. There they were interrogated while being beaten with heavy clubs. Teachers, businessmen, students and journalists received special treatment: more severe beatings. The interrogation-beating sessions lasted from 10 minutes to half a day, depending on the whims of the liberators. Prisoners slept on the ground, without blankets in the cold nights. Many were ill. They were forced to pass before Lebanese informants, and if selected, were sent to Israel.
For no reason that he could discern, this man was one of those selected. Their first stop in Israel was Nahariya, where Israeli women entered their buses, screaming hysterically at the bound prisoners, hitting them and spitting at them while the guards stood by and laughed. They were then driven to an Israeli camp where they were greeted by soldiers who again beat them with clubs. They were given dinner—a piece of bread and a tomato. Then soldiers came with four large shepherd dogs on chains, who were set upon the prisoners, biting them, while those who tried to defend themselves were beaten by soldiers. “Particularly the young boys, aged I5 and 16, began to cry from fear,” leading to further beatings.
“Each day brought with it new torture.” Many were beaten with iron bars, on the genitals, on the hands, on the soles of the feet. One had four fingers broken. This man was hung by his feet “and they used me as a punching bag.” When prisoners begged for water they were given urine, provided by the liberators. One day they were taken to the sports stadium of a nearby village where the inhabitants came to throw bottles and other objects at them. Prisoners were forced to run like cattle, beaten with clubs. Once they were made to sit for a solid week, most of the time with hands on their heads. The worst times were Friday night and Saturday, when the guards celebrated the Sabbath by getting drunk, selecting some prisoners for special punishment “to the accompaniment of laughter, full of hate.”
After the war ended this man was taken back to Lebanon, to the Ansar concentration camp, where there were then about 10,000 prisoners. There the terror continued. One day they saw many Lebanese women outside the camp. They waved to them and shouted. To stop the turmoil, the guards shot in the direction of the women, and the prisoners, angered, threw stones, and were fired on directly with 28 wounded, eight seriously. One night, at 1 AM, he was told that he was free; 225 men were freed, all Lebanese. He was sent to Nabatiye, where an officer told him: “We wish you all the best. We had to mete out justice. It was a long time indeed, but justice triumphed anyway. “I do not know what he meant,” this man adds, concluding his story.148
The story was translated into Hebrew and appeared in Ha’aretz, but curiously, it was missed by the New York Times, New Republic, and other journals that were lauding the “purity of arms” and magnificent moral standards of the liberators. Apparently, it was not deemed of sufficient importance to be communicated to those paying the bills.
According to other reports, prisoners were held blindfolded and bound in barbed wire compounds; whil
e Lebanese prisoners were kept with arms tied, Palestinians were kept naked, blindfolded, with arms tied. Despite daily appeals from June 6, the ICRC was permitted to see only 18 injured Palestinians in a hospital in Israel until July 18. Wealthy Lebanese detainees who say that they had “fought the PLO” describe beatings and humiliation, confirming the reports of others.149 One reads an occasional description, usually in the foreign press, of “the agitated crowd of Arab women gathered in the shade of a neighbouring wall to see whether any of their relatives could be spotted,”150 but the torment of the families is of as little interest to the paymasters as is the fate of the prisoners themselves.
The Greek Orthodox Archbishop of “demolished Tyre,” Monsignor Haddad, described “the arbitrary arrests” as “an insuperable barrier to the establishment of a just peace,” expressing his certainty “that 95 percent—if not 99 percent—of the people arrested are innocent.”151 It might be added that some questions also arise about the concept “guilt,” as applied by a conquering army.
Correspondents in Lebanon provide more information. One Reuters reporter gives this eyewitness account after seeing prisoners under guard:
Flicking a two-thonged leather whip, an Israeli soldier moved through the lines of suspected guerillas squatting on a lawn outside the Safa Citrus Corporation. Nearby, a row of eight men stood with their hands in the air as a greenbereted Israeli border guard, an Uzi sub-machinegun slung over his shoulder, inspected them. “This is where they bring our men. It is the Israelis’ interrogation center,” said a sobbing woman in a small crowd on the pavement opposite. The border guards, a force renowned for their toughness, barked out orders in Arabic and refused to let journalists linger at the gates of the corporation, a depot on the southern outskirts of Sidon. Through the bars, about 100 prisoners could be seen on the lawn while a queue waited to enter the depot, apparently for questioning. Those able to satisfy the Israelis that they were not PLO guerillas were put onto a bus and driven to an open space in the town for release. As the men left the bus, soldiers stamped a Star of David on their identity cards to show they had been cleared. Those who had no card were stamped on their wrists.
A picture above the story shows the top half of the body of an unidentified man, killed during the bombing of a school building in Sidon a week earlier, lying in the ruins where residents say that more than 300 died. A woman who was personally acquainted with several men who were released says she was told that “they had to stand or sit in the sun all day. The only water they got was poured on the ground, and they had to lap it up like animals.” “Other Lebanese residents of Sidon told the same story.” Adult males had been rounded up after the occupation, taken to the beaches, and passed before men wearing hoods who pointed some of them out, “and then the Israelis took them away.”152
Again, it is useful to ask ourselves what the reaction would be in the
United States if an Arab army had conquered half of Israel, leaving a trail of destruction in its path, sending all males to prison camps where they were beaten, murdered, humiliated, while their families were left to starve or be harassed or killed by terrorist bands armed by the conqueror.
William Farrell visited the same school 7 months later, reporting again that “several hundred refugees were killed” when the school’s shelter was hit. This one shelter, then, contained more corpses than the total number killed in all of Sidon, according to the Israeli official responsible for the population in the territories that were “liberated,” Minister of Economic Coordination Ya’akov Meridor, who reported to the Israeli Knesset that 250 people were killed in Sidon,* “including terrorists and their hostages”—which presumably translates as “Palestinians and Lebanese.”153 Farrell interviewed the assistant principal of this French-language elementary school: “there are problems with some of the students, he said, who still shudder when they hear planes overhead. ‘It will take a long time to take this impression from them,’ he added.”154
More information about the prisons comes from Israeli sources. Dr. Haim Gordon, an IDF educational officer, describes his visit to what he calls the Ansar “concentration camp.” Prisoners are not permitted to leave their tents, but must lie on the ground. There are no showers, in the burning July sun. “The terrible stink ‘maddens’ the Israeli guards.” One prisoner is an 83-year-old man who “collaborated” with the PLO,
* For the accounting by those who were celebrating their liberation, see note 103. Recall that the actual numbers are unknown, and that months after the battle ended corpses were still being found and the IDF feared that epidemics might break out because of those still buried under the rubble. See section 5.1.
renting a field to Palestinians who allegedly used it for an ammunition dump. He is therefore “a terrorist,” and “we must frighten him so that in the future he will not collaborate,” Gordon was informed by a guard.
Amnon Dankner reports testimony by an Israeli soldier who served as a prison guard. He too describes the terrible smell, intolerable to the Israeli guards; and “the cries of pain of those under interrogation.” He describes the pleading women who kiss your hands and show you a picture, begging you to tell them whether you have seen their husband or child, whom they have not seen or heard from for three months. And the military police officer who shoots into a crowd of prisoners (see section 5.3), the blood streaming from the wounds of those who are hit, the roadblocks where you must stop and send back a woman about to give birth or an old man in terrible pain, trying to reach a hospital. And finally, the suicide of an Israeli soldier, who, it seems, could bear no more.155
Within Israel, the matter has elicited some concern. Knesset Member Amnon Rubinstein brought up in the Knesset the issue of “terrifying incidents in Ansar,” alleging that “intolerable conditions that are a stain on Israel’s reputation” prevail in the camp: “Prisoners walk about barefoot in the severe cold and there have been many incidents of assaults against them.”156 In the United States, little has been said about the topic. We return to the Israeli response to an Amnesty International appeal on the matter.
Israeli soldiers returning from duty in Lebanon in the reserves add more to the picture. One, a student at Tel Aviv University, reports what he saw in Koteret Rashit (a new journal with Labor support, including many Labor doves). In 1978, he had been arrested in Argentina on suspicion of spying and had spent ten days in an Argentine prison, but had seen nothing there to compare with what he found in the IDF headquarters in Sidon in January 1983, where he spent a month. At least 10 people were arrested each day and forced to perform menial labor for the IDF and the Israeli Border Guards, cleaning latrines and private quarters, washing floors, etc. In a letter of complaint to the Defense Ministry, this man and two other reservists, reporting their experiences, state that the IDF is becoming “an army of masters.” Prisoners in this military base were held only on suspicion, and many were released after a brief stay. In the base they were brutalized by the Border Guards; “whoever is caught will be punished,” these reservists were told by the commanding officer. They witnessed degradation and beating of prisoners who were bound and blindfolded, forced to crouch on the floor for long hours, then often released. Even worse than the behavior of the Border Guards (with the knowledge of their officers, who did nothing) was that of the Haddad forces who had free access to this IDF base. They beat prisoners brutally, again, with the knowledge of IDF officers. In one case a young woman, “completely bound…and crying from pain wherever they touched her,” was repeatedly raped by Haddad soldiers who also attempted to force her to copulate with a dog. Then “they returned her to imprisonment.” “Naturally there was no investigation” of what had happened within this IDF military base; the responsible IDF officers “explained to me that this is how they behave in Lebanon...” The soldiers had hoped to present their complaints to Chief of Staff Eitan, who arrived on a tour, but were unable to contact him. His visit had some good effects, however: the prisoners were given mattresses and blankets for the first tim
e, after having been forced to work extra hours to clean the building in preparation for Eitan’s visit. This soldier, who seems completely apolitical and is certainly no dove, is unwilling to return to Lebanon but does not want to join the hundreds who have refused service there (many others have refused service at Ansar). He is thinking of emigrating, as several of his friends have done.157
It might be noted, incidentally, that brutal treatment of helpless prisoners is an old Begin specialty. After the Deir Yassin massacre, survivors were paraded through the streets of Jerusalem by Irgun soldiers proud of their achievement. Colonel Meir Pail, who was communications officer for the Haganah in Deir Yassin and an eyewitness, describes how Begin’s heroes loaded 25 survivors into a truck and drove them through Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, then taking them to a quarry where they were murdered, while others were driven off to be expelled beyond Israeli lines. And after Begin’s troops had finished with their “orgy” of looting and destruction in Jaffa in April 1948, they also paraded blindfolded prisoners through the streets of Tel Aviv, “to the disgust of a large section of the public.”158 Many of those driven from Jaffa in 1948 found their way to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where their families were subjected to the gentle ministrations of Israel’s local adjuncts in September 1982; see chapter 6, section 5.
