Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Alice Sperry.
She is a reporter for The Intercept and has reported from Palestine, Haiti, El Salvador, Colombia, and across the US.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks so much for having me.
Really appreciate you joining me on the show today.
And I really want to talk about this huge story, this very important story.
We ran it as the spotlight on Antiwar.com back a few weeks ago.
It was from July 31st, the homecoming.
How Ahed Tamimi became the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression, which is really great.
I don't know, 3,000 words or something.
Deep dive into, well, all kinds of things.
We'll get to that in a second.
But I wanted to start with the news here because it's also your most recent pieces about this.
Palestinian Bedouin village braces for a forcible transfer as Israel seeks to split the West Bank in half.
And then the news is that the Israeli court has given the final green light for the demolition of Khan al-Amar.
So could you please talk about this Bedouin village and their fight in the court that they've now lost and what this means for the future of the West Bank there?
Yes.
So Khan al-Amar is a village of about 200 people in the occupied West Bank.
So I think the most important thing is really to visualize a map of the area we're talking about.
This is a place where the Jahaleen Bedouin who lived there were displaced to back in the 50s.
They were originally living in the Negev Desert, which is today part of Israel, and were pushed out after the Israeli state was established in 1948.
And they have been living in this village, which is really, as many Bedouin communities are, is really just a few tents.
There aren't really any permanent structures in the village except for a school that's built of mud and tires and that was built by foreign volunteers.
But the problem with this village is that it is in an area that Israel has long wanted to annex.
It's very strategically located close to Jerusalem.
It is surrounded by settlement, and it's really thought of as one of the last obstacles in the way of a decades-old plan that Israelis have had, which is to essentially divide the West Bank by establishing a continuous Jewish presence between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea and the Jordan River.
And so this is a very small community, but a very embattled one, and one that's kind of at the heart of a much wider, much bigger conflict over land that, as you all know, has been going on for decades.
And when I visited this summer, the legal case was still going on.
There have been a number of appeals.
The case has been going on for years and made it all the way up to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court just finally authorized this just a couple days ago, authorized the demolition of this village and the eviction of its residents.
Now, the residents themselves have said they're not going anywhere, which really means they will be forcibly evicted.
And that's something Israel has done in the past, but really not since the 90s, when, you know, like forcibly evicting an entire village.
Well, first of all, it's a war crime under international law, but it's also an ugly spectacle, definitely not good for public relations.
And I think it's something they've tried to avoid.
And so we're all watching to see what happens in Karlachmar in the next days.
Well, now I saw footage out of there a couple of weeks ago of them beating up some lady and some guy and dominating the people there during a protest.
It seems like they were dragging them all off, but no.
There have been a number of protests.
And back in July, there was a large one where the military came in and they essentially, they brought in bulldozers and they bulldozed the area between different tents.
So they didn't, you know, demolish people's homes quite yet, but they set up the stage for what will eventually be the demolition of the place.
And so there was a lot of, you know, pushback there and clashes and a number of people were arrested.
And of course, when that happens, it's never, you know, it's never a pretty scene, absolutely.
So we've seen an escalation there for definitely over the last months, but also over the last years and decades.
I mean, these problems for residents that I interviewed really started in the 80s when one of the nearby settlements was built and the settlement encroached on their land so that, you know, they're shepherds, essentially, and they were grazing their land.
They were grazing their animals on this land that was taken over by settlements, which, you know, in case our audience doesn't know, settlements are illegal under international law.
And the settlers used to, you know, take their animals and then sell them back to the Bedouins.
So they really created a hostile life environment for them for decades.
Yeah, I was going to say, you know, you mentioned that, well, they're not permanent structures, they're Bedouins.
So it sounds like, well, you know, those are the breaks when you're a nomad.
It's hard to define your property rights and this kind of thing.
But of course, I mean, you already answered the question, where are they from?
They're from that land that has a big suburb on top of it now where they're not welcome anymore.
And that's why they're stuck here in what amounts to a refugee camp.
And, you know, I think a lot of people use the fact that the Bedouins are nomadic people.
And really, these are semi-nomadic people.
They, you know, they move seasonally.
They're not always on the move.
And they use that as a way to say, you know, this land is not theirs.
But really, this land is part of the occupied West Bank, which is the land on which a future Palestinian state will be built if ever such a thing will happen.
And, you know, actually this week is the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords.
That, as you may know, sort of set in motion a system that should have eventually led to the creation of a Palestinian state, which of course has not yet happened.
So this is land that, you know, if anything, the Palestinian Authority would have control over, not Israel.
But of course, it's much more complicated than that.
The West Bank is fragmented into different areas.
The Israelis have varying degrees of control over different areas.
And they've definitely been trying to annex a lot of it over the last decade.
I mean, we know settlements are a huge obstacle to peace in the region.
And they're constantly expanding, which is part of the reason why Karel Akhmar is slated for demolition is to make room for more.
And now, when you talk about, well, you talk about how it's already, the West Bank is already cut up in so many pieces.
But you talk about, you know, the difference that this makes if they get rid of this village and extend the settlements through here.
This really bisects the West Bank to a much greater degree, I guess.
But also, isn't this the same one?
Or has this already happened somewhere else where they were trying to connect the settlements that were, you know, meant, obviously it was meant to separate East Jerusalem, to cut off the last corridor of East Jerusalem into the rest of the West Bank?
Yeah, so this is an area that Israel calls E1.
And that's essentially that, exactly.
So the settlements that… Okay, that's what I'm thinking of.
They are practically suburbs of Jerusalem.
They are, you know, a 10-minute drive from Jerusalem.
They're already now are very easily connected to Jerusalem.
And Karel Akhmar is really the last Palestinian community in between them.
Of course, there are many more around it and in other areas.
And this is not the only place in the West Bank where Israel is trying to evict and force out Palestinians so they can expand and connect their settlements.
And one of the fears is that what the ultimate result of all this will be isolated Palestinian communities that are completely surrounded by settlements and that are cut off from each other.
So already now, you know, if you're a Palestinian resident of the West Bank and you're trying to get from, for instance, Ramallah to Bethlehem, which are two of the biggest Palestinian cities, unless you get special permits that you get through the Israeli authorities, you can't cross to Jerusalem, which would be the natural, logical, geographically logical thing to do.
You have to go around.
And this is an everyday reality for Palestinians.
They have to, you know, come up with this roundabout ways to get from point A to point B because they don't have access to points Israelis have taken over.
And so basically what taking over E1 and demolishing Karel Akhmar will do is further fragment and further isolate all these Palestinian communities, which then in turn makes it easier for the Israeli military to control them.
Because if you can just surround a community, it's a lot easier to sort of control movement in and out of it and to limit people's lives even more.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, all right.
So from that tragedy to another one here, the homecoming.
And this is the story of Ahed Tamimi finally getting out of military prison where she'd been held by the Israelis for, I think, eight months.
And so, well, the subhead here is how Ahed Tamimi became the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression.
So let's start with that.
How did she become the symbol?
Yes.
And this is a story I've been wanting to tell for a long time, because some of you may remember, you know, back in December, shortly after Trump announced that he would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, there were protests in different Palestinian cities.
And during one of these protests in Nabi Saleh, which is a small village in the West Bank, this Palestinian girl was filmed slapping a soldier, pushing a soldier who had come onto her property, onto her house.
And the video went viral.
And it was, you know, it made it all over U.S. media.
And I'm someone who follows Israel and Palestine closely, and I had seen others, but I often find that people here in the U.S. in particular are not really up to speed with what's happening over there.
I mean, it's very rare that the media covers anything that happens, unless it's Gaza.
Gaza is a bit of an exception.
But that video was different.
It went viral and it was all over the place.
I remember seeing posters of Ahed Tamimi at rallies in U.S. about completely different issues and causes.
And so I thought it was very interesting how she really became this icon.
Also, it's important to remember, this wasn't the first time for her.
She comes from a very prominent activist family in the West Bank.
When she was 11 years old, she raised her tiny little fist at a soldier, and a photographer was there, took a photo of that, and that also went viral.
She was invited to speak in different countries, and she kind of became a symbol back then already.
And then when she was 15 years old, I believe, she again was photographed biting a soldier who was arresting her brother.
And so she's kind of been out there in the media already.
And it's important to know that she comes from, as I said, Nabi Saleh, which is this very small village, very close to an Israeli settlement, and one of the villages that are part of the popular resistance movement in Palestine.
It's been over the last decade, there has been this peaceful protest movement during which Palestinians every Friday would march towards the settlements and sort of protest the occupation and protest settlements.
And her family has been very active in that.
So she definitely comes from a family in a village that's been exposed to media before.
But that video really went viral, and her name was known everywhere.
And the thing that always struck me is that even though her story is certainly compelling, and she's a very compelling person, there are hundreds of Palestinian children who are arrested by Israeli authorities all the time.
In fact, there are 500 to 700 Palestinian minors in Israeli prisons every year.
And these are Israeli military prisons.
I think an important distinction to make is, or something people don't necessarily realize, is that there is an Israeli criminal justice system, much like our own criminal justice system, that prosecutes Israelis that commit crime.
But if you're Palestinian and you live in the occupied territories, and you are accused of a crime, you're accused of a security crime, really, so usually participating in protests, or most of them are accused of throwing rocks at soldiers, which is kind of the ultimate symbol of Palestinian resistance, then you don't go through the criminal justice system, you go through a military court system.
And I visited some of the courts.
It is, you know, military bases, it's a completely different setting.
And so I was really interested in telling this story because, while Ahed Tamimi is unique and certainly a very compelling, very brilliant and motivated young girl, she's only 17, she's also one of hundreds that go through the same thing every year.
Right.
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Thebumpersticker.com So now it's interesting, right?
Because her mother even said that, Hey, look, there's some racism going on here where she has blonde hair.
And I don't know if they're blue, but lighter eyes.
And she looks like an all-American girl, or at least a little bit more than the average Palestinian.
And so, oh, this is one that you care about kind of thing.
And the mother was trying to say, I don't think she was saying she was ungrateful that people care, but she was saying what you just said that like, well, what about everybody else too?
And so I wonder how you feel about that.
I mean, it seems like, you know, you got to take what you can get when it comes to what makes people pay attention.
I think the mother even said that she got emails from people saying, or whatever contact from people saying, wow, she looks just like my daughter.
And that was, you know, what had tipped the scale.
But, you know, I guess I look at it like, yeah, that's right.
The Palestinians are human beings and, you know, they live on earth just like you.
And you might take a look sometime.
So maybe that's what it takes, right?
Is somebody who looks a little bit more like you.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think it's, you know, it's something the family itself is very conflicted about.
It was the aunt that was making those comments.
But yes, she was basically saying, you know, ironically, actually, it's not completely uncommon for Palestinians to be blonde and have lighter eyes.
It's, you know, Americans and foreigners in general are so little accustomed to seeing Palestinians.
They wouldn't even know that.
But that aside, it's really, yes, I mean, I think it's really a matter of highlighting the tragedy of Palestinian children.
And I think Ahed herself is extremely aware of this.
And in her own press conference and in all the statements she's given after she was released, she's constantly made this point.
She said, you know, I'm one of many.
There are hundreds more that are detained and we're not free until they're all free.
And so in a way, I think that was actually my main motivation for wanting to write the story is that I had seen all the attention she was getting.
And, you know, I tend to think, yes, any attention is good attention as long as then you get to inform people about the context.
Because I've also seen a lot of media coverage of Ahed that really wasn't getting the details of the story correct, wasn't really understanding.
You know, people were saying, well, she just like assaulted a soldier.
I'm like, well, the soldier wasn't supposed to beat her in the first place, right?
It's just private property on occupied land.
So I think it's important to take advantage of these moments of notoriety, if you will, to talk about the context and talk about the people who are not famous and really tell the bigger story.
Right.
Well, and we got plenty of time and I want to do that.
So indulge me on the superficial for one more second here, because I guess the way I always thought of it was not about skin color, because what can you do about that anyway, right?
But that, you know, the Palestinians would really benefit from wearing American brand logos on T-shirts, you know, for whenever they are on camera, that their shirt has D.C. shoes or, you know, Nike or whatever kind of brand that Americans can identify that, you know, these guys, they look just like Americans to me.
If that's the same as human.
I don't know.
They look like anybody that could live in my same neighborhood.
So maybe they're not so foreign.
Maybe, you know, they do actually have rights that they're born with, even if they're born somewhere far away and victims of our government's allies.
Maybe I'll take a look at that.
And I think, you know, in this case, it's the blonder hair that's done the same trick.
But it seems like that could actually do a lot more than people might think.
Because, in fact, someone said to me the other day, they think of Palestinians, they think of Yasser Arafat in one, a military uniform and two, an Islamic headdress.
And there's just nothing there for me to see as compatible or anything to negotiate with in any sense.
You know, that kind of thing.
So it sounds stupid.
I know it sounds stupid, but people are stupid.
I mean, symbols mean everything.
You know what I mean?
And I guess I don't really know because I've never been there, but it seems like Palestinians are a lot more westernized than a lot of different Arab cultures.
They are, you know, even in the picture here, her father's wearing a suit and tie.
He traveled around the Middle East extensively.
And there's, you know, both people that wear Nike and US and European and other sort of brands and people that wear traditional dress.
I don't really think, like, I understand, you know, how people who haven't traveled much or who haven't been exposed to Palestinians might have been sort of surprised by Ahed's look.
But I don't think it really should matter at all.
In fact, you know, the week she was released, another girl, another younger 19-year-old girl was released from another city in Palestine for eight months.
And I think she, you know, she wore more traditional clothes and she wore a hijab.
And I just don't think it's on oppressed people to sort of adjust their looks to make themselves more compelling.
Well, no, I understand.
I guess I'm saying it's horrible, but it is what it is.
You know, I'm not saying that, you know, it should be that way or anything like that.
But I just think people really are that, that kind of, you know, like Henry Kissinger would say the pictures they showed and the order they showed them in for the general impression being left, you know, that kind of thing.
So it's, it's, it's a horrible reality.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound so crass.
But anyway, so I have you on for the same reason, really, that you wrote this thing, which is to really talk about how this works, this system of military so-called trial.
I mean, Guantanamo style, kangaroo star chamber BS trials for Palestinian children.
And, and, you know, and this is the story of Ahed Tamimi, and it's the story of a lot of them too, where the IDF comes literally swooping in like the boogeyman in the middle of the night, 3 and 4 a.m.and steal these little children out of their bed like monsters.
Like in the tales of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that I grew up on of the realities of 20th century totalitarianism.
Yeah, I mean, I think what's really interesting, you know, there are a few organizations that have documented the stories and they all tend to be very similar, right?
We usually see pre-dawn raids and soldiers break into their homes.
They separate the children from their parents.
They physically and verbally assault them.
And really, you know, if you've had any interaction with soldiers anywhere, I would say, but, you know, my personal interactions have been with Israeli soldiers for the most part.
And there's, you know, this very aggressive posture that's, you know, that's what soldiers are, and especially soldiers on occupied land, right?
On occupied territory we're talking about.
This is not Israel.
This is the West Bank, right?
And so anyway, we have the soldiers coming in.
They're separating children, blindfolding them is very common, handcuffing them, and then they usually drive them to interrogation centers where there are these lengthy interrogations that go on for hours, sometimes for days.
And children almost never have access to their parents, let alone a lawyer.
And many of them end up confessing just out of exhaustion and fear of being arrested.
I actually was in court, in a military court in Israel, well, in the West Bank, last summer, and I saw this trial where basically all this, not children in that case, it was young adults, but they were made to read statements they had signed, and then they sat in court, you know, you forced me to sign this, that's not my signature, you threatened to arrest my sister, and basically, you know, and then after that, we see a system that's actually pretty similar to the US plea bargain system, right?
Once the Israeli military decides they have enough evidence, which is really based on not much at all, either a forced confession or just a statement of a soldier, then they'll offer these deals so that it's actually pretty rare for cases to go to trial besides the original hearing, and kids get sentenced to months in prison.
And as I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of this time, you know, there are occasionally more serious offenses, but almost always, and particularly with minors, it's a matter of kids throwing rocks at soldiers, and yeah, you can think of it as, you know, a rock can hurt somebody, it's violence, but throwing rocks against a military jeep really kind of, you know, gives you a visual image of the disparity of power here.
Right.
Well, and especially when, as you said, you know, it's a military officer, it couldn't possibly be spun any other way, really.
And especially as you're talking about throwing rocks at armored vehicles and so forth, getting shot over that.
No way, except it often is, right?
So if you look at the coverage of the Ahed Tamimi incident, definitely in the Israeli media, actually, it was interesting.
A lot of people were like, you know, proud of the way the soldier behaved.
They were like, you know, this is another interesting point of comparison that I often make is around the time, more or less around the time that Ahed was arrested and prosecuted, the case was going on of an Israeli soldier, Elora Zaria, who had executed a Palestinian who had attacked other soldiers and had been detained and restrained and couldn't go anywhere.
He was like down on the floor and he executed him.
And the guy got a 14-month sentence and he was out after nine months.
So this soldier spent nine months in prison for executing a Palestinian.
Ahed Tamimi spent eight months in prison for slapping a soldier.
So you get a sense of sort of the fairness of the justice system here.
And it is an interesting part of that story, too, that the soldier originally was a good sport about it because she, after all, was at the time a 16-year-old girl.
And the media originally, like you said, oh, look, let's pat ourselves on the back of how humane we are.
And she was, I think, and then somebody and then a chorus rose up complaining that rather than being a good sport, instead this made the Israelis look weak, that they got hit by a girl and took it and didn't hit back.
And so now something must be done.
And so then they like decided to go after her a few days later, which was the reason for the raid in the middle of the night rather than arresting her on the spot, where at the time it was like, come on, he's not just a full-grown man.
She slapped him with her open hand.
So come on.
Yeah, I think they were definitely embarrassed.
She might have gotten off a lot more easily.
But they shouldn't have been embarrassed.
Like, you're right.
The original take was the right take, which was, come on, you know, let her get away with it because who cares, right?
It's like a warning instead of a speeding ticket here.
This is not a crime.
Yeah, and I think also what's important to note is that after her arrest and her mother and a cousin were detained with her with an eight-month sentence for incitement because she posted the video.
But after that, there have been a number of other raids.
Ahed's own brother was arrested in May, I believe.
Two of her cousins have been arrested.
I mean, this is something that's ongoing.
One of her cousins was killed in June by the military in her village.
So this is, it's not over.
I mean, it's something that people in Nabi Saleh and many other Palestinian communities deal with every day.
And what's also important to note is that this is not the spotlight moving on as it always does.
You know, there's a certain level of media interest and media attention, and then people move on to the next thing.
And that's when things tend to escalate for people that are left behind.
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Yeah, okay.
And now you say that there are 500 to 700 minors in military detention here.
And this is after plea bargains, but also so-called administrative detention where they don't even bother with the pretension of a military trial.
Is that right?
Yes, administrative detention is a very problematic tool Israelis use for the most part against adult prisoners, but not only.
They can detain somebody for six months without charging them with anything.
And usually that's, you know, even the cases in which they do charge people with something are based on what we, you know, could fairly say is flimsy as evidence, if any evidence at all.
But in these cases with administrative detention, there really is no evidence at all because there are no crimes people are charged with.
And the administrative detention tends to be used particularly against activists, against politicians.
There are a number of elected legislators, Palestinian legislators, who are in administrative detention.
And after six months, the detention can be renewed and it can be renewed over and over again up to, I believe, two or three years.
And then after that, people are often released for maybe like a month or two, and then they're administratively detained again.
So I have met people that have been in and out of administrative detention, never charged with any crime for, you know, a decade.
And it's mostly used as a tool for information about the Israeli occupation.
It's used as a tool for also basically bringing people in that they can then mentally torture until they extract information out of them that they're trying to get at.
And it's an extremely problematic practice that's, you know, very much happening on a large scale.
All right.
Now, you brought it up before, but could you talk a little bit more about what they're protesting about in Nabi Salah in this village and the taking of the water?
Yeah.
So, I mean, all the protests are really against the Israeli occupation, right?
So the West Bank has been under Israeli occupation since 1967.
And that's always the bigger.
I mean, when you go to any Palestinian protest, that's always what people are calling for is an end to the occupation, which really dominates their lives in all ways.
But in Nabi Salah in particular, very close to Nabi Salah, there is the Israeli settlement of Al Amish.
And Al Amish settlers incorporated into the territory they took over this water spring that used to be part of the village.
And so for the last decade, really every Friday, Palestinians from Nabi Salah would try to go down, try to walk into the area where the water spring is, really as just a symbolic gesture.
It's not really like they have the capacity of staying there.
I mean, that's, you know, the settlers are protected by the military.
But that's really been kind of the goal of their protests.
But there are a number of issues.
And there are protests around times when somebody is killed, as happened earlier this summer.
There were protests, of course, around Trump's announcement to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
But the overall thing, any Palestinian you ask to, is always the end to the occupation.
Which, by the way, now that this is Oslo's anniversary week, there's going to be a lot of remembrance of the peace deal and the handshaking that, you know, everybody thought was going to put, and I don't know if everybody thought, but many people thought was going to put an end to the conflict.
And, of course, the deal was never really finalized.
The solutions were supposed to be temporary.
There was supposed to be a Palestinian state established.
After Oslo, that never happened.
It's now been 25 years.
So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of speculation is still there that ultimately is always what Palestinians will ask for is an end to the occupation.
And then they're still doing these marches every Friday down to try to take their spring back, at least symbolically, like you're saying?
In Nabi Saleh, they have mostly ended.
At some point, there were, you know, they have been violent.
There have been three people killed during these protests.
There have been more than 350 people arrested.
They were kids.
At some point in 2016, which is when some of the last protests were held, 22 people were arrested at the same time.
So it's been, you know, it's taken a huge toll for the community there.
So it has mostly died down there, but also Nabi Saleh wasn't the only village where these protests were taking place.
There were Boudroos and Belen and Nileen.
There's a number of villages in the West Bank that are close to settlements where these protests have been taking place.
And I guess I would say they're ongoing, not always at the same, not always with the same frequency.
There have been, there has been a different movement in Gaza more recently, the March of Return.
We've seen, you know, peaceful demonstrators pushing close to the, it's not a border, but to sort of the line between Gaza and Israel.
And there have been protests in the West Bank in solidarity with Gaza.
So there's, I mean, there's always, there's always something.
And I would also like to remind people it's almost always peaceful protests, right?
Yeah.
Well, and now, so in your article you say here, since 2010, at least 8,000 Palestinian minors have been detained and prosecuted.
So the first thing is, do you define that between, is there a distinction between teenagers and children and how young do they get the arrested Palestinian children?
No, so these are all children under 18, minors under 18.
A majority of them are boys, not all, but they tend to be boys.
I mean, actually in the article you say Palestinian children, but I think you're, you mean minors by that, right?
I mean, well, yes, a child, the legal definition of a child.
I understand, but so what I'm asking though is how many actual children?
Most of these kids are teenagers, I would say some of the youngest that have been in detention for a long time have been 13, 12.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not saying that's okay.
There's no problem down or anything like that.
I'm just curious about the details is all.
They tend to be young teenagers and they tend to be boys.
Yeah.
Which still, that's pretty damn young to be held by a foreign government's military prison system.
You know, there's no, there's no, but we're not talking about seven-year-olds either.
So I guess you're saying, which I wouldn't put it past the Israelis to grab a seven-year-old.
Why not?
I don't know.
I mean, we have the US government and the parents, so I wouldn't put anything behind anybody.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
So, and then, so talk to us too about the treatment of these children once they're held in there.
It's just like summer camp, huh?
Well, that's what some Israeli officials have said.
It's, you know, it's prison.
Prison is not fun anywhere.
It's, I think for a lot of kids, the toughest experience is really the arrest and the interrogation.
Interrogation is really where, you know, Israeli security forces are trained at messing with you.
It's really a scary experience.
And then after that, when people, when kids are sent to prison, they're, you know, in a setting where they're surrounded by other kids and they have classes that are not particularly challenging or, you know, following any particular curriculum.
We'll stick with the interrogations for a minute.
Tell us all about that because you do write about that in this great piece.
Yeah.
So the interrogations, I mean, that's, that's what the Israeli security forces do in two ways.
First of all, they're trying to extract confessions and then the convictions are based on confessions, right?
So they're trying to intimidate and scare and exhaust people to the point that they will just admit to anything.
And then secondly, they also use them as sources of information where they try to extract knowledge about, you know, people that the kids might know, relatives, adult acquaintances and other people they live with.
And it's actually really interesting.
One technique that's used pretty often is to take a child or even an adult, actually, and then let them believe that the interrogation has concluded and then let them believe that they are being taken to prison.
And then when they're in prison, they are approached usually by an Arabic speaking person who is very friendly and, you know, chops them up and asks them what their story is.
And that is actually a part of the interrogation.
So then if they do talk to this person, they're then taken out and again met with by security forces who tell them, well, you, you know, you confess all these things to this person and we know what you said.
And so there's, you know, there's all kinds of techniques that are used by, by interrogators.
There's also widespread views of solitary confinement where, where kids are isolated in their cells.
They're like eating food in their cell so they can't leave.
They don't see anybody else.
There's the use of stress positions, which, you know, is essentially you make somebody sit in very uncomfortable positions so that they, their whole body is actually under stress and under.
Yeah, basically it's a physical experience.
There isn't so much outright beating during these interrogations or sort of like obvious violence.
There's a lot of mental violence and sort of psychological violence, but they're careful not to cross that line.
And, you know, they become sort of more sophisticated in their ways.
Well, I think, you know, in Guantanamo, they had the Palestinian chair and I'm pretty sure I thought I, I thought it was in this article where you had a picture of it where it's all slanted where their, their hands are tied behind it, but they're, yeah, I don't have a picture of it in the article, but I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, it's, I just saw it recently, I guess.
I'm sorry.
I conflated the two different things, but this is, this is part of, you know, in other words, the full grown man treatment is delivered on to 12 and 13, 14 year old kids in here.
Yeah.
And really not just the full grown man treatment, but really everybody is treated as a security threat, which means they're essentially treated as terrorists, right?
That's kind of Israel's posture towards, towards anybody they detain, which is, yeah, I mean, extremely, it's terrifying experience for the people that go through it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
And then so they put them in classes and all that.
That's just, you know, the PR or the UN rules or something that they have to give them what, a little something better than bread and water there.
I mean, there's been a lot of sort of I don't know, pinkwashing, I guess, of the whole experience.
There's, you know, there have been a number of reports by international organizations that have criticized the way Israel has detained these kids and prosecuted these kids.
And so recently, well, you know, a few years ago, they set up a separate juvenile court, juvenile military court system.
And as I mentioned earlier, I went to offer prison and courts, which is this military, this military base with a court and a prison in the West Bank.
And the difference between the adult courtrooms and the children's courtrooms are like really basically nothing.
I mean, there's the adult courtroom is a tiny container and the children's courtroom is a slightly bigger container where the judges may be a little friendlier.
But nothing actually changes in essence, nothing changes in the process.
And in fact, the main difference is that they cite privacy concerns for minors.
So it's actually a lot harder for journalists or NGOs to monitor minors proceedings because of this privacy concern, which makes it even more difficult for us to know what's happening in this settings.
All right.
Now, in the article, you profile a few different people and families besides the Tamimis in here about their experiences in dealing with the court and dealing with the system and all that.
So go ahead and tell us some of those if you want.
Yeah.
So, I mean, there are really dozens of stories like this, but some of the kids I met, there is a story of two cousins in Anapta, which is a small town in the northern West Bank.
And they say they were just, you know, walking around and kind of hanging out behind one of their houses in this like hilly area.
And I visited and there's really nothing there.
It's just kind of a patch of olive trees.
And then they said, out of nowhere, soldiers came and threw them down to the ground and started shouting at them and cursing at them and arrested them.
And then when they were interrogated, the kids were accused of throwing rocks, which they denied doing.
And they continued to deny doing throughout.
And then they denied to me that they had done it.
But one of the interrogators told one of the kids, you know, soldiers don't lie.
Soldiers send you through rocks, so you threw rocks and that's it.
That's, you know, that's all I need to know about it.
Or in another case, the interrogator gave one of the cousins a piece of paper telling him, these are your rights.
So you see this facade of justice.
You see this facade of sort of proper ways in which these things can be done.
If you could say such a thing where, you know, a kid is handed out a piece of paper telling him what his rights are.
And then he saw on the piece of paper that he had a right to silence.
So he told the interrogator, I am going to not say anything because I have a right to silence.
And at which point the interrogator started yelling at him and say, you know, why do you think I got you here?
You have to say something.
So you really see sort of the abuse of even whatever semblance of protocol they have in place.
And that's, you know, one of the stories.
And another one of the stories, you know, one of the kids I talked to actually confessed to throwing rocks.
And, you know, the story doesn't mean to say that these kids never do the things they're accused of.
They often do throw rocks or participate in demonstrations.
But I was kind of talking to this guy who was 16 and I was asking him, do you think, you know, I think it was six months that he spent in prison.
Do you think that's a fair punishment for what you did?
And he kind of like looked at me and wasn't really sure, you know, what to make of that question.
And then his older brother came in and was like, you're not guilty of anything.
This is your land.
You can throw rocks wherever you want, you know?
Which actually is the international law, right?
That they have the right to resist.
Yeah, I mean, this is, yeah, I think it's a bit contentious.
Yes, this is their land.
And like, what is illegal is the Israeli military presence there.
Right?
So they shouldn't be there in the first place.
But I just think that's interesting that never mind, you know, our opinion or, you know, I'm a libertarian, so I'm big on property rights or all that.
But none of that matters.
I mean, in the scheme of things, the international law agrees with me.
How do you like that?
Right?
Yeah, but I think international law, you know, is, the problem with international law is that there aren't really a ton of mechanisms to enforce it.
And, you know, international law is violated and abused, not just by Israel all the time.
Right?
And so, I mean, the US is violating international refugee law right now.
Right.
And so it's, Israel doesn't, you know, like settlements are illegal.
Jerusalem is an occupied city.
It's not the capital of Israel.
Like international law- I mean, all that really matters, right, is that the powers of the earth, led by the United States and its allies, that they at least recognize, you know, they wouldn't in the UN charter and whatever the rest of it, they wouldn't, you know, say that no, you don't have the right to resist.
They acknowledge, they recognize that these people do and they're violating their rights, even the ones that they recognize.
That's all.
It's not to say that it can somehow magically make them obey because clearly it can't, but it just goes to show that, well, it's criminal, you know, even according to the rules made by the ones doing the breaking.
I think they basically operate in a different legal system.
Like what I say is illegal what the international community says is illegal.
To Israel, it says, you know, that's an area they control.
That's like, these are security crimes.
So according to Israel, it's all, you know, these are throwing rocks at soldiers is a security crime.
And so by their book, it's a crime, right?
Which is like really the, yeah, the separate system they operate on really.
And for the most part, you know, they get away with it because nobody has threatened any serious consequences for these violations.
I mean, the US has been funding Israel forever.
I think there was one instance in the 90s when they threatened to withdraw funding and didn't.
And so it really, there has been no consequence.
There has been no price to pay, which incidentally is, I think, why Israeli authorities are so up in arms about this, you know, the boycott campaign.
That's the BDS movement.
That's been sort of building power in the last years is because that's, if it does work has, you know, as boycott campaigns in South Africa and elsewhere have worked, then that's where they will have to actually pay a cost for their actions.
And I think they feel threatened by that.
And so we've seen them in recent months banning any kind of foreign groups that say to support BDS or they've been stopping activists at the airport and turning them around.
It's, they are, you know, responding to the threat, I think.
Yeah.
Well, and for every dollar lost is, you know, a ton of political capital lost as people, you know, especially when the whole thing is framed in the same argument as South Africa in the 80s, boycott apartheid in South Africa, and you just replace South Africa with Israel there.
That's a real PR loss for them.
So you can see why they're terrified of that because it raises all those questions about, well, why would anybody call them an apartheid state?
That's not what TV says, but somebody seems to think so.
So what's going on there?
I mean, and that's really where we're at on this is forever at the bottom of the hill, just starting to climb where most Americans really don't understand the facts of the occupation in the basic sense at all.
You know?
Yeah, definitely.
And there's the occupation and then there's also the reality that really a lot of people don't understand of Palestinians and Israel.
So, you know, there are Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem, and then there are, of course, all the Palestinians in the diaspora, right?
So Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria and in the U.S. and in Canada and wherever else they ended up.
And then there are 20% of Israel's population were Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent or Palestinian citizens of Israel.
And actually, since you brought up the question of apartheid, Israel has passed this extremely controversial nation-state law this summer that essentially, once again, declares Israel as a Jewish state, therefore making everybody who is not Jewish, so Palestinians, Jews, other minorities that live there, essentially class B citizens, right?
And so I think for a long time there was, you know, people compared Israel to an apartheid state, but there were, like, some minor differences and they, I don't know, maybe could argue back.
But this nation-state law has made that so explicit that it's really codified apartheid.
There's no way around it now.
It's completely unambiguous.
This is what Israel is right now.
Yeah.
Well, and it's been interesting to watch where, for some American liberal Zionists, this is crossing the line and this is going too far, which obviously puts them in the ironic spot of finishing the rest of that sentence that, well, you know, from 48 up until now, from 67 up until now, this much has been tolerable.
But now they've crossed the line.
Kind of, you have to at least reconsider the occupation since 67 here.
You know, it seems like it's been apartheid as hell all along for these people.
Yeah, I mean, it's really ironic that, you know, what is it that is the last straw?
It's, yeah, as you said, you know, what did it take?
And you can kind of make the same argument in the US, you know, where, like, people were just rightly, you know, horrified by the family separation policy.
Like, okay, well, we've had plenty of other problems in the last year and a half, and those didn't bother you, you know?
So it's, yeah.
And even with the nation-state law in Israel, I mean, there's been major pushback to it, but nothing really has changed yet, right?
There have been no consequences, and I think that's the thing that remains.
Until there are consequences, nothing else would change.
Yeah.
Well, I'm afraid that's true, and as bad as it gets, and it really is, you know, I don't know.
I bring up the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany for a reason not to make, like, just a tired comparison.
No one's ever allowed to compare anything to Nazism or whatever, but it is a totalitarian system.
These people have no political rights whatsoever, no real property rights, no system of law that protects them from their own security force, at least anything like, you know, I know it's a sham, but that's the way it's set up everywhere, and they don't get to elect the people in power over them whatsoever.
And, you know, we don't have anything like this anywhere else in what we consider the Western world, where children are taken out of their beds in the middle of the night by foreign soldiers like this, and then it just goes on and on and on like this.
It's absolutely intolerable and yet tolerated.
Yeah.
Worth a start.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show and this great piece of journalism.
I hope everyone will look at it.
Thank you for having me.
It's appreciated.
Yeah, thank you again.
It's Alice Sperry, and you can find it at The Intercept.
It's how Ahed Tamimi became the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression, and it's about much more than that, so please definitely take a look.
It's got a great take on that and the entire situation there as well.
And then her most recent piece at The Intercept is called A Palestinian Bedouin Village Braces for Forcible Transfer as Israel seeks to split the West Bank in half.
Both of those, again, at TheIntercept.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
