The dehumanization begins with the blind adoption of the concepts dictated by the defense establishment: Shabahim, for example, an IDF acronym for human beings, literally illegal transients and used only for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank who cross into and stay in Israel for hours or days, without a permit.
That is how tens of thousands of day laborers, the people who build our homes and our roads, become non-people. License to abuse follows.
Just as the term “administrative detention” allows detentions without trial; just as “disorderly conduct” justifies the dispersal of demonstrations using force that sometimes turns lethal, as in the worst dictatorship;s and just as the words “terrorist organization” can be a cover for disqualifying any political party, as in the worst totalitarian regime, so shabah was coined o enable the abuse of anyone defined as such.
The shabah is an “illegal” transient in his own land, from which his antecedents were expelled. The law is the law of the conqueror, the occupier; this unlawful law that divides and discriminates and dictates that only Jewish settlers may move freely. Israeli apartheid deniers cover this up. But the truth is that the only shabahim are the settlers. They are unlawful transients in a land not theirs. The Israeli glossary of terms denies this.
The disturbing story by Haim Rivlin on Channel 13’s “Hamakor” this week, about five Border Police officers who “hunted” and abused Shabahim in the Meitar Forest, in the northern Negev, was a rare, important event in Israeli media, which systematically conceals the occupation and its crimes from consumers who don’t want to see them. But even this piece did not stray far from the mainstream’s comfort zone: It focused on how police officers robbed their victims, in addition to abusing them physically. And the theft is the reason they were indicted, in contrast to those who abuse shabahim on a daily basis, but are never prosecuted. Any kind of violence can be excused as part of the security cult – but not robbery. “Hamakor” focused on the robbery, as if that was the worst part, while also disclosing the face of evil in the blows, the humiliation and the sadistic pleasure of the abusers.
About three months ago, photographer Alex Levac and I met the victim of Count No. 5 of the indictment, Majdi Ikhtat. He also appeared in Rivlin’s story, his face bleeding as he was ordered to strip before a Border Policewoman, who cheerfully recorded the events on a cellphone and was not indicted. Meet the shabah whose abuse – but not robbery, God forbid – Israel sanctions: 32, a father of three, with a Bachelor’s degree from the Open University of Hebron in Arabic literature and a permit to work as a construction worker in Israel where he is building the city of Be’er Sheva. He was hunted down for slipping through breaches in the separation fence that the IDF deliberately left open. Every morning at 3:30 A.M. he would leave his home in the South Hebron Hills, returning after dark. The only way he can support his family is through this hard, humiliating job in Israel.
The Border Policemen beat him with clubs and brass knuckles. He has contributed more to the state than they have. He is building it, as a member of the Palestinian Labor Battalion, which replaced the Jewish Labor Battalion, doing work once considered pioneering and highly valued. After the Border Police lowlifes beat him up, his Israeli work permit was revoked. That’s the routine handling of victims of institutional violence, lest they attempt revenge.
Ikhtat has not recovered from the trauma. He is young, without a present and without a past. He lives not far from my home, which was built by a few of his friends – one of tens of thousands of Palestinians who build our country for us. They are invisible, no one is more invisible than they are. There are very few building sites in Israel without Palestinian workers, some of them shabahim. There are very few shabahim involved in terrorism in recent years. But they are hunted and abused instead of being honored for doing the scut work no Jew is willing to do. And sometimes their abusers also rob them. And then, only then, are we shocked to our very core.
This article has been republished from Haaretz 25 November 2020
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.
Comments
4 responses to “Israel calls them ‘illegals’ in their own land whilst our media ignores this flagrant human rights abuse.”
Judah was one of the 12 “tribes. All supposedly descended from Abraham.
But were the 12, all divisions of wise men and women, Brahmin, part of a world wide civilization?
Judah and Kohan, the money changers who guarded the wealth of the state in temples, lived in Judea. The 10 other tribes lived in Israel.
The Kohan were rejected by Judah. Judah prefers rabbis to priests, such as the Sadducees and Pharisees. This did not please the Lord … of the priests. So the bankers, Kah, Khan, Cohen Cohn et al and their allies elsewhere, made anti semitism a science. They founded Israel. They have nurtured it and all its stupidity.
Just remember that the Dead Sea was formed by a tsunami. What has happened once will generally recur, in nature. We live in an amnesiac world where history is rewritten every 70 years or so with the boom bust cycle…
Most Americans are clueless and could not care less. Money, money, money. Now you got our attention.
Well, not me, but most of the others.
Not long ago I watched the tv series Fauda (from Arabic meaning ‘Chaos’). It was a truly shocking story about Israel’s attempts to prevent and destroy Palestinian attempts at attacks in Israel. The story paints both sides as hyper-psychotic members of Shin-Beth and Hamas ruthlessly exploited by their respective bosses. Judging by this article it seems that the story is not all that far fetched. Much of this ruthless fighting comes directly from Israel’s continued illegal land grabbing of Palestinian lands, ably supported by western countries like the USA and Australia, amongst others. This process, again, shows the utter evilness of some religions that promote a god-given right to take other people’s lands.
The establishment of Israel after WW2 was meant to provide a home for the Jewish diaspora after the horrors of the war, but with typical British ignorance about other cultures it was simply superimposed over Palestine without any regard for the existing occupants. (Interestingly, it seems that the British even once considered the establishment of an Israeli state in the Australian Kimberley ranges. From a practical point it seems likely that the Israelis would have it a whopping success as they did with Palestine.)
Had Israël been less repressive of the Palestinians living in the area, the experiment may well have succeeded. But thanks to a bunch of ultra-orthodox Jews the experiment went utterly wrong and it is difficult to see how this may ever be corrected.
It is hard to reconcile how a State so clever as to turn deserts into oases would allow itself to slide into such a moral abyss – as if they are enacting in a sophisticated make-believe legal way what the Nazis had done to the Jews not so long ago.
No wonder Simon Schama ended his five part tekevision series on The story of the Jews saying that the behaviour of the Israelic State is not compatible with the values and norms of Judaism.