Humiliation is a subjective matter, depending on people’s personal symbols. For me, for example, what feels most humiliating is not the fact that they urinated on him, but that they stripped him naked. At first Mohammad’s father was ashamed to tell about the pissing. To even say these words out loud. I think that for him, that was the most humiliating thing they did to his son, more than all the other things.
What kind of person, I wonder, takes a 13-year old boy no matter why, and tortures him like this. And then I answer myself, almost any Israeli. Any soldier in the army when it comes to Palestinians. Any person, in fact, if only the local codes designate that it’s permissible.
The day I first saw him was one of those Mondays at the ‘Ofer’ military court, in hall number 2. That’s where the children are tried. 20, 22, 23 children a day. Children and youths arrive in groups of two, three, sometimes four, wearing brown prisoners’ garb, their feet chained, one hand shackled to the next boy’s hand.
I noticed him in particular because he had soft, round curls, and because he looked very young, and because he wept. Not that others don’t weep from time to time, of the younger ones, I mean. But at least as far as I’ve seen, not weeping openly like this, without attempting to hold back the tears or hide them.
The military court is about prolonging custody, most of the time. This is the system, even when it comes to children. Regardless of what the detainee is accused of, or what kind of evidence has brought to his arrest. In this sense, be the role of the military court as it may, it certainly has nothing to do with seeking the truth and respective punishment. Not when children are picked up in their homes in the dark of night, usually as a result of someone else having incriminated them, someone who often is but a child, like them. Usually for throwing stones, or hurling improvised Molotov cocktails. And for this they are arrested, without an option of release with bail, until the end of the proceedings.
