An Israeli police officer and Palestinian women in Hebron, last year
In many aspects of life the lesser details can be as telling as the most eye catching. So it is with those smaller manifestations of racialised oppression in Palestine, in their way just as revealing of the nature of the “Jewish State” as the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
A friend told me the church her sister worships at had organised a visit to ‘The Holy Land’. At a checkpoint their Palestinian guide had been escorted from their bus by armed soldiers who, in view of everyone, subjected her to a full strip search.
This is hearsay at two steps removed but it had me searching on “IDF strip searches”. I found no comparable accounts. 1 Just this, a month before the October 7 Hamas attacks, in Israel’s liberal daily, Haaretz:
Israel’s Humiliating Practice of Strip-searching Palestinian Women
An Israel Defense Forces unit, which included soldiers from the canine unit and Kiryat Arba police, raided the Ajluni family’s home in Hebron following intelligence about illegal weapons.
According to the IDF Spokesman’s Unit, the search on the night of July 10 uncovered an M16 assault rifle, a magazine, and ammunition. The eldest son, married with three daughters, was arrested. His detention has been extended several times. 2
Twenty-six family members, including 15 children, were gathered into the apartment belonging to a brother, Abdullah, and his wife, Amal. As is usual in such raids, the women and children were separated from the men; they were held in two rooms guarded by armed soldiers.
The soldiers conducted body searches of the men while they were clothed. The female members of the family – the 53-year-old mother, her 17-year-old daughter, and the mother’s three daughters-in-law, all in their 20s – were each taken, separately, into the children’s room. There, according to what they told both B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Ja’bari and Haaretz, two armed and masked female soldiers demanded that they strip nude.
Amal, the first who was asked to strip, was forced to do so with her terrified children present in the room. The women said there was also a dog in the room and that when they refused to take off their underwear, the soldiers let him approach and threatened to set him loose.
The IDF Spokesman’s Unit said the dog wasn’t in the room, but didn’t explain why the women had to strip. If they were trying to hide ammunition or a rifle, that could have easily been discovered without touching them, certainly once they were down to their undergarments.
Military raids on Palestinian homes are routine. They happen every night, sometimes to arrest people with weapons or an activist in the popular protests against the settlements, and sometimes for the purposes of gathering information, deterrence, or exercises.
Like in other raids, the Ajluni family was woken up by the sound of banging and shouting, only to discover dozens of armed soldiers, most of them masked. As always, the dogs (at least two) added to the terror, especially for the children. And here, too, the women rushed to cover their nightclothes with their prayer robes, which are easy to don quickly.
It’s rare for soldiers to demand that women strip completely, the B’Tselem researcher said. But in recent months, she added, there have been more such incidents. During the mass searches of homes in Hebron that followed a deadly shooting attack two weeks ago, soldiers came to her home as well.
She, too, was told to strip, even though she wasn’t suspected of weapons possession. It’s clear the demand that women strip in front of armed, masked female soldiers can’t be interpreted as an “operational necessity,” but rather a method of humiliation for its own sake, for the larger purpose of automatic punishment, oppression and intimidation. If there are any actions over which the black flag of illegality flies, this is unquestionably one of them.
I don’t say the above compares, in scale or in kind, with the ongoing mass murder rained down on the Gaza Strip as the whole world watches. Just that “automatic punishment, oppression and intimidation” were assuredly not triggered by the Hamas attacks of October 7. The same goes for “actions over which the black flag of illegality flies”.
An Arab Israeli woman walks past female IDF soldiers
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Meanwhile, apropos events in DC re the war on Russia in Ukraine – which for reasons to be set out in an imminent post is going very badly for the true aggressors as Ukraine pays the price in half a million needlessly slain (nice one, Boris) – Simplicius the Thinker has today penned a few words.
Zelensky was supposed to address Congress in a classified meeting tonight, which was for some reason cancelled at the last minute. One of the potential explanations is that the Republicans have snubbed Biden and the Democrats’ overtures to unlock Ukrainian funding, as the Rs simply won’t budge from their demands on securing the border first.
What are those demands exactly?
The most relevant revolve around asylum and parole laws in immigration proceedings. Republicans want all ‘asylum seekers’ to be detained upon entry while they await their claims to be processed. As of now they’re simply released into the country, allowing any number of them to easily escape without any legal due process.
The Democrats have rejected this, proposing instead a “streamlining” of the asylum claim process, calling Republican proposals “extreme” and claiming they would “end all asylum as we know it, and effectively shut down the border”—yeah, I think that might be the plan.
Even Lindsay Graham has suddenly backed off from his radical warhawk stance and now demands no more aid for Ukraine without securing the border. It seems both sides are pretty adamant; one can see why—for the Democrats, shutting down illegal immigration would mean losing the next election.
As of now they have until December 15th, then there’s a recess until next year. After that, Ukraine may not get any aid until well into 2024, by which point they will already have begun experiencing the military arms equivalent of agonal breathing. A few months ago, there were reports that much of Ukraine’s critical aid like shells, etc., is given “hand to mouth.” Meaning, as soon as it rolls off the production line it’s immediately shipped and just as immediately used. They don’t have vast storehouses of it and thus the cut off would theoretically have instant ramifications on their ability to carry out basic battlefield functions.
In the meantime, the pro-UA crowd is having a meltdown. All kinds of Ukrainian analysts and figures of the commentariat have been dishing out increasingly high-pitch squeals and cries of alarm. Everyone from Arestovich, Gordon, various soldiers on the frontline—there seems to be nothing but bad news.
Western MSM is likewise drowning in doom and gloom.
Arestovich has come out and outright declared, regrettably, “we chose the wrong side.”
Oleksii Arestovich is a Georgia born political and military columnist who worked as a Strategic Communications Adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine from December 2020 to January 2023.
He goes on to explain how the U.S. and West in fact can’t match Russian and Chinese industrial production because the West has completely dissolved the productive capacities that made it the powerhouse of the world during the Cold War era.
He extrapolates the Ukrainian conflict to the wider one between the West and the entire Global South and East, and says he no longer has confidence that the West will win the overarching clash.
For those strip-searched Palestinians – their ordeals, deprivations and humiliations greenlit at every turn by that same West – Mr Arestovych’s doomsaying is their faint ray of hope.
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- Absence of evidence is not, of course, evidence of absence.
- In international law that detained son has the “right to resist” an illegally occupying power with an M16 assault rifle or any other means short of prohibited weapons like poison gas. Or the IDF’s white phosphorous. By contrast, and contrary to what Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak and the equally dreadful Ursula von der Leyen may believe or purport to believe, an illegally occupying power has no “right”, in international law, to self defence.