Amiram Ben Oliel was arrested on December 1, 2015, on suspicion of committing the much celebrated arson-murder of a baby and both his parents in the village of Duma, 16 miles south-east of Shechem in Samaria. The arrest came a full four months after the July 31 event, at a point in the investigation where many in Israel, especially on the right, were beginning to doubt both the very idea that the murder had been committed by Jews, necessarily, and both the left and the right were doubtful as to the security forces’ ability to crack the case.
So that once Israel’s internal security agency, the Shabak, became convinced that they had their man, they were determined not to let him go. Well prepared for his interrogation, Ben Oliel, 21, kept silent through 17 days and night of continued interrogation, sleep deprivation and brutal physical abuse — according to his claim, presented Sunday by Israel’s Channel 2 News.
According to Ben Oliel, he started to crack not under regular torture, but as the result of an unexpected psychological torment, as he described it: “They interrogated and kept interrogating me and I didn’t cooperate, until they caught on that I’m trying not to listen to women’s singing, so they simply decided to turn on the radio. They put on women’s singing, I asked them to stop, they didn’t agree, and when I got up to turn it off they jumped me, beat me up, cuffed my hands and legs, pressed me in painful places.”
Women’s singing is considered sexually enticing, and some religious Jewish men avoid it as part of their religious practice. Is Ben Oliel’s story believable, that he was able to stand up to weeks of torture only to finally succumb to women’s singing? It’s possible, of course, but is it plausible? Menachem Landau, former head of the Shabak Jewish division, argued that point on Radio station 103FM on Monday with Ben Oliel’s attorney, Itamar Ben-Gvir. As was to be expected, Landau wasn’t buying any of it.
“Breaking the accused with women’s singing? Come on, seriously, that’s not how it’s done,” Landau told the show’s host Gabbi Gazit. “I know the system and am still connected to it today,” Landau continued. “The service and the interrogators knew that all the focus was on them, and they couldn’t commit an error, couldn’t screw up. Which is why every single thing they did was done with the approval and authority of elements that supported it, the prosecution, legal advisers, and so on.”
Landau said, “I also heard that they (the Duma suspects) were hung by their feet and were [tied up on] ‘Sodom beds.’ You really know a judge who would approve such a thing? You really know an interrogator who would risk his entire career, everything he had built for himself? It’s true, an interrogation is not a pleasant thing, you’re sitting morning till night and you’re being interrogated, and you’re kept away from your attorney and family.
“You’re in a state of mind where you have no idea what’s happening outside and what time it is. So it’s no picnic, that’s no secret. That’s what an interrogation is. But from there to the stories I’ve heard [about torture it’s a big distance]. But as soon as I heard that women’s singing broke him down, I relaxed.”
Except that it has already been established that former Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein gave his approval to using severe interrogation techniques against the Duma suspects, and those interrogations were taped by the Shabak, as determined by law, and so the first phase of the Ben Oliel trial would almost inevitably be a mini trial over the validity of the defendant’s confession, in light of the torture he had endured.
It was probably a PR mistake on the part of Ben Oliel to share with a secular audience his intimate issues with unwanted enticement, via women’s singing on the radio and, as he described it, the female interrogator they assigned him who started petting him. It is silly to expect a secular public that’s been desensitized to sexual enticement by viewing thousands of hours of television to understand an ultra-Orthodox young man who refuses to be debased this way. But it wasn’t the embarrassing female intimacy that finally broke him down, according to Ben Oliel’s story, it was violence and brutality.
It happened after he, the suspect, had been declared a “ticking bomb” by AG Weinstein, meaning that anything short of killing him could be done to force his confession. We’d like to see those tapes: “They cuffed me with short handcuffs behind my back, gave me a slap, told me I’m going to start talking, the silence ends here,” he related. “They made me sit back at a 45 degree angle, an impossible position. After one minute I fell back until my head almost hit the floor. I felt crazy pain, I screamed horribly. They didn’t care. They asked me, ‘You’re going to talk?’ I kept silent, and screamed. At some point they lifted me, one of them caught me by the shirt and told me, ‘I’m going to be your nightmare. We’ll drink your blood from your ears.’ All kinds of threats, yelling, screaming, beatings, slapping, until at one point I decided, fine, I’ll fake something for them so they’d let me go, and I told them, I’ll talk, I’ll talk.”
The rest is history. The fate of this Duma trial — there may be others — hangs on the court’s view of whether or not the severity of the torture disqualifies Ben Oliel’s confession altogether. Weinstein’s decision to treat him as a ticking bomb is another issue the court may or may not choose to evaluate. There’s no doubt that even at this stage, the narrative established by the defense is very powerful, a lone prisoner standing up to his tormentors through weeks of isolation and torture, as one by one the rules of ethics and decency are being broken by the agents of the state. If this were a Hollywood movie, it would end with Weinstein going to jail for overstepping the boundaries of the law. But it isn’t, so the realistic outcome is still a very long sentence and a lifetime of vilification for Ben Oliel.
Stay tuned.
