A brutal architecture of cruelty in Palestine

The report of Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, tells one of the cruelest and most inhuman stories of our times. It should make the world ashamed that this is fact, not fiction, and feel guilty that it is being enacted in its midst. Cases of brutality perpetrated by individuals or groups are not uncommon. Rogue armies and other such organisations have also been known to commit such acts. But rarely in history has such organised and systematic violence been unleashed on a people by a State with impunity, as Israel has done in the occupied Palestinian territories. The UN Special Rapporteur provides a graphic description of the most inhuman tactics adopted by the Israeli establishment, including its defence and police forces, to oppress, torture and kill the Palestinians. The report is a severe indictment of the Israeli regime and its policies and actions directed against the entire population of the occupied Palestinian territories.

The revelations and observations are serious. Israel has made systematic use of torture involving custodial and non-custodial practices, which “meet the threshold for genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. There is extensive documentation showing that torture has become integral to the policy and practice of domination and repression of the Palestinian population. The implementation of this policy is “through custodial abuse and a relentless campaign of forced displacement, mass killings, deprivation and the destruction of all means of life to inflict long-term collective pain and suffering”. The report goes on to say that a continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror is being imposed—one designed to break bodies, deprive a people of dignity and force them from their land. This, it says, is not incidental violence but the architecture of settler colonialism, built on a foundation of dehumanisation and maintained through cruelty and collective torture. Palestinians are systematically denied dignity, treated as a “rightless” and “expendable” population, and reduced to objects to be controlled or eliminated.

These are strong words coming from a UN official. But various reports in the media and accounts from those with knowledge of the situation vouchsafe for the truth of Albanese’s statements and conclusions. Although her mission was obstructed by the Israeli authorities, she gathered information from sources including 300 testimonies, remote consultations with torture survivors and inputs from others, including Israeli whistleblowers. The report is thorough and comprehensive, supported by references, other reports, media citations, photographs, testimonies and other evidence. 

Albanese states that torture has been employed on a scale not seen before since October 2023 as a form of collective vengeance and destructive intent. Policies, carried out in the name of ensuring Israel’s security, have normalised cruelty. Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke of targeting Palestinians “as an entire nation out there”. Palestinian detainees were labelled “terrorists”, handcuffed in dark cells with iron beds and pit toilets, often in underground detention rooms. Torture is not limited to cells and interrogation rooms.

The report describes how Israeli soldiers have swept up entire communities, seizing even the elderly, people with disabilities, pregnant women and children. Specific groups have been targeted for detention and heightened abuse: activists, doctors, political persons, human rights activists and journalists. Sexual violence is an integral part of the policy. Women, children and men have all been subjected to it. Some of the descriptions evoke repulsion and horror. 

Through mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, military and settler violence and pervasive surveillance and terror, the occupied Palestinian territory has become a space for collective punishment “where the destruction of conditions of life turns genocidal violence into a tool of collective torture with long-term mental and physical consequences”. The homes of over a million people have been destroyed. Thousands of people have been killed, tortured and subjected to all kinds of abuse, and many have been subjected to permanent and life-altering injuries. The report states that genocidal violence functions as a form of collective torture against Palestinians as a group, aimed at breaking their will, stripping their autonomy and ultimately expelling them from their land. Laws have been altered to validate the repression. The State apparatus is most involved in these genocidal policies and actions. Violence has also spread beyond Gaza, with armed forces and violent settlers intensifying patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Albanese warns that Israel is trying to create a new nakba (forced displacement). 

The report makes deeply disturbing reading. Jews, whose homeland is Israel, were themselves victims of one of history’s worst genocides under Hitler’s Germany. That experience ought to have ingrained in them a moral revulsion to such crimes. No other people in the world should be more repelled and sensitive to the horrors of genocide as the Israelis. But, disturbingly, such violence has become State policy in Israel. Is there a psychological lesson here? Do victims develop the oppressors’ mindset?

The nature of genocide cannot be changed by calling it self-defence or a national security imperative. The killing of even a single person is wrong in a rule-bound society. Extermination of a people by the State using the most brutal and inhuman methods violates not only laws and norms of national and international conduct but savages the conscience of the world. 

The report makes recommendations to Israel which include cessation of all acts of torture and ill treatment, dismantling of the apartheid regime in the occupied territory, full reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. It has recommended to the International Criminal Court to investigate the acts of genocide and torture and seek the arrest of the Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli military and other officials, some of whom it has named. The report has also told states and international institutions to recognise Israel as an apartheid state. It has also called for international sanctions and an arms embargo against Israel. The report has reminded the world that its obligation is immediate and delay would entrench a system of cruelty that international law and the United Nations are designed to prevent, stop and punish. But we know that Israel will not heed, and the world is unable to act. 

The colonial British policy and the settler policies in the newly founded Israel were aimed at driving Palestinians from their land. Historical and other accounts and literature have recorded such violence. Even in a work of fiction sympathetic to the Jews’ case, like Leon Uris’ Exodus, such violence is stark. These policies are still in action to kill, maim and drive away Palestinians from their land and create a bigger Israel. The report considers the present genocide as part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler colonialism in Palestine. The Golan Heights and the buffer zone in Syria beyond the 1974 UN-mandated zone have been annexed. Israel has now announced that it wants to occupy a buffer zone in southern Lebanon. The genocide has a purpose, and that is a Greater Israel.

History has witnessed other genocides in the world—the Armenian genocide of 1914-1915 in the Ottoman Empire and the Rwandan genocide of 1994, among them—as well as mass atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre in 1937. The large-scale killing of Native Americans by European settlers provides another grim parallel to the Israeli actions in Palestine. These have been documented in history. The UN rapporteur’s account documents another sordid chapter of killings, torture and dehumanisation of people amounting to a genocide. It is a voice of conscience. That such a tragedy continues to unfold before the eyes of the world, largely unchecked, is a failure not only of politics but of conscience.

In bearing witness to a terrible saga of cruelty, the Albanese report forces the world to confront an uncomfortable truth that even in a land sanctified by teachings of Biblical compassion and sacrifice, the language of power of the present leaders is drowning out the moral voice of history of the land. 

The writer is a former associate editor and editorial advisor of Deccan Herald.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)