Israelis are having a meltdown over the leak of a video of Israeli soldiers gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman torture camp.
The uproar isn’t about the dozen or so Israeli soldiers who inserted a sharp object into a Palestinian prisoner’s anus and ripped his rectum apart. No, it’s over the fact that it was made public at all — and leaked by Israel’s Chief Military Advocate, no less.
On Sunday night, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the top lawyer supposedly in charge of making sure the Israeli army follows the law, was arrested after having revealed last Friday that she was the one who had leaked the infamous rape video to the media over a year ago.
The court case against the suspected rapists — who are not even charged with rape, but “aggravated abuse” and “causing aggravated injury” — is still ongoing. Meanwhile, Tomer-Yerushalmi is now being leveled with charges such as “breach of loyalty,” “breach of trust,” “dereliction of duty,” and “disrupting investigative operations,” Israel’s Channel 12 reported in Hebrew.
In her resignation letter, the ex-Military Advocate said she approved the video leak “in an attempt to rebuff the deceitful propaganda against the law-enforcing elements in the army.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netantahu did not miss the opportunity to dramatize the matter, portraying the whole case as an attack on the nation: “This is perhaps the most severe public relations attack that the state of Israel has experienced since its establishment,” he railed.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called the case a “blood libel,” promising that “all required sanctions” would be taken against Tomer-Yerushalmi, including stripping her of her rank.
“Anyone who falsely spreads blood libels against IDF soldiers and prefers the welfare of the Nukhba terrorists over theirs is not worthy of wearing the IDF uniform and belongs in prison,” the Defense Minister said. Although, as the Times of Israel and other news sources clarified, the Palestinian detainee who was raped by the reservists in Sde Teiman was a civilian and not a Hamas fighter.
Even still, the leak is playing to the rapists’ favor, since the nature of the leak might end up compromising the position of the prosecution.
What’s notable about all this is the popular outrage in Israel, with widespread sympathy toward the “wronged” soldiers turning the affair into a national story — in support of their right to rape Palestinians with impunity.
Hellbound and Down 