I see headlines such as "IDF general arrested for leaking video of torture of Palestinian". Those headlines are plain wrong in a sense: the general is the head of military prosecution, and was arrested for perjury, and rightly so. That is not to say that the whole "Sde Teiman affair" is made up. Far from it. I also think there is a lesson to be learned here about supporting people who are not perfect frpm "our side".

Sde Teiman detention camp was created shortly after the beginning of the war. A place was needed to detain the many new Palestinian prisoners. The civilian Prison Service wanted nothing to do with it. Sde Teiman is an existing military base near Be'er Sheva and the existing emergency military plan for a PoW camp was there. There was no plan for that many prisoners. The camp housed, at the time, several thousands of Palestinians. Some of them were Hamas people. Some weren't (this is where they were supposed to be interrogated, potentially).

While there were technically some plans for the camp, they were not prepared for the scale. And there were no trained prison guards. Therefore regular reserve soldiers were drafted to guard the camp, and a special unit, Unit 100, was created from volunteer reservists, to be the intervention force. They ended up more interacting with the prisoners.

There were rumors of misconduct in the camp, and military police didn't bother very much to investigate them. However, in some cases they had to: when a detainee ended up in hospital (which means that he couldn't be treated in the in-facility clinic) and doctors found signs of brutality, military police had to step in.

They already did this once in March 2024. And they we get to the events of April 2024 when another detainee ended up in hospital and an investigation was launched.

BTW: initially a sexual assault was suspected, but pretty soon the findings were re-examined and the allegations were changed to "merely" brutality. The MP investigators looked at video footage of the event and could clearly see that the event is hidden: the detainee was taken by 8 soldiers of Unit 100 who stood as a wall hiding the event from the camera. And afterwards he ended up badly injured.

So after a while the MPs came to investigate those soldiers. And at that point all hell broke loose. The soldiers did not want to go to jail. So they decided to overrule the MPs. Now don't get me wrong, soldiers overruling MPs by the way of brute force is a well honored military tradition, but not when done in plain sight.

In this case they called for all of their friends to come and help them. Not only for other soldiers in the base: everybody. Most of the people in Unit 100 happen to be settlers, and this is who they called. And thus not long afterwards there was a whole mob outside the gates of the base.

There was several politicians, including a (government) ministers and two members of parliament present. And they were heading the mob. Eventually the mob broke into the military base. Much so because the (civilian) police didn't do anything. Some of the MPs have managed to escape with detained soldiers, and a mob was waiting for them in their home base in Beit Lid (and again, the civilian police did nothing).

At this point a major outcry started in the right wing circles claiming that those poor soldiers did nothing and that they are being wrongly accused. Israel has already been heavily polarized, with an efficient propaganda machine that spreads lies of Netanyahu and co. and now that propaganda machine set its target on the (investigative) military police and the military prosecution, because it's obvious that that case is bollocks and why won't they release our heroes?

So at that point we finally get to Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi: the head of the Military Advocate General. She gets crisped by the right wing propaganda machine, including outright lies, merely for doing her job. And now she does her big mistake: she leaks the video footage. The footage shows the guards standing as a wall and hiding all the event from the camera. It is not a complete proof, but it shows that this was not "nothing happened".

It is stupid, because at that stage only the prosecution has that evidence, and therefore that leak can only come from a small set of people. And should could have released that footage in a simpler method: directly. she makes a further blunder by not admitting it was her.

Leaking the footage was a minor offense. The really bad thing she did was claiming to not have leaked it to various forums, including eventually to the (civilian) supreme court. This is something a high-ranking officer, let alone the Advocate General, must not do. When this was found, she was immediately forced to resign.

However, this is not the end of the story, because this affair lives on in the politically charged investigation to see who else knew (but I'll leave that one out).

All along, the minister and the MPs who broke into the base refuse to be interrogated regarding their part. People on the right try to shift the whole affair to be the issue of the military prosecution. And it's not. This case was very effective in deterring the military police and military prosecution from further probes into those fields.

Another thing to take from it is that people on our side are not always perfect, and that's OK. Tomer-Yerushalmi was right to press on the investigation. She was wrong in the way she leaked the video and later tried poorly to cover it up. But the fact that she was wrong, does not make our case wrong (and this likewise should apply on the other wise and to people we disagree with).

#Israel #Sde_Teiman