Rasha Kareem wasn’t hiding from the police. She didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. And she hadn’t done anything wrong. Not by any reasonable standard. Rasha was simply going about her day. She owned a beauty salon in Majd Al-Krum, a town in the Galilee. She was running routine errands when Israeli police pulled her over.
Rasha is tall and elegant. She has the face of a model and long, shimmering black hair. She was wearing a sleek black dress. She tried to maintain her composure as Israeli police swarmed around her. There is a look of confusion and then a flash of fear on her face as she is told she’s being arrested. Her hands are tightly cuffed in zip ties. Then Rasha begins to weep, as the police ominously strap a blindfold over her eyes. You can see the long fingers on her restrained hands tremble as she tries to wipe the tears from her face. Imagine what was going through her mind at that moment. Why the blindfold? Where are they taking me? What have I done to deserve it? This decorous and dignified woman, who had offered not the slightest resistance, was being treated as a terrorist.
What had Rasha done? Not much. Not anything, really. She was a Palestinian woman living in Israel who had written pro-Palestinian comments on Social Media. She expressed her sorrow and anger at the mounting deaths in Gaza. Like many, even a growing number of Israeli Jews, she wrote of her hopes that the killing would stop and the war would end. But such openly expressed sentiments are considered a crime now in Israel and it seems someone had ratted out Rasha Kareem to the offices of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the fanatical Minister of Security in the Netanyahu government.
“A report was received of a few posts made by the suspect against the IDF’s soldiers and the Israeli government that could disrupt public order,” the Israeli police said in a statement. Ben-Gvir and his minions wanted Rasha charged with incitement to terrorism. The histrionic minister of security, who controls Israel’s police wanted to make an example of her. An example of what, though? His ability to crush any form of dissent, however innocuous, from whatever harmless quarter, even a beauty parlor.
The Israeli police had a problem, though. Ben-Gvir didn’t trust the State Attorney General’s office to issue a warrant against Rasha Kareem. The Security Minister’s attacks on the Attorney General, Galli Baharav-Miara, have become more and more bombastic. Baharav-Miara, Israel’s first female attorney general, was appointed to her post by Naftali Bennett, during his brief tenure as PM, in 2022. There’s no question Baharav-Miara is a hardliner. But not hard enough for Ben-Gvir, who has accused her of leading “the moral and professional degradation” of the attorney general’s office and “acting in an unprecedented manner against the state.” The state being Ben-Gvir’s brutish ministry, one assumes.
So instead of serving Rasha Kareem with a warrant, Ben-Gvir’s police targeted her on their own using the novel theory that her social media posts posed a threat to public order. On this thin pretext, Rasha was detained, cuffed, blindfolded and whisked away to some Israeli black site where she was subjected to interrogation.
But soon a startling video of her arrest leaked. Apparently, the video was shot by one of the Israeli cops involved in the arrest, so it’s not out of the realm of reason to assume it was leaked by Ben-Gvir’s goons with the intention to humiliate Rasha and intimidate anyone else from expressing empathy for Palestinians in Gaza. If so, the malicious intent seems to have backfired. The video of Rasha’s arrest elicited more sympathy and outrage, than fear or panic. Rasha’s lawyer protested her arrest and detention to the office of the State Attorney, who swiftly found that Ben-Gvir’s police had not received the necessary permission to investigate her and that “the police’s decision to cuff the suspect with zip ties and blindfold her is unclear.”
Kareem was released from custody and ordered to house arrest for five days. Ben-Gvir condemned her release and accused the State Attorney’s office of“rushing to intervene in support of the terror backer Rasha Kareem.” The arbitrary arrest, detention and interrogation of Rasha Kareem is nothing new. During the First Intifada, more than 100,000 Palestinians were arrested, many of them without warrants or trials, under an administrative detention policy that was a relic of the British Occupation of Palestine. At least 85,000 were subjected to torturous interrogations.
Now this oppressive scheme is being revived. Since October Israel has arrested more than 9,000 Palestinians, including 300 women and 635 minors, from the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, alone. There’s no accurate count of the number of Palestinians Israel has detained from Gaza but it’s certainly more than the 9000 arrested in the West Bank.
Many of the male Gaza detainees, young and old, have been interned at Sde Teiman military-run torture camp near the city of Be’er Al Sabe, where they are kept blindfolded, stripped of most of their clothes and shackled for weeks at a time. Most of the Palestine women and young girls detained in Gaza have been sent to the Anatot military torture camp outside Jerusalem.
Unlike Rasha Kareem, who was snatched in daylight on the street, most of the arrests of Palestinians took place late at night with doors being blown open while the targets and their families were asleep. Israeli soldiers and security police often barge in with attack dogs, hurl threats and insults at family members, vandalize property inside the dwelling and humiliate and abuse the detainees in front of their families.
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn).
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