The phenomenon of Israel abducting activists in international waters as they attempt to bring shipments of aid to Gaza has become, through sheer repetition, so familiar as to risk seeming unremarkable. A fleet of ships, manned by aid workers and human rights activists and carrying food and medicine and other humanitarian supplies, departs from Barcelona or Marseilles or Sicily and is intercepted by the Israeli navy in non-territorial waters not far from Crete or Cyprus, its passengers imprisoned.
This is just something that happens now, it seems, just one of the many ways in which Israel behaves (and is allowed to behave) in ways other countries don’t. It’s not Iran or Russia doing this; less still is it Portugal or Norway or Belgium abducting Irish and other European citizens from international waters and imprisoning them, and so there’s only so much attention and outrage one can expect.
But last week’s performance – the most recent rendition, as it were, of the interception and abduction routine – was something different, thanks in part to the starring role played by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security. Among what used to be known as “the international community”, Ben-Gvir provoked a rare level of outrage by posting footage on social media in which he taunted and ridiculed the abducted activists, forcing them to kneel in rows with their hands bound as he stood over them waving an Israeli flag. In one video, he is seen gloating that the activists “came here all full of pride, like big heroes. See how they look now, not heroes, not anything.”
Ben-Gvir is a uniquely repellent figure, an extremist even within the context of Binyamin Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition. He was, famously, denied entry into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a teenager because of his extremist views; he has a number of convictions, including for incitement of racism and for supporting terrorism. Slightly less famously, though no less unsettlingly, he met his wife, fellow ultra-right activist Ayala Nimrodi, when she was 15 and he was 26; they married two years later. According to the New Yorker, they visited on their first date the grave of the settler terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 gunned down 29 Muslim worshippers at a holy site in Hebron.
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His stunt with the abducted flotilla activists was largely orchestrated to shore up his ultra-right credentials in advance of a general election next autumn. As grotesque as it was, it was relatively minor compared with the abuse the abducted activists say they were subjected to when the cameras were off.
The Canadian government said it had received information detailing “appalling abuse” of its citizens; the German and Spanish governments said a number of their citizens returned from captivity with injuries, while the flotilla organisers allege at least 15 activists were sexually assaulted by the Israeli military. (The Israeli authorities have rejected these claims.) The governments of France and Poland have banned Ben-Gvir from entering their territory, citing the appalling treatment of their citizens.
Even US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee weighed in, accusing Ben-Gvir, presumably without ironic intent, of betraying “the dignity of his nation”. Not to be outdone by Huckabee in this absurdist game of exquisite corpse, the Israeli prime minister himself condemned his coalition partner, describing his actions as “not in line with Israel’s values”.
Netanyahu, for whom an arrest warrant has been issued by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, is an unrivalled master of such impassively Orwellian pronouncements. To give him the benefit of the doubt here, though, what he presumably meant by this was that it was not in line with Israel’s values to treat captives in this way when they are not Palestinians – when they are, in particular, Europeans and Americans.
Many of the flotilla activists made some version of this point: that if this is how they were treated, knowing that they would return to their countries and speak publicly about their ordeals, then one can only imagine the brutality of the treatment meted out to Palestinians in Israeli custody who have no such recourse. Here, for instance, is Adam Fitzhenry, one of 13 Irish citizens who were on board the flotilla and taken from international waters to Israel, speaking to RTÉ on his return to Ireland: “Every injury, every bit of abuse, every bit of torture, they knew would be reported back to our Government. They knew we would be able to talk to all these cameras, so just imagine what is happening to the Palestinians every day.” Ben-Gvir himself seemed to hint at this idea in one of his social media videos. “I say to prime minister Netanyahu,” he gloated, “give them to me for a long, long time. Give them to us for the terrorist prisons.”
Thanks to a recent essay by Palestinian author Nasser Abu Srour, published in the magazine Equator, we don’t have to imagine what is happening to the Palestinians in Israeli custody. The essay, entitled Why Don’t You Just Die?, is a memoir of Srour’s experience in an Israeli prison. Srour was imprisoned for life in 1993, having confessed (apparently under torture) to being an accessory to the killing of an Israeli intelligence officer; he was released last October as part of a prisoner exchange deal and deported to Egypt.
The essay is harrowing in its detailing of the dehumanisation and torture suffered by Srour and his fellow political prisoners. For most of his period of incarceration, the conditions in which he and his fellow prisoners were kept were relatively humane; after the Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7th, 2023, this gave way to relentless vengeful cruelty.
“Three months into the war,” he writes, “the identification ‘guard’ was unstitched from the front of uniforms and replaced with ‘warrior’ – in large letters. This new persona had an immediate effect; the warriors behaved as if assigned to lethal missions on the front line. They attacked prisoners for the slightest infraction, real or imagined. They targeted us everywhere – in the head, legs, chest, face – and they assaulted us with everything: canes, truncheons, tear gas, electric shocks, rubber bullets and live ammunition. Sometimes they rushed into cells, beat prisoners, bound them in chains – and then dragged them into the prison yard for a repeat beating. Often they were accompanied by an enormous dog that would attack chained prisoners and leave bleeding wounds on their bodies (as happened to me multiple times).”
[ Israeli far-right minister’s Gaza flotilla abuses likely to be a vote-winnerOpens in new window ]
This, and worse, is what is happening to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody, and it is what Ben-Gvir seems to be announcing he wants to do to those activists attempting to bring humanitarian aid by sea to Gaza. The more he and the government he represents try to humiliate and dehumanise them – to portray them as “not heroes, not anything” – the more remarkable their courage comes to seem.
