South Africa's torture of children woke up the world. Will Israel's crimes do the same?
Teenagers Mohammad al-Zoghbi, Faris Abu Jamal and Mahmoud al-Majayda were abducted last year by Israeli soldiers as they searched for food in Gaza.
They were bound and blindfolded. They survived weeks or months in Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman prison with scarce food, and were subjected to beatings that broke bones, electric shocks, confinement in freezing cells, nighttime raids with dogs or stun grenades, and hours of ultra-loud music in the “disco room”.
Interrogations included these and other variations of torture, including psychological, such as Faris being told that his mother and sisters had been raped and killed by soldiers, and then being suspended by his hands for weeks.
In Mahmoud’s case, an Israeli officer tried to recruit him as a human shield, promising a monthly salary of $9,200 and a well-stocked apartment. He twice attempted suicide.
After immense suffering, “overwhelming pain and paralysing fear”, three hugely changed boys finally returned to their families in Gaza, where their experiences were subsequently documented by professionals.
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Through the torture of these Palestinian children, and many others like them, Israeli officials have daily shredded international law, UN resolutions and the Geneva Conventions, with total impunity.
Targeting children for torture and assault is a strategy aimed at crippling their society’s future. Apartheid South Africa became notorious for this during the lawless, violent state of emergency in the mid-1980s. Global outrage mounted as children spoke out about their treatment, just as these Palestinian boys have done. No one can un-see or un-know what they have lived.
Horrifying testimony
I met some of the affected South African children four decades ago. In the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, in September 1987, 12-year-old Moses Madia from Soweto broke the veil of censorship and secrecy imposed by the apartheid government’s state of emergency.
In testimony to a lawyer that was presented at an international conference, Moses explained how police had randomly seized him and four friends while they walked along the road near their homes, and put them in the back of a police van.
Along the way, police picked up two other boys who were bleeding and crying. Upon arrival at the local police station, the boys were assaulted with a long green hosepipe, wielded first by one policeman and then another. As the smallest of the boys, Moses said he tried desperately to hide behind the others.
'Each time the boot came down upon my back, it would force my face into the floor, and at times I thought that my skull would break'
- Moses Madia, 12
Police made them lie down on the floor, and then “started to kick and stamp on us with their shoes and boots … Each time the boot came down upon my back, it would force my face into the floor, and at times I thought that my skull would break.”
Moses’s horrifying testimony was echoed and amplified by the words of other boys, mothers, lawyers, church leaders and medical staff, recounted over four days in Harare. The children were by then mostly living outside of South Africa.
Testimonies painstakingly gathered by doctors and lawyers over months revealed police patterns, including mass arrests in schools and sporting events; groups of dozens of boys taken naked into mortuaries and made to lie on the white tiled floor, where they were viciously assaulted with whips and batons, sometimes for hours; and boys being struck in the face, losing teeth, suffering electric shocks, and spending weeks in solitary confinement.
Similarly, the testimonies of Mohammad, Faris and Mahmoud, along with other child survivors of Sde Teiman, have been gathered by lawyers, doctors, social workers and researchers with respected human rights organisations, such as Defence for Children International Palestine, Addameer, Al-Haq, Adalah and B’Tselem.
These and other similar groups are under acute threat from the Israeli government. Years of persistent and accelerating critiques have escalated to crippling obstruction. Israeli forces have raided their offices, designated some as terrorist organisations, and blocked international staff and donations - but their crucial humanitarian work continues.
Lawless inhumanity
During the Harare conference, there were protests from government officials in apartheid Pretoria. But the support of South African civil society for the targeted children was powerful and unanswerable. It was a meeting of highly charged emotions, where hundreds of South Africans - who never imagined they would be able to come together in such a manner - resisted the overwhelming power of decades of an apartheid system supported by the West.
But in the mid-1980s, stances began to shift in Britain and other western governments that had been complicit with apartheid for decades. South Africa’s children were pivotal to that change. Within a decade, apartheid was gone in South Africa.
The parallels are inescapable between apartheid South Africa’s destabilisation campaign across southern Africa, aided by Washington; and today’s Israeli bombings, occupations and political assassinations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, with the vital military assistance of the US and other western countries, including Britain and Germany.
Faded photographs of scars covering the back and arms of a young Black boy; of dead Black schoolchildren; and of South African armoured vehicles packed with terrified Black children and police wielding whips, show the inhuman norms of apartheid for children during the 27 years when anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.
Today’s images of Palestinian children dying of cold, hunger and lack of medicines in tents; of the remnants of bombed schools in Gaza; and of children tortured in Israeli prisons, their bodies withheld from their families, are the current equivalent - the inhuman norms of Israeli apartheid.
I have met other groups of boys once devastated like Mohammad, Faris, Mahmoud and Moses, but since transformed by the humanity of strangers. In 1987, in the dying years of South African apartheid, a group of Namibian teenagers in Cuba’s Island of Youth told me confidently that they would go home and become doctors, teachers, scientists and fighter pilots once their nation gained independence from South Africa.
They had arrived in Cuba years earlier, child survivors of apartheid South Africa’s 1978 massacre of 600 Namibian civilians in a refugee camp in Cassinga, southern Angola. One of their Cuban teachers recalled: “They were all so small, so terrorised, so silent, you would have imagined they would be permanent emotional cripples.”
Cuba in the 1980s hosted a network of schools that gave thousands of children from lands crushed by apartheid a first-class education, along with confidence in the new future they could build in their own countries. Cuba had already been under a US economic embargo for more than two decades at that point - sanctions that remain in place to this day, as Washington’s lust for regime change has been fuelled by its latest illegal attack on Venezuela.
Indeed, the US government’s new norms include repeated violations of international law, and rendering impotent the global bodies built half a century ago for a safer and more just world. Shamefully, most other western leaders remain silent in the face of this lawless inhumanity.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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