A Brief History of Israeli Denialism

Or: Should we believe that the IDF raped Palestinian prisoners with dogs?

IDF soldier and dog of war sharing an intimate moment. To the best of our knowledge, this dog is not implicated in sexual assaults on Palestinian prisoners. Source: Oketz K9 Unit Veterans Foundation.

A lot of people are reading Nicholas Kristof’s NYT’s The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians in horror and disbelief. Could it really be true that multiple Palestinian prisoners held in IDF facilities have been sexually assaulted with dogs? It sounds made up, like the accusation that Israel used to steal organs from dead Palestinians without permission from their families and then tried to cover it up.*

The discourse that has followed brought to mind conversations I used to have about Arab propaganda growing up in Israel. This is my pesonal story from that time - so bear with me.

The Bus 300 Affair

In 1984, Palestinian terrorists** hijacked a bus (“Bus 300”) and tried to take it and its passengers to Gaza. The IDF was able to stop the bus, storm it with commandos, and free all the hostages with only one killed. During the operation, two of the four hijackers were killed. What was kept secret for a brief time, was that two of them were caught alive. They were then beaten to death not far from the scene.

And this became known fairly quickly as journalists saw them alive. Those responsible lied and denied for years, through multiple efforts by the judicial system to uncover the truth. The episode reverberated through Israel’s political, judicial, and security systems. By the end, the public knew that:

• GSS (Shin Bet) head Avraham Shalom lied and coordinated witnesses in an effort to implicate an IDF general in the extrajudicial killing.

• Several members of the GSS and others on the scene drive the two men to an isolated location and beat them to death with rocks and iron bars.

• Senior politicians were implicated though not convicted of any crime. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir for ordering the killing, Defense Minister Moshe Arens for being present at the scene and lying about it, President Chaim Herzog for pardoning the killers AND those that lied about it to investigating judges.

• Israel’s Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir was fired for insisting on a judicial probe.

• Israel’s High Court of Justice approved something that was a novelty at the time. Pre-emptive pardons given to the GSS agents known to have committed the murder before charges could be filed. (This is what Trump is asking Israeli President Herzog to do for Netanyahu.)

• The revelations from this incident led to the establishment of the Landau Commission - an official body that eventually legalized and regulated the use of torture by the security forces.

At every step of this multi-year ordeal there were cover-ups, all of which failed to prevent the truth from coming out. But there were also efforts to evade legal accountability, which were successful. It left a mark on me; in 1984 I was 15 years old and starting to pay read the news. It was only thanks to was left-wing (commercial) publications like Hadashot, Al-Hamishmar and HaOlam Hazeh that the facts where uncovered.

Mom: “Stop Trusting Arab Propaganda”

As I matured other newspapers found their way to me. These were explicitly leftist outlets like Zu Haderech (Israeli Communist Party), Matzpen (Socialist Organization in Israel), and Derekh HaNitzotz. They reported on abuses happening in Lebanon, the Occupied Territories, and among Palestinians living in Israel. It was what you’d expect: killings, torture, detention without trial, land confiscation, settler violence and so on.

When I tried to discuss what I was learning with my mother, she would shake her head and tell me that you can’t believe the Arabs. According to her they are culturally and politically predisposed to lying. Just about anything coming from an Arab source is likely propaganda. While some of what the left-wing press reported on reached a mass-audience in Israel, most did not. The Jewish Israeli public fell mainly in three categories: didn’t know, didn’t care, or were glad it happened. Ah, the good old days. It really was a more innocent time.

One fine day in 1985 my girlfriend’s father was driving us somewhere. He knew I was turning into a leftist and wasn’t too happy about it. He regaled me with a story about transporting Palestinian prisoners from Lebanon to a secret facility in Israel that no one knew about. He chuckled as he described beating the prisoners along the way with his army buddies, all reservists. The message was something like Oh you innocent kid, just wait until the army straightens you out by making you participate in violence against Arabs with your buddies! Note: He was not the only adult to engage me using the same persuasive logic.

That tension, between an authority figure (hi mom!) clutching pearls over ‘Arab lies’ and the boastful confession of torture and unlawful detention is a good way of capturing something so very common back then. It never happened, it didn’t happen like they say, and if it did then it was justified - because look what they do to us. When I told my mother about the secret prison camp where people were tortured she said I must have misunderstood. Or it was Arab propaganda, even though I heard it from an IDF reservist.

(Camp 1391, the secret detention facility revealed to me by my GF’s father, was revealed to the public in 2003.)

When Did We Learn How to Bury Living People?

During my time as a soldier, at the start of the First Intifada, a terrible incident came to light. Somewhere in the West Bank, soldiers beat four young men and then buried them alive with a bulldozer. ‘’Even in my worst dreams, I would never imagine such a thing,’‘ General Amram Mitzna, the commander of troops in the West Bank, said of the case. He’s still alive; I think by now he can imagine such things.

An Israeli pop star, Si Hyman, wrote a song that referenced the incident. Titled Yorim u’Bochim (Shooting and Crying). It came out a month after the incident, clearly inspired by what had happened. It was a powerful protest song was immediately banned from being played on Army Radio.

So about that: discipline over at Army Radio wasn’t that great. They played it once. I happened to be home with my mother when it played. We hadn’t heard this song or even about , so this came as a surprise. One of the lyrics goes “When did we learn how to bury living people?” I remember being in my uniform and watching my mother start crying. I started crying too. She said something like “Maybe you were telling the truth about some of those things after all.”

(Listen to the song on YouTube - it won’t play on substack.)

And So It Goes

Israel during the First Intifada was a more innocent time. Elite public opinion was against things like extrajudicial killing, torture, and burying people alive. When Yitzhak Rabin gave his famous orders to beat Palestinians (“Breaking bones policy”) instead of arresting them, it was argued that this was a humane approach. One of the alternatives it was meant to replace was shooting unarmed protestors (who were often throwing rocks). Deaths and injury from gunfire might have been reduced. Number of limbs broken shot WAY up.

During the New Historians era (early ‘90s) there was a heated debate in Israel over our history. A handful of upstarts were publishing papers using Israeli archives about what happened during Israel’s founding. They demonstrated that the Zionist leadership and military forces deliberately expelled large numbers of Palestinians. They described massacres and other crimes previously not well known. The naysayers weren’t claiming that these facts were wrong; they were asserting that it was wrong to air them. Or to air them without explaining why it was justified.

Generations of Israeli schoolchildren were raised on a different narrative. It claimed that Palestinians ran away because of radio broadcasts from Arab leaders. That they despite public offers of goodwill and equality by Israeli leaders. And if here and there some expulsions did happen, they weren’t part of a larger scheme specifically aimed at ethnic cleansing.

In the end the Israeli public decided that all these new facts didn’t matter very much, expect in one unexpected way. A political party that called for expelling ‘the Arabs’ was banned after winning a seat in the Knesset in 1984. But by the early 90s, support for what became known as ‘Transfer’ went mainstream and an even larger party championing that cause won an even larger share of the vote. This party, Moledet used to publish quotes from Zionist leaders of the past in support of mass expulsion, to help normalize those sentiments.

It worked. Today adherents of those views serve at the highest levels of Israel’s political and security echelons.

When you hear supporters of Israel claim that Kristof’s article is poorly sourced and exaggerated propaganda you should remember the history of Israeli denialism. Every reporter and analyst in Israel who covers the military affairs knows the truth of what Kristof wrote. His editors at the New York Times posted a note saying the claims in his article were extensively fact-checked. The human rights group B’Tselem published a very well documented report about conditions in Israeli prisons with even more evidence of the pervasive use of torture with a sexual component.

I’m Jewish. I grew up in Israel. I served in the army. (Though I did refuse service in the Occupied Territories. and spent time in prison as refusenik). And I’m ashamed, but not at all surprised by these revelations. No one should be. It’s consistent with the evolution of Israel and its leadership. And so is the bizarre nature of the denialism as it has taken shape in social media. We’re having extensive conversations about the logistics of canine sexual assault. As Tucker Carlson might say, “Is this what we’re doing now?”

For all we know, the brave IDF K9 soldiers didn’t insert their dog penises into the rectums of Palestinian prisoners. Maybe they only humped the men while they were bent over, naked. Maybe they lunged at the men’s genitals. Maybe a prison guard smeared peanut butter on someone’s ass and laughed as a dog licked it all up. What an insane debate to be having. The minute you have naked prisoners and dogs interacting AT ALL you’ve lost the debate. The minute the guys who shoved a cell phone into someone’s ass became folk heroes, you’ve lost.

There is no way for Israel to come back from this. The rot, so to speak, has penetrated too deep into that country’s digestive system. Certain people have been shoving poison there, lubing up the entry points into the body politic, and absolutely going to town for ages. Long before the current Israeli administration. And for just as long, American - and American Jewish mainsteam institutions - have insisted that there’s no choice but to give those folks a blank check. They share in the responsibility here; without them, who knows what constraints might have been imposed on Israel’s behavior.

I’m reminded of the Rebbe of Klausenburg, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam (1905–1994). He lost 11 of his children in the Holocaust. He told his students, “it could have been worse.” So they asked him, “What could have been worse than the horrors of that dark period?”

His answer was beautiful in its moral strength – “It would have been worse if we had been the murderers.”

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* Yes, Israel did harvest organs from dead Palestinians without asking permission or informing the families of the deceased. However, defenders of Israel want you to remember that we didn’t kill them for the organs; we killed them for other reasons. The organs were just icing on the cake.

** I still think hijacking a bus full of civilians counts as terrorism. Fully prepared to be cancelled by the hashtag resistance folks. Don’t hijack buses.