“‘It is the most barbaric experience I have ever had in my life…’They torture you with your head lowered.
They beat you with your head lowered.
When you try to raise it, you are struck again.
Above you, the entire time, there is a weapon pointed at you.
For hours, forced into kneeling or bent-over positions.
Your eyes fixed on the floor, on the metal plates, on their boots,
stealing whatever quick glances you can at your comrades around you.
As if it were a systematic management of the gaze itself.Whether or not the etymology is linguistically exact, it carries a truth we came to learn:
upright posture and the raised gaze are fundamental elements of the human condition.
When they are methodically taken away from you, you are dehumanized at the most basic level.The procedures were standardized: step by step, in sequence, with specific people assigned to each stage.
We are talking about a Fordist factory of torture: an assembly line, transfer from one stage to another, division of labor, the production of submissive bodies.In Sde Teiman, Ofer, Megiddo, and Ketziot — where we too were taken — thousands of Palestinian bodies are held for years.
With the same and far worse forms of torture, the same forced positions, and much more: sexual violence, electric shocks, amputations, deaths.
Since October 2023, hundreds of Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons.
Many without ever having been tried.When the same torture reaches European, American, or Latin American bodies, the Western world is moved just a little more.
We are “legible” to the Western gaze: we have names, nationalities, families.
To the Western eye, the Palestinian is a statistic, a number in genocide documentation reports.
That alone reveals the racist architecture of international law, the media, and the Western political sphere.Kites have become a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
Children in Gaza, with demolished homes and fractured families, still fly makeshift kites — even ones made from scraps of cardboard.
Above the drones, above the F-16s, above the settlers.
As though reclaiming the gaze through poetry.It is the gaze reclaiming its own self-determination.
It is ano throskoIt is the refusal to become an animal.
The insistence on remaining human, with all the weight that word carries.In Palestine, around ten thousand Palestinian prisoners remain incarcerated.
What we witnessed for a few days, they endured for decades.The Greek government and the state apparatus remain complicit: arms supplies to Israel, diplomatic cover, transit facilitation, IDF tourism on the islands, real estate investments, ports serving the genocide, research collaborations and funding ties with Israeli universities and companies.Until the gaze of every Palestinian is free.
Free to look wherever they want.We move forward into the next waves.
Pantelis in the following video describes shocking accounts of beatings and torture, including electric shocks using tasers, on the prison ships during their captivity.”
Το πρωτότυπο άρθρο ανήκει στο Στήλες – Άρθρα – Εφημερίδα ΠΡΙΝ .
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