April/May 1992, Page 9, 10

From the Hebrew Press

Israeli Occupation Authorities: The Mideast's Most Totalitarian Regime

By Dr. Israel Shahak

The U.S. media commonly labels Israel "the only working democracy in the Middle East." The notion of Israel as a democracy, however, ignores the nature of Israeli administration of the occupied territories, which has lasted nearly a quarter of a century. That Israeli rule is both totalitarian and racist.

In fact, with the elimination of so many similar regimes in recent years, the Israeli occupation has become one of the most despotic regimes still existing on earth. As in all totalitarian regimes, it is the secret police which wield absolute power over the population: in this case the Israeli secret police over the Palestinians living in the territories. To understand how the situation there affects the prospects for peace, it is absolutely vital to know the extent of those secret police powers.

The formal name of the Israeli secret police is "General Security System." The popular name is its Hebrew acronym, Shabak. The agency is rigidly compartmentalized into two separate branches: one dealing with Israeli citizens (whether living in Israel or in the territories) and the other, more important, branch dealing with the inhabitants of the territories.

The role of the latter in governing the territories and the power it has over the daily life of their Palestinian residents has been described by Danny Rubinstein, perhaps the most knowledgeable Israeli journalist covering the West Bank, as "near absolute." In Ha'aretz of Feb. 7 he writes: "It is the Shabak which decides whether any kind of permit is or isn't granted: be it a permit to leave the territories for entering Israel or going abroad, to open a business, to build a house, to obtain a driver's license, to obtain any tax adjustment, whatever."

All of these powers are exercised in a completely arbitrary manner. Shabak can deny a driver's license to any Palestinian for years without giving any reason, or as a way of turning an applicant into an informer. Dalya Shkhori, another perceptive Israeli political correspondent, writes in Al Hamishmar of Feb. 7 that, in addition to opposition from the Jewish settlers to the autonomy plan advanced by the government of Yitzhak Shamir, a second more crucial obstacle to autonomy is the unwillingness of Shabak to accept curtailment of its enormous powers.

"At present Shabak has absolute power over the territories. It holds the stick and dispenses the carrot," Shkhori writes. "Everything depends on Shabak's will. . . Can we imagine Shabak quietly closing down its offices after the autonomy is established? Can it conceivably readjust to a different kind of work?"

This totalitarian reality, based upon an all-powerful secret police, is a more important obstacle to peace than the settlements; more important than all other aspects of the situation in the territories combined.

In other Middle Eastern countries, obtaining even a driver's license does not depend on the whim of the secret police. In this crucial respect, therefore, the Israeli regime in the territories is much less democratic than most Arab regimes.

A Rigid Apartheid

The totalitarian system implemented in the territories by Shabak also enforces a rigid apartheid. "The procedures of detention and interrogation are totally different from the ones applying in Israel," Rubinstein writes. "In the territories, there is no need to bring a suspect before a judge within 48 hours. He can be kept incommunicado for no fewer than 18 days without seeing a judge. He can be denied access to a lawyer. The authorities can ask [a military judge] to remand him several times and for up to a total of 90 days. He can be denied visits from his family."

By contrast, none of these rights are denied to Jewish suspects, neither the settlers nor the leftists. It does not matter how extreme they may be or what crime they are charged with, even if they are charged with collaboration with the PLO.

Whether they are arrested in Israel or in the territories, Jewish suspects always are brought first before a civilian judge, and then interrogated in Shabak installations located in Israel. This is one of the reasons why the Jewish settlers can operate with impunity throughout the occupied territories. Shabak systematically inculcates racism into the training of its agents. This training has been discussed in interviews granted to the Hebrew press with Shabak's full blessing, by retired Shabak agents, usually in the wake of the scandals which have occurred regularly since 1987.

An example is a long interview by Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz of Jan. 5, 1990 with two retired Shabak agents. In their 30s, they obviously were sent by Shabak to be interviewed after it was reported that a Palestinian detainee from Gaza, Kamal Sheikh Ali, had died of blows to his stomach during Shabak interrogation.

Both interviewees said they had volunteered to serve in Shabak as a "natural" outgrowth of their service in "elite" units of the army. In self-congratulatory words, they described Shabak recruitment targeted at "those with high national and Zionist consciousness, for whom decency and the work ethic are guiding principles."

An all-powerful secret police is a more important obstacle to peace than the settlements.

Said one of them, "You become totally dedicated to your job, totally loyal to the organization. As in the army units in which we served, the commander is the God who is always right." They attributed Shabak's success in inculcating this attitude to its total control over the private lives of its agents. This control rages from preferential access to basketball tickets to choosing the lawyer and paying the fees for an agent's divorce proceedings.

According to Levy's interviewees, beatings seldom occur during initial Shabak interrogations because "success comes through understanding the Arab mentality." "Sometimes this knowledge does not suffice," they added, "and then there arises the need for psychological torture or maltreatment."

When asked what constitutes maltreatment, one described "putting a sack on someone's head." He did not mention the handcuffing and the forced standing or kneeling for many hours which invariably accompanies that technique.

After further probing by the interviewer, they gave the example of "an interrogator who smashes a detainee into pieces, without leaving a single bone intact." This, they explained approvingly, requires making sure that a tortured detainee remains alive so he can be tried and convicted on the basis of the resulting confession. To justify this practice they approvingly quoted Stalin's favorite dictum, "when you chop wood, splinters fly."

One of the Shabak agents then explained: "I consider myself a peace-seeking liberal who wants to give back the territories. But I tell you this method of interrogation is legitimate, even when the detainee is subsequently found to be innocent."

Boasting of humane feelings and support for peace, while simultaneously approving of torture so long as it is not acknowledged as such, is a common feature of the secret police forces in all modern dictatorships. It was not by chance that the interviewed Shabak agents quoted Stalin.

When asked about the deaths of detainees under Shabak "treatment," the agents attributed them to the carelessness of inexperienced interrogators. They are proud of their professionalism. The evidence of Palestinian detainees bears them out.

Such Palestinians describe two kinds of beatings, according to Michael Kedem in Hadashot of Dec. 29, 1989: "The blows of Shabak interrogators are not like the blows of the soldiers. The soldiers kick, slap, or strike at random with their fists wherever and whenever they wish. The Shabak interrogators hit intelligently, in ways which are extremely painful but calculated not to leave traces and not to cause permanent damage either to the detainee or to themselves. This is why they use their boots or their sandals, after taking them off, and only rarely their bare hands. They aim their blows at sensitive parts of the body like the knees or genitals."

The "Arab Mentality"

The agents' description of the "Arab mentality" in the interview was obviously parroted from their Shabak training. It supposedly is shared "by all of the Arabs" and differs both from the "Jewish mentality" and the "mentality" of any other nation. The interviewees said to Levy:

"No Bedouin can be tested by polygraph. His morality is so different from ours that he can say that day is night and the polygraph will register it as a true statement. But if you then knock him over the head, he may well tell the truth. . .

"All Arabs are like that. All Arabs, without exception, exaggerate. All of them live in a fantasy world. This mentality poses a problem. It may not be nice to say, but the fact is that their mentality is qualitatively different from that of all people in the West. It is a matter of their genetic constitution."

Firm in such "knowledge." the Shabak interviewees assured Levy that "non-Arabs are never beaten up by Shabak," even when suspected of spying. Although that statement by the Shabak agents can safely be dismissed as a lie, their racism, so closely resembling Nazi beliefs about the Jews, is genuine. They firmly believe all of this racist claptrap, and this explains Shabak's practices.

One important point, generally unknown in the United States, is pertinent to any discussion of Shabak's routinely practiced torture. Although it began right after the conquest of the territories in 1967, there was an interval of several years when it was not practiced. The point often has been raised by Israeli commentators since 1987.

Discussing the report of the Landau Commission, which legalized the use of torture so long as it was called "moderate physical pressure," Nahum Barnea made an observation in Koteret Rashit of Nov. 11, 1987, which remains valid:

"The report failed to mention the clear order of Prime Minister Menachem Begin (in the fall of 1977) to refrain from violence during Shabak interrogations. . . The Landau Committee sought to conceal from the public that, unlike various forms of humiliation of detainees, physical torture had seldom been practiced after Begin's order was issued.

"Why did the committee not commend the prime minister publicly? They apparently reasoned that revealing that Begin had halted torture would imply that Israeli prime ministers had knowledge of Shabak's interrogatory practices. . . Obviously, the committee was very careful to steer clear of such implications."

In fact, support for torture is bipartisan in Israel, with Likud and Labor belonging to the same school. The only real differences stem from individual cases such as Begin's deviant prohibition of torture of Palestinians, which was observed only until early in 1983, when Begin's mental health deteriorated.

Barnea also remarks that "all convictions Shabak has obtained since the practice of torture was resumed apparently have been based on 'evidence' extracted from the detainees by torture."

The systematic practice of torture by Shabak, before and after the 1977 to 1983 interval, has been described in gruesome detail by the alleged victims, by the Hebrew press since 1987, and lately by the Israeli "B'Tselem" association and the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center. There can be no doubt that knowledge of Shabak's torture is fairly extensive in Jewish society.

Men serving in the army have always known about it. Newspaper readers have been aware of it at least since 1987, when reports of torture began to appear frequently in Hebrew papers. In fact, no special efforts have been made to silence the screams of torture victims so as to prevent them from being heard by anyone in the vicinity.

Challenging the claim of the Landau report that political authorities were unaware of Shabak's deeds, Ze'ev Tzahor asked in Hotam of Nov. 13, 1987: "How is it that we [the soldiers] have all known about it, but they haven't? Let me give on example. The Hebron prision contains a [Shabak] wing where security prisoners are held. It is located in the Military Administration Building. . . Over the years thousands of soldiers have served there. . . Many still recall those frightful nights when they could not sleep because the prisoners held in that wing were screaming so deafeningly."

Other reports in a similar vein have been published subsequently. With the possible exception of those who don't read Hebrew, since the reports have not appeared in the English-language Jerusalem Post, the Jewish public has known of Shabak's routine torture for several years.

Support for torture is bipartisan in Israel.

Although opposition to these atrocities is growing, public approval both of torture and of Shabak still prevails. The widespread knowledge of the practice among Israelis contrasts jarringly with the silence, or at least the reluctance to speak out publicly, about Israeli torture both by the U.S. media and by American Jews and their publications. The single exception to this conspiracy of silence has been an excellent article by an Israeli, Stanley Cohen of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in the Nov.-Dec. 1991 issue of the liberal U.S. Jewish periodical Tikkun.

In assessing the possibilities for "a solution," even one as spurious as the fake "autonomy" proposed by Shamir, Shabak's role in governing the territories is a factor of utmost importance.

Shamir's repeated assurances to Jewish settlers that the autonomy will not affect the nature of Israeli rule in the territories is significant. It points up the Likud government's resolve to leave Shabak's powers in the territories intact, regardless of whatever meaningless formula is offered to the U.S. in return for its continued financial aid.

Even the "pragmatists," who are unmoved by questions of ethics and morality, should pay heed to Shabak's inability to police the territories, except with masses of Israeli soldiers. Not only was Shabak unable to prevent the intifada, its racism became a major cause of the intifada's outbreak and staying power. There is evidence that, instead of learning from its mistakes, Shabak is becoming increasingly racist, inefficient and crass. Its evolution becomes another example of Lord Acton's famous saying that "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Dr. Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and retired professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is chairman of the Israeli League of Human and Civil Rights. His monthly translations From the Hebrew Press are available to Washington Report readers for $25 a year.

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