JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995, Pages 14, 44

Behind the Headlines

Israeli Legalized Torture Undermines Chances of Reconciliation

By Kathyrn Casa

"Four interrogators came into the room and said, 'We are going to kill you. You will not come out of here alive. You will leave here only dead or insane. Trust us.'"

—Palestinian detainee Ahmed al Batsh, interrogated for 75 days at Ramallah

"If the beating didn't help anymore, because he was about to die, and you just couldn't keep hitting him, they would pour something on the open wounds. It was like acid or something. I don't know. They kept it in a bottle, and poured it. And when that happened, well, it's hard to describe. They just screamed and screamed. Screams like I have never heard."

—Israel Defense Forces reserve First Sergeant A.M., speaking about his 1989 reserve duty at al'Far's detention center.

There are headlines, and then there is reality. The headlines trumpet signing ceremonies and peace prizes, but for most of the 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, reality continues to be daily rounds of mass curfews, arrests, demolitions and checkpoints.

And then comes news that the Israeli government intends to expand its breach of international human rights treaties by broadening the use of torture (or "moderate physical pressure" as it is called in Israel) in an effort to crack down on Islamic extremists who have carried out a spate of attacks in recent weeks that have left some 30 Israelis dead.

This fresh round of violence has strengthened what is often called in Israel the "ticking bomb" argument: that violence is justifiable to extract information that could prevent an imminent killing.

But studies show brutality behind the closely guarded doors of Israeli interrogation chambers has never slowed. And human rights activists argue that Israel and the Palestinians remain locked in a vicious cycle in which violence breeds hatred that leads to more violence, and undermines any chance of peace.

In June 1994, Human Rights Watch released a detailed study indicating that over the past six years as many as 50,000 Palestinian young men have been subjected to interrogation that included some type of torture or ill-treatment. The chilling 316-page study, the most detailed ever done on the subject, is based on interviews with Israeli guards and with 36 Palestinian detainees interrogated between June 1992 and March 1994—a period that encompasses the first six months after the signing of the Israel-PLO declaration of principles.

Its principal author is James Ron, a soft-spoken sociology student at the University of California at Berkeley, who grew up in Jerusalem and still holds dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. Ron was an Israeli paratrooper and worked as a journalist in Jerusalem before joining Human Rights Watch.

He argues that if Israeli interrogators continue to crank out victims, any hope of a genuine peace agreement can be shelved. "If there is an unending stream of people emerging from interrogation with hatred of Israel that's so burning and so deep, this is going to keep going on forever," Ron said in a recent interview.

After 18 months documenting the Israeli interrogation system, Ron concluded that Israel runs "one of the most efficient, vast and all-encompassing information-gathering networks in the world." He found the methods routinely used to extract this information include hooding with tight, foul-smelling fabric, prolonged exposure to extreme heat or cold, blaring music played for hours or days at a time, forced standing or shackling at awkward heights or confinement to cramped spaces, deprivation of sleep and food, strict isolation and restricted access to the toilet.

Ron found interrogations in Israel today are conducted by three agencies: the Shin Bet, a select group of interrogators who use the most refined tactics to carry out 40 to 50 percent of all interrogations, dealing only with those detainees considered experienced in interrogations or of high political or educational caliber; the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which deals primarily with 16- to 20-year-olds suspected of less serious offenses such as stone-throwing or writing graffiti, and whose interrogations are more brutal than the Shin Bet's; and the Israeli Police, whose interrogation system, like that of the IDF, is less organized and subject to less scrutiny than the Shin Bet's, and whose interrogation techniques for 15- and 16-year-old suspects include electric shocks and mock executions.

Torture vs. "Ill Treatment"

Some of the techniques employed by all three agencies constitute torture under international human rights standards, even when used alone. Other techniques could be characterized individually as "ill-treatment," Ron reported, but become torture when used in combination, as Israeli interrogators consistently do. It is a fine point, however, since both torture and ill-treatment are categorically prohibited under international human rights treaties to which Israel is a signatory.

Israel formally defines these tactics as "moderate physical pressure," and officially okayed their use after a 1987 inquiry into the interrogation techniques employed by the elite Shin Bet security forces, carried out by the government-appointed Landau commission.

"The Landau Report is a unique document in the history of liberal democratic regimes in that it basically authorizes the use of torture during interrogation, but subjects it to a hierarchy of control," said Ron. "It doesn't bar torture, it says it can be used, but to do it according to a set of guidelines which set out, in quite some detail, what can be done."

The Landau guidelines were written for the Shin Bet, which was the only agency employing torture at the time. But shortly after the rules were written, the Palestinian intifada erupted, wreaking havoc amid the security service's carefully cultivated network of Palestinian informers. "Military leaders knew they had lost control of the streets," Ron said, "and the Shin Bet knew their system of informants had been cut off." It was then that the use of torture took on new proportions.

"What the Israelis did was basically go into villages and pick up everyone they could see who was between the ages of 16 and 30. They no longer discriminated between people whom they really wanted to get and people who just happened to be on the street. So during those early years of the intifada interrogations were very brutal and very straightforward. People were brought in and clubbed, bones were broken and they gave names. The names were all collected on a huge computer data base and cross-tabulated," Ron said.

While interrogators were gathering huge amounts of information, human rights organizations and the media were beginning to discover the methods used to extract it. Then, in 1991, the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem published a report showing that of a sample group of 41 Palestinian detainees, 40 had been badly beaten.

Not long after, the International Committee of the Red Cross broke with its traditional practice of briefing Israeli officials confidentially on its findings, and publicly denounced Israel's gross use of torture during interrogations.

"Following those reports, the government clamped down on the interrogation agencies and forced them to move to a new phase of techniques," said Ron. "In January 1993, when I began my study, I found a new system, a revamped system that had some very unique characteristics."

What was once made obvious through broken teeth and bones and bruised bodies has now become a more subtle, sophisticated method that has even involved working with a physician's checklist to determine exactly how much "physical pressure" a detainee can survive.

The checklist was exposed in 1993, when an Israeli newspaper, Davar, published a copy of it. The form asks doctors to determine whether a detainee can undergo a prolonged stay in an isolation cell, being tied, wearing a head covering, and prolonged standing. It asks the doctor whether the detainee had any physical injuries prior to the interrogation, and to list his primary medical limitations.

Publication of the checklist caused a minor uproar within Israel and, although the documents no longer are circulating, Ron said IDF medics continue to guide interrogators away from activities that would result in permanent scarring or death.

In many cases, beatings have given way to severe shaking, which is less apt to produce visible injury. Breaking bones and teeth is discouraged. Individual interrogators are protected from identification and accountability by hooding the detainees during interrogation, use of nicknames among interrogators, and the fact that third parties seldom are present during torture sessions.

"By and large they don't beat people up any more," said Ron. "What they do is subject them to a complex package of psychological and physical measures which are designed within 30 days to drive the interrogation subject temporarily insane."

So while the glare of public exposure has forced Israeli interrogators to stop breaking bones, Ron continued, "What we have done is teach them how to interrogate people in much more sophisticated ways so that we no longer can cry foul when someone walks out of an interrogation room."

In doing this, Ron said, "the Israelis have convinced themselves that what they're doing is not really torture because, as logic would have it, if it's so regulated, if it's subjected to so much oversight, how could it be torture?"

Ron recalls sitting in on a military trial in which the interrogators admitted they had tied the detainee to a small chair, placed a hood over his face, shackled his hands and legs together and hadn't let him sleep. "The judge sat there and listened to that and then said, 'OK, so did you torture him?'"

It is at this point, Ron contends, that human rights organizations come up against a dead end. "We're reporting on things the government already admits to. The government basically admits to 95 percent of what's in here," he said, pointing to his study, "only we interpret it differently. We say this is torture and they say it's not."

"What we are seeing now is a ratcheting up of the interrogation process," said Ron, pointing out that when Israeli troops pulled back from parts of Gaza and Jericho, in May, the number of interrogations dropped significantly. Since then, however, Human Rights Watch statistics show arrests have again increased.

"This is all in a frantic effort to find both the Hamas armed cells that are carrying out attacks on Israel, and also to keep track of all the other political groups that oppose the peace process," Ron said.

"Obviously, you need a political solution," Ron continued. "But in the interim the system itself has got to be changed...We've been talking about a political solution since 1967 and in the meantime, we've taught the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to hate every Israeli for as long as they live."