Ten weeks ago I would have read this and rolled my eyes like, "lol tinhat." Six weeks ago (before I learned about the corpse-stealing organ-harvesting thing after Al Shifa) I'd have spat out my own tea in horrified disbelief. Now, I barely blink. Yes, of course they did that, why not. I mean these are people who hack LGBT dating apps and catfish queer Palestinians to blackmail them into becoming informants.
This article from 2015 is by the late, great David Graeber himself. It's full of other gems too.
The East German police did what.
It goes on to explain how living in the shadow of Israel keeps Palestinians collectively at the edge of insanity, the power-hungry myopia of Israeli politics (absolute chip off the old US block), and exactly why the baseline of Israeli society is the kind of racist freak that would probably stick out in Crackertown, Utah.
David mentions that he was raised in a Zionist Jewish household and appears to have been almost unmanned by Palestinian's cultural magnanimity and welcome. I can't even say it was coloured by white guilt (yeah I'm a cynic) because one of Refaat's articles also highlights how Gazans almost fight each other to give their meagre portions to another. I'm no stranger to acts of caretaking and generosity in times of crisis, but to see a society that's been in crisis for 75 years embrace them uneroded as forms of survivalism and resistance is unheard-of to me. Which makes Israel's deliberate targeting of it especially cruel.
David's style of blunt connect-the-dots rundown is most appreciated by a lay person who's been around the block enough times to get how this works already (very Brennan Lee Mulligan). If you don't want to work through a reading list to understand Israel-Palestine, this is one of the pieces you should read.
As for the sexual assault salons, the director of Paradise Now and Omar, Hany Abu-Assad, did a movie based on them in 2021.
(tw: scenes of drugging and non-consensual intimate photography.)