As Trump Tours Mideast, Palestinians Report War-on-Terror-Like Torture in Israeli Jails

Edited by Sam Thielman

PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS LEFT Riyadh for Doha on a trip that is bearing fruit for both American and Middle Eastern oligarchs. There's another huge military windfall for the Saudis, the latest in a line stretching back decades, and this one is worth $142 billion. Nvidia and AMD will supply semiconductors for a Saudi artificial-intelligence-focused data center. A gas-turbine export deal goes to GE; Boeing will sell more of its dubious planes in Saudi Arabia; and the Saudis will invest a promised $20 billion in "AI data centers and energy infrastructure," per the White House. The Saudis will provide the U.S. with expanded access to Saudi critical minerals, following China pausing mineral exports to the U.S. in retaliation for Trump's tariffs. (No nuclear deal with Riyadh, however.) Accompanying Trump were Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Alex Karp of Palantir, BlackRock's Larry Fink, the guy who runs Uber, the guy who runs Amazon instead of Jeff Bezos, and other oligarchs who are backing Trump. In Qatar today, Trump will celebrate receiving one of the more notable bribes a foreign leader has ever given a U.S. president. 

Before leaving Saudi Arabia, Trump gave a speech declaring that he, the Saudis and their other Gulf allies—and, tacitly, Qatar, the Saudi/Emirati regional rival—were "transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past." Trump sounded fewer bellicose notes than typical U.S. presidential speeches in the Mideast, particularly with regard to Iran, where, after deploying long-range bombers to the staging island of Diego Garcia, he spoke of not having "permanent enemies." (Daniel Larison has a bucket of cold water for this, however.) 

By far the most significant geopolitical decision Trump has made on this trip is to lift Bashar Assad-era sanctions on post-Assad Syria, something urged by bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—and against the wishes, reportedly, of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "Damascus had prepared a pitch to Trump that included access to Syrian oil, reassurances of Israel’s security and a proposal to build a Trump tower in Damascus," reports The Guardian's William Christou. Eastern Syria is a network of U.S. military bases surrounding oil fields and city-sized detention camps. It remains to be seen whether Trump's decision will close those facilities down or give them a new lease on life. 

Significantly, Trump's speech was directed not to the region's people, but its leaders, since that’s who Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman rewarded in Riyadh on Tuesday. (Van Jackson's take on it is worth reading.) The region's people are far more concerned with the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and Israel's moves toward annexing the West Bank. The Israeli government took a massive step toward annexation this week by creating a land registry in Area C, the largest part of the West Bank and where most Israeli settlements are, a move to nullify Palestinian claims of land ownership. 

Trump has recently stunned Israel by forging a separate peace with the Houthis—who attacked Israel on Tuesday to rub it in—and negotiating directly with Hamas for the release of Israeli-American hostage Eban Alexander. At the beginning of May, Netanyahu's government agreed on a plan to conquer Gaza that gave Hamas until the end of Trump's trip to release all hostages and functionally surrender. But Trump envoy Steve Witkoff this week told families of Israeli hostages that it's "up to Israel" whether the hostages go free or the war intensifies, something both Trump and Joe Biden before him typically pin on Hamas.

On the eve of Trump's trip, which did not include a de rigeur stop in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu mused in a cabinet meeting about Israel eventually weaning itself off its defense dependency on the United States. That's a stunning thing to hear from the leader of a country that gets 69 percent of its arms imports from America and is frankly unlikely to get a better deal from, say, China. The current Israeli alarm about Trump's abrupt distance from Israel prompted a Likud cabinet minister this week to call him untrustworthy. Israel should "wait and try to influence [Trump's] environment—whether through American Jews or members of Congress and the Senate, according to Israel's interests," Regional Cooperation Minister David Amselem said. 

I have no idea if we're on the verge of the final Israeli conquest of Gaza, or the verge of a new ceasefire/hostage deal that averts it, or the verge of a third thing. But the stakes are underscored in a report issued Monday from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. (PCHR; normally I like to avoid acronyms, but it's going to be easier this way). PCHR interviewed more than 100 Palestinians detained by the Israeli military in Gaza. They described widespread, systemic torture in both their detentions and interrogations. PCHR puts the torture in the context of the Israeli genocide, as mechanisms of dehumanization designed to leave irreversible damage—physical, mental, and to their identities as Palestinians. And those mechanisms, PCHR observe, "bear alarming similarities to those used in notorious facilities like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib." 

BEFORE WE DELVE INTO THESE ALARMING SIMILARITIES, let's note that the point here isn't to determine which techniques originate with America and which with Israel. The techniques of torture and occupation iterate on one another, across different practitioners and occupations. A previous edition of FOREVER WARS explored the dialectical relationship between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the War on Terror. Additionally, such techniques are not exclusive to the U.S. or to Israel, nor are all techniques shared by the two, but there are certain conspicuous similarities. That frankly makes sense given the close U.S.-Israel relationship.

As well, the descriptions that follow are gruesome and can be hard to bear for some. I don't want to delve into the details in an unseemly fashion. But bearing witness requires describing what these more-than-100 people experienced. 

"[T]hreats, insults, humiliation, beatings and other forms of physical violence were commonly inflicted on detainees," PHCR found. Beatings in particular, were reported by "all interviewees," and occurred "from the moment of arrest, during transfer, and throughout detention in both military facilities and prisons." That overview matches many interviews I've conducted with ex-U.S. detainees, although many of the weapons involved ("rifle's butt, batons, chains, sticks, iron rods, brass knuckles, steel, shoes") don't. Israeli soldiers threw people out of their armored vehicles and "dragged me all the way down a pebble road," one ex-detainee tells them. During a 22-year old's single day in detention, Israeli soldiers cut off part of his ear. While the U.S. didn't engage in detainee mutilation—although we don't know what happened to Abu Zubaydah's left eye, and Navy SEALs performed corpse desecrations—there are certain other similarities, particularly regarding dehumanization. One 36 year-old man says he was called an animal and beaten until he agreed he was one, recalling the "dog-walkings" of Iraqis by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib. 

Inside the network of military detention centers and prisons, Palestinians were subject to frequent sleep deprivation, and not only for interrogation purposes. Sleep deprivation was a hallmark of the post-9/11 CIA and U.S. military wartime-detentions complex and often achieved by contorting the body into painful "stress positions" that rendered sleep impossible. Similarly, Palestinians report being subjected to extreme cold, "like a meat freezer," much as denizens of Guantanamo and the CIA black sites were. "Dogs were used more broadly during arrest and detention," similar to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, with Israeli soldiers telling Palestinian detainees that the dogs were rabid and they would unleash the animals on them. 

There were also similarities in interrogation methods. A 34-year old man reported an interrogation that could have happened at Guantanamo or the black sites. "I was then escorted to a room, where they played loud music"—one sensory-deprivation room the Israelis use is known as the Disco—"and turned fans and air conditioning on the cool mode, forcing us to kneel on a gravel floor for hours." I don't know of anyone in U.S. custody who had to kneel on gravel, but at the black sites, stress positions could occur in rooms infested with insects. In other cases, the Israelis slam Palestinians' heads into walls, something the CIA called "walling" and conducted with a towel held like a rope behind the detainee's head. The PCHR report also states that the Israelis conducted waterboarding sessions, but does not describe them.

Palestinian detainees reported being forced to take unfamiliar medications "before and especially during" interrogation that resulted in hallucinations. Use of such mind-altering drugs on detainees was confirmed at Guantanamo and beyond by a Pentagon inspector general report in 2012. (The Pentagon inspector general claimed they weren't used for interrogations, but confirmed the drugs' non-consensual administration. However, Physicians for Human Rights objected, "If detainees’ mental illness was caused and perpetuated by the interrogations, health care professionals would have been 'treating' their patients only to improve their condition in order to return them to the very situation that had caused their illness.") One Palestinian prisoner described having a hallucinogen administered before the Israelis made him respond to a word-salad of questioning. When he displeased his interrogator, he received electric shocks. (That's something the U.S. didn't do after 9/11, though it sure did in Vietnam.) 

The Israelis also performed mock executions, as the CIA conducted for Abdel Rahim al-Nashiri. In one instance, two soldiers stripped a man naked, bound and blindfolded, by a sand berm, asked him where he was on October 7, and if was affiliated with any Palestinian faction. When he said no, one soldier ordered the other to shoot him. That soldier fired above the man's head. "I was literally shaking in fear and begging the soldier to kill me," he told PCHR. In a different case, a 31-year old woman said she was part of a group on whom the soldiers trained their laser sights before asking, "Who wants to be shot first?"

In and outside of the context of interrogation, several detainees reported being hung in the "Shabh"/"Shabeh" position. (Assad's mukhabarat was known for using this one.) While there are many variations, the Shabh is about suspending someone "from the ceiling [while] his toes are lifted off the ground." A 42-year old journalist told PCHR that he was "left hanging in this position for six hours." A 27-year old man reported "unbearable pains, especially since I weigh 136 kilograms, and all the weight rested on my wrists." The stress position was not only used for interrogation, but for "punishment for complaining, failure to comply with orders, or attempting to move." The guy I'm writing my next book about has described similar treatment at multiple black sites. According to Palestinian interviewees’ responses, other stress positions, whether sitting or standing, lasted "from ten minutes to 25 days. Most stated that they were forced to kneel 'all day,' 'all night,' 'long hours' or 'most of the time.'" Many former detainees of the U.S. have described being kept in stress positions for long hours, and the guy I'm writing about had it happen to him for days on end, multiple times.

Then there is the sexual violence that the Israelis, the Americans and many, many others inflict on helpless people in their custody. The humiliation of frequent nudity was a fixture of the early War on Terror's detentions and interrogations. In the military camps of Gaza, after women IDF soldiers forced a 26-year old woman into an invasive strip search, they made her shower. "They did not give me any clothes to wear, but later female detainees from the West Bank gave me pyjamas and headscarf to wear." The male soldiers call the women detainees bitches and whores, and laugh at the genitals of the male detainees. "Before each interrogation," a 37-year old woman reported, women soldiers strip-searched women detainees and "were biting their lips, implying sexual intent, while the male soldiers were staring at us." Rape threats, also features of Guantanamo and the black sites, occurred in the Israeli prisons, as did rape. 

There are also horrific accounts of using dogs in the prison, much as the Americans did at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to threaten detainees. Here, however, the dogs mauled one person and then was used during a sexual assault on another. 

I think at this point you get the general idea. The whole report is available here if you wish to read it. Before moving on, I have to note the account of one woman who described how the Israelis generated collaborators. During interrogation, the soldiers told her "that they would deprive me of my seven children if I did not collaborate. They told me, 'The computer says you are affiliated with Islamic Jihad.'" 

That's a reminder of what artificial intelligence is truly for, today, regardless of the promises the tech industry self-interestedly makes about what AI will offer in the future. That's part of why investment in AI is included in Trump's Mideast yield. I'm relieved that the U.S.-Houthi War has stopped; I think lifting sanctions on Syria is the right decision; and I hope, even if I don't expect, for Trump to force Israel into a ceasefire, something that has been possible every single one of the 587 days since October 7. But the prominence of AI-based investment during this most recent tour shows that what Trump is offering is ultimately about perpetuating the regimes of the current Middle Eastern rulers. We have no excuse not to know what that means by now, but a reminder is found inside Israeli interrogation rooms. 

WE DELETED AN ITEM IN THE LAST NEWSLETTER about a suspicious ice cream truck parked outside Brooklyn College during a pro-Palestinian protest with an NYPD keychain in the ignition and a surveillance camera perched on the back. I've since spoken to its owner, and while I wouldn't say that conversation resolved all my suspicions, I didn't make an attempt to reach out to him for comment before running something accusing him, a non-public figure, of being a police informant. Both he and you, the reader, deserve better, and that's what FOREVER WARS will endeavor to provide, as a measure of its regret for this error. 

FINALLY, AS WE WERE EDITING THIS EDITION, Zeteo's Prem Thakkar reported that Badar Khan Suri was recently released on bond today, as fellow political prisoners Mohsen Mahdawi and Rumeysa Özturk have been. Legal challenges to the renditions and political assaults known as Mass Deportation have, in the past week, prompted both Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon to publicly float the suspension of habeas corpus. Their pretext is absurd—immigration is not an invasion, no matter how many times MAGA cynically insists in order to avail itself of emergency powers—but the point is to intimidate the courts into a mass surrender. And then, to lock up without charge anyone it calls a threat. It's almost like the persistence of indefinite wartime detention, often with judicial acquiescence, was a Chekhov's gun for American democracy after all.