3/15/26
Once Upon a Time There Was a Base Called Sde Teiman – or Was There?
Once Upon a Time There Was a Base Called Sde Teiman – or Was There?
Detainees in the Sde Teiman military base.
Once upon a time there was a military base in southern Israel called Sde Teiman, where during the Gaza war four pens were built in which hundreds of Gazans were held without trial, some of them innocent. Once upon a time there were reports of the death of 36 detainees who, according to various accounts, died of torture, starvation or the lack of medical attention. Once upon a time there were also testimonies about detainees who underwent limb amputations due to necrosis caused by permanent shackling in plastic restraints. Once upon a time there were also accounts of sexual abuse and even rape by military reservists who guarded the inmates.
And once upon a time there was the "Sde Teiman affair," in the wake of which a wild mob led by cabinet ministers and lawmakers broke into the camp, in front of the cameras. Once upon a time here was a video that documented the abuse that led to the affair, which ended Thursday with a fart, the fart of Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Itai Ofir, a settler. Only the video remains, forgotten, vilified, cast to the margins of history as irrefutable but entirely irrelevant evidence of what really transpired at Sde Teiman on July 5, 2024. I watched it again this weekend. It was as hard to watch as it was before, infuriating, disgraceful, terrifying.
It depicts goings-on in a torture camp. It shows sadism on the part of men in uniform, prison guards who in the Israeli grotesque are called "combatants," without irony. The video presents compelling evidence of the horrific abuse of a helpless man, writhing in pain at the feet of the storm troopers. One holds a baton while the others hold up riot shields to cover up their crimes.
Remaining, too, are the right-wing mouthpieces who celebrate their victory, the victory of lies over truth, evil over humanity. From here on, only the lies will remain: the lies of the guards in the black hoods, who aren't ashamed to claim they were defending themselves against the danger posed by a starving, tortured man, handcuffed behind his back, as they dragged him along the floor like a sack, his eyes covered; the lies of their lawyers and admirers, who turned the perpetrators into victims, night into day, the torture affair into the video-leak affair. They deflected the conversation from the only question that matters – did it happen or did it not it – to the marginal, totally, irrelevant issues: the former military advocate general, the leak of the video to journalist Guy Peleg, Israel's Channel 12 News which aired it and the procedure in which the new military advocate general rushed to do exactly what was expected of him in order to placate the people who appointed him, in order to put an end to this affair.
A screengrab from footage published on Channel 12, allegedly showing IDF reservists physically and sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman facility in 2025.
But the affair is not over. Instead of the lost issues of justice and equality before the law, of good and evil, of crime and punishment, we have a clear statement by state institutionswhereby from here on, military prison guards are allowed to rip the anus of every prisoner, as long as he is Palestinian, to break his ribs, puncture his lungs. Not only will no harm come to them, they will become heroes. If the heroes of our childhood were, to our shame, soldiers in the shady commando unit 101, the heroes of the new zeitgeist are the criminal prison guards in Unit 100. That is the history of Israel in a nutshell.
The IDF reservists charged with physically and sexually abusing a Gazan detainee at Sde Teiman, November.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
The affair is not over because instead of these questions, which Israel fled from and refrained from addressing, a much more fateful question arises in all its might: What is the role of truth in our lives and is it still relevant? The Sde Teiman affair has delivered its response: No, truth has no importance any more. What really happened is irrelevant, reality has no more role to play, only fabrications do. In the prevailing atmosphere that's taken over, any lie can conceal any truth. This is a scrambling of all values, even more important than the existence of a military prison where torture took place.
Once upon a time there was, or was not, a military base called Sde Teiman, in which Israeli prison guards abused Palestinian detainees as a matter of routine. Once upon a time there were, or were not, military-prison guards who returned home as heroes after committing atrocities in full view of cameras. Once upon a time there was something called truth, but it is no more.