Israeli hostages, Palestinian prisoners: the worthy and unworthy
By Stuart Rees
Sep 5, 2024
Israeli soldiers stand by a truck packed with a truck packed with stripped, kidnapped Palestinians. Israeli mass kidnapping of Palestinian civilians is a war crime. kidnapped Palestinians. Israeli mass kidnapping of Palestinian civilians is a war crime. (Photo inserted)
Israeli citizens’ demand to bring home an estimated 100 Israeli hostages still held captive by Hamas is assumed to depend on a Gaza ceasefire which would include a Palestinian prisoner release.
By contrast, Palestinian citizens’ “bring them home!” cry concerns the estimated 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, who are also hostages in Israeli jails, including as many as 200 juveniles.
The plight of Israeli hostages is a priority concern for the Israeli public and receives worldwide attention, but the imprisonment of Palestinians attracts political and media interest only as a means of paying attention to the plight of Israelis.
Advocacy for the Israeli hostages’ return, coupled to media and political disinterest in the fate of Palestinian hostages, rests on an age-old policy distinction between worthy and unworthy people. Israeli hostages are worthy, Palestinian prisoner hostages unworthy, yet if the release of Palestinians had been treated with the same urgency as the attention given to the fate of Israelis, both groups would have benefitted. Examine the record.
Of 250 hostages taken by Hamas operatives on October 2023, in November 2023, in exchange for the release of 150 Palestinians, 117 hostages were freed, including 23 Thai nationals and one Filipino. From that date, the Netanyahu Government waged unending war against the people of Gaza and would make no deal with Hamas.
On 8 June, four hostages were rescued by Israeli forces, but to achieve that objective, an estimated 100 Palestinian citizens were killed. A few days ago, the return of the bodies of six Israeli hostages provoked a general strike in Israel and protesters’ demands that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu negotiate a deal for the return of the surviving hostages.
He insisted “no deal with Hamas, our hostages were murdered ‘in cold blood’.” He blustered as though 40,000 Gazans were killed in warm blood. If history is concocted as though only one people are worthy, cruelty continues with little challenge.
That Palestinian prisoners are regarded by Israeli authorities as of little consequence is apparent from a decades-old policy of removal and silencing by imprisonment. In the Washington Post of 13 May 1988, Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Glenn Frenkel described the Israeli invention of administrative detention, a response to the Palestinian second intifada. It was, he wrote, a cruel, arbitrary and harsh system of secret justice, with few discernible rules or standards which gave victims no veritable means of appeal. That system punishes Palestinians even if they are not suspected of committing a crime. It also ensures that any prospective leader is silenced by being imprisoned without trial, often for decades.
The first victims of administrative detention included doctors, lawyers, union leaders, university officials and students, precisely the people whom Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he wanted to negotiate with over the future of Gaza and the West Bank. But once prisoners were defined as terrorists, Israeli politicians could claim there was no leadership and therefore no-one with whom to make peace. My colleague, Dr Evan Jones, observes that the same mentality led to the murder in Tehran on 31 July of Ismail Haniyeh, a Palestinian leader and chief negotiator for a ceasefire and hostage deal.
Since the Hamas killings of October 2023, the maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners has become a weapon of war. By the end of August, al-Jazeera and the Adameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association estimate that thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank have been sent to prisons on security grounds. Removed from public view, they are silenced and may die or disappear.
Once an individual is defined as unworthy or a terrorist threat, horrific treatment can be justified and family members remain ignorant of what is happening. Permission to visit prisoners in Israeli jails has been suspended, but at the end of July, released prisoners told al-Jazeera they had been sexually abused, beaten and tortured. Amnesty International then called on Israel to end “rampant torture” taking place in prisons.
Witnesses of prisoners raped by Israeli Force 100 in the Sde Teiman detention centre prompted an al-Jazeera reporter’s judgment: “This is Israel’s Guantanamo Bay.” The arrest of nine soldiers for the alleged rapes then provoked an attempted invasion of the detention centre by Israeli protesters and a demand from the National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Givir that the soldiers be released.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said any release of prisoners would be a “terrible and horrific event” because their existence posed an existential threat to the security of Israel. He had earlier declared that the dead bodies of Palestinian prisoners should be dragged through the streets as a lesson to others.
Human rights-oriented politics promotes the release of Israeli hostages as a completely justifiable cause, but refusal to release Palestinians, about 4000 of whom are in administrative detention, represents a politics of discrimination: these are Palestinians, even as fast as they are killed or imprisoned they remain a threat, therefore they should not be released, and certainly not as a result of any discussion with Hamas.
A hypocritical morality prevails and has no place for the rules of international law. Age-old prejudice inherent in distinctions between the worthy and unworthy ignores even the 1984 Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Acceptance of this immorality has hindered deliberations about the release of Israeli hostages, has opposed the freeing of large numbers of Palestinian prisoners and shows that history is being repeated.
In the colonisation of Palestine, aggressors can be labelled worthy, the victims unworthy and only one group should be officially regarded as terrorists.
No-one can be sure about the conditions in which the surviving Israelis are being held, but they are almost certainly oppressive.
In worldwide efforts to relieve poverty, only those judged worthy might receive government assistance, people living with a disability are far less likely to receive support than those regarded as able-bodied. Asylum seekers and refugees would need to be judged worthy before they might be given refuge let alone social security or citizenship.
Stuart Rees AM is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney & recipient of the Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize.