I Was Detained by Israel: Here’s What Ben-Gvir Didn’t Want You to See
Zeteo contributor Alex Colston, who was released from Israeli detention a week ago, breaks down the torture and other abuse Israel inflicted on Global Sumud Flotilla activists beyond the camera’s view
I stepped off the plane in Istanbul last Thursday, still in grey Israeli military prison garb, after three days in Israeli captivity, but I didn’t yet know the world had gotten a glimpse of the treatment my fellow detainees had faced. I didn’t yet know that European nations had summoned Israel’s top diplomats in their respective countries in protest. I didn’t yet know that Israeli leaders had put out obviously disingenuous statements condemning National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversaw our detention.
What I did know is that, along with more than 425 others who were aboard the latest Global Sumud Flotilla trying to break Israel’s siege of Gaza, I had endured abuse far worse than the last time we were detained, and yet this was only a small fraction of what Palestinians have endured for decades.
Watching the video posted by Ben-Gvir that went viral during our detention, and that perhaps helped to secure our release, I was struck by how little of the Israeli violence against the flotilla participants was actually documented in Ben-Givir’s self-serving depiction. True, he had publicized a typical kind of domineering Israeli attitude about whomever the country imprisons and holds captive, but that is nothing new: Israeli officials often publicly gloat about their right to extreme, and often murderous, state violence, and for anyone on the other side of their guns, this also manifests in the comportment of the Israeli military and Israeli settlers. Yet still, the scenes on the ground that day – and the testimonies of what happened beyond the camera’s view – were more harrowing and terrorizing than the public could glean from that one video.
Here’s what I experienced and witnessed: