‘Torture isn’t new to Palestinians’: How Israel learned from colonialism | Israel-Palestine conflict

Warning: This story consists of descriptions of sexual assault that some readers will discover disturbing.

A companion essay to Al Jazeera’s Bodies of Evidence: Israel’s Darkest Weapon, directed and government produced by Awad Joumaa.

He was within the subsequent room. The partitions had been skinny. The door between the rooms was open. He might hear the whole lot.

In 1969, Abdel Latif Ghaith, who would later change into director of the Palestinian prisoner-rights organisation Addameer, was being held in a Jerusalem detention block when, in a contiguous cell, different Israeli interrogators had been making an attempt to interrupt one other younger Palestinian. Her title was Rasmea Odeh.

“I noticed Rasmea within the interrogation room,” Ghaith recounts. “And she or he was bare.”

His voice was gradual and actual, as he relived a reminiscence he has carried for greater than half a century.

Rasmea’s father was dropped at the room, Ghaith stated. Seeing his daughter in that situation, the daddy toppled her: “You probably have one thing or don’t have one thing, say something to allow them to get out of this case.” The daddy cried. Rasmea stated: “I don’t have something, I didn’t do something.”

The daddy left, however Rasmea’s ordeal didn’t finish. “And I noticed her in the course of the interrogations as soon as once more, the place she was severely tortured,” Ghaith recalled.

Ten years later, in 1979, after a prisoner alternate, Rasmea Odeh stood earlier than a United Nations committee in Geneva and described what had been carried out to her physique in that Jerusalem cell: rape with a stick. Electrical shocks to her mouth and genitals. Threats that her father can be pressured to rape her. Her testimony entered the UN document years earlier than the Convention Against Torture was adopted.

However Rasmea was not, as Ghaith places it, “the primary”.

“In Palestine, we’ve got seen many conditions like this,” he says. And Rasmea wouldn’t be the final.

‘Torture isn’t new to the Palestinians’

“Torture is, actually, the trademark of this final two years of oppression of the Palestinian individuals,” Francesca Albanese, the UN particular rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, tells Al Jazeera within the movie Bodies of Evidence.

However, she insists, it isn’t new. “Torture isn’t new to the Palestinians. Israel has practised torture towards the Palestinians because the very starting of its existence.”

Then she names the lineage that well mannered worldwide debate prefers to not seek advice from.

“In the course of the British Mandate in Palestine, it’s documented that the British administration used practices of torture, or legislation enforcement, that had already been used towards the Irish insurgency as a part of counterinsurgency measures. These practices had been [applied in] Palestine. Additionally it is documented that the British emergency laws had been integrated [into the Israeli legal system].”

They weren’t tailored. Not translated. Not modernised. They had been, in Albanese’s phrases, “instantly acquired and ingrained within the Israeli system”.

Merely put, sexual violence inside Israeli detention in the present day isn’t an accident. It’s the inheritance of an imperial technique that Britain rehearsed in Eire, exported to Palestine, and repeated in Kenya; that France industrialised in Algeria; and that apartheid South Africa systematised towards Black South Africans. And that Israel, the European settler-colonial mission Britain itself ushered into being, then took as its personal. The cells change. The uniforms change. The method doesn’t.

“Torture is sort of widespread in colonial methods or racially ordered regimes,” Albanese provides, “as a result of the infliction of humiliation and erasure is seen as a apply to manage.”

What sexual torture really is

Underneath worldwide legislation – together with the UN Conference Towards Torture, the Rome Statute of the Worldwide Prison Courtroom, the rulings of the tribunals for the previous Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the Worldwide Committee of the Pink Cross’s customary humanitarian legislation – sexual violence in custody consists of rape, the insertion of objects, sexual mutilation, pressured nudity, strip-searches performed as humiliation, threats to rape detainees or their kinfolk, sexualised beatings, assaults on genitals, using canines and the filming and circulation of intimate pictures. When any of those verbal or bodily acts of abuse are carried out within the presence of relations, that too is taken into account sexual violence.

All of it may be prosecuted as torture, as a struggle crime, as a criminal offense towards humanity. Cuno Tarfusser, the previous Italian decide on the ICC, states the purpose starkly in Our bodies of Proof: “Sexual violence turns into greater than crime … sexual crimes change into a way to battle the struggle.”

Kifaya Khraim, worldwide advocacy coordinator on the Ramallah-based Girls’s Centre for Authorized Help and Counselling (WCLAC), says Israeli forces know precisely what they’re doing, as she describes what number of girls inform teams like hers of units inserted inside them “with out having the ability to determine that as rape or sexual violence”.

“Israeli forces know of [the social stigma], they usually use it they usually exploit it.”

Eire: the place the empire discovered to interrupt a individuals

To grasp what Britain did in Palestine, you must perceive what it had simply completed doing in Eire.

Between 1920 and 1922, because the Irish Conflict of Independence reached its peak, Britain deployed a paramilitary pressure in Eire that turned a byword for colonial terror: the Black and Tans and their officer counterparts, the Auxiliaries. When the Irish struggle ended, the empire didn’t retire its Black and Tans. It redeployed them. Roughly 650 former Black and Tans had been despatched to Mandate Palestine in April 1922 to type the brand new British Palestine Gendarmerie. By 1923, in line with Richard A Cahill’s research Going Berserk: “Black and Tans” in Palestine, former Black and Tans made up between 75 and 95 % of that pressure.

They introduced their strategies with them. One of many males related to the slang time period “duffing up”, Douglas V Duff, was later discovered responsible in 1931 of getting a subordinate officer to inflict ill-treatment and bodily misery on a prisoner.

That is the chain Albanese factors to. It’s not a metaphor. It’s personnel. It’s payroll. It’s the similar males, on a unique shore, doing the identical issues to a unique colonised individuals, protected by the identical emergency legislation.

Palestine, 1936: The empire goes to work

By the Thirties, Britain was now not experimenting in Palestine. It was governing it as a settler-colonial mission of its personal design. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had dedicated Britain to “the institution in Palestine of a nationwide dwelling for the Jewish individuals”. The Mandate, awarded in 1922, made Britain the colonial midwife of the Zionist mission.

In 1936, Palestinians answered with a six-month normal strike. It turned the Nice Arab Revolt, three years of armed rebellion towards British rule and the Zionist mission it was constructing.

A marketing campaign of state terror adopted: Britain deployed greater than 20,000 troops to Palestine, imposed curfews and collective fines, dynamited properties, demolished a lot of outdated Jaffa, and used Palestinian civilians as human shields. Matthew Hughes traces the shift “from legislation and order to pacification” in his landmark research of Britain’s suppression of the Arab Revolt.

The Mandate’s police manuals didn’t must order rape. They constructed the rooms wherein it might be denied: arrest with out warrant, pressured entry, search by pressure, joint police-military raids and indemnity for officers appearing “in good religion”.

It was additionally from the Mandate that Israel inherited the apply of administrative detention, below which Palestinians are held indefinitely in jail with out fees, veteran Israeli lawyer Leah Tsemel identified.

The identical logic would outlive the Mandate itself. Britain didn’t simply write the handbook for the Nakba of 1948 and the continued Nakba ever since. It cleared the sector.

Kenya: What the empire does when it thinks nobody is watching

Within the Fifties, the identical imperial state that had ruled Palestine ran a community of detention camps in Kenya generally known as the Pipeline, designed to interrupt the Mau Mau rebellion towards British rule.

Survivors described castration, rape with bottles and damaged glass, the insertion of objects into the rectum and vagina, pressured nudity throughout interrogation and sexual humiliation as strategies of breaking political will. In 2013, after years of authorized wrestle by Mau Mau survivors represented by British legislation agency Leigh Day, the UK authorities settled the case.

Algeria: France turns torture into doctrine

If Britain constructed the structure, France wrote the doctrine.

In the course of the Algerian struggle, the French military raped Algerian girls in detention and of their properties. Algerian males had been stripped, electrocuted and threatened with the rape of their kinfolk.

The case of Djamila Boupacha, tortured and raped with a bottle by French paratroopers, turned a global scandal as a result of French-Tunisian lawyer and activist Gisele Halimi and French thinker and activist Simone de Beauvoir took it up, and refused to let it disappear.

In Blida, some 45km from capital Algiers, the French psychiatrist and thinker Frantz Fanon handled Algerian victims of French torture in the identical hospital the place he handled French personnel who carried it out.

Torture, Fanon understood, was not an extra of struggle. It was the essence of the colonial relationship. As Albanese places it, “Frantz Fanon was curing the victims of torture and the perpetrators.”

Israel and France: An alliance solid in Algerian blood

Israel didn’t inherit solely the British structure of sexual violence and torture. It additionally sure itself, nearly instantly after its delivery in 1948, to the French one. In October 1956, Britain, France and Israel signed the Protocol of Sevres, a secret conspiracy to invade Egypt and topple Gamal Abdel Nasser.

It was France that helped Israel construct the nuclear plant in Dimona. French scientists and engineers performed a central position in designing the reactor and reprocessing infrastructure that gave Israel the bomb.

However the bomb was not all Israel discovered from France. It discovered to deal with an anti-colonial inhabitants itself because the enemy, and that the physique of the colonised, its sleep, its sexuality, its household, its disgrace are all official terrains of struggle. The Israeli authorities’s 1987 Landau Fee would name this “average bodily stress”. The 1999 Israeli Excessive Courtroom would bar some strategies whereas leaving the door open for using such practices when “necessity” calls for it.

And who decides what’s “crucial”? The identical Israeli safety state that the Excessive Courtroom order was presupposed to restrain.

‘For the reason that very founding of Israel’

None of it is a shock.

“Sexual violence is one thing that’s been taking place traditionally towards all Palestinians by Israel because the very founding of Israel,” Khraim of the WLAC says. “It’s well-known that in 1948, in the course of the ethnic [cleansing], sexual violence was used as a way to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.”

Israeli historian Benny Morris, drawing on declassified archives, acknowledged not less than a dozen documented rapes by Israeli forces in 1948, a quantity he known as “simply the tip of the iceberg”.

By the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, even Israeli insiders now concede that pressure was utilized in interrogations. Human Rights Watch documented the strategies in 1994.

Throughout that arc, the names change, Rasmea Odeh in 1969; Mohammed Zaki Al-Bakri in 2024, however the strategies don’t.

A unadorned physique. A sure physique. A father introduced into the room. A canine introduced into the room. A digital camera. Fun. A file with a quantity on it.

The survivors talking now

The historic archive issues as a result of it feels like the current.

In Our bodies of Proof: Israel’s Darkest Weapon, one former detainee from Jenin describes a feminine guard making a sexual risk about his sister throughout a physique search. “I’ll always remember that second,” he says. “My tears fell. I used to be 18 years outdated.”

Mohammed Zaki Al-Bakri describes the physique below assault in easier phrases: “You might be now not a human being. You might be only a physique below their management.” That’s the mechanism Kifaya Khraim describes: the weaponisation of household, stigma and disgrace.

Sde Teiman: The current-tense hyperlink within the chain

If anybody wants a single tackle the place the colonial chain reaches its current hyperlink, it’s Sde Teiman. A army base within the Negev desert, repurposed after October 7 right into a detention website for Palestinians from Gaza, Sde Teiman has change into – via the testimony of launched detainees, Israeli whistleblowers, B’Tselem, the Public Committee Towards Torture in Israel, and leaked footage – the image of what Israel’s detention system turned after its formal restraints collapsed.

Because the movie’s personal opening information line states: “All fees towards 5 troopers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee on the Sde Teiman army jail in July 2024 have been dropped.” Detainees have described being held shackled and blindfolded for weeks, denied medical care, overwhelmed, starved, stored in nappies and sexually abused. In March 2026, the Israeli army’s prime authorized officer dropped the fees within the central sexual abuse case. Amnesty Worldwide known as the choice “disgraceful”.

One extraordinary public alternate, after the scandal broke, distilled the doctrine beneath all of it. In a July 2024 Knesset dialogue, Palestinian politician Ahmad Tibi requested whether or not it might ever be official “to insert a stick into an individual’s rectum.” Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of the Knesset from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud social gathering, answered: “If he’s a Nukhba [Hamas fighter], the whole lot is official to do. Every little thing.” It was a chilling second: not a denial of abuse, however a defence of it below the language of necessity. In that sentence, the logic of exception was made specific – that after a detainee is marked as an enemy, the legislation could be suspended, the physique could be violated, and cruelty could be recast as safety.

In 2025, the UN Secretary-Basic’s annual report on conflict-related sexual violence listed Israel and the State of Palestine in its conditions of concern, citing patterns of sexual violence by Israeli forces towards Palestinian detainees.

‘A torturous setting’

Albanese calls it “a torturous setting”: a spot the place the infliction of ache is deliberate and fixed. That repression additionally extends to these making an attempt to doc it. Tahseen Elayyan of Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organisation, says his organisation was focused due to its work. In October 2021, Israel’s Ministry of Protection, below then-Protection Minister Benny Gantz, designated Al-Haq and 5 different Palestinian civil society teams as “terrorist organisations”, a transfer UN consultants condemned as an assault on Palestinian human rights defenders.

The veteran Israeli lawyer Leah Tsemel describes the ambiance after October 7 as one in every of “pure harassment”.

“The humiliation of Palestinians and the perspective to them as non-human beings doesn’t disturb.”

Sexual violence is essentially the most intimate instrument inside that panorama. It really works as a result of it produces silence.

That’s what Ghaith witnessed in 1969 when Rasmea Odeh’s father was dropped at her cell. That’s what survivors describe in the present day when troopers movie the abuse and threaten to ship it to households. The silence is the weapon. Breaking the silence is the resistance.

Why the our bodies bear in mind

In 1969, an Israeli interrogator made Rasmea Odeh’s father weep in a hall in Jerusalem. In 1979, Rasmea stood earlier than a UN committee in Geneva and instructed the world what had been carried out to her physique. The world heard her. It did little or no.

In 2026, the survivors sharing testimonies in Our bodies of Proof: Israel’s Darkest Weapon are doing the identical factor, on the similar value, inside a system designed to make their speech not possible. Raji Sourani, founder and director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, says merely: “We don’t need Gaza to be the graveyard of worldwide legislation, and we wish the Gazans to have justice and dignity.”

Chantal Meloni, an Italian prison lawyer, professor of worldwide prison legislation on the College of Milan, and senior authorized adviser on worldwide crimes and accountability on the European Middle for Constitutional and Human Rights, calls this second “the primary concrete cracks within the wall of a longstanding impunity”.

That impunity, just like the sexual violence it shields, has additionally travelled from Eire to Palestine, from Palestine to Kenya, from Algiers to Pretoria, and from there to Hebron. When their very own flag comes down, empires hand over their structure of abuse to the following regime prepared to make use of it. Then they insist it by no means occurred.

The Palestinian survivors talking in the present day aren’t asking the world to imagine an unprecedented horror. They’re asking the world to recognise an outdated one and, this time, to behave. The uniforms change. The authorized vocabulary modifications. The emergency is renamed. However the physique retains the document.

Watch Bodies of Evidence on Al Jazeera English’s YouTube channel.