In May, a shocking CNN report based on whistleblower testimony placed Israel’s Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert under the global spotlight and led to it being compared to the notorious US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba where I was imprisoned for more than a decade.
Three Israelis who worked at the desert camp doubling as a detention centre since the beginning of the Gaza war told CNN that they witnessed systemic physical and psychological abuse of Palestinian detainees at the facility.
They said the Palestinians imprisoned there, who are held without charge or legal representation, are blindfolded, forced into stress positions, beaten, insulted, and prevented from speaking for extended periods. Prisoners at Sde Teiman, the whistleblowers claimed, routinely have their limbs amputated due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing.
CNN also published two photographs from the facility, showing rows of men in grey tracksuits sitting blindfolded in an outdoor area ring-fenced by barbwire and lit by floodlights.
The report, collaborated by independent reporting from other outlets, as well as testimonies of the released Palestinian prisoners, made my heart sink. It immediately transported me back to that dark day in February 2002, when I was first sent blindfolded and shackled to Guantanamo, where I would spend more than 14 years in arbitrary imprisonment, without knowing when or if I would be released, or even why I was being held.
In Guantanamo, my experience as a prisoner was indeed very similar to the one described by the Israeli whistleblowers in the CNN report – an experience defined by a sense of perpetual uncertainty and fear.
Just as it appears to be the case with Sde Taiman, psychological abuse was rampant in Guantanamo. We were routinely put in isolation, exposed to extreme temperatures and threatened with physical abuse. Humiliation through forced nudity and sexual assaults were also common. Sensory overload and deprivation, through extended exposure to bright lights and loud noises, or being forced to sit in solitary in complete darkness for hours, further chipped away our sense of reality.
The similarities between Guantanamo and Sde Teiman are not limited to the treatment of prisoners either. The two facilities also justify their existence, and provide legal cover for their excesses, using similar arguments and narratives.
The US government established Guantanamo Bay after 9/11 to detain and interrogate men suspected to have had a hand in those attacks, or other terror connections, without being restrained by international humanitarian law and other treaties that ban the mistreatment of war captives. The US government classified all prisoners in Guantanamo Bay as “illegal enemy combatants,” enabling itself to hold us without charge, with limited legal representation, and in blatant violation of international law for years. In the years after 9/11, the US “disappeared” countless innocent Muslim men and boys in this way. I was one of the 779 men and boys sent to Guantanamo. But thousands of others are believed to have been imprisoned and eventually disappeared in similar black sites and military detention centres around the world.
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