This is what it's like to live in Israel today.

“Half of the Israeli public is no longer in favor of the war,” one friend told me Saturday night as we witnessed thousands of Israelis take to the streets to protest the Israeli government under the slogan, “Elections Now.” “Yes, but the other half is all-in, and REALLY in favor,” responded his wife. “And they are the more powerful group.”

She, of course, is right. For months, reports of torture and rape have emerged from Israel’s military base turned torture camp, Sde Teiman, where Israel has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians without charge. I wrote about it in a previous diary earlier this month. Palestinians who have emerged from this torture camp refer to it as the “slaughterhouse” with horrendous tales of torture, rape, abuse, and sleep deprivation being meted out by Israeli prison guards. Nearly 30 Palestinians have died while in Sde Teiman and other prisons, according to the information provided to date.

And while the precise chain of events is unclear, what we do know is that the Israeli military advocate general decided to dispatch the military police to question nine Israeli soldiers on suspicion of gang-raping and sodomizing a Palestinian man from Gaza at Sde Teiman. The man was rushed to the hospital where he exhibited signs of rape, including a ruptured bowel and broken ribs. It would be a mistake to simply think that Israel’s actions in prisons like Sde Teiman came only after October. Since becoming Israel’s national security minister in 2022, ultranationalist Itamar Ben Gvir has made prisons his target, with him authorizing abuse against Palestinians. He has also called for the death penalty to solve problems of overcrowding.

    • @[email protected]
      42•3 months ago

      Maybe being biased against rape and torture is a good thing ¯\(ツ)/¯. Many newspapers used neutral and “objective” language in the 1800s when covering the lynching of black people, and it’s hypothesized that this helped normalize the practice. There are many valid criticisms against “journalistic objectivity.”

      Also, be mindful that ChatGPT is intentionally biased through training data selection, RLHF, and many guardrails.

    • @[email protected]English
      14•3 months ago

      No sick burn was intended.

      Regardless of whether you think an emotive or a dispassionate tone is more appropriate for this particular story, the facts contained in both articles remain the same, do they not?

        • @[email protected]English
          14•3 months ago

          I disagree – I think there is definitely room for this more impassioned/personal style of reporting as long as the facts being reported are accurate, especially with this conflict in particular. After all, the headline is not misleading – people literally attacked military bases in defense of the right of IDF soldiers to rape and torture Palestinian detainees with impunity. That happened.

          If you prefer the more dispassionate, passive-voice-using, equivocating language about what is going on in Israel/Palestine right now, you have almost the entire rest of the Western news media to choose from.

            • @[email protected]English
              10•3 months ago

              The idea that propaganda cannot be propaganda if it is delivered in a dry, objective tone is nonsensical.

              The Israel/Palestine conflict is a great example of this - especially in the US. Anyone who has closely watched the mainstream news media cover the situation in Gaza, or the college protests that sprung up as a result, has witnessed consent for Israel’s war being manufactured in front of their very eyes, along with the vilification of anyone who stands opposed to it. The fact that it is delivered by seemingly professional journalists in a somber, even tone has no bearing whatsoever on how accurately it describes reality.

            • @[email protected]
              3•3 months ago

              You have a completely imaginary concept of how news works. It’s always biased. It’s always propaganda. Your “neutral tone” is just a propaganda tool of hegemony.

              The best we can hope for is that the news is biased against rape, genocide, etc. Even though most often it is not.

        • @[email protected]
          4•3 months ago

          i do want to believe that majority of the israeli society does not riot for a right to rape prisoners and as a person living 3000 km from the conflict, being fed emotional propaganda from both sides doesn’t make the job of making the opinion easier.

          Oh so we need to let you remain delusional so you can live in comfort while people are raped and genocided nearby?

        • @[email protected]
          3•3 months ago

          Because that’s the quote from the lawmaker asking the question. If they didn’t quote him exactly they’d be lying.

          Even now, as a wider war with Hezbollah and Iran looms, Israel remains deeply divided over an incident that feels a lot like the US torture abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib and the January 6 riot rolled into one. Ahmad Tibi, a member of the Knesset (MK) from an Arab political party, asked during a parliamentary debate over the abuses at Sde Teiman if “inserting an explosive into the rectum of a person [is] legitimate.” In response, Hanoch Milvetsky — a member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party — said that when it came to Hamas commandos, “everything is legitimate.”

          https://www.vox.com/politics/364343/israel-riot-military-base-sde-touman-torture-member-knesset