When will Israel free the Palestinians it is holding hostage? | Arwa Mahdawi

If you want to understand the complicated situation in the Middle East, you need to start with two basic sets of facts, which are the foundation for everything else.

The first is that Israelis are civilized people, just like westerners. You should believe whatever the Israeli government says, because they are obviously not going to lie. If an Israeli soldier or settler commits a terrible act, they’re not considered a reflection on the state as a whole; they’re a bad apple who will be held accountable. Even if the data shows they are rarely held accountable. The bottom line: Israelis are good people who want peace; any violence they commit is justified because they have an absolute right to self-defense.

Palestinians , meanwhile, and Arabs more generally, are seen as barbarians . Barely human. Not even mammals: more like wasps, caterpillars and spiders – to borrow an analogy from the celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman . You can’t trust a word they say. If a Palestinian does something terrible they are not a “bad apple”, they’re an example of how all Palestinians are rotten to the core. One shouldn’t think of any Palestinian as an innocent civilian – they are all terrorists, even the children. The bottom line: Palestinians are bad people who want war; nothing they do can be justified because they have no right to self-defense.

Far-right extremists in Israel’s government, along with a number of US politicians, are honest about their prejudices; happy to talk in these blunt terms . More respectable politicians and journalists, meanwhile, generally don’t say the quiet part out loud. Still, behind a lofty insistence on objectivity, these underlying assumptions often make themselves clear.

They were crystal clear when Joe Biden repeatedly parroted unverified – and false – reports that Hamas beheaded babies on 7 October. Repeating such an inflammatory claim without proof would be unthinkable in normal circumstances; the Biden administration has been outspoken about the dangers of disinformation. But in this particular case, no proof was needed. The proof was that the accused were Palestinian. (By contrast, Biden has been quiet about videos of Gazan children decapitated by US-made missiles all over social media.)

These assumptions were also clear when Biden doubted the death toll in Gaza, saying he didn’t think that Palestinians were telling the truth. Again, Biden had no evidence Palestinians were lying – the only proof he needed was that they were Palestinians.

You also see these assumptions reflected in the language used to describe the conflict. Look, for example, at who is classified as a hostage and who isn’t. When an Israeli soldier goes into a civilian’s house, grabs them at gunpoint, and sticks them in a cage then that person is a “detainee” or “prisoner”. When Palestinian combatants do the same that person is a “hostage.” These are important distinctions: the word “detainee” insinuates guilt – that person has clearly done something wrong. The word “hostage” insinuates innocence – that person is clearly a victim. The word “detainee” suggests due process in accordance with international law; the word hostage suggests terrorism.

The civilians Hamas captured on 7 October are obviously hostages. There’s no debate about that. There’s no debate that taking hostages is a war crime.

What there really should be a debate about is why that same designation isn’t being afforded to the thousands of Palestinians sitting in Israeli jails and detention centers in both the West Bank and Gaza – many being held under a system of administrative detention that observers say is a violation of international law . Administrative detention is a form of arbitrary detention that allows Israel to hold someone without trial and without them having committed an offense, just because someone has an inkling that they might break the law in the future . Because it’s a preventive measure, there’s no real time limit as to how long they can be held. Years of research into Israel’s treatment of Palestinian detainees suggests that many of these detainees are being subjected to inhumane treatment that, in some cases, amounts to sexual abuse and torture .

But these detainees are clearly terrorists not hostages, Israel’s apologists might scoff. Are they? Are they terrorists just because Israel, often with zero proof, says they are? Or are they terrorists simply because they exist as Palestinians?

Ask yourself this: why isn’t 23-year-old Layan Nasir considered a hostage? Earlier this year, Israeli troops stormed the West Bank home of Nasir at around 4am and took her from her parents at gunpoint. A soldier reportedly told her father: “We are at war, we can do anything.” Other than the fact that she’s Palestinian, it’s not clear what Nasir’s supposed crime is. Her parents don’t know where she is being held and Israel can in effect keep her indefinitely without proving she has done anything. She faces unknown allegations with no way to disprove them. This week an Israeli military court decided to renew her administrative detention for another four months.

Nasir’s case has had some publicity because she is a Christian. People like Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, have spoken out , saying: “The widespread and routine manner in which Israel uses administrative detention of Palestinians as an instrument of Occupation is deeply discriminatory [and] cannot be legally or morally justified.” But while there is some outrage about Nasir’s case, most of the detainees, including children, locked up by Israel are rotting behind bars in obscurity.

“We are at war, we can do anything.” What that soldier told Nasir’s father wasn’t a threat, it was a statement of fact. Israel has been afforded such impunity by the US and other western countries that it can essentially do whatever it likes. It can breach international law with the full knowledge that the US will undermine institutions like the ICC on its behalf.

It’s not clear what sort of conditions Nasir is being held under but we do have an idea of the sorts of conditions that thousands of Gazan prisoners held at the Israeli Sde Teiman camp are being subject to. Whistleblowers have spoken of torture and sexual abuse. On Monday – after months of reporting by the UN and multiple media organizations – Israel took the unusual step of arresting nine soldiers on suspicion of raping a detainee. Much of the reporting about this alleges that the victim in question “is said to have been a senior member of Hamas”. No evidence seems to have been provided for this. But you see what this accusation does, right? It suggests that he had it coming to him. That he wasn’t really a victim. Again, there is the underlying assumption that Palestinians can never truly be victims.

Certainly, plenty of Israelis don’t seem to think that a man who was sexually abused by nine soldiers is any sort of victim. On Monday ultra-rightwing Israeli nationalists stormed two military facilities to protest against the detention of the IDF reservists accused of the abuse. A member of Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party also justified the rape and abuse of Palestinian prisoners saying that any sort of abuse was legitimate “if he is a Nukhba [Hamas]”. (Which is very convenient when you consider every Palestinian to be “Hamas”.) Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, also justified the abuse. Essentially there was a protest in Israel in defense of the right to rape.

I want to be very clear that what is happening in Sde Teiman isn’t some sort of anomaly and isn’t a result of 7 October. Again, there are reports by human rights organizations stretching back over a decade about how Israel mistreats Palestinian “prisoners”. There are reports of children being locked up with charges of throwing stones being subject to physical and psychological abuse and having “ confessions ” coerced through torture . Reports of Palestinian minors being threatened with sexual assault.

Israel has always been allowed to act with some degree of impunity, but now it seems there are truly no limits to the violence it is allowed to inflict on Palestinians. I know that I am not alone when I say that, over the last 10 months, I have felt like I’m losing my mind. Seeing Netanyahu being given the red carpet treatment in the US and receive a standing ovation from politicians across both sides of the aisle while he helps to starve children in Gaza – who are facing bombs, malnutrition and polio – feels like gaslighting of the highest level.

There is clearly no convincing some people that Palestinians are humans, so I won’t even bother trying any more. Instead let me appeal to Israel’s apologists. If you support Israel, then I urge you to support accountability for Israel. Violence, unchecked and unpunished, taints everything it touches. It doesn’t just destroy those it is used against – as the right-to-rape protests this week starkly demonstrate it destroys the perpetrator as well. You can’t inflict violence on others without it also finding its way back home.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist