Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 26.05.2026

There is no one in Israel who does not know that the Nazis established concentration camps, that the Nazis tortured prisoners in these camps. Because they murdered people, especially Jews, and a number of Nazi leaders were hanged after Germany was defeated. The German people closed their eyes so that they did not know what was happening, and only a few saved Jews and even Jews accused of security offenses. As in Germany, they close their eyes and ears and do not protest what is done in their name.

The liberal Zionist newspaper Haaretz wrote in an editorial today that since October 7, the Israeli public has not known what is happening inside the security prisoners’ prison system. A small window is rarely opened and the sight is horrifying. For example, the video of the abuse of a Palestinian detainee by the soldiers of the 100th Force was published. In the video, soldiers with a dog are seen attacking a detainee with terrible violence and raping him. The video is so shocking that even the MAG Corps, which has shown almost total indifference to countless proven crimes committed by soldiers in Gaza, decided to file an indictment after a video documenting the torture of a Palestinian prisoner was published around the world. But that indictment was dropped after the detainee, who was the main witness, was released back to Gaza without his testimony being taken and after the public discourse shifted to the question of who was the criminal who leaked the video and damaged Israel’s image.

Last week, a small window opened again to what was happening in the prisons. Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir documented himself. In the video, which has garnered tens of millions of views, the detainees are seen in painful plastic handcuffs and kneeling with their faces to the ground, while the Zionist anthem is played from large loudspeakers – a kind of perverse method of torture. When a detainee named Zohar Regev tried to shout at him, she was pushed to the ground with great force by a police officer or a prison guard. When the flotilla activists were released, they gave detailed and reliable reports of the violence used against them. A number of them were hospitalized due to broken bones, and yesterday, a 14-year-old autistic boy told of the constant violence of guards against him and other detainees.

Last week, Nicholas Kristoff also published an investigation in the New York Times about the sexual abuse reported by released Palestinian detainees.  The wanted criminal, Zionist Prime Minister Netanyahu, strongly attacked the investigation and threatened a libel suit. But reports of the use of sexual violence against detainees have repeatedly emerged from reports by human rights groups and the United Nations, journalistic investigations, and testimonies from detainees and doctors.

In order to try to hide the extent and forms of torture, the government does not allow Red Cross personnel to visit the security prisoners? And this when in the last two and a half years 98 people have been reported to have died in Israeli prisons? Detainees lose tens of kilograms of weight due to starvation in prisons. You have to close your eyes and ears so that you don’t know that under the fascist minister Ben Gvir and the commissioner of the IPS, the criminal suspect, Kobi Yaakobi, Israeli prisons have been turned into detention camps for torture.

Haaretz writes: “The Israeli public must receive answers to these questions. Worryingly, most of the public doesn’t care, and with the exception of a few votes, there is no one to ask.” And the rulers of Israel are not afraid of him, and therefore they have no need for fascism. Israel is not a fascist state because fascism crushes the workers’ movement. In Israel, the Jewish working class supports the Likud and the rulers have no need for fascism. But the imagination screams. Now is the time to organize a protest on a united front, each organization with its own demands, but the common denominator as much as possible in Israel and around the world is to denounce the torture of political prisoners in Israel.