Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Anybody got a take on the stuff in Israel about soldiers arrested for rape resisting arrest resulting in riots or something? My Twitter timeline is full of it but I can't honestly decode what's going on from the propaganda.
It’s all rather embarrassing. The MKs involved are from the coalition parties, which makes things even worse. It seems like Likud et al just can’t get past their revisionist roots so they must always play the revolutionary underdog role, even when they’re supposed to be the rulers.
In any case, everyone involved is from the Israeli Jewish mainstream, so real violence isn’t likely.
Edit: forgot to answer, as far as I understand the prisoner had a broomstick shoved up his ass. Pretty sick.
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It's remarkable how fractious and divisive these people are in the face of external dangers. Normal people fighting a dirty war try to hush up their crimes, sweep things under the rug... You see this in Germany and the Holocaust, you had higher ups in the Posen speeches saying to a selected audience of elites 'alright this is wartime we can get away with stuff we can't do in peacetime, once we win this won't be spoken of in public'.
But the Israelis are screaming at eachother in Parliament "Is it legitimate to insert a stick in someone's rectum?" and someone goes "Yes everything is permitted, they're Nukhba!" (A Hamas unit).
https://x.com/CensoredMen/status/1818143620098081123
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Hm. WaPo, Haaretz (2), Al J.
It's kinda interesting that both Haaretz and ALJ describe the victim in this case as "he" -- were it one, I might think translation issues, and that's still possible, but it's a lot less likely. There's a lot of demographic reasons for a lot of violence against prisoners to target men, and I've seen 'gang-rape' used to describe the situation, but doesn't exclude the Abu Ghraib or Oncale-style sexualized-violence-as-humiliation option. Which is still bad!
At least from the public reporting, the accused soldiers were arrested. While some (and/or some other soldiers stationed at the facility?) resisted, they didn't do so very long or very successfully. A separate problem came about when external protestors, including some Israeli politicians, started protesting outside the base and then pushed their way inside, before being redirected back out. This is absolutely embarrassing for a military power, but it's more shoving contests gone dumber than a serious riot.
I think some of the right-wing protest comes about because there have been a number of high-profile exaggerated examples of IDF abuse, but a lot of the criticisms of treatment in other cases do have real foundation. Whether the underlying allegations here are Oncale-style abuse or more conventional gang-rape of a prisoner, they're going to need serious investigation to prove whether they happened or not.
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