Yael Berda
New Lines Magazine / October 2, 2024
The extreme right’s raid on Sde Teiman illustrates the ongoing spread of violent fragmentation.
The Israeli state’s authority is breaking down. The current far-right government was elected less than two years ago and for the past year and a half has been in the process of implementing what it calls judicial reform. Once fully implemented, the “reforms” would end the judiciary’s independence and make it subservient to the governing coalition. Opponents of the plan call it a regime coup. Meanwhile, ongoing events make clear that the fragmentation of state authority and power is rushing forward, almost entirely unchecked. The government is pursuing a shift toward authoritarianism in the shadow of the war in Gaza, while settler vigilantes set fire to villages across the West Bank and attack unarmed Palestinians with impunity. Israel’s democratic institutions, meanwhile, are seemingly not strong enough to resist the ongoing coup of Israel’s far right.
To unpack this moment, two factors must be understood. The first is that the goal of the judicial overhaul, from the right-wing perspective, is annexation of the West Bank. The far right intends to achieve this goal by decimating Israel’s High Court of Justice and revoking the powers of government legal advisers — the institutions that had, until now, acted to place some limitations on the settler enterprise. The second is that the racialized practices in the West Bank, by which settlers have for decades been committing acts of violence against Palestinians with impunity, have, as many prominent Israeli intellectuals have warned for decades, permeated Israeli society. Now, under the far-right government, police are implementing practices they developed to control and surveil Palestinians in the occupied territories to control the opposition within Israel. For the first time, the state’s targeted opposition includes the elites — the highly educated, secular, Israeli Jews who live primarily in the country’s urban areas and historically voted for the centrist and center-left parties. In other words, the police and the government are now turning the methods of the occupation against Israeli citizens.
The deterioration of the state’s authority accelerated precipitously in August and September due to far-right vigilantism, but had already become tragically apparent during the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 last year when the security services proved incapable of protecting or rescuing hundreds of thousands of Israelis who live on the southern border with Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon. It was starkly visible on July 29, when far-right settlers, incited by members of Netanyahu’s extremist government, attacked military bases and a military court, set fire to a Palestinian village in the West Bank and attempted to establish a settlement in Gaza.
On July 29, far-right members of the government called upon civilians to protest against an investigation by the military police of a group of soldiers who were suspected of participating in the gang rape and torture of a Palestinian prisoner. The Palestinian prisoner was held at Sde Teiman, a military base that has been repurposed as a detention center for at least 1,400 noncombatant prisoners captured in Gaza over the past year and detained without charge. When masked military police attempted to arrest the reserve soldiers suspected of committing the heinous acts, hundreds of right-wing protesters flocked to Sde Teiman, where an estimated 60 Palestinian detainees have died in custody since Oct. 7, according to a recent report released by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization. Israel has a dark history, documented in reports from various human rights organizations, of torturing Palestinian detainees, of which there have been over 750,000 since the state was founded. But the extreme violence of the gang rape and torture of this Palestinian prisoner, who was taken to hospital with severe injuries, was particularly shocking — particularly given that the soldiers recorded the incident with their phones and appeared to feel no remorse. One of them appeared on a prime-time television news broadcast to defend himself. A clip that showed another, his face covered by a balaclava mask, bending his head to receive a blessing from a Sephardic rabbi, made the rounds on social media
Some called it Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, or Israel’s Guantanamo. But in Guantanamo there were 780 detainees and nine custodial deaths. This is grim enough, but pales in comparison with the 60 custodial deaths in Israeli prisons since the massacres committed by Hamas on Oct. 7.
On Aug. 7, right-wing organizations and bereaved families protested against a hearing at the High Court of Justice on conditions at Sde Teiman. The assembled demonstrators chanted violent threats toward the judges and physically threatened Attorney Sawsan Zaher from Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel; Zaher, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had to be escorted out under the protection of at least 10 court-supplied bodyguards.
What is the significance of this right-wing protest, which included ministers and members of parliament, who broke into a military base in order to prevent an investigation into horrific allegations of torture and rape? What does it have to do with the massacre of Oct. 7 and the mass killing during the Gaza war?
The Israeli opposition, the liberals who have been demonstrating for months against the judicial reform and for a cease-fire and a negotiated deal for the release of the hostages, were appalled by the far-right riots at army bases. They rightly saw the spectacle of members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition aligning with far-right, violent demonstrators as another major breach of the rule of law, another step that pushed the Israeli regime to the brink of lawlessness. Many said that the army undertook an investigation of the incident in order to pre-empt the issuing of international arrest warrants and intervention, something that in international law is called the principle of complementarity. This means that if Israel investigates and prosecutes soldiers who commit crimes that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) could adjudicate on the grounds that they violate international law, then the ICJ does not have jurisdiction. However, very few of the voices expressing opposition to the government are addressing the ongoing allegations and testimonies of torture and abuse that Israeli soldiers are perpetrating on Palestinian detainees on a massive scale. Furthermore, Israel’s record of investigating and prosecuting soldiers for violations of the law is extremely poor. Data collected by the nongovernmental organization Yesh Din shows that from 664 complaints about possible violations of international law committed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza over the past six years, the military advocate general delivered only one indictment.
The opposition’s critique focuses on what is called the judicial overhaul, or what they call the authoritarian regime coup that began in January 2023, as a plan to eviscerate the judiciary and deplete the power of the legal advisers that curbed, to some extent, the power of the government ministries.
The opposition — that is, the Israelis who have been out on the street for nearly two years protesting the proposed judicial overhaul — believe that the major change in Israel’s regime happened when Netanyahu formed his far-right governing coalition. The current government, which is often described as the most right-wing in Israel’s history, includes the Kahanist Jewish Power party and far-right religious-nationalist Zionist parties, which aspire to annex the West Bank and transfer the Palestinian population out by force. The opposition’s position is also a means of expressing distance between so-called mainstream Israel, whom they believe they represent, and the extremists, whom they once saw as a fringe phenomenon that they called “wild weeds,” the Hebrew equivalent of bad apples.
The opposition sometimes acknowledges Israel’s long-term occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, with its harsh military rule, as the provenance of this radical, far-right ideology. But the focus of their critique is the decline of the rule of law in Israel, as it affects Jewish citizens, and the rise of unchecked governmental power that puts Israel’s democracy in danger. Their concern is not Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its treatment of the Palestinians who live there, but the norms of Israeli civil society and democracy as they apply to mainstream Israeli Jewish society.
But human rights groups and lawyers have a different perspective on Sde Teiman. They see it as the worst in a series of devasting episodes of detention and torture carried out by Israelis — and their allies — against Palestinians. These include the torture that was carried out on Palestinian prisoners during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, at Khiam and Ansar in Nabatieh, where at one point 9,000 Palestinians were detained in camps known as Ansar 1 and Ansar 2. It includes ongoing torture at various sites, including the Russian Compound (“Al-Moskobiya” in Arabic) located in the heart of Jerusalem right next to the Courts of Justice, where Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are detained. From this perspective, the torture of Palestinian prisoners at Sde Teiman is not a change in policy, but an escalation of the severity and degree with which torture is used. This escalation includes now-open support among the Israeli right for the use of torture; the same people oppose regulation and punishment of extreme violence committed against Palestinians, which they argue is justified by the attacks committed by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Torture has been regulated bureaucratically in Israel since 1999, when the High Court of Justice ruled that a general state of “necessity” could not provide legal authority for torture. Instead, the court suggested another avenue that enabled torture, but one that had to be properly legislated: “If the State wishes to enable the GSS [General Security Services, widely known by its Hebrew acronym Shin Bet] investigators to utilize physical means in interrogations, they must seek the enactment of legislation for this purpose.” The purpose was to authorize what they called “moderate physical pressure,” which could be applied to interrogated detainees who were deemed “ticking bombs,” or people who had knowledge of an imminent terror attack. In other words, the High Court enabled regulated torture and extrajudicial executions — provided they were based on necessity, carried out according to administrative decisions and followed the general path of the rule of law. It is this regulation, which is already entirely insufficient for the safeguarding of human and civil rights, that the right are protesting. They object to decision-making based on legal process. In essence, they don’t want government lawyers to have any power to curb the military and police from doing whatever they want with impunity.
This attitude stems from the widely held belief that Supreme Court and government advocates, by catering to what proponents of the far right see as the false gods of international law and European public opinion, have been preventing the Israeli military from achieving victory against Israel’s enemies. For years, one of the best-known right-wing slogans has been “tnu l’tzahal lenatzeach” or “let the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] win.” Following Oct. 7, broad segments of the Israeli population subscribed to that slogan. They urged the military to ignore international and domestic law, which they said were considerations for weak liberals. They called upon the army to suspend its own ethical code when carrying out its operations and to remove all limits on the rules of engagement in the name of revenge and retaliation for the Hamas attack. They called this “speaking Arabic,” a racist phrase that means behaving with complete ruthlessness.
The blunt demand for impunity culminated in the July 29 riot at Sde Teiman, when a surge of far-right protesters broke through the fences of the military base where the soldiers accused of committing gang rape were held pending interrogation. The police at the scene did not stop the demonstrators who broke through the fence; nor did they arrest them later. This failure to enforce the law reflects wide support among Jewish Israelis for the torture and execution of Palestinians since Oct. 7, against the background of a widely held belief that the vast majority of Palestinians were somehow active or passive supporters of the attacks Hamas carried out. Now, according to supporters of the far-right parties, the word “terrorist” is code for “Palestinian.” Channel 14, a right-wing television station that is Israel’s version of FOX News, has featured a daily count of the casualties in Gaza. The count does not deviate significantly from the numbers publicized by the Hamas-led Ministry of Health in Gaza but on Channel 14 all the dead, including the thousands of children, are described as terrorists.
Another social development that feeds into the notion of soldiers’ impunity is a pervasive reluctance among Israelis to risk the lives of soldiers in Gaza. This is particularly true of soldiers who are killed in battle as a consequence of trying to avoid killing Palestinian civilians. This is why the majority of the Israeli public supports massive air strikes before ground troops enter the field, even when those air strikes kill a high number of civilians. In this context, the idea that Israeli soldiers should be penalized for violence or harm against Palestinians becomes unacceptable. More than 10 years of consistent campaigns by far-right organizations, identified by human rights groups as particularly violent, culminated when protesters stormed the military base with the intention of freeing the soldiers who had been detained on suspicion of committing torture and rape. The leaders of the break-in were members of the Knesset and government ministers, members of the far-right parties that Netanyahu brought into his governing coalition. As of this writing, neither the military police nor the military advocate general has arrested or interrogated a single participant in the mob that attempted to prevent a criminal investigation.
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights NGO, decided in 2016 to stop filing complaints about human rights abuse committed by the military police and soldiers against Palestinians. Their reason was simple: Based on their own data, pursuing legal justice was entirely ineffective. The organization announced that they would continue to document abuses, but would no longer participate in the de facto legitimization of a legal system that demonstrably provided neither protection nor justice for Palestinians.
Is the torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners at Sde Teiman a symbol of this unprecedented period in Israeli-Palestinian history, or is it the culmination of the normalization of torture over decades? This question matters, because in order to stop the deterioration of Israeli civil society and the extreme, ongoing harm caused by the current government, one must acknowledge the deep, long-term structures and beliefs that have enabled this movement.
For most Palestinians, the war in Gaza — the mass killing, detention of civilians, prison abuse and expulsions — is a continuum of events that started with the Nakba in 1948, when the Israeli military participated in the mass expulsion of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from the newly founded state of Israel. They see current events through the lens of 76 years of dispossession, 57 years of occupation (some might say 76 years of occupation) and a steady worsening of conditions after the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada, the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli military bases and settlements from Gaza, the siege of Gaza that began in 2007 and every day since Oct. 7. For the liberal middle-class Israelis who form the pro-democracy, anti-Netanyahu opposition, the current far-right government and the documented torture of Palestinian prisoners at Sde Teiman mark a sea change in the rule and implementation of the law. But for many — perhaps most — Palestinians, Sde Teiman is yet another event in a continuous history of torture and abuse in detention centers and prisons.
There is another way to view what seems like lawlessness and the fragmentation of government authority, one that acknowledges Israel’s long history of rule by emergency decree and military control. These policies, which can be called colonial practices of violent control, and the right-wing push for annexation were the motivation for the judicial overhaul. The pro-annexation far right wants to do away with separation between Israel and the occupied territories by eviscerating the power of the High Court and of the government’s legal advisers to prevent them from achieving their goal.
The ongoing regime changes in Israel began with the enactment of a new counterterror law in 2016, which dramatically expanded the power of law enforcement to arrest and detain people suspected of committing ill-defined acts of terror, and the 2018 Nation-State Law that legally enshrines the rights of Jewish citizens over Palestinian citizens, who are 20% of Israel’s population. By passing laws that make Israeli citizens subject to measures similar to those imposed upon Palestinians in the West Bank, the Netanyahu government has accelerated the unification of the military-colonial regime in the occupied territories with the regime established within Israel’s borders in 1948. The result is what political scientist Ian Lustick recently called a “one-state reality.”
In other words, the struggle to protect the rights of Jewish citizens of Israel has occurred in tandem with the legislated removal of the rights of Palestinian citizens. This shows how colonial Israel — i.e., the occupied West Bank — has coexisted with liberal Israel through the structure of the rule of law, which has consistently separated the two regimes. But the current government’s attack on what can be called the liberal rule of law and the separation of powers, particularly the status and authority of the High Court of Justice to strike down legislation, renders the separation between the two regimes— the colonial and the liberal — impossible to maintain. The Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016 and the Nation-State Law of 2018 ended the facade of liberal citizenship in Israel. The ongoing judicial overhaul that began in 2023 is designed to dismantle the liberal rule of law and solidify a regime of annexation and apartheid across Israel-Palestine. The attack on the independence of the judiciary and its subordination to the executive is a means of buttressing the first part of the regime change, the revocation of citizenship.
At the end of 2015, B’Tselem accused Netanyahu of enabling field executions of Palestinians suspected of committing acts of terror, by police and military that shot them to death. This was after a series of stabbing attacks carried out by Palestinians that was dubbed the “knife intifada.” Netanyahu’s policy in 2015 was a significant watershed, in that it encouraged security forces and ordinary civilians to shoot to kill when they suspected someone of committing a terror attack, regardless of the level of danger. Officials encouraged Israeli citizens to actively engage with terrorists and commended them for “neutralizing” those who were suspected, often with little to no evidence, of preparing to commit an attack. Before 2015 there was an implicit impunity for soldiers or civilians who killed Palestinians suspected of acting against the military in the occupied territories; but now there was a shift to explicit impunity for civilians who shot a Palestinian who just happened to be walking the streets of Jerusalem.
Violence committed by settlers against Palestinian villagers while the military and police turn a blind eye is nothing new. The colonial aspect of Israel’s occupation includes a legal system that has separate practices for different groups, based on a racial and national hierarchy. A settler who throws a stone at a soldier suffers no punishment. But a West Bank Palestinian can be arrested and jailed for a year just on suspicion of throwing a stone at a soldier. Now, the differentiated practices in law enforcement, allocations of land and representation are moving inside Israel.
Yet as the settler violence increases by the day and the impunity for torture and war crimes mounts, centrist voices in Israel are distancing themselves from the violence in the West Bank, claiming that the messianic vigilantes burning down the towns of Jit and Hawara are not representative of Israel’s mainstream. But it is important to address for a moment how the authoritarian turn is reconfiguring the relationship between Israel’s colonial control over the West Bank and liberal Israel. For decades, Israel’s left and center treated settlers as the obstacles to peace, but did not provide ideological and practical alternatives to the economy of occupation, and the privileges afforded Jewish Israelis who have found a welfare state in the settlements. Settlements provide only 1% of Israel’s tax revenue, while they receive twice as much funding as other localities within Israel proper.
Israel has reached a point in which there is no longer even a semblance of separation between the authoritarian practices developed to control Palestinians in the occupied territories and the police tactics used against the liberal opposition in Israel proper. As practices developed and maintained to control, monitor and quash dissent in the occupied territories are now used against the Jewish Israeli opposition, even as the Israeli state is rapidly annexing the West Bank, there is no longer a separation between the colonial regime and a liberal regime. They are merged into an authoritarian regime in which there is very little to stop settler violence, torture and the crushing of dissent.
Yael Berda is an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Hebrew University
