Report by HJJ member Richard Wistreich
On Thursday, 19 September 2024, I was invited to join a group of about 25 Jewish women from North London to participate in a performance outside the National Theatre. The focus was the testimony of a young man of 24, recounting the unspeakable tortures meted out on him and other Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli army detention camp in recent months.
Some of the participants (including myself) are children of Holocaust survivors, devastated to be witnessing acts of dehumanisation and genocide enacted by a Jewish state created in the wake of the Holocaust.
The event was organised by North London Peaceniks, a small group of older Jewish women who curate events in London to highlight their abhorrence as Jewish people at what is being perpetrated against the Palestinian population in Gaza and beyond.
One of the organisers later told me they had also heard from Ahmed Tobasi, who is the artistic director of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, who described how they were made to sit for some hours... 'each person inside of each person so they sit in the hip of the one behind you and another one in front of you, so your legs are open, your hands back, you’re blindfolded, your head down, you cannot move, you cannot talk, and they walk around you, their guns touching your body, imagine you feel the side of an M16 or a big gun in your neck or in your back, you think you’re going to die, you cannot go to toilet you cannot get water...And when I was in that position I feel so humilated and that’s what they want you to feel - you are not a human. ... . Am I not having blood, skin, a mind, a tongue?'
The event in London was predominantly a silent vigil. It took place in the circular performance space outside the National Theatre at Embankment.
We walked in single file into the arena and while about 15 of us stood around the perimeter, each holding posters explaining the action, another group, wearing blindfolds, kneeled on the ground in imitation of the inhumane postures forced on Palestinian detainees by Israeli forces.
They wore black T-shirts on which were printed extracts from the testimony of one of the torture victims. After about 15 minutes, one of our group stood up, lifted her blindfold and read the young man’s testimony aloud.
The testimony described being arrested in Gaza together with about 60 other men, their subsequent imprisonment in small cages in a prison yard, and the unspeakable abuse, starvation, beatings, and brutal and systematic rape of many men that ensued over the course of two weeks. The victims ranged in age from 15 to 40.
The testimony described what happened to the 40-year-old: 'While one soldier was facing him and kept asking him questions about Hamas and tunnels and fighters. The man was whining and screaming, shouting most of the time: "I don’t know, I am a taxi driver, I don’t know."
'When two of them finished with him, the third brought a fire hose and started to push it inside the man. We were all crying and screaming with panic and sadness. The poor man was bleeding, his screams shook us. One of us threw up. Another one fell on the ground. After some time, the man stopped screaming and stopped moving. They took us back to the cell.'
Further testimony read:
'13 days, beating, raping, electric shocks. Food once a day, barely enough for a 3 year old. 13 days, I wished to die. 13 days, I called upon God. I called all the Gods but no help came. 13 days. 13 days thinking of my parents, my wife and the children I left behind. What happened to them? 13 days.
'Today I am in Deir Al Balah, Abu Haseen School in Beit Lahia was bombed again in December. More than 30 persons were killed, my father and my mother among them. My 7 years old son was injured, his arm was amputated. The rest of my family are still in the north. I can’t meet them. I can’t feel my left hand, I can’t sleep, I can’t remove the image of that man from my head, day and night. Did he die? Did he survive?'
Thanks to @KBuus for kind permission to reproduce images from the protest.
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