Michael Wyschogrod
MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD The Israeli secret services must remain effective but they must operate within the framework of Jewish morality and law. Do the Israeli police, security services and military...
...If we have captured the person we believe has planted the bomb, may we torture the suspect to find out where he or she has planted it...
...Under the best circumstances, a prisoner in the hands of the security services is in a difficult and dangerous situation...
...The last six words caught my attention...
...Since the creation of Israel, the fight against terrorism has, understandably, enjoyed nearly total support from the Israeli and American Jewish public...
...This is not a political issue...
...The temptation to use illicit methods of interrogation, partly condoned by the language of the Landau Commission report, is overwhelming...
...Security services all over the world see themselves fighting their societies' mortal enemies in a war where there is no quarter given or asked...
...The story added that a police spokesman "said eight suspects, all from the Jerusalem area, have been arrested and are cooperating with the police...
...The recently formed Public Committee Against Torture in Israel says they do and they cite specific instances...
...I have no way of independently verifying these allegations, but I have been reading whatever I could find about this problem and talking to people who know more about Israeli procedures than I and my discomfort has been increasing...
...The antitorture group, which includes Hebrew University criminologist Stanley Cohen and psychiatrist Yehoyakim Stein, alleged that methods such as beatings, sleep deprivation, dousing with cold water, binding prisoners' hands and feet and holding them in a "banana position," and forcing suspects to stand hooded for many hours with their hands behind them manacled to a metal bar were not infrequently used in the course of the interrogation of security prisoners...
...it has nothing to do with whether one is a hawk or a dove, whether one believes that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, who are forbidden to surrender any part of it or whether one supports a peace for land policy...
...Al-Amud was released several months later when the man believed to be the real killer was apprehended...
...Torture contaminates the best of causes...
...Ashur tried to commit suicide in jail and was treated in a psychiatric hospital after his release...
...The trouble is that they have done and continue to do wrong...
...Just a week before the Jerusalem Post's international edition announced the formation of the antitorture group, it ran a story headlined "Fatah Cell Uncovered in Capital...
...I can understand one or two members of the gang being persuaded to testify against their friends by promises of lenient treatment, though even this is not terribly plausible under current circumstances...
...The Israeli secret services must remain effective but they must operate within the framework of Jewish morality and law, which have long frowned on confession as a basis for conviction...
...Confessions are therefore suspect...
...Why are the suspects cooperating with the police...
...This is a nonpolitical, moral issue on which American Jews have a right to be heard...
...The moral damage Israeli use of torture inflicts on Israel and the Jewish people worldwide is too great...
...And if the use of moderate physical pressure on PLO terrorists can turn them into cooperative witnesses, perhaps the pressure was not all that moderate...
...What is more, the 1987 cabinet-appointed Landau Commission report on Shin Bet (Security Services) investigative methods approved the application of "moderate physical pressure" in the interrogation of security suspects...
...These charges are deeply disturbing...
...9 Michael Wyschogrod is professor of philosophy at Baruch College of the City University of New York...
...It seems that "moderate physical pressure"—otherwise known as torture—can make people confess to crimes they did not commit...
...The Post reported j that a well-armed, Jerusalem-based terrorist cell responsible for at least one murder and linked to Fatah, Yasser Arafat's mainstream faction of the PLO, had been uncovered...
...After a point, the potential for human sadism takes over and the original goal becomes secondary...
...I do not believe so...
...In the process, a mentality seems to have developed that the security services can do no wrong...
...They expect effective antiterrorism measures and are not too squeamish about methods used...
...First convicted and later acquitted at a retrial, Ashur charged at a press conference called by the antitorture group that during interrogation he was denied sleep, made to stand for many hours, punched in the stomach, beaten on the legs and held in an isolation cell for four months during which he was not permitted to change his clothing or wash...
...In another case, an Israeli, Rami j Ashur, spent 25 months in jail, from 1986 to 1988, while in military service after being convicted of "giving aid to the enemy and endangering state security...
...He writes on Jewish theology, history and philosophy...
...But all eight of them...
...The newly formed antitorture group calls the Landau report "a unique document, in which a society that calls itself democratic officially lays down regulations for the carrying out of torture...
...Denial is no longer available to me...
...I am convinced that it is wrong to do so, no matter how vital the information such persons possess...
...This is also true in Israel with its history of the clandestine Hagannah fighting against the British and the battles of the Shin Bet and Mossad against Arab enemies...
...Could they be cooperating because of application of the "moderate physical pressure" permitted by the Landau Commission report...
...This is the ideal atmosphere for the growth of abuses...
...The culture of security services condones many things society would condemn...
...They cited cases, including that of a Palestinian, Ras al-Amud, who confessed to killing an alleged collaborator and re-enacted the crime...
...He co-edited with Clemens Thoma Understanding Scripture: Explorations of Jewish and Christian Traditions of Interpretation (Paulist Press, 1987...
...The only issue here is whether it is permissible to maltreat prisoners who are in custody to extract confessions and information...
...The 1984 killing by nine Israeli security officers of two coastal road bus terrorists after their capture is but one example...
...Israel must not tolerate such a scenario...
...Jewish law teaches that "no person makes himself out to be evil" (Sanhedrin, 9b...
...In Israel, WYSCHOGROD continued from page 13 most convictions on security offenses are obtained on the basis of confessions alone...
...Even when the issue is not the use of confessions in a court of law but extracting valuable information from unfriendly suspects, a Jewish state must be willing to dispense with information that only torture can extract...
...Do the Israeli police, security services and military police torture prisoners during interrogations...
...Or so it seems...
...The possibility that they are true is so threatening that denial seems the only possible response...
...Many American Jews will reject them out of hand because the charges do not fit their image of Israel...
...What if someone has planted a bomb that will go off in a few hours and will kill many people...
...It creates a class of torturers who come to terms with their profession or worse...
...Torture is never a permissible means to even the most worthy goals...
...There is something wrong, I now believe, with the operating procedures of the Israeli police and secret services...
...This means that it is not human nature to admit wrong-doing...
...Most Israelis do not ask too many questions...
...Alone, under the control of interrogators, the suspect's word is pitted against his captors' word...
Vol. 15 • August 1990 • No. 4
