Open Letter to Jonathan Freedland – Why are you Publishing Fake Atrocity Propaganda when Israel is Committing Very Real Atrocities?

Your Weaponisation of Hamas ‘Rape’ is No Different to how White Supremacists Behaved or the Nazi Portrayal of Jews as Sexual Predators

Instead of the Holocaust Being A Warning as to Where Racism Leads You’ve Turned it into a Justification for Genocide

My Plea to Guardian Readers – Don't Subsidise this pro-Imperialist War Paper

Debunking Israel's "mass rapes" atrocity propaganda - Electronic Intifada

Dear Jonathan,

I received a message from a teacher at the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Jenin a day ago. Hamas does not rule in Jenin.

We are not safe .. just now i could hold the phone..Things are horrible, and they beat us and asked us to sing for their country! We are outside side in the cold for more than 14 hours ! I have no news about the center. i heard that 30 solders bombed the doors of it and they were shouting inside ..... 

Tony Tony u are our family, all the world are lying to us 

I dont know about the injured children all of us women and children sitting in rain and they eat and drink infront of us and make video ....I hope i wont be arrested after this email ....but that is enough they treat their dogs better than us 

We are just animals

This is your ‘Jewish’ State Jonathan and this is the purpose of the atrocity propaganda that you are publishing in the Guardian. The ‘monsters’ that you write about are not Hamas but the Generals of the Israeli Army with whom you are so friendly.

Footage shows bodies piled up after Israeli attack on Gaza school - presumably the women, children and babies who were executed were the ‘monsters’ that Jonathan Freedland said Israel was fighting in Gaza

This is from a harrowing account published by Al Jazeera, reposted by Richard Silverstein, of the torture of Palestinian men and even children. 

Inside one of the rooms of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, Mahmoud Zindah stays close to his father, Nader, the horrors of the past week etched on both of their faces. Their eyes are wide, darting around.

The 14-year-old and his father were among hundreds of Palestinians rounded up on December 5 by Israeli forces…who endured five days of torture and degradation before they were released – without any explanation.

…The men and teenage boys were taken to a warehouse where they sat on a bare floor…There they were beaten, interrogated and verbally abused…

Mohammed Odeh, 14… and his family were stuck in their homes for five days, starving…Two of the neighbourhood boys who left to look for water were killed on the street by Israeli snipers…. The soldiers dragged the men and teenagers out, slapping, punching and hitting them with their guns.

“There was no reasoning with them,” Mohammed recalls. “They kept saying, ‘You are all Hamas.’ They wrote numbers on our arms. My number was 56.” When he stretches his arms out, the red marker is still visible on his skin.

Owen Jones on how Israeli Army Videos do not show rape or abuse 

Let that sink in: Israeli soldiers not only tortured Palestinian men and children in a cold, dark chamber they inscribed numbers on their arms.  Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz also had numbers tattooed on their arms.

 “They hit me in the back where my kidneys are and my legs. They took my family, and I don’t know where they are,” he says, his voice breaking.

Before they were forced inside the warehouse, Israeli female soldiers came and spat on the men, Mohammed recalls.

In the warehouse, it was common for groups of five soldiers to suddenly enter and beat one person while the others were forced to listen to his screams of pain. If any of the men and teenagers nodded off from exhaustion, the soldiers poured cold water on them.

…“Some people didn’t return from the torture sessions,” Nader says darkly. “We would hear their screams and then nothing.”

At one point, Mahmoud told his father that his wrists were bleeding from the handcuffs. A soldier overheard, asked where it hurt and then proceeded to press down on the spot. Nader tried to shield his son… When Mahmoud resisted, he was kicked in the face

“My dad kept shouting at them that I’m a child and threw himself on top of me,” he says….

Blindfolded and handcuffed, the men and boys endured hours of beatings.  Every time you tried to talk, asking to use the bathroom or a drink of water, they would come and beat us up, using the butts of their M16 rifles.”

The soldiers accused the Palestinians of stealing their army jeeps and raping Israeli women. When they asked Mahmoud where he was on October 7 and he answered that he was sleeping at home, the soldiers hit him, he says.

“They have this unbelievable racism. They really hate us,” Nader says. “This isn’t about Hamas. This is about a genocide, signed off by Biden.”

…The men were given only a few drops of water and some scraps of bread to eat. Some were forced to relieve themselves on the spot while others were handed a foul-smelling bucket.

On the fifth day, Saturday, Nader, Mahmoud, and 10 other men were released.

Interview with woman prisoner about the beatings and torture of prisoners 

By providing justification for Israel’s genocide in Gaza by making false rape allegations you are as much a war criminal as the Generals in their Tel Aviv war rooms who decide which family to erase from history.

You and your fellow ‘journalists’ help to create the climate in which the murder of over 10,000 Palestinian children is acceptable.

You have less of a moral compass than a 12 year old school student striking in protest at Israel’s genocide. As Dylan Thomas wrote, ‘the hand that signed the paper felled a city.’

In the article you cite as proof of mass rape you mention the work of a UN Commission of Inquiry into possible war crimes on October 7, yet it transpires that it

‘is likely to be hampered by the fact that Israel has not cooperated with the commission, which it accuses of having an anti-Israel bias.’

Israel has a long history of refusing to co-operate with independent inquiries. It prefers that people take what it says on trust despite the long record of lying and cover ups by the Israeli army. The assassination of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh stands out.

Your article cites another article, ‘Israel women’s groups warn of failure to keep evidence of sexual violence in Hamas attacks’ . It cites Tal Hochman, a government spokesperson, as saying that ‘the victims were buried and the forensic evidence buried too. No samples were taken.’  An article in Yedioth Aharanot stated that much of the evidence ‘had not been properly photographed, preserved or forensically examined before bodies were buried’

Yet you still state that ‘The bodies of dead Israeli women and girls told a clear, consistent and harrowing story.’ This is simply untrue.

The response of Israel’s Minister of Justice was that Yediot’s article was ‘irresponsible’ which suggests that truth isnt’ their main concern. Your article cites a survivor of the attack on the Supernova rave witnessing a gang-rape. Except that noone can trace Yoni Saadon who was quoted in The Times as being the source of the claim. Nonetheless you assert that:

A police interview with a woman known as Witness S… includes details that are too appalling to be repeated here: suffice to say she describes a frenzy of sexual torture and mutilation that makes the soul sink.

It is true that there was a photograph on the Israeli government website of a women who was raped and whose body was defiled but it turned out that she was a Kurdish female fighter killed in May 2023!

Your article is long on rhetoric and short on facts. It ignores the context, a consistent pattern of Israeli atrocity propaganda. What happened to the 40 babies who were beheaded? Joe Biden claimed to have seen them before the State Department walked it back?

You suggest that what lies behind the carpet bombing of refugee camps,  homes and hospitals is ‘The centrality of sexual violence’.  In so doing you purposely omit the real reason for the ongoing genocide. The desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians.

table of abuse of children military court watch

The sexual violence that does occur is perpetrated by the IDF against Palestinian children, as a Save the Children Report of July 2023 found. But as these victims aren’t Israeli, in your eyes they don’t count.

Palestinian children in the Israel military detention system face physical and emotional abuse, with four out of five (86%) of them being beaten, and 69% strip-searched… Nearly half (42%) are injured at the point of arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones. Some report violence of a sexual nature and some are transferred to court or between detention centres in small cages, the child rights organisation said. 

The real motive for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleaning is an article by Gila Gamliel, Israel’s Intelligence Minister ‘Victory is an opportunity for Israel in the midst of crisis’.

The assertion that the motive behind the bombing is rape and sexual assault by Hamas fighters is risible. Was that why every single hospital in the north of Gaza was attacked by the Israeli army using planted evidence as its justification? Even the BBC found it unconvincing.

The Town of Guernica, which was the first to be bombed by Nazi Germany, stands in solidarity with Gaza 

Once again ‘liberal’ Zionists are providing a cover for right-wing Zionists and the neo-Nazis in Israel’s cabinet, Gvir and Smotrich.

Their concern is not sexual assault, but racial purity. Even Moshe Yalon, former Likud  Defence Minister, called Gvir ‘Mein Kampf in reverse’.

The False Comparisons Between October 7 & the Holocaust

Israel is fond of describing the October 7 attack as the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. In fact the biggest massacre was by Israel’s friends, the Argentinian Junta between 1976 and 1983, some 3,000 Jews.

I have another comparison. The death toll is already 20,000. If we count those buried under the rubble, the number of dead in Gaza is likely to have already exceeded the 34,000 Jews murdered at Babi Yar, the largest single Nazi massacre by bullets during the Holocaust.

Last week the Guardian carried an article by Howard Jacobson which argued that the Holocaust gave Israel immunity from the charge of genocide. Like all good anti-Semites, Jacobson equated the actions of Israel with all Jews. The time has come to end Israel’s use of the Holocaust as a free pass to kill Palestinians.

If there is one lesson that can be drawn from the Holocaust it is that any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, can commit genocide. There is no Jewish exception to this. Being a victim doesn’t prevent you becoming a perpetrator. Do the Armenians, Cambodians and Rwandans have similar immunity?

When Israel launched its attack on Gaza, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was

imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.

On October 4 1943 Himmler called Jews ‘human animals’ when justifying the Final Solution. Don’t you find it strange how Zionism gets its inspiration from the Nazis whilst accusing others of anti-Semitism?

The UN has warned that half Gaza’s population is starving thanks to Israel’s food and water blockade. The use of starvation against a civilian law is expressly prohibited by international law. However, as we know, Israel observes international law in the breach.

The Nazis intentionally used starvation and hunger as a weapon of war. Raul Hilberg estimated that half a million Jews died in the Polish ghettoes because of starvation. Your Zionist friends have learnt the lessons of the Holocaust well.

Perhaps you can explain why the alleged rapes and atrocities on October 7 justified bombing Al Ahli hospital killing over 500 people? Or invading Al Shifa hospital, beating up doctors and allowing babies in incubators to die for lack of oxygen, their bodies decomposing, eaten by wild animals? Or do war crimes only extend to Israeli Jews?

Footage shows bodies piled up after Israeli attack on Gaza school

And now we learn that dozens of Palestinians were executed at point blank range in a school in Jabalia. Are there no lengths to which you won’t go Jonathan to justify genocide and war crimes?

October 7 was undoubtedly a terrible shock to those who have spent over half a century bombing and killing Gaza’s Palestinians. Hamas has been demonised in precisely the same way as the PLO, President Nasser and Yasir Arafat. These are the ways of colonialism. The British did it with Ghandi and the Mau Mau. Then too there were journalists prepared to turn a blind eye to colonial atrocities.

Whether you like or not Hamas is a Palestinian resistance organisation in just the same way as the Jewish Fighting Organisation [ZOB] in the Warsaw Ghetto was a resistance organisation.

In 2002 no less than Marek Edelman, the last Commander of ZOB, addressed a letter to the Palestinian resistance whom he compared to Warsaw’s Jewish fighters. This caused outrage in Israel where the dominant narrative is that the Zionists led the resistance to the Nazis.

As Paul Foot, who was a genuine journalist, wrote

its tone infuriated the Israeli government and its press. He wrote in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter, … not dissimilar in desperation to the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories. He addressed his letter to "commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations - to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations".

It was no surprise that the funeral of Edelman, who died in 2009, was boycotted by Israel. Not even the lowliest clerk from Israel’s Embassy attended Edelman’s state funeral, at which the President of Poland gave a tribute as well as there being a 15 gun salute.

We should remind ourselves of Israel’s reaction when Israeli hostage, 85 year old Yocheved Lifshitz gave a press conference at Ichilov hospital. The Israeli government was furious that it had been allowed to go ahead.

The Times of Israel reported ‘Lifshitz press conference panned as disastrous for Israel, PR win for Hamas’. The article told how ‘Criticism is pouring in after freed hostage Yocheved Lifshitz appeared to praise her Hamas captors and criticize Israel’’

When asked what she meant by the gesture of shaking a Hamas gunman's hand, freed hostage Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, says 'because they treated us very nicely'.

"They seemed really prepared and had concealed it for a long time," she added.

🔗https://t.co/170bCo7ebO

📺 Sky 501 pic.twitter.com/8F4d4wnuED

— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 24, 2023

Ha'aretz described how Lifshitz’s remarks were ‘Seen by Government Officials as Damaging to Israeli Interests’ and that her statement that she was 'given access to medical care' and 'treated well while in captivity' worried officials.

Israel’s Channel 12 reporter Dana Weiss called the press conference a “disaster,” noting the lack of state intervention in managing her appearances. Israeli journalists are, like you, mouthpieces of the state! Why such vehement criticism for telling the truth? The answer is that Israel is not interested in the truth. All that counts is the propaganda war.

So angry were the Israeli authorities that the spokesperson for the hospital, Avi Shushan, was suspended and summoned to a pre-dismissal hearing on 13 November. Eight days later he was forced out. This is the State whose integrity you rest your allegations of rape on Jonathan.

What worried Israel’s government was that Lifshitz’s portrayal of  Hamas fighters as human beings might undermine their plans for genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Danielle Aloni, one of Israel’s captives, wrote to the ‘Generals of Hamas’ praising them for their kind behaviour to her daughter Emillia

‘in spite of the difficult situation you faced I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your extraordinary humanity shown towards my daughter, Emilia."

Maya Lecker, a political analyst, wrote in Haaretz complaining about people ‘applauding Hamas gunmen for giving high-fives to their captives on camera’ and that ‘pro-Palestinian influencers and social media users’ were finding the nightly hand-overs of hostages ‘heart-warming public displays of humanity and morality by Hamas militants.’

Prison guards take part in an Israel Prison Service drill at Gilboa Prison,

The Israeli government went to great lengths to ensure that all hostage releases after Lifshitz were not accompanied by press conferences in case the contrast between Hamas’s civilised treatment of hostages and Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners became too obvious.

The military correspondent for Israel’s Channel 13, Alon Ben David, said that he had spoken with some of the released captives. All said that the Hamas fighters “have gathered the members of each kibbutz together, which gave them a greater sense of comfort.”

This is strange behaviour from the ‘monster next door’ that you refer to in your article.  This is why people like you have been wheeled out to repeat the discredited ‘rape’ propaganda.

For example in the specially prepared video by the Israeli army for selected journalists there was no concrete evidence of rape or sexual assault. Everything was inference. We know that because even Owen Jones, who was one of those journalists, stated afterwards that “If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera.” See I Watched The Hamas Massacre Film. Here Are My Thoughts.

Your concern over the ‘Hamas rapes’ is about supporting a narrative that justifies Israel’s war. You admit this when you ask:

Why is the fighting still going on, even now, more than two months after the 7 October massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas? As those demanding an immediate ceasefire might put it, surely Israel has hit back hard enough now? Surely it has made its point?

In searching for an answer, a helpful place to start might be the area that is among the most painful. For many weeks, campaigners have urged the UN and others to pay attention to the now extensively documented evidence of sexual violence perpetrated by the men of Hamas on 7 October….

Leave aside that there is no documentation for the reasons I have given. The idea that Israel, which armed General Pinochet,  which supplies the Myanamar military with weapons and which even trained and armed the Argentinian Junta that killed Jews, as well as helping the Guatemalan army perpetrate the  genocide of 200,000 Mayan Indians, is concerned about  sexual violence, is fanciful. These regimes all indulged in the most abominable sexual tortures. Yet you proclaim that

This is one reason why Israel is still fighting Hamas … indeed a direct reason in one specific sense. Last week, a series of rolling truces came to an end. Both sides blame each other, but Israel insists that Hamas refused to go through with the promised release of 10 female Israeli hostages. Both the US and Israeli governments suspect that a factor in that refusal was Hamas’s fear that the women would testify to sexual abuse at the hands of their captors. 

There is of course a much simpler explanation. The fascist right in Israel’s government – Ben Gvir et al. – have made it clear that if the war ends so does their alliance with Netanyahu. But even to mention the neo-Nazis and their influence on Israel’s government is for you taboo.

The contrast between how Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners have been treated could not have been starker. ‘It would’ve been better if they shot us’: Palestinians recount prison abuse upon her release.

Palestinian activist and author Ahed Tamimi has been released from Israeli prison as part of the exchange of captives between Israel and Hamas. pic.twitter.com/0dwIgChUm0

— AJ+ (@ajplus) November 30, 2023

Ahed Tamimi talked about the dozens of female detainees still in Israeli prisons who are “getting mistreated every day.”Ahed talked about the dire conditions that Israeli prison authorities are forcing Palestinians to live under.

“There’s no food, no water, nothing at all, no clothes. They sleep on the floor,”

Her father, Bassem Tamimi, is held under administrative detention.

“As I was leaving [the prison], they threatened me by invoking my father. They said we’ve got your father in prison, and if you say a word, we’ll kill your father in prison.”

See Released Palestinians reveal horrors in Israeli prisons

According to human rights NGO HaMoked, among the more that 7,600 “security” inmates that Israel is currently holding in prisons across Israel and the occupied West Bank are at least 260 Palestinians that it defines as “unlawful combatants,” including those who participated in the attacks of October 7.

their constant screams can be heard alongside the barking of dogs. Israel is concealing the names and detention conditions of many of the detainees from Gaza and is preventing lawyers and the Red Cross from visiting them.

Unlike the false allegations of torture on October 7, these allegations are very real and confirmed. Amjad a-Najjar from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, described how

“Ben Gvir has declared war against the prisoners,” he said. “The tools of communication are batons and beatings. Death hovers over the prisons, awaiting a decision from the guards to strike any of the detainees.”

Mahmoud Katnani, one of the prisoners released in the exchange deal between Israel and Hamas, was in the same prison cell where Abu Assab was held.

On Nov. 18, at 6 p.m. during the security count, the forces [from the IPS’s rapid response unit, Keter] began to break into the room. There were 10 prisoners in the room, and we sat as usual: kneeling with our hands over our heads and heads down. Suddenly, the forces attacked us for no apparent reason, beating us with batons and kicking us.

The beating continued violently. They slammed the prisoner Thaer Abu Assab on the floor and dragged him to a corner near the bathroom, beating him on his head and body for several minutes. Then they exited the room, leaving Thaer covered in blood flowing heavily from his head. We approached him [and realized that] his heart had stopped beating. We pulled him to the middle of the room; he had died. 

Strangely enough Jonathan  these atrocities don’t warrant your attention even though they are well documented.

‘I will ask them to rape you right here’

Lama Khater, a journalist and writer from Hebron and a mother of five children, was arrested on Oct. 26 at her home in Loza area, west of Hebron. “I could not have imagined the severity of the situation,” she said, describing how the soldiers trashed the contents of her home.

zzzz

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Megaphone | ميغافون (@megaphonenews)

I was taken to a military vehicle where I was forced to lie down on the floor, handcuffed and blindfolded. Soldiers sat next to me until we reached a location unknown to me. 

I was brought into a room. I could see with limited visibility beneath the blindfold. I asked to go to the toilet and drink water, but the female soldier refused. They claimed not to understand Arabic; I tried English, but to no avail. After an hour of detention, I was allowed to use the restroom and drank water from the tap there. The female soldier refused to allow me to close the toilet door completely.

After that, Khater was taken by a female soldier to an interrogation room, still handcuffed and blindfolded. She was seated in a chair and played an audio recording of somebody speaking about the atrocities committed by Hamas in the Israeli communities near the Gaza fence. 

The interrogator “asked me my opinion about the rape of a 10-year-old [Israeli] girl,” she recalled.

I stated that I didn’t know anything about this. The interrogator yelled at me and insulted me using offensive language. He then said: ‘You should know that there are 20 soldiers in this room — I will ask them to rape you right here.

One can only assume that because these witnesses aren’t Jewish you are prepared to discount their testimony. According to Khater, the interrogator’s threats went on.

“He said: ‘The girl who was raped looks like your daughter Yaman, and we could bring Yaman there and be raped, and I could go to your house and burn your children down while they sleep. Here there are no laws or rights. You are a prisoner of war, and I hope that a government will come that will allow us to do what we want with you [Palestinians].’” 

Khater was then taken to HaSharon Prison in central Israel. “Another female detainee and I underwent a strip search,” she recounted.

In front of the cell where we were about to enter, the guards brought out a [non-security] prisoner whose face was marked with bumps and blisters, wrapping his body in a blanket. The guards were talking among themselves, as if he had a serious infectious disease. 

Nasralla al-A’war, a 17-year-old from Silwan, who was released with Dawabsheh on Nov. 26, said that the prison guards “unleashed the dogs on us without muzzles. We were beaten and they did not stop cursing and humiliating us, and there was very little food.”  

 “I saw blood on the floors of the solitary confinement cells,” he continued.

“Some faced violent assaults for not cursing Hamas. Guards would step on detainees’ heads with their shoes. Detainees were beaten on their heads with belts, and hot and ice water was poured on their bodies. Guards beat detainees on sensitive areas of their bodies while telling them, ‘We will deprive you of being a dad.’” Al-Hethnawi concluded his account in tears, saying: “Had they shot us and killed us, it would have been better than this torture.”

Of course this did not start today.  In June of this year as the pogroms were getting going on the West Bank 2 year gold Muhammad Tamimi was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier. As Gideon Levy wrote in Ha'aretz

The military released the results of its internal investigation and ruled it was a case of “misidentification.” The snipers were using telescopic scopes, but got the target wrong. Were their state-of-the-art scopes insufficient for them to see that they were shooting a baby’s head?

The Israeli army has long had absolute impunity from prosecution if they kill Palestinians, even the smallest child. In contrast a child is locked up indefinitely for throwing a stone at a tank.

As these war crimes are committed against Palestinians Jonathan Freedland, you are silent. It is only when Palestinians fought back on October 7 that you found your voice. See A wail of pain pierced the silence. Mohammed, 2½, was fatally shot. To Israel’s army, it’s just a mistake

Tony Greenstein