Palestinians in Gaza protesting over the February 2013 death of Arafat Jaradat in Megiddo prison. Image: Joe Catron/Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0
Those who can’t connect barbaric abuses of Palestinians by Israelis — generation after generation — and the crimes of October 7, have little understanding of human nature, writes Jonathan Cook.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
For many years I lived just up the road from Megiddo prison in northern Israel, where new film of Israeli guards torturing Palestinians en masse has been published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
I drove past Megiddo prison on hundreds of occasions. Over time I came to barely notice the squat grey buildings, surrounded by watch towers and razor wire.
Footage uploaded to Israeli media depicts Israeli occupation forces collectively torturing Palestinians held in Megiddo prison.
The video shows prisoners lying face down on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, while being terrorized by dogs. pic.twitter.com/mZOIC1Glj8
There are several large prisons like Megiddo in Israel’s north. It is where Palestinians end up after they have been seized from their homes, often in the middle of the night. Israel, and the Western media, say these Palestinians have been “arrested,” as though Israel is enforcing some kind of legitimate legal procedure over oppressed subjects — or rather objects — of its occupation.
The prisons are invariably located close to major roads in Israel, presumably because Israelis find it reassuring to know Palestinians are being locked up in such large numbers. (As an aside, I should mention that transferring prisoners out of occupied territory into the occupier’s territory is a war crime. But let that pass.)
Even before the mass round-ups of the past 11 months, the Palestinian Authority estimated that 800,000 Palestinians — or 40 percent of the male population — had spent time in an Israeli prison.
Many had never been charged with any crime and had never received a trial. Not that that would make any difference — the conviction rate of Palestinians in Israel’s military courts is near 100 percent. There is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, it seems.
Terrifying rite of passage
Rather, imprisonment is a kind of terrifying rite of passage that has been endured by generations of Palestinians, one required of them by the bureaucracy managing Israel’s apartheid-occupation system.
Torture, even of children, has been routine in these prisons since the occupation began nearly 60 years ago, as Israeli human rights groups have been regularly documenting.
View of Meggido prison (on right) from Meggido Hill in 2007. Image: Golf Bravo/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The imprisonment and torture of Palestinians serve several goals for Israel. It crushes the spirit of Palestinians individually and collectively. It traumatises generation after generation, creating fear and suspicion.
And it helps to recruit a large class of Palestinian informants and collaborators who secretly work with Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, to foil Palestinian resistance operations against Israel’s illegal occupation forces.
This kind of Palestinian resistance, we should note, is specifically permitted in international law. In other words, what the West denounces as “terrorism” is actually legal under the principles the West established after the Second World War.
Paradoxical, to put it mildly.
The humiliation and trauma systematically inflicted on these hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the wider Palestinian society — and the complete lack of concern from the “international community”, or, worse, its complicity — have inevitably fed into growing religious extremism among parts of a Palestinian society that was once largely secular.
No justice, then resistance
If there is no justice, no redress to be offered by the international institutions created by a West that both trumpets its secularism while also flaunting its Christian values, then, Palestinians conclude, maybe they can find justice — or at least retribution — not through futile, rigged “negotiations” but through greater commitment to violent resistance carried out in the name of Islam.
That explains the emergence of the group Hamas in the late 1980s and its relentless growth in popularity.
Hamas’ unapologetic Islamic militancy contrasted with the more accommodationist secular nationalism of Fatah, long led by Mahmoud Abbas. Support for Hamas was something Israel was only too happy to cultivate. It understood that Islamism would discredit the Palestinian cause in the eyes of Westerners and further bond the West to Israel.
But Israel’s system of torture — whether in “normal” prisons like Megiddo or in the giant open-air prison that Israel made of Gaza — also led to an ever greater determination among groups like Hamas to liberate themselves through violence.
If Israel could not be reasoned with, if it only understood the sword, then that was the language Palestinians would speak to Israel. This was precisely the rationale for the atrocities of October 7.
If you were horrified by October 7, but are not more horrified by what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for more than half a century in its prisons, then you are either in a state of deep ignorance — hardly surprising given the lack of media coverage of Israel’s despotic rule over Palestinians — or in deep denial.
If you cannot see the causal connection between the barbaric abuses of Palestinians generation after generation and the crimes committed on October 7, then you have no understanding of human nature.
Family trauma passed down
You have no inner awareness of how you would act had you, your father and your grandfather been tortured in an Israeli prison, a trauma passed down through families little differently than hair colour or build.
The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at all of us, not just Palestinians. ‘Black sites’ are about reminding those who have been colonised and enslaved of a simple lesson: resistance is futile.
The findings by Israeli and international organisations that this is going on systematically.
The horrors are staring us in the face. But too many of us are looking away, reverting to the magical thinking of our babyhoods in which, when we cover our eyes, the world disappears.
The horrors of Israel’s prison system aren’t new. They have been going on for decades. What’s new is that Israel has intensified the abuse. It now relishes atrocities it previously hid away like a dark secret.
Israel is lost. It is deep in a black, genocidal hole. The question is, are you going to allow yourself to be sucked into the same void? Are you going to keep covering your eyes? Does the torture end just because you prefer not to see it?
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). Republished from here with the author’s permission. If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
Riria Dalton-Reedy during a live cross for Te Ao Māori News. Image: Te Ao Māori News/File
COMMENTARY: By Jessica Tyson
In recent years Kiingi Tuheitia became known as the “king of unity” with his determined drive forkotahitanga involving rangatahi.
So last week, through his tangihanga and the accession of his successor, a unique first took shape as the largest group of Māori broadcasters to ever work together collaborated with iwi in honouring his “wairua wind”.
Every day during the week-long tangihanga, news and radio teams from many Māori media outlets worked together to broadcast live news breakout shows on Whakaata Māori, online and on social media, showing what was happening on the ground at Tūrangawaewae Marae.
On the final day, Thursday, September 5, an official outside broadcast aired on Whakaata Māori and TVNZ presented by reporters from a variety of Māori media outlets covering the nehu (burial) of Kiingi Tuheitia and the whakawahinga (coronation) of Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po Pootatau Te Wherowhero te Tuawaru.
Aukaha executive producer Roihana Nuri led the news breakout shows throughout the week, with the inclusion and support of kaimahi from news and iwi radio outlets; Te Ao Maōri News, Te Ao with Moana, The Hui, Te Karere, TVNZ, Aukaha News, Tahu News, Tainui Live, Waatea Radio, Nga Iwi FM, Maniapoto FM and Te Reo o Te Uru.
The shows aired live on Facebook and attracted audiences of many thousands from around the country and Australia.
“The highlight was seeing the collaboration of all Māori news and current affairs programmes coming together and having some real old hands and young up-and-coming journos in the mix,” Nuri said. “We were all there for the one kaupapa which was to poroporoaki Kiingi Tuheitia.”
“This is the beginning of what reshaping Māori news media and working together is. We all talk collaboration — this is actual collaboration and action and is about succession because the oldies, like me, we’re not going to be here forever, and we need to start getting our rangatahi in the mix.
“We need to start to be able to share the knowledge, share the skills, the tricks of the trade.”
Peata Melbourne and Tumamao Harawira presented the lives breakouts from the studio at Whakaata Māori. Image: Te Ao Māori News/File
On day one, six reporters presented the news breakouts but that quickly increased later in the week as more regional and national news services freed up their resources to join the collaboration.
“On the final uhunga day, I think we had 13 reporters and presenters in the mix of that two hour pre-show before the big broadcast started,” Nuri recalled.
“All of the reporters and presenters had kaupapa to talk about; parking, roadblocks, mahi ringawera, hauora stuff. It’s a lot of information to give to the tens of thousands going to descend on Tūrangawaewae.”
The news breakouts were presented by Peata Melbourne and Tumamao Harawira in the Whakaata Māori studio. They crossed live to reporters at Tūrangawaewae including Riria Dalton-Reedy, Michael Cugley, Kereama Wright, Moana Maniapoto, Matai Smith, Shakayla Andrews-Alapaki, Regan Paranihi, Aroha Broughton, Te Kawa Paora, Herewini Waikato, Kawe Roes, Te Okiwa Mclean and Timoti Tiakiwai.
Aukaha reporter Te Kawa Paora during his live cross. Image: Te Ao Māori News/File
Working behind the scenes were more than 50 kaimahi (staff) including studio operators, producers, engineers, editors, camera operators, journalists and digital content creators from across the Māori media sector.
“There are so many moving pieces,” Nuri said “I was really extremely proud of every single individual who participated in our news breakouts over the seven days of Kiingi Tuheitia’s tangihanga.”
Te Ao with Moana journalist Te Rina Kowhai jumped in to help manage the operational grunt across the broadcast as line-up producer, pulling on her vast experience both technically and editorially.
Although it was a sad occasion, the Kiingitanga, for Kowhai, brought kotahitanga for the Māori media sector.
“For me unity, reo me ona tikanga, has always driven me and the kaupapa in this industry,” Kowhai said.
She also reflected on veteran Māori broadcasters, who had mentored her such as the late Whai Ngata, Hone Edwards, Miki Apiti, and especially the late Derek Wooster who had directed Te Arikinui Te Atarangikaahu’s tangihanga.
“Derek would tell me all the stories, the fond memories, the technical logistics of how they covered the late Te Arikinui Te Atarangikaahu tangi and now I have my own stories to tell. We’ve made history through this Māori media sector collaboration and I feel optimistic for our rangatahi coming into this space. It’s been a huge privilege.”
Behind the scenes as Te Reo o Te Uru reporter Aroha Broughton goes live. Image: Te Ao Māori News/File
Strong advocate for rangatahi With Kiingi Tuheitia such a strong advocate for rangatahi, producers wanted to prioritise the rangatahi voice in the news breakouts. Many of the young reporters were paired up with senior reporters to help produce their live crosses.
“We’ve got these amazing senior journos and presenters in the mix but it was about bringing the rangatahi in there on a sad occasion but quite a historical moment.
“We have a new queen, nearly a rangatahi queen, Kuini Nga Wai hono i te po. So a lot of things said to me, in terms of my experience, we needed to get as many of our rangatahi from all of our programmes into this.”
Shakayla Andrews-Alapaki from Tahu News said she felt “really honoured to be here because nō Te Wai Pounamu ahau (I’m from the South Island). I’ve travelled all this way to be a kairipoata (reporter) and it’s the biggest kaupapa in my lifetime so far as a Māori. So, nōku te hōnore ki te tae mai ki kōnei ki te whakanui tō tātou nei kiingi (I’m honoured to be here to celebrate our king).”
Te Reo o Te Uru reporter Regan Paranihi said, “Mōku ake, he mea nui i te mea ko ia te Kiingi. Ko ia te Kiingi mō ngāi tātou te iwi Māori. Nā reira, i runga i tērā āhuatanga, nōku anō te maringa nui kia whai wāhi ki tēnei kaupapa i runga anō i te kotahitanga o te noho me te ao pāpāho Māori. Koira tāna i whai nei i roto i tēnei tau tata nei, ko te kotahitanga me te kite i te kotahitanga i roto i te ao pāpāho Māori. Koirā pea te ōhākī i waiho e ia mō mātou. Nō reira nōku te maringa nui, ka mutu, ka mahara ake au i tēnei wā mo te roanga o tōku oranga.”
“For me personally, it’s significant because he’s the king. He is our Māori king. So, because of that, I feel fortunate to be a part of this event, and to be a part of this united effort by the Māori broadcasting industry. That’s what he was striving for over the last year or so, it was unity, and now we’re seeing unity in the Māori media. Perhaps that is the legacy he has left us. So, I feel very fortunate, and I will remember this time for the rest of my life.”
Waikato-Tainui communications and engagement manager Jason Ake said he heard the phrase ‘Ko koe te kiingi o kotahitanga, ko koe te kiingi o te rangatahi (You are the king of unity, You are the king of the youth)’ said by speakers on the ātea during the pōwhiri.
“So what we did see is absolutely those two things in full force. We got to see Māori media organisations collaborate, kotahitanga, and we also got to have a significant part of that reflected in the rangatahi voice as well. So I think we achieved absolutely what he was known for and what he was being recognised for in that space. So well done.”
‘Iwi-led and media-supported’ On the final day, thousands from across Aotearoa and the world tuned into the official broadcast led by the Kiingitanga, aired live on Whakaata Māori and TVNZ of the historic coronation of Kuini Nga Wai hono i te po and the nehu of Kiingi Tuheitia.
Experienced journalists presented the show including Julian Wilcox, Stacey Morrison, Tom Roa, Mihingarangi Forbes, Tini Molyneux, Scotty Morrison, John Campbell, Oriini Kaipara, Matai Smith, Te Arahi Maipi and Maiki Sherman.
In a social media post, Kaipara said: “May this new wave of solidarity continue to grow alongside our inherent right to mana motuhake. May it strengthen us all as a collective in a turbulent industry. May us oldies and not-so-oldies hear, see, value and nurture our awesome rangatahi to become their best selves and let them lead the way from time to time”.
Whakaata Māori news and current affairs director Blake Ihimaera said the official broadcast was “iwi-led and media supported”.
“For me personally, I’ve always been a big believer in iwi and the power of iwi and watching the Kiingitanga, Waikato-Tainui waka in action was amazing to witness,” she said.
“That official broadcast, being made by the Kiingitanga and taken by all of the stations, was another collaboration; one emphasising that iwi are in control of their narrative. It’s their kaupapa but we can support it and make it amazing.”
Collaboration with iwi radio Another highlight was the inclusion of iwi radio outlets including Tainui Live, Waatea Radio, Nga Iwi FM, Maniapoto FM and Te Reo o Te Uru.
As well as having radio journalists on the ground at Tūrangawaewae, Te Reo o Te Uru executive producer and Te Korimako o Taranaki station manager Tipene O’Brien travelled to Whakaata Māori in Auckland during the week to watch and learn the process of delivering a broadcast from behind the scenes in the studio.
“That was a big eye-opener for us. The overall goal for us is to be able to take those ideas and implement them at a regional level. Obviously, the difference is that we don’t have the big budgets and we don’t have the human resources that they do, but I think, if we understand the concepts of how they do it, we can figure out how to adapt it and customise to our needs and wants.”
Before each newsbreak ended, presenters handed over the audience to the Kiingitanga Facebook page to continue to watch the live coverage of each pōwhiri at Tuurangawaewae.
Ake said: “It was really exciting for us because at one point there we handed over an audience of between 120,000 and 130,000 viewers straight into the Kiingitanga page, so it wasn’t starting off cold and it gave good context leading into it every morning and afternoon.”
Ake said it was important for national and regional news to continue to collaborate because “a lot of regionally significant stories would otherwise be lost on a national platform.”
“Sometimes those stories have equal weight back home. It’s great listening to some of the nationally focused news that takes place but, equally, I think the focus for regional stories, there is a hunger for them and the landscape is moving very, very quickly in that regard,” Ake said.
He said linear broadcasting would probably be dead or defunct within the next five years so news outlets needed to create content where “our people are either listening or watching”.
“We can’t carry on delivering content on platforms where our people actually have a [lower] consumption rate. We need to go to them and we know more and more they are consuming stuff digitally and online and TVNZ and Whakaata Māori have recognised that.”
The future is collaboration Ihimaera said now that Māori media had collaborated on “the biggest kaupapa of our lifetime”, she expected it to continue to happen.
“We’ve set a foundation for that to happen further. The future is collaboration and so, whatever kaupapa it might be, we probably will be using all of our our partners because it’s only right.”
Ihimaera said Whakaata Māori and Te Ao Māori News would work to collaborate with other Māori media during Te Matatini next year.
O’Brien said Te Reo o Te Uru would “certainly be contributing in a big way” to produce content in collaboration with other outlets during Te Matatini.
“It’s a messaging that’s coming clear from Te Māngai Pāho that we need to look at collaborating and working together.”
Te Māngai Pāho is the government-funded agency that provides funding for media and content to promote Māori language and culture. Whakaata Māori is also government-funded but is expected to receive a $10.3 million funding decrease over the next two financial years.
“We made history — we are right now being supported by the government [but] they could support a lot more,” Nuri said.
“I feel we just demonstrated and showed the power of kotahitanga within Māori media. I think the government will be willing to have a conversation about how we create an innovative digital future for us.”
This week Whakaata Māori and Te Ao Māori News have already collaborated with the Ngā Manu Kōrero to bring a livestream of its pōwhiri online.
Jess Tyson is a multimedia journalist and digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. She has also worked as co-presenter for Rereātea, Māori Television’s online midday news bulletin, as well as an Online Reporter. This article was first published by Te Ao Māori News and is republished with the author’s permission.
We need to begin thinking, feeling, and living in accordance with this new reality. We cannot continue along the ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory that our small circles of compassion have made possible, or else we will go extinct. Image: caitlinjohnstone.com.au
We can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
The other day someone on Twitter asked me why he should care about what’s happening in Gaza, saying, “Why should I care about anyone that isn’t in a 20 mile radius of where I live?”
I was a bit taken aback by this. I must confess I live in a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to caring about the world; most people I interact with from day to day either agree with me or disagree with me about the abusive nature of the empire and what our problems are and what should be done about them, but the one thing they all have in common is that they care.
Outside my little bubble I suspect this “why should I care?” sentiment is probably pretty common, though.
There’s a 2017 Huffington Post article by Kayla Chadwick titled “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” which expresses frustration at this type of attitude, because it is very difficult to argue against. If you’re not already the sort of person who would naturally care about the death and suffering in Gaza, it’s going to be hard to get you to see why you should.
If you’re missing the part of yourself which hurts when it sees children ripped apart by Israeli bombs, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the value of that part.
But I like a challenge. So I’ve had a bit of a think about it, and I’ve come up with the most honest and complete answer to this question that I am able to produce right now. It might not convince anyone, but it is a well-reasoned answer.
Why should you care about Gaza? Because we can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.
For better or for worse, we now live on a planet with eight billion humans who are no longer separated by distance in the way we used to be. This species which spent so much of its development relating to itself in units of small tribes is now an intimately networked global community whose behavior is literally altering the face of this planet, and we need to start acting like it.
We need to start doing what Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion” beyond our small tribal units of people we personally know and like, or we simply won’t be able to survive and thrive on this planet.
The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.
The ability of plutocrats to exploit cheap labor overseas directly affects how much you and your neighbours can earn to provide for yourselves and your families. If we had true international class solidarity, they wouldn’t be able to get away with that anymore.
The ability of corporations to feed our biosphere into the capitalism machine and offload costs of production onto the ecosystem to maximise profits directly affects the kind of environment we’ll all be living in in the coming years. Corporate suits can only get away with this because the citizenry who vastly outnumber them have been manipulated into accepting their cancerous behavior.
The ability of war profiteers and empire managers to push for more war and militarism around the world directly affects how much of our nation’s wealth and resources are allocated to supporting the needs of ordinary people at home, and threatens us all with the looming possibility of nuclear armageddon.
The imperial propaganda machine works so hard to manufacture consent for this madness because otherwise nobody would consent to it.
The oligarchs and government agencies who run the US-centralised empire are able to exploit our tendency to only care about our immediate surroundings to construct global mechanisms which affect everything — including our immediate surroundings. All it takes is a little narrative manipulation coupled with our own nearsightedness to keep us from seeing what they’re doing.
They destabilise entire regions in the Global South with war and imperialist extraction, and when people start fleeing those horrible conditions they use propaganda to manipulate those in the Global North into hating immigrants instead of focusing on what’s driving the mass exoduses.
They deliberately maintain a level of unemployment to artificially depress wages, and then propagandise the working poor into thinking the unemployed are parasitic welfare moochers.
They create a controlled opposition false dichotomy between two mainstream political factions who both serve the capitalist empire in every meaningful way, and then manipulate both sides into blaming all the problems this causes on the other side instead of on the architects of this whole disaster.
These manipulations would not work if our circles of compassion were sufficiently wide. The same moral myopia which causes us to fail to see a Palestinian child as worthy of our care and attention also causes us to fail to recognise the underlying causes of all the major problems we see all around us.
It’s true that caring about that Palestinian child, in and of itself, will yield you no personal material gain. But being the sort of person who would care about that Palestinian child will help pave the way from hell on earth to paradise.
Enough humans having a wide enough circle of compassion to care about the suffering of other humans who they will never meet is all it will take for us to create a healthy world.
Our species can no longer existentially afford small circles of compassion. We can no longer afford ignorance and apathy. We’ve got to start learning about what’s happening in the world, thinking in terms of global community, and caring about our fellow beings on this planet in the way we care for our friends and neighbors.
Sure that’s not our tendency right now, but every species eventually hits a point where it needs to adapt or go the way of the dinosaur. That’s where we’re at right now.
The days where “rugged individualism” could be defended as a rational worldview are long over, if it was ever rational to begin with.
This isn’t the 12th century. We’re not going from birth to death in tiny communities unconnected to the rest of the world. Whatever device you’re reading this on has parts from multiple foreign countries, which passed through countless foreign hands to come into yours.
We all touch one another’s lives around the world from distances which used to have no relevance to the human experience of this planet.
We need to begin thinking, feeling, and living in accordance with this new reality. We cannot continue along the ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory that our small circles of compassion have made possible, or else we will go extinct.
That’s why you should care about Gaza. Because humanity’s collective failure to care about such things is driving our species further and further into misery and dystopia, and closer and closer to the precipice of eternal oblivion.
Kiingi Tuheitia is laid to rest at Taupiri maunga this week. Image: RNZ/Nick Monro
RNZ MEDIAWATCH:By Colin Peacock
“Anticipation is growing. The warriors are ready. They’re preparing themselves. The paddlers are already on their waka,” Scotty Morrison, alongside veteran journalist Tini Molyneux, told viewers from the banks of the Waikato River.
It was Thursday, and the body of Kiingi Tuheitia was being escorted to the barge to take him to his resting place on Taupiri maunga.
That prompted Morrison — the presenter of TVNZ’s Te Karere and Marae — to recall that council permission was required in 2006 for Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu to make the same journey.
“In 2008 after the Waikato River settlement … a request was put in by Waikato Tainui that they had more control over the river. This time they could say: ‘We’re taking our King on the awa at this particular time,’” Morrison said.
“That’s mana motuhake for you,” Molyneux replied.
Times have changed a lot for the media since 2006 too.
Whakaata Māori now has two TV channels, which both carried live coverage of the ceremonies over five days.
The Kiingitanga’s own channel also broadcast live throughout on YouTube and Facebook as well.
The Kiingitanga’s own channel live broadcast.
Another broadcaster who joined that epic broadcast on Friday, Matai Smith, reminded viewers that the notion of media is not what it was in 2006 either.
“We know that we live in a world of TikTok and Instagram. [We know] the relevance of the Kiingitanga to Waikato Tainui, but also to us here in Aotearoa — and many of us could be seen as quite ignorant of the significance of this kaupapa,” Smith said.
Kuini Nga wai hono i te po is crowned . . . “it’s going to be interesting to see how she shapes Kiingitanga into this modern age.” Image: Kiingitanga/RNZ
“I’ve been checking the socials because she is 27 years old, and the average age of Māori is also 27 years old. This is the way that this generation communicates,” Forbes said, noting that her own social feeds filled up with tributes to the new Kuini.
While the tangihanga itself was a sombre and highly ceremonial occasion, the live coverage also had moments of levity on the paepae — and between broadcasters and their guests.
All this played out at Tuurangawaewae marae less than a fortnight after dignitaries and the media gathered for the annual Koroneihana celebration of the coronation of Kiingi Tuheitia.
The historic moment in te ao Māori and New Zealand history was covered comprehensively over five days thanks to collaboration between Whakaata Māori and the iwi radio network Te Whakaruruhau. It was probably the longest continuous multimedia coverage of any event in our media’s history.
So how was all this done?
Kawe Roes hosting Kawe Korero on Whakaata Māori. Image: Maori Television screenshot
One of those in the media pack at Tuurangawaewae throughout was former Whakaata Māori presenter Kawe Roes, who is now a digital media reporter for Waatea News.
The Auckland-based Waatea also provides news to Te Whakaruruhau o Ngā Reo Irirangi Māori — the national iwi radio network.
“Tainui and the Kiingitanga already have systems in place to make it easy for broadcasting. They’ve been doing live streams for nearly 15 years,” Roes told Mediawatch.
“In my years of broadcasting, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the amount of talent that was put into making sure Kiingi Tuheitia had the best broadcast for his tangihanga for the whole world to watch.
“Once Tuheitia had taken the throne, he literally became the king of social media. By doing that so early Kiingitanga and Koroneihana events were able to transition from a special broadcast that might have been done in the TVNZ days to a livestream.
“The hardest part wasn’t getting anyone there. We had so many people to choose from, including journalists like myself who are versed in te reo and English. You also had Māori journalists who were just versed in English and Iwi radio networks were also part of that.”
The Morning Report team at the tangi for Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII and the naming of the new Māori monarch, 5 September 2024. Image: Layla Bailey-McDowell/RNZ
Roes said it was one big collective effort.
“The kaupapa was that the broadcast was more important than the brands. Even though we’re in different organisations, we all know each other. We’re a very small family, and I think by having that rapport made the job easier.
“We shared all our knowledge. I was sharing knowledge of Kiingitanga and Tainui whakapapa with a New Zealand Herald reporter.”
“We put that to the side. If I, as a Māori journalist, can’t help him then what am I doing on my job, really?
“At the end of the day, we’re here to put out an amazing story. And for me, that’s what made it beautiful.”
Were they broadcasting in the service of Kiingitanga and iwi around the country? Or to be the eyes and ears of people who could not be there? To capture it all for history? Or all of the above?
“From our Māori broadcasting perspective, it was all about quality … because we knew it was going to be historic. The journalists, they took all the knowledge around them, and they put out some amazing content.”
Back to the future
Dr Ruakere Hond speaks to Morning Report at the tangi for Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII and the naming of the new Māori monarch. Image: RNZ/Layla Bailey-McDowell
The Kiingitanga evolved to deal with the Crown over urgent matters such as land sales and alienation. Now there is a young queen who is of the digital generation at a time when Māori/Crown relations are again tense and controversial.
“So it’s going to be interesting to see how she shapes Kiingitanga into this modern age. She is the boss. She is now the queen of Māoridom and how she wants to roll with tikanga, how she wants to roll in a digital space is up to her,” Roes said.
“From what I can tell, a lot of the status quo will remain. The only thing I would suggest is be careful who you’re talking to, not because of what you’re going to say, but we don’t want to overuse the majesty, and people end up hōhā listening to her.
“The reality is — in my Tainui perspective — we look at them with a sense of tapu. That means you don’t naturally go up to them and start talking. But we might see her going to Waitangi for instance.
“With young people, that might be where she thrives a bit more, and she can connect more with rangatahi — and she’s an easy lady to talk to.”
Māori media have treated the Kuini’s accession in a reverential way. But when seeking the voice of Māoridom on political or controversial things, that will have to change.
“I think the King changed the media landscape when throwing out support for the Māori Party. We’ve got an example there on how we can critique and how we can ask questions.
“But you’ll only ever get to the monarch through spokespersons, and that’s why you have people like Rahi Papa and (Kīngitanga’s chief of staff and adviser) Ngira Simmonds, who bring those thoughts to the media. Tainui are across how to deal with media — an iwi who have been dealing with the Crown for 166 years.”
Colin Peacock is the RNZ Mediawatch presenter. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The mainstream [Australian] media is very largely a mouthpiece for Washington propaganda. And that American propaganda is pushed out through the legacy media. Image: Pearls and Irritations
Of the international intelligence information that comes to Australian agencies from the Five Eyes, 90 percent comes from the CIA and related US intelligence agencies. So in effect we have the colonisation of our intelligence agencies These agencies dominate the advice to ministers, writes John Menadue.
Michael Lester:Hello again listeners to Community Radio Northern Beaches Community Voices and also the Pearls and Irritations podcast. I’m Michael Lester.
Our guest today is the publisher and founder of the Pearls and Irritations Public Policy online journal, the celebrated John Menadue, with whom we’ll be so pleased to have a discussion today. John has a long and high profile experience in both the public service, for which he’s been awarded the Order of Australia and also in business.
As a public servant, he was secretary of a number of departments over the years, prime minister and cabinet under a couple of different prime ministers, immigration and ethnic affairs, special minister of state and the Department of Trade and also Ambassador to Japan.
And in his private sector career, he was a general manager at News Corp and the chief executive of Qantas. These are just among many of his considerable activities.
These days, as I say, he’s a publisher, public commentator, writer, and we’re absolutely delighted to welcome you here to Radio Northern Beaches and the P&I podcast, John.
John Menadue: Thank you, Michael. Thanks for the welcome and for what you’ve had to say about Pearls and Irritations. My wife says that she’s the Pearl and I’m the Irritation.
ML:You launched, I think, P&I, what, 2013 or 2011; anyway, you’ve been going a long while. And I noticed the other day you observed that you’d published some 20,000 items on Pearls and Irritations to do with public policy. That’s an amazing achievement itself as an independent media outlet in Australia, isn’t it?
JM: I’m quite pleased with it and so is Susie, my wife. We started 13 years ago and we did everything. I used to write all the stories and Susie handled the technical, admin, financial matters, but it’s grown dramatically since then. We now contract some of the work to people that can help us in editorial, in production and IT. It’s achieving quite a lot of influence among ministers, politicians, journalists and other opinion leaders in the community.
We’re looking now at what the future holds. I’m 89 and Susie, my wife, is not in good health. So we’re looking at new governance arrangements, a public company with outside directors so that we can continue Pearls and Irritations well into the future.
Pearls and Irritations publisher John Menadue . . . “I’m afraid some of [the mainstream media] are just incorrigible. They in fact act as stenographers to powerful interests.” Image: Independent Australian
ML: So you made a real contribution through this and you’ve given the opportunity for so many expert, experienced, independent voices to commentate on public policy issues of great importance, not least vis-a-vis, might I say, mainstream media treatment of a lot of these issues. This is one of your themes and motivations with Pearls and Irritations as a public policy journal, isn’t it? That our mainstream media perhaps don’t do the job they might do in covering significant issues of public policy?
JM: That’s our hope and intention, but I’m afraid some of them are just incorrigible. They in fact act as stenographers to powerful interests.
It’s quite a shame what mainstream media is serving up today, propaganda for the United States, so focused on America.Occasionally we get nonsense about the British royal family or some irrelevant feature like that.
But we’re very badly served. Our media shows very little interest in our own region. It is ignorant and prejudiced against China. It is not concerned about our relations with Indonesia, with the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam.
It’s all focused on the United States.We’re seeing it on an enormous scale now with the US elections. Even the ABC has a Planet America programme.
It’s so much focused on America as if we’re an island parked off New York. We are being Americanised in so many areas and particularly in our media.
ML: What has led to this state of affairs in the way that mainstream media treats major public policy issues these days? It hasn’t always been like that or has it?
JM: We’ve been a country that’s been frightened of our region, the countries where we have to make our future. And we’ve turned first to the United Kingdom as a protector. That ended in tears in Singapore.
And now we turn to the United States to look after us in this dangerous world, rather than making our own way as an independent country in our own region. That fear of our region, racism, white Australia, yellow peril all feature in Australia and in our media.
But when we had good, strong leaders, for example, Malcolm Fraser on refugees, he gave leadership and our role in the region.
Gough Whitlam did it also. If we have strong leadership, we can break from our focus on the United States at the expense of our own region. In the end, we’ve got to decide that as we live in this region, we’ve got to prosper in this region.
Security in our region, not from our region. We can do it, but I’m afraid that we’ve been retreating from Asia dreadfully over the last two or three decades. I thought when we had a Labor government, things would be different, but they’re not.
We are still frightened of our own region and embracing at every opportunity, the United States.
ML: Another theme of the many years of publishing Pearls and Irritations is that you are concerned to rebuild some degree of public confidence and trust that has been lost in the political system and that you seek to provide a platform for good policy discussion with the emphasis being on public policy. How has the public policy process been undermined or become so narrow minded if that’s one way of describing it?
JM: Contracting out work to private contractors, the big four accounting firms, getting advice, and not trusting the public service has meant that the quality of our public service has declined considerably. That has to be rebuilt so we get better policy development.
Ministers have been responsible, particularly Scott Morrison, for downgrading the public service and believing somehow or other that better advice can be obtained in the private sector.
Another factor has been the enormous growth in the power of lobbyists for corporate Australia and for foreign companies as well. Ministers have become beholden to pressure from powerful lobby groups.
One particular example, with which I’m quite familiar is in the health field. We are never likely to have real improvements in Medicare, for example, unless the government is prepared to take on the power of lobbyists — the providers, the doctors, the pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies in Australia.
But it’s not just in health where lobbyists are causing so much damage. The power of lobbyists has discredited the role of governments that are seduced by powerful interests rather than serving the community.
The media have just entrenched this problem. Governments are criticised at every opportunity. Australia can be served by the media taking a more positive view about the importance of good policy development and not getting sidetracked all the time about some trivial personal political issue.
The media publish the handouts of the lobbyists, whether it’s the health industry or whether it’s in the fossil fuel industries. These are the main factors that have contributed to the lack of confidence and the lack of trust in good government in Australia.
ML: A particular editorial focus that’s evident in Pearls and Irritations is promoting, I think in your words, a peaceful dialogue and engagement with China. Why is this required and why do you put it forward as a particularly important part of what you see as the mission of your Pearls and Irritations public policy journal?
JM; China, is our largest market and will continue to be so. There is a very jaundiced view, particularly from the United States, which we then copy, that China is a great threat. It’s not a threat to Australia and it’s not a threat to the United States homeland.
But it is to a degree a threat, a competitive threat to the United States in economy and trade. America didn’t worry about China when it was poor, but now that it’s strong militarily, economically and in technology, America is very concerned and feels that its future, its own leadership, its hegemony in the world is being contested.
Unfortunately, Australia has allowed itself to be drawn into the American contest with China. It’s one provocation after another. If it’s not within China itself, it’s on Taiwan, human rights in Hong Kong. Every opportunity is found by the United States to provoke China, if possible, and lead it into war.
I think, frankly, China will be more careful than that.
China’s problem is that it’s successful. And that’s what America cannot accept. By comparison, China does not make the military threat to other countries that the United States presents.
America is the most violent, aggressive country in the world. The greatest threat to peace in the world is the United States and we’re seeing that particularly now expressed in Israel and in Gaza.
But there’s a history. America’s almost always at war and has been since its independence in 1776. By contrast, China doesn’t have that sort of record and history. It is certainly concerned about security on its borders, and it has borders with 14 countries.
But it doesn’t project its power like the US. It doesn’t bomb other countries like the United States. It doesn’t have military bases surrounding the United States.
The United States has about 800 bases around the world. It’s not surprising that China feels threatened by what the United States is doing. And until the United States comes to a sensible, realistic view about China and deals with it politically, I think they’re going to make continual problems for us.
We have this dichotomy that China is our major trading partner but it’s seen by many as a strategic threat. I think that is a mistake.
ML: But what about your views about the public policy process underlying Australia’s policy in reaching the positions that we’re taking vis-a-vis China?
JM: There are several reasons for it, but I think the major one is that Australian governments, the previous government and now this one, takes the advice of intelligence agencies rather than the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Our intelligence agencies are part of Five Eyes. Of the international intelligence which comes to Australian agencies, 90 percent comes from the CIA and related US intelligence agencies. So in effect we’ve had the colonisation of our intelligence agencies and they’re the ones that the Australian government listens to.
Very senior people in those agencies have direct access to the Prime Minister. He listens to them rather than to Penny Wong or the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. On most public issues involving China, the Department of Foreign Affairs has become a wallflower.
It’s a great tragedy because so much of our future in the region depends on good diplomacy with China, with the ASEAN, with the countries of our region.
Those intelligence agencies in Australia, together with American funded, military funded organisations such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have the ear of governments. They’ve also got the ear of the media.
Stories are leaked to the media all the time from those agencies in order to heighten our fear of the region. The Americanisation of Australia is widespread. But our intelligence agencies have been Americanised as well, and they’re leading us down a very dangerous path.
ML: I’m speaking with our guest today on Reno Northern Beaches Community Voices and on the Pearls and Irritations podcast with the publisher of Pearls and Irritations Public Policy Journal, John Menadue, distinguished Australian public servant and businessman.
John, again, it’s one thing to talk about that, but governments, when they change, and we’ve had a change of government recently, very often, as I’m sure you know from personal experience, have the opportunity and do indeed change their advisors and adopt different policies, and one might have expected this to happen.
Why didn’t we see a change of the guard like we saw a change of government?
JM: I think this government is timid on almost everything. It was timid from day one on administrative arrangements, departmental arrangements, heads of departments.
For example, there was no change made to dismantle the Department of Home Affairs with Michael Pezzullo. That should have happened on day one, but it didn’t happen.
Concerns we’ve had in migration, the role of foreign affairs and intelligence with all those intelligence agencies gathered together in one department has been very bad for Australia.
Very few changes were made in the leadership of our intelligence agencies, the Office of National Assessments, in ASIO. The same advice has been continued. In almost every area you can look at, the government has been timid, unprepared to take on vested interests, lobbyists, and change departments to make them more attuned to what the government wants to do.
But the government doesn’t want to upset anyone. And as a result, we’re having a continuation of badly informed ministers and departments that have really not been effectively changed to meet the requirements and needs of, what I thought was a reforming government.
ML: In that context, AUKUS and the nuclear submarine deal might be perhaps a case in point of the broader issues and points you’re making. How would you characterise the nature of the public policy process and decision behind AUKUS? How were the decisions made and in what manner?
JM: By political appointees and confidants of Morrison. There’s been no public discussion. There’s been no public statement by Morrison or by Albanese about AUKUS — its history, why we’re doing it.
It’s been left to briefings of journalists and others. I think it’s disgraceful what’s happened in that area. It’s time the Australian government spelled out to us what it all means, but it’s not going to do it. Because I believe the case is so threadbare that it’s not game to put it to the public test.
And so we’re continuing in this ludicrous arrangement, this fiscal calamity, which Morrison inflicted on the Albanese government which it hasn’t been game to contest.
My own view is that frankly, AUKUS will never happen. It is so absurd — the delay, the cost, the failure of submarine construction or the delays in the United States, the problems of the submarine construction and maintenance in the United Kingdom.
For all those sorts of reasons, I don’t think it’ll really happen. Unfortunately, we’re going to waste a lot of money and a lot of time. I don’t think the Department of Defence could run any major project, certainly not a project like this.
Defence has been unsuccessful in the frigate and numerous other programmes. Our Department of Defence really is not up to the job and that among other reasons gives me reason to believe, and hope frankly, that AUKUS will collapse under its own stupidity.
But what I think is of more concern is the real estate, which we are freely leasing to the Americans. We had it first with the Marines in Darwin. We have it also coming now with US B-52 aircraft based out of Tindal in the Northern Territory and the submarine base in Perth, Western Australia.
These bases are being made available to the United States with very little control by Australia. The government carries on with nonsense about how our sovereignty will be protected.
In fact, it won’t be protected. If there’s any difficulties, for example, over a war with China over Taiwan, and the Americans are involved, there is no way Americans will consult with us about whether they can use nuclear armed vessels out of Tindal, for example.
The Americans will insist that Pine Gap continues to operate. So we are locked in through ceding so much of our real estate and the sovereignty that goes with it.
Penny Wong has been asked about American aircraft out of Tindal, carrying nuclear weapons and she says to us, sorry but the Americans won’t confirm or deny what they do.
Good heavens, this is our territory. This is our sovereignty. And we won’t even ask the Americans operating out of Tindal, whether they’re carrying nuclear weapons.
Back in the days of Malcolm Fraser, he made a statement to the Parliament insisting that no vessels or aircraft carrying nuclear weapons or ships carrying nuclear weapons could access Australian ports or operate over Australia without the permission of the Australian government.
And now Penny Wong says, we won’t ask. You can do what you like. We know the US won’t confirm or deny.
When it came to the Solomon Islands, a treaty that the Solomons negotiated with China on strategic and defence matters, Penny Wong was very upset about this secret agreement. There should be transparency, she warned.
But that’s small fry, compared with the fact that the Australian government will allow United States aircraft to operate out of Tindal without the Australian government knowing whether they are carrying nuclear weapons. I think that’s outrageous.
ML: Notwithstanding many of the very technical and economic and other discussions around the nuclear submarine’s acquisition, it does seem that politically, at least, and not least from the media presentation of our policy position that we’re very clearly signing up with our US allies against contingency attacks on Taiwan that we would be committed to take a part in and we’re also moving very closely, to well the phrase is interoperability, with the US forces and equipment but also personnel too.
You mentioned earlier, intelligence personnel and I believe there’s a lot of US personnel in the Department of Defence too?
JM: That’s right. It’s just another example of Americanisation which is reflected in our intelligence agencies, Department of Defence, interchangeability of our military forces, the fusion of our military or particularly our Navy with the United States. It’s all becoming one fused enterprise with the United States.
And in any difficulties, we would not be able, as far as I can see, to disengage from what the United States is doing. And we would be particularly vulnerable because of the AUKUS submarines. That’s if they ever come to anything. Because the AUKUS submarines, we are told, would operate off the Chinese coast to attack Chinese submarines or somehow provide intelligence for the Americans and for us.
These submarines will not be nuclear armed, which means that in the event of a conflict, we would have no bargaining or no counter to China. We’d be the weak link in the alliance with the United States.
China will not be prepared to strike the mainland United States for fear of massive retaliation. We are the weak link with Pine Gap and other real estate that I mentioned. We would be making ourselves much more vulnerable by this association with the United States.
Those AUKUS submarines will provide no deterrence for us, but make us more vulnerable if a conflict arises in which we are effectively part of the US military operation.
ML: How would you characterise the mainstream media’s presentation and treatment of these issues?
JM: The mainstream media is very largely a mouthpiece for Washington propaganda. And that American propaganda is pushed out through the legacy media, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the news agencies, Fox News which in turn are influenced by the military/ business complex which Eisenhower warned us about years ago.
The power of those groups with the CIA and the influence that they have, means that they overwhelm our media. That’s reflected particularly in The Australian and News Corporation publications.
I don’t know how some of those journalists can hold their heads. They’ve been on the drip feed of America for so long. They cannot see a world that is not dominated and led by the United States.
I’m hoping that over time, Pearls and Irritations and other independent media will grow and provide a more balanced view about Australia’s role in our region and in our own development.
We need to keep good relations with the United States. They’re an important player, but I think that we are unnecessarily risking our future by throwing our lot almost entirely in with the United States.
Minister for Defence, Richard Marles is leading the Americanisation of our military. I think Penny Wong is to some extent trying to pull him back. But unfortunately so much of the leadership of Australia in defence, in the media, is part and parcel of the mistaken United States view of the world.
ML: What sort of voices are we not hearing in the media or in Australia on this question?
JM: It’s not going to change, Michael. I can’t see it changing with Lachlan Murdoch in charge. I think it’s getting worse, if possible, within News Corporation. It’s a very, very difficult and desperate situation where we’re being served so poorly.
ML: Is there a strong independent media and potential for voices through independent media in Australia?
JM: No, we haven’t got one. The best hope at the side, of course, is the ABC and SBS public broadcasters, but they’ve been seduced as well by all things American.
We’ve seen that particularly in recent months over the conflict in Gaza. The ABC and SBS heavily favour Israel. It is shameful.
They’re still the best hope of the side, but they need more money. They’re getting a little bit more from the government, but I think they are sadly lacking in leadership and proper understanding of what the role of a public broadcaster should be.
I don’t think there’s a quick answer to any of this. And I hope that we can extricate ourselves without too much damage in the future. Our media has a great responsibility and must be held responsible for the damage that it is causing in Australia.
ML: Well, look, thank you very much, John Menadue, for joining us on Radio Northern Beaches and on the Pearls and Irritations podcast. John Menadue, publisher, founder, editor-in-chief of, for the last 13 years, the public policy journal Pearls and Irritations. We’ve been discussing the role of the mainstream media, independent media, in the public policy processes too in Australia, and particularly in the context of international relations and in this case our relationships with the US and China.
Thank you so much John for taking the time and for sharing your thoughts with us here today. Thanks for joining us John.
JM: Thank you. Let’s hope for better days.
John Menadue, founder and publisher of Pearls and Irritations public policy journal has had a senior professional career in the media, public service and airlines. In 1985, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for public service. In 2009, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Adelaide in recognition of his significant and lifelong contribution to Australian society. This transcript of the Pearls and Irritations podcast on 10 August 2024 is republished with permission.
If there are no red lines for Israel when it comes to brutalising Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza, why would there be any red lines for those kidnapped off its streets and dragged into its dungeons? Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
Israel’s zealots are ignoring the pleas of the top brass. They want to widen the circle of war, whatever the consequences.
ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook
There should be nothing surprising about the revelation that troops at Sde Teiman, a detention camp set up by Israel in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, are routinely using rape as a weapon of torture against Palestinian inmates.
Last month, nine soldiers from a prison unit, Force 100, were arrested for gang-raping a Palestinian inmate with a sharp object. He had to be hospitalised with his injuries.
At least 53 prisoners are known to have died in Israeli detention, presumed in most cases to be either through torture or following the denial of access to medical care. No investigations have been carried out by Israel and no arrests have been made.
Why should it be of any surprise that Israel’s self-proclaimed “most moral army in the world” uses torture and rape against Palestinians? It would be truly surprising if this was not happening.
After all, this is the same military that for 10 months has used starvation as a weapon of war against the 2.3 million people of Gaza, half of them children.
It is the same military that since October has laid waste to all of Gaza’s hospitals, as well as destroying almost all of its schools and 70 percent of its homes. It is the same military that is known to have killed over that period at least 40,000 Palestinians, with a further 21,000 children missing.
It is the same military currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court in the world.
No red lines If there are no red lines for Israel when it comes to brutalising Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza, why would there be any red lines for those kidnapped off its streets and dragged into its dungeons?
I documented some of the horrors unfolding in Sde Teiman in these pages back in May.
Months ago, the Israeli media began publishing testimonies from whistleblowing guards and doctors detailing the depraved conditions there.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to the detention camp, leaving it entirely unmonitored.
The United Nations published a report on July 31 into the conditions in which some 9400 captive Palestinians have been held since last October. Most have been cut off from the outside world, and the reason for their seizure and imprisonment was never provided.
The report concludes that “appalling acts” of torture and abuse are taking place at all of Israel’s detention centres, including sexual violence, waterboarding and attacks with dogs.
The authors note “forced nudity of both men and women; beatings while naked, including on the genitals; electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced to undergo repeated humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and threats of rape; and the inappropriate touching of women by both male and female soldiers”.
There are, according to the investigation, “consistent reports” of Israeli security forces “inserting objects into detainees’ anuses”.
Children sexually abused
Last month, Save the Children found that many hundreds of Palestinian children had been imprisoned in Israel, where they faced starvation and sexual abuse.
And this week B’Tselem, Israel’s main human rights group monitoring the occupation, produced a report — titled “Welcome to Hell” — which included the testimonies of dozens of Palestinians who had emerged from what it called “inhuman conditions”. Most had never been charged with an offence.
It concluded that the abuses at Sde Teiman were “just the tip of the iceberg”. All of Israel’s detention centres formed “a network of torture camps for Palestinians” in which “every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering”. It added that this was “an organised, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities”.
Tal Steiner, head of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, which has long campaigned against the systematic torture of Palestinian detainees, wrote last week that Sde Teiman “was a place where the most horrible torture we had ever seen was occurring”.
In short, it has been an open secret in Israel that torture and sexual assault are routine at Sde Teiman.
The abuse is so horrifying that last month Israel’s High Court ordered officials to explain why they were operating outside Israel’s own laws governing the internment of “unlawful combatants”.
The surprise is not that sexual violence is being inflicted on Palestinian captives. It is that Israel’s top brass ever imagined the arrest of Israeli soldiers for raping a Palestinian would pass muster with the public.
Toxic can of worms
Instead, by making the arrests, the army opened a toxic can of worms.
The arrests provoked a massive backlash from soldiers, politicians, Israeli media, and large sections of the Israeli public.
Rioters, led by members of the Israeli Parliament, broke into Sde Teiman. An even larger group, including members of Force 100, tried to invade a military base, Beit Lid, where the soldiers were being held in an attempt to free them.
The police, under the control of Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader with openly fascist leanings, delayed arriving to break up the protests. Ben Gvir has called for Palestinian prisoners to be summarily executed — or killed with “a shot to the head” — to save on the costs of holding them.
No one was arrested over what amounted to a mutiny as well as a major breach of security.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, helped whip up popular indignation, denouncing the arrests and describing the Force 100 soldiers as “heroic warriors”.
Other prominent cabinet ministers echoed him.
Three soldiers freed
Already, three of the soldiers have been freed, and more will likely follow.
The consensus in Israel is that any abuse, including rape, is permitted against the thousands of Palestinians who have been seized by Israel in recent months — including women, children and many hundreds of medical personnel.
That consensus is the same one that thinks it fine to bomb Palestinian women and children in Gaza, destroy their homes and starve them.
Such depraved attitudes are not new. They draw on ideological convictions and legal precedents that developed through decades of Israel’s illegal occupation. Israeli society has completely normalised the idea that Palestinians are less than human and that any and every abuse of them is allowed.
Hamas’s attack on October 7 simply brought the long-standing moral corruption at the core of Israeli society more obviously out into the open.
In 2016, for example, the Israeli military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.
Compensation suit dismissed
In 2015, Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed a compensation suit from a Lebanese prisoner that his lawyers submitted after he was released in a prisoner swap. Mustafa Dirani had been raped with a baton 15 years earlier in a secret jail known as Facility 1391.
Despite Dirani’s claim being supported by a medical assessment from the time made by an Israeli military doctor, the court ruled that anyone engaged in an armed conflict with Israel could not make a claim against the Israeli state.
Meanwhile, human and legal rights groups have regularly reported cases of Israeli soldiers and police raping and sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children.
A clear message was sent to Israeli soldiers over many decades that, just as the genocidal murder of Palestinians is considered warranted and “lawful”, the torture and rape of Palestinians held in captivity is considered warranted and “lawful” too.
Understandably, there was indignation that the long-established “rules” — that any and every atrocity is permitted — appeared suddenly and arbitrarily to have been changed.
The biggest question is this: why did the Israeli military’s top legal adviser approve opening an investigation into the Force 100 soldiers — and why now?
The answer is obvious. Israel’s commanders are in panic after a spate of setbacks in the international legal arena.
‘Plausible’ Gaza genocide
The ICJ, sometimes referred to as the World Court, has put Israel on trial for committing what it considers a “plausible” genocide in Gaza.
Separately, it concluded last month that Israel’s 57-year occupation is illegal and a form of aggression against the Palestinian people. Gaza never stopped being under occupation, the judges ruled, despite claims from its apologists, including Western governments, to the contrary.
Significantly, that means Palestinians have a legal right to resist their occupation. Or, to put it another way, they have an immutable right to self-defence against their Israeli occupiers, while Israel has no such right against the Palestinians it illegally occupies.
Israel is not in “armed conflict” with the Palestinian people. It is brutally occupying and oppressing them.
Israel must immediately end the occupation to regain such a right of self-defence — something it demonstrably has no intention to do.
Meanwhile, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the ICJ’s sister court, is actively seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes.
The various cases reinforce each other. The World Court’s decisions are making it ever harder for the ICC to drag its feet in issuing and expanding the circle of arrest warrants.
Countervailing pressures
Both courts are now under enormous, countervailing pressures.
On the one side, massive external pressure is being exerted on the ICJ and ICC from states such as the US, Britain and Germany that are prepared to see the genocide in Gaza continue.
And on the other, the judges themselves are fully aware of what is at stake if they fail to act.
The longer they delay, the more they discredit international law and their own role as arbiters of that law. That will give even more leeway for other states to claim that inaction by the courts has set a precedent for their own right to commit war crimes.
International law, the entire rationale for the ICJ and ICC’s existence, stands on a precipice. Israel’s genocide threatens to bring it all crashing down.
Israel’s top brass stand in the middle of that fight.
They are confident that Washington will block at the UN Security Council any effort to enforce the ICJ rulings against them — either a future one on genocide in Gaza or the existing one on their illegal occupation.
No US veto at ICC
But arrest warrants from the ICC are a different matter. Washington has no such veto. All states signed up to the ICC’s Rome Statute – that is, most of the West, minus the US — will be obligated to arrest Israeli officials who step on their soil and to hand them over to The Hague.
Israel and the US had been hoping to use technicalities to delay the issuing of the arrest warrants for as long as possible. Most significantly, they recruited the UK, which has signed the Rome Statute, to do their dirty work.
It looked like the new UK government under Keir Starmer would continue where its predecessor left off by tying up the court in lengthy and obscure legal debates about the continuing applicability of the long-dead, 30-year-old Oslo Accords.
A former human rights lawyer, Starmer has repeatedly backed Israel’s “plausible” genocide, even arguing that the starvation of Gaza’s population, including its children, could be justified as “self-defence” — an idea entirely alien to international law, which treats it as collective punishment and a war crime.
But now with a secure parliamentary majority, even Starmer appears to be baulking at being seen as helping Netanyahu personally avoid arrest for war crimes.
That has suddenly left both Netanyahu and the Israeli military command starkly exposed — which is the reason they felt compelled to approve the arrest of the Force 100 soldiers.
Top prass pretexts
Under a rule known as “complementarity”, Israeli officials might be able to avoid war crimes trials at The Hague if they can demonstrate that Israel is able and willing to prosecute war crimes itself. That would avert the need for the ICC to step in and fulfil its mandate.
The Israeli top brass hoped they could feed a few lowly soldiers to the Israeli courts and drag out the trials for years. In the meantime, Washington would have the pretext it needed to bully the ICC into dropping the case for arrests on the grounds that Israel was already doing the job of prosecuting war crimes.
The patent problem with this strategy is that the ICC isn’t primarily interested in a few grunts being prosecuted in Israel as war criminals, even assuming the trials ever take place.
At issue is the military strategy that has allowed Israel to bomb Gaza into the Stone Age. At issue is a political culture that has made starving 2.3 million people seem normal.
At issue is a religious and nationalistic fervour long cultivated in the army that now encourages soldiers to execute Palestinian children by shooting them in the head and chest, as a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza has testified.
At issue is a military hierarchy that turns a blind eye to soldiers raping and sexually abusing Palestinian captives, including children.
The buck stops not with a handful of soldiers in Force 100. It stops with the Israeli government and military leaders. They are at the top of a command chain that has authorised war crimes in Gaza for the past 10 months – and before that, for decades across the occupied territories.
What is at stake
This is why observers have totally underestimated what is at stake with the rulings of the ICC and ICJ.
These judgments against Israel are forcing out into the light of day for proper scrutiny a state of affairs that has been quietly accepted by the West for decades. Should Israel have the right to operate as an apartheid regime that systematically engages in ethnic cleansing and the murder of Palestinians?
A direct answer is needed from each Western capital. There is nowhere left to hide. Western states are being presented with a stark choice: either openly back Israeli apartheid and genocide, or for the first time withdraw support.
The Israeli far-right, which now dominates both politically and in the army’s combat ranks, cares about none of this. It is immune to pressure. It is willing to go it alone.
As the Israeli media has been warning for some time, sections of the army are effectively now turning into militias that follow their own rules.
Israel’s military commanders, on the other hand, are starting to understand the trap they have set for themselves. They have long cultivated fascistic zealotry among ground troops needed to dehumanise and better oppress Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. But the war crimes proudly being live-streamed by their units now leave them exposed to the legal consequences.
Israel’s international isolation means a place one day for them in the dock at The Hague.
Israeli society’s demons exposed The ICC and ICJ rulings are not just bringing Israeli society’s demons out into the open, or those of a complicit Western political and media class.
The international legal order is gradually cornering Israel’s war machine, forcing it to turn in on itself. The interests of the Israeli military command are now fundamentally opposed to those of the rank and file and the political leadership.
The result, as military expert Yagil Levy has long warned, will be an increasing breakdown of discipline, as the attempts to arrest Force 100 soldiers demonstrated all too clearly.
The Israeli military juggernaut cannot be easily or quickly turned around.
The military command is reported to be furiously trying to push Netanyahu into agreeing on a hostage deal to bring about a ceasefire — not because it cares about the welfare of Palestinian civilians, or the hostages, but because the longer this “plausible” genocide continues, the bigger chance the generals will end up at The Hague.
Israel’s zealots are ignoring the pleas of the top brass. They want not only to continue the drive to eliminate the Palestinian people but to widen the circle of war, whatever the consequences.
That included the reckless, incendiary move last month to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran — a provocation with one aim only: to undermine the moderates in Hamas and Tehran.
If, as seems certain, Israel’s commanders are unwilling or incapable of reining in these excesses, then the World Court will find it impossible to ignore the charge of genocide against Israel and the ICC will be compelled to issue arrest warrants against more of the military leadership.
A logic has been created in which evil feeds on evil in a death spiral. The question is how much more carnage and misery can Israel spread on the way down.
Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.
A "Stop the genocide" banner in today's "Stop the killing of children" protest in the Te Komititanga Square in New Zealand's largest city Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR
Speakers at a large rally in the heart of New Zealand’s largest city today strongly condemned Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinian children in its 10-month genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip.
The 2000-strong rally was replicated in “Stop the war on children” protests across New Zealand this weekend.
Ironically, the demonstrations came as world leaders and humanitarian organisations condemned the latest atrocity by the Israeli military.
“School time” on Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip enclave in downtown Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square today. Image: David Robie/APR
An Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians in Gaza City during prayers has killed more than 100 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian officials who expect the death toll to rise.
While the Israeli military claimed in a statement that its air force on Saturday struck a “command and control centre” that “served as a hideout for Hamas terrorists and commanders” at the al-Tabin school.
However, it did not provide evidence and claimed it had taken steps to reduce the risk of harming civilians while questioning the accuracy of the reported death toll.
“There has been no evidence to back up the claims made by the Israeli military over the last 10 months when targeting civilian infrastructure and densely populated areas that are filled with displaced Palestinians,” reports Hamdah Salhut of Al Jazeera.
“Right after the Gaza City school was struck with three air strikes by the Israeli army, the military released a statement claiming that they were targeting Hamas operatives inside both the school and the mosque.
The Israeli carnage at Gaza’s al-Tabin school . . . world condemnation. Image: AJ screenshot APR
“They say that they use precise munitions in order to minimise the civilian damage and death, that this was an intelligence-based attack carried out in coordination with the Shin Bet, the internal security agency.
‘Pictures show different story’
“But pictures show a different story. The sources on the ground, the medics and the Civil Defence workers who are picking up body parts of Palestinians that have been blown to pieces tell a different story.
“We also heard from an Israeli army spokesperson in English who said that the military is denying the fact that more than 100 Palestinians were killed, based on Israeli military intelligence, which again was not provided.”
Al Jazeera has been banned by the Israeli government from reporting or broadcasting within Israel. It is reporting the Israeli side of the war from Amman, capital of the neighbouring state of Jordan.
Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that Israel’s attack went against “all humanitarian values” and was “an indication of the Israeli government’s attempt to block [peace] efforts and postpone them”.
It added that “the absence of a decisive international stance to restrain Israeli aggression and compel it to respect international law and stop its aggression against Gaza” was resulting in “unprecedented killings, deaths and human catastrophe”.
Five Israeli attacks on Gaza schools this week . . . at least 179 people killed and 154 wounded or missing. Graphic: Al Jazeera CC (creative commons) 10 August 2024
Qatar Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the attack constituted a “horrific massacre and a brutal crime against defenceless civilians”.
It called for an independent UN fact-finding mission to investigate attacks on shelters for displaced Palestinians in Gaza and demanded that the international community oblige Israel to ensure their protection and uphold international law.
Qatar, Egypt and the United States are the mediators between Israel and Gaza and have called for a new round of ceasefire negotiations for Thursday as fears grow of a broader conflict involving Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah.
Auckland “Stop The War on Children” protesters in Te Komititanga Square today. Image: David Robie/APR
Hamas “The massacre at al-Tabin school in the Daraj neighbourhood in central Gaza City is a horrific crime that constitutes a dangerous escalation,” said the movement that governs the Gaza Strip.
Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the Palestinian group’s political bureau, said there were no armed men at the school.
Hamas said in its statement that Israel’s claims of the school being used as the group’s command centre were “excuses to target civilians, schools, hospitals, and refugee tents, all of which are false pretexts and expose lies to justify its crimes”.
“We call on our Arab and Islamic countries and the international community to fulfill their responsibilities and take urgent action to stop these massacres and halt the escalating Zionist aggression against our people and defenseless citizens,” the statement said.
Ismail al-Thawabta, the director-general of Gaza’s Government Media Office, called on the international community and UN Security Council “to pressure Israel to end this cascading bloodbath among our people, namely innocent women and children”.
Fatah Fatah, the rival Palestinian faction that last month signed a “national unity” agreement with Hamas, said the attack was a “heinous bloody massacre” that represented the “peak of terrorism and criminality”.
“Committing these massacres confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt its efforts to exterminate our people through the policy of cumulative killing and mass massacres that make living consciences tremble,” it said in a statement.
A distraught Gazan mother wails for her family killed in an Israeli attack on al-Tabin school killing at least 100 people people. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Iran Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, said the Israeli government’s goal was to thwart ceasefire negotiations and continue the war.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Nasser Kanaani said Israel had again shown it was not committed to international law as he condemned the attack as genocide and a war crime.
He urged immediate action from the UN Security Council and said Israel’s actions in Gaza were a threat to international peace and security.
Protesters at the “Stop the War on Children” rally in Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square today. Image: David Robie/APR
Egypt The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Israel’s “deliberate killing” of unarmed Palestinians showed it lacked the political will to end the war in Gaza.
In a statement cited by the state-run Middle East News Agency, it accused Israel of repeatedly committing “large-scale crimes” against “unarmed civilians” whenever there was an international push for a ceasefire.
It said such attacks reflected “an unprecedented disregard” for international law.
Saudi Arabia The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it denounced the attack in the “strongest terms” and stressed that “mass massacres” in the enclave “need to stop”.
Gaza is “experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe due to the ongoing violations of international law”, the ministry said.
Lebanon The strike offered clear evidence of the Israeli government’s disregard for international humanitarian law and its intention to prolong the war and expand its scope, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
It called on the international community to take a unified stance and stressed that stopping the war in Gaza is necessary to prevent an escalation in the region.
Turkey “Israel has committed a new crime against humanity by massacring more than a hundred civilians who had taken refuge in a school,” Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said.
It accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of wanting “to sabotage ceasefire negotiations”.
UNRWA
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, called for an end to the “horrors unfolding under our watch”.
“We cannot let the unbearable become a new norm,” he wrote on X.
“The more recurrent, the more we lose our collective humanity,” he said, reiterating his call for a “ceasefire now”.
Gaza civil defence workers and community volunteers trying to save lives after the Israeli bombing of the al-Tabin school in Gaza City. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation The strike was “an extension of the brutal massacres and genocide committed by the Israeli occupation for more than ten months in the Gaza Strip”, the OIC said.
It called on the international community, especially the UN Security Council, to oblige Israel to respect its obligations as an occupying power under international law and provide protection to the Palestinian people.
European Union The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said he was “horrified” by the images of the attack, adding that at least 10 schools had been targeted in the past week.
“There’s no justification for these massacres,” he said.
Horrified by images from a sheltering school in Gaza hit by an Israeli strike, w/ reportedly dozens of Palestinian victims.
At least 10 schools were targeted in the last weeks. There’s no justification for these massacres
We are dismayed by the terrible overall death toll. 1/2
UN rapporteur
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, condemned the world’s “indifference” to mass bloodshed in Gaza.
“Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one ‘safe zone’ at the time. With US and European weapons,” Albanese posted on X.
“May the Palestinians forgive us for our collective inability to protect them, honouring the most basic meaning of international law.”
Gaza: In the largest and most shameful concentration camp of the 21st century, Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one ‘safe zone’ at the time. With US and European… https://t.co/bHmrFbySYi
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) August 10, 2024
Save the Children Tamer Kirolos, a regional director for the United Kingdom-based charity, called it the “deadliest attack on a school since last October”.
“It is devastating to see the toll this has taken, including so many children and people at the school for dawn prayers,” Kirolos said, adding that “children make up around 40 percent of the population and of people killed and injured since October” in the enclave.
“Civilians, children, must be protected. An immediate definitive ceasefire is the only foreseeable way that will happen.”
News headline of another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
“We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.”
COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook
The headline above, about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in yesterday’s Middle East Eye.
When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes — what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.
1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.
2. I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.
3. From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.
4. Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they has been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region. In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.
News headline of another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.
That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.
1. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity.Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives. Don’t believe me? Watch this from Israel’s Channel 12:
🔴SHOCKING🔴
Israel is quite possibly the only nation in the world where it is permissable and commonplace to go on TV and openly declare that the RAPING of prisoners should be a LEGITIMATE and OFFICIAL POLICY of the state and must be widely implemented. pic.twitter.com/1PyRXk8fxU
2. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.
3. The people of Gaza are fleeing their homes — or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed to ruins — not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them — men, women and children — are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military, at best, indifferent to their suffering and their fate.
The official death toll in Gaza is a lie. The casualty numbers are far, far higher.
4. No serious case can be made today that Israel is carrying out any of its crimes in Gaza — from bombing civilians to starving them — with regret, or that its leaders seek the best for the Palestinian population. Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court precisely because the judges there suspect it has the very worst intentions possible towards the Palestinian people.
We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was always a settler colonial project.
And like other settler colonial projects — from the US and Australia to South Africa and Algeria — it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination.
What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.
We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today. Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work.
Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.
"Welcome to Hell" . . . B’Tselem has collected testimonies from 55 Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons and detention facilities since 7 October 2023. Thirty of the witnesses are residents of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; 21 are residents of the Gaza Strip; and four are Israeli citizens. Image: B'Tselem screenshot APR
COMMENTARY: By Qadura Fares
On August 3, last Saturday, prisoner rights institutions and Palestinians all around the world were standing in solidarity with Gaza and Palestininian prisoners. This day is dedicated to highlighting Israeli crimes and violations of Palestinian prisoners’ rights and the continuing genocide in Gaza.
The machinery of brutality that punishes and tortures in secrecy in Israeli prisons must be brought to light.
Since October 7, Palestinian detainees have faced horrific crimes.
Shortly after Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was cutting off food, water, electricity and fuel to Gaza, effectively announcing the start of the genocide, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir launched his own war against Palestinian political prisoners and detainees held in Israeli jails and camps, by declaring a policy of “overcrowding”.
Since then, the Israeli army and security services have launched mass arrest campaigns, which have swelled the number of Palestinian citizens from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to 9800.
At least 335 women and 680 children have been arrested. More than 3400 have been put under administrative detention — that is, they are held indefinitely without charge. Among them, there are 22 women and 40 children.
There has never been such a high number of administrative detainees since 1967.
Gaza arrests number unknown
Israel has also arrested an unknown number of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, possibly exceeding thousands, according to our humble estimates. They are held under the 2002 “Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law”, which allows the Israeli army to detain people without issuing a detention order.
Israeli prisons cut food rations for Palestinians to the point of starvation since 7 Oct.
Testimonies of freed prisoners reveal that Israeli authorities rapidly converted more than a dozen prison facilities into a network of torture camps for Palestinian detainees. >> pic.twitter.com/BzciJGfzGY
Under Ben-Gvir’s orders, the already grave conditions in Israeli prisons have been made even worse. The prison authorities sharply reduced food rations and water, closing down the small shops where Palestinian detainees could purchase food and other necessities.
The cover of “Welcome to Hell”, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s report on systemic violations against Palestinian prisoners. Image: APR screenshot
They also cut off water and power and even reduced the time allocated to using the restrooms. Prisoners are also prohibited from showering, which has resulted in the spread of diseases, especially skin-related ones like scabies.
There have been reports of Palestinian prisoners being deprived of medical care.
The systematic malnutrition and dehydration Palestinian prisoners are facing has taken a toll. The few that are released leave detention centres in horrific physical condition.
Even the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that such weaponisation of food is “unacceptable”.
The use of torture, including rape and beatings, has become widespread. There have been shocking reports about prison guards urinating on detainees, torturing them with electric shock and using dogs to sexually assault them.
Human shield detainees
There have been even testimonies of Israeli forces using detainees as human shields during combat in Gaza.
The systemic use of torture and other ill-treatment has predictably gone as far as extrajudicial killings.
According to a recent report by Hebrew daily Haaretz, 48 Palestinians have died in detention centres. Among them is Thaer Abu Asab, who was brutally beaten by Israeli prison guards in Ketziot Prison, and died of his injuries at the age of 38.
According to Haaretz, 36 Gaza detainees have also died in the Sde Teiman camp. Testimonies from Israeli medical staff working at the detention centre have revealed horrific conditions for Palestinians held there.
Detainees are reportedly often operated on without anaesthesia and some have had to have their limbs amputated because they were shackled even when sleeping or receiving treatment.
Palestinians who have been released have said what they were subject to was more horrific than what they had heard took place at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo detention centres, where American forces tortured and forcibly disappeared Arabs and other Muslim men.
They have also testified that some detainees were killed through torture and severe beatings. One prisoner from Bethlehem, Moazaz Obaiat, who was released in July, has alleged that Ben-Gvir personally took part in torturing him.
Denied lawyer, family visits
Israeli authorities have denied prisoners visits by lawyers, family, and even medics, including the International Committee of the Red Cross. They have carried out acts of collective punishment, destroying the homes of their families, arresting their relatives and holding them hostage, and illegally transferring some to secret detention camps and military bases without disclosing their fate, which constitutes the crime of enforced disappearance.
Despite condemnations from various human rights orgaisations, Ben-Gvir and the rest of the Israeli governing coalition have doubled down on these policies. “[Prisoners] should be killed with a shot to the head and the bill to execute Palestinian prisoners must be passed in the third reading in the Knesset […]
“Until then, we will give them minimal food to survive. I don’t care,” Ben-Gvir said on July 1.
Electric shocks, rape, and torture to death.. Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons face serious violations, with some families receiving news of their deaths weeks later.
Euro-Med Monitor regularly documents dozens of testimonies from released Palestinian detainees and… pic.twitter.com/o04T1JS9bG
By using mass detention, Israel, the occupying power, has systematically destroyed Palestinian social, economic and psychological fabric since 1967. Over one million Palestinians have been arrested since then, thousands have been held hostage for extended periods under administrative detention and 255 detainees have died in Israeli prisons.
Israeli crimes against the Palestinians did not begin in October 2023, but are a continuation of a systematic process of ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and apartheid that began even before 1948.
But Israel’s colonial regime overlooks the Palestinian people’s resilience. Inspired by the experiences of the free nations of Ireland, South Africa and Vietnam, we draw strength from our determination to achieve our right to self-determination, freedom and independence.
This is why on this day, August 3, we urged the world to collectively protest against Israeli occupation crimes and racist laws and we call on governments to uphold their legal duties to prevent such crimes from happening.
Political prisoners solidarity
We also called on unions, universities, parliaments and political parties to effectively participate in large-scale events, demonstrations and digital campaigns in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners.
The international community should hold the occupying power to account by imposing a complete arms embargo on it, applying economic sanctions, and suspending its UN membership.
They should also nullify bilateral agreements, and halt Israel’s participation in international forums and events until it abides by international law and human rights. The international community must compel Israel to protect civilians according to its obligations as an occupying power.
Israel must also reveal the identities and conditions of people it has forcibly disappeared. We demand an end to arbitrary and administrative detention policies. The bodies of those who have died inside and outside prisons must also be released, and all prisoners must receive legal protection.
Israel, the occupying power, is under the obligation to allow special rapporteurs, United Nations experts, and the International Criminal Court prosecutor to visit Palestine, inspect prisons and deliver justice for the victims, including material and moral compensation.
Israel must not be allowed to get away with these horrific crimes.
Qadura Fares is head of the Commission of Detainees Affairs in Palestine. Republished from Al Jazeera.
RNZ Mediawatch’s Hayden Donnell did an excellent job in "outing" The Herald’s practice. Donnell had the insight to put it through AI detection software and, like the Customs Service’s First Defender against drugs on Border Patrol, it returned a positive reading. Image: RNZ screenshot APMN
COMMENTARY:By Dr Gavin Ellis
Integrity is the most valued element of a news organisation’s reputation. Without it, it cannot expect its audience to lend credence to what it publishes or broadcasts. So, The New Zealand Herald has dealt itself an awful blow.
Its admission that it used generative AI to scrape content and then create an editorial about the All Blacks came only after it was caught out by Radio New Zealand. RNZ’s subsequent revelation that it may have found another three robot editorials in The Herald was met with sullen silence.
All the country’s largest newspaper will say its that it should have employed more “journalistic rigour”.
That is not good enough. It does not explain why the paper made the bizarre choice to employ Gen AI to create what should be its own opinion. It does not explain why there was no disclosure of its use (although to do so on an editorial should raise more red flags than a North Korean Workers Party anniversary). It does not tell us how widespread the practice is within publications owned by NZME (The Herald editorial was reprinted in its regional titles).
It does not explain why even the most basic subediting was not applied to an obviously deficient piece of writing when editorials have previously been checked and rechecked to prevent the most minor of errors. And it does not reveal what went wrong in the editorial chain of command to allow all or any of the foregoing to occur…or not.
RNZ Mediawatch’s Hayden Donnell did an excellent job in “outing” The Herald’s practice. I admit that when I read the All Blacks editorial my reaction was that it was a particularly badly written leader that had been shoved into the paper unedited. That would have been bad enough, but it never occurred to me that it might be the scribbles of a robot hand.
Donnell had the insight to put it through AI detection software and, like the Customs Service’s First Defender against drugs on Border Patrol, it returned a positive reading. It indicated it was most likely the product of Gen AI. His finding was revealed on Mediawatch last Wednesday. A follow-up fronted by Colin Peacock on Sunday’s Mediawatch revealed a further three editorials — all on sporting subjects — had returned similar readings to the first.
Peacock told listeners the publisher had declined to comment.
The Herald’s own disclosure of the issue to its readers was buried in Shayne Currie’s Media Insider column. Headed “AI and that NZ Herald editorial”, it was the fourth item after an interminable piece on TVNZ’s ongoing fight with former Breakfast host Kamahl Santamaria, TVNZ’s CEO paying her own way to the Olympics, and the release of the Wall Street Journal reporter held in Moscow on fabricated charges.
The item about itself assumed everyone had already caught up with the RNZ story and simply began by saying newsroom staff had been called to a meeting “to discuss use of artificial intelligence (AI), following a case in which NZME says it should have applied more “journalistic rigour” in the way AI was used to help create a recent NZ Herald editorial”.
It quoted Herald editor-in-chief (and NZME’s chief content officer-publishing) Murray Kirkness setting out the general principles on which The Herald and other publishers used artificial intelligence. He went on to say:
“I’m keen to hold another of our regular All Hands meetings next week, which will include discussion about our use of AI now and into the future.
“As always, trust and credibility are vitally important to us and will be part of the discussion.
“Next week’s session will be an opportunity for us to talk further about our use of AI and the standards we need to maintain as we use it.”
That does not signal to me — or to other Herald readers — that he accepts there is a major issue facing him and his editorial department. Much as NZME might like to minimise what has happened, this is a serious matter that requires no small amount of damage control.
That daily column headed “We say” is more than just one of the many opinion columns peppered throughout the paper. To my way of thinking, it was supposed to be the considered, intellectually rigorous view of the masthead, one from which the public might form their own opinions and draw their own conclusions.
It was also the place from which the powerful could be called to account. As such it always played a significant role in determining the integrity of the masthead and the trust that readers resided in it. That is why its production each day was the direct responsibility of the editor or deputy editor.
I have been both an editorial writer and an editor. I know, from direct experience, the rigour that must be applied to the processes in its production — from robust discussion of the subject, to determining a justified point of view, and ensuring its accuracy and quality. I have felt the weight of responsibility in its publication each day, a weight that is the greater when calling people to account. Our editorials were unsigned because they represented the view of the masthead. The editor took direct responsibility for what it said.
My mentor, and one of my predecessors as editor of The New Zealand Herald, John Hardingham, wrote in the Manual of Journalism about the delegating nature of the editorial structure. He added the following:
One duty, however, is never delegated. That is the expression of the newspapers’ opinions through its leading articles or editorials. The editor, or the deputy editor, personally chooses the daily topics for comment, defines the approach in consultation with the specialist leader writers, and sub-edits the completed work.
The New Zealand Herald’s first editorial 13 November 1863. Image: knightlyviews.com
That signalled the significance attached to the editorial column. Even if its readership level is low compared with other parts of the newspaper, that significance is not lost on those in power, and they have learned over time that they ignore editorials at their peril. What is said in the name of the masthead may be the touchpaper that ignites a crowd.
Shayne Currie informed readers on Saturday: “Once upon a time, The Herald had a dedicated team of editorial writers, or at least senior editors who had a special focus to consider the newspaper’s opinion on daily issues. Now, the responsibility falls on a wide cross-section of staff, including journalists who might be specialists in particular areas.”
I sense this is yet another indication of NZME’s laser focus on its digital content. The print edition is a legacy medium which, like a geriatric, is offered palliative services while the real effort is devoted to those with the promise of longer life. The fact the editorial is now written by a “wide cross section” suggests (along with the truncation of letters and addition of forgettable photographs) that the company is unwilling to devote resources to the page that was once the most direct link between paper and public.
That would not be lost on staff who could then be forgiven for regarding the editorial writing assignment as a chore rather than a privilege. Using AI to write the editorial may be a manifestation of that attitude. Sadly, all of this ignores the fact that the editorial also appears in digital form and should be accorded the same status it used to enjoy in print.
Shayne Currie used an unfortunate turn of phrase in the paragraph reproduced above. He said “responsibility falls”. The duty may fall to that wide cross-section but responsibility continues to sit where it has always been — with the person at the top of the editorial tree.
As such it falls to Murray Kirkness to fix what is a deepening problem that has been created not only for The Herald and its fellow NZME publications but for the wider media as well.
The AI generated editorial disclosure is a gift from the gods for those who seek to undermine news media and other institutions. I can hear the repeated refrain: “Don’t believe what they say: It is written by a robot”.
Doubtless, it will be extrapolated to embrace the entire content of the paper: “There aren’t any reporters: It’s written by robots.” Sound implausible? If people believed the claim the country’s reporters and editors had been bribed by the Public Interest Journalism Fund, anything is possible.
The editor-in-chief will have to deal with two related issues.
The first is integrity. I have no doubt that AI can be a useful tool in researching the subject of an editorial but never in writing one. The view of the newspaper must be created by the women and men who know and understand the intrinsic values that cannot be scraped from existing data.
Murray Kirkness must give readers an ironbound guarantee that Gen AI-written editorials have stopped, and will not happen again.
The second is transparency. Artificial intelligence has an undoubted place in the future of journalism where it can have immense benefits in, for example, the “digesting” of vast amounts of data and the processing of information. However, its use must be carefully proscribed by a publicly accessible AI code of conduct, which must also set out standardised forms of guaranteed disclosure of when and how it is employed. Failure to follow the code should be a disciplinary offence that could lead to dismissal.
The Herald must show that it is putting its house in order. It is always ready to hold others accountable. It did so last year over an RNZ staff member’s “Russia-friendly edits” of stories on the war in Ukraine, and did so this year over TVNZ’s missteps with redundancies.
It’s time to hang out its own laundry and show that it intends to be whiter-than-white.
There is a lot riding on the “regular All Hands meeting” at NZME tomorrow. If it minimises or ignores the damage done, it could reap the product of a seed unintentionally sown at the top of the first New Zealand Herald editorial on 13 November 1863. It was a quotation:
“Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Sage advice, true, but we should also not lose sight of the fact that the quotation is from Act 1 Scene 3 of Hamlet – one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
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