Over the first four days of Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange, Israel arrests 133 Palestinians while releasing 150.
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But the worry for Palestinian prisoners does not end after their release. The majority of those freed are usually rearrested by Israeli forces in the days, weeks, months and years after their release.
Dozens of those who were arrested in a 2011 Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange were rearrested and had their sentences reinstated.
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Many of the women and children released during the truce have testified to the abuse they experienced in Israeli prisons.
Several videos have also emerged in recent weeks of Israeli soldiers beating, stepping on, abusing and humiliating detained Palestinians who have been blindfolded, cuffed and stripped either partially or entirely. Many social media users said the scenes brought back memories of the torture tactics used by United States forces in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.
You think you’re defending Israel but you’re actually doing a much worse service to it. If Israel is guilty of apartheid, which I think it is, it has a clear path to redemption. If however the Israeli crimes are sui generis, then we end up with a whole new class of crime against humanity called “the crime Israel is doing to the Palestinians”, for which the international order has no precedent for how to redeem. And that’s a huge danger for Israel because it opens up the space of possible reactions, much much more widely than apartheid.
The crime Israel is doing to Palestinians (I’ve seen Nakba suggested as a name, so I’ll use it for brevity) extends beyond Apartheid. The Nakba’s intent is to take apart Palestinians’ ability to exist as a political collective by dividing them and implementing varying levels of Apartheid and violence against them, up to and including genocide. This goes beyond South African Apartheid, whose goal was for black people to serve white people. The Nakba is meant to destroy Palestinians as an entity capable of having political will. This is why they’re currently divided into Israeli citizens, East Jerusalemites, Gazans and West Bankers, with the goal of eventually ethnically cleansing the latter two (along with East Jerusalemites on a larger timescale).
The Nakba includes Apartheid as one of its components, but it’s not Apartheid.