The Israeli military released Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls early this morning, after subjecting him to physical abuse and detaining him for five days in an overcrowded prison cell without ventilation or cooling, despite extreme summer heat that drove temperatures close to 100 degrees, according to the legal aid group Adalah and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
Neither the U.S. consulate nor the U.S. embassy officials met with Smalls, though they were notified of his release details in advance, nor did they visit him or other U.S. activists during their detention despite repeated requests, the organizations said.
Smalls was the only Black member of the 21-person international crew aboard the coalition’s boat, the Handala, as it sought to deliver food, medicine, baby formula, and diapers to Gaza, and he was subjected to some of the worst abuse. After six days, the Israeli military intercepted the delegation in international waters and took them to Givon Prison; his abuse began then, the organizations and an eyewitness said.
More from Whitney Curry Wimbish
“When he reached the Israeli prison, U.S. human rights defender Chris Smalls was physically assaulted by seven individuals. They choked him and kicked him in the legs, leaving visible signs of violence on his neck and back,” the coalition said. “When his lawyers met with him, Chris was surrounded by six members of Israel’s special police unit. This level of force was not used against other abducted activists.”
Attorneys who met with Smalls and other prisoners reported that they were “denied basic hygiene supplies, and their sleeping areas are infested with bedbugs,” Adalah said in a statement. “With no yard time, they remain confined in closed rooms all day, without fresh air or space to move.”
Smalls was the last person released early Thursday morning along with Tunisian activist Hatem Aouini, who was received by the Tunisian embassy at the border with Jordan. Both Smalls and Aouini had gone on a hunger strike for all five days they were in prison; attorneys from Adalah visited the two and reported that prison guards “had been violently raiding and searching their cells on a regular basis.”
Smalls was the only Black member of the 21-person international crew aboard the coalition’s boat.
The silence from the U.S. government about Israel’s abuse of Smalls reflects indifference toward anything associated with Palestine, including its own citizens, said Bob Suberi, a 77-year-old U.S. peace activist and dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, who was aboard the Handala with Smalls. He noted that Israeli forces have killed multiple American and dual citizens in Palestine over the years; as Zeteo pointed out, they’ve killed at least six Americans since October 7th, yet politicians have shown no interest.
It’s even more surprising that, while the largest labor union in Canada has condemned Smalls’s detention, few U.S. unions have spoken out about the situation. Smalls’s own Amazon Labor Union, the California Faculty Association, and Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants were notable exceptions.
In a Wednesday night vote, 27 Democratic senators among the 44 voting supported blocking the sale of certain weapons to Israel, the first time a majority of the caucus has expressed that sentiment in a vote. The resolution still failed amid unanimous opposition from Republicans.
The flotilla plans to continue its efforts regardless of what Israel or America does, Suberi said, adding that members of civil society are the ones who will halt the genocide.
“There’s no government power, no international power that has got the guts or the willingness to challenge what’s going on, or that can challenge the U.S. and Israel,” he said. “The idea and the point of this is to break the siege.”
IN THE MEANTIME, SUBERI TOLD THE PROSPECT, the international community must understand that Israel is spreading its genocide beyond Gaza. As the Prospect’s Ryan Cooper reported, the plan to obliterate Palestine is already under way, with the Israeli Knesset’s formalization of annexing the West Bank and an additional $275 million in funding for expansion of the settlements.
Shortly after the Israeli military released him from custody on Sunday, Suberi returned to the West Bank and witnessed yet another series of horrors. Israeli settlers had driven a bulldozer into the village of Umm al-Khair. Then, the U.S.-sanctioned settler Yinon Levi opened fire with a handgun. Aiming directly at people and firing indiscriminately, as eyewitnesses told Haaretz, he shot to death Awda Hathaleen, a peace activist and one of Suberi’s best friends, whom the U.S. had just deported without explanation as he arrived for an interfaith speaking tour with the Kehilla Community Synagogue in California.
The settler “was just firing, just erratically firing, and Awda was standing quite a ways away, 150 feet away. The bullet went through his chest, went through his lung, he was choking on his own blood,” Suberi said. “Awda was such a sweetheart. He was such a down-to-earth guy.”
Speaking shortly after a memorial service for Hathaleen, Suberi described how the West Bank terror campaign didn’t end with his friend’s death. As is typical, he said, Israelis create havoc somewhere, then authorities arrest Palestinians, claiming that they started it.
“So after shooting Awda, they arrested five of my friends. They’re in prison right now. They’re going to be in court on Thursday. They’ll impose heavy fines on them,” said Suberi, who is Jewish and a U.S. veteran who calls himself a “recovering Zionist.” Activists will come up with the funds to bail them out, and the whole thing will happen “over and over and over again.” Israeli soldiers and settlers have attacked West Bank residents “exponentially,” he said, killing 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since the October 7th attacks, an all-time high, and injuring 7,000 more.
Like the funeral for murdered Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh three years ago, Israelis then attacked the mourning tent Palestinians had set up for Hathaleen, Suberi said.
“They were friggin’ brutal,” he said. “They set off shock grenades to scare people and then they arrested a couple people. They have no respect. They come in and murder somebody, and then when people are mourning the loss of the individual, they come in and disrupt things.”
Hathaleen’s three children and wife are “shattered,” Suberi said, and he misses his friend who teased him for not learning enough Arabic the last time they were together.
“Our attention has to be first and foremost on the genocide on Gaza,” Suberi said, “but we can’t forget that they’re setting up the West Bank to be treated exactly the same way.”
He described the Israeli military forcing people out of Area C, which includes about 61 percent of the West Bank’s territory, and into densely crowded urban areas like Yatta. He described settlers burning cars and setting entire neighborhoods on fire. In one instance, he said, settlers burned nearly a thousand olive trees last year because they were incensed by Palestinians who dared to hold a kite festival in the south of Nablus.
“Their towns are surrounded by settlements, settlements are raiding them, killing their livestock, killing them, lethal attacks are happening more frequently,” Suberi said. “Even in Ramallah settlers will come and burn vehicles, stone people … So it’s not just Gaza. Gaza is rightly on the front pages, but it’s going to happen in the West Bank.”
Suberi described the attempted journey to Gaza as six days of comradery, joy, and drills to practice what to do when the Israeli military showed up. He was on watch with another member the night a large Israeli military ship popped up on the radar 20 miles off the starboard bow, surrounded by two dozen smaller inflatables. When the soldiers finally arrived on board at midnight, they followed the same script as they did in June, when they halted another Gaza Freedom Flotilla boat, the Madleen, which Swedish activist Greta Thunberg had joined.
One by one, the inflatables surged up to the Handala on both sides; soldiers leapt on board, armed and ready for war. The Israeli forces told Suberi and the other 20 crew members to gather in the center of the boat. They filmed a soldier offering water to the group, which everyone refused. Then they cut off the boat’s cameras and communication.
How the Israeli military treated the group fractured at that point. They took Suberi and another dual U.S.-Israeli citizen off the boat, detained them for 24 hours, interrogated them for “laughable” charges, haggled over the terms of their release, then let them go.
Others faced much worse, especially Smalls. Suberi said he remembers looking back at others as they disembarked and seeing Smalls on the ground, surrounded by soldiers standing over him. And he remembers the unsettling detail that all the soldiers hid their identities behind masks, an echo of the masked agents who are disappearing people in the U.S. The militarized abduction, his friend’s death and detention, America’s terror campaign against immigrants; are all connected, in Suberi’s estimation. Fascist countries learn from each other, adopt their tactics, and test their plans on vulnerable populations before spreading elsewhere.
“What goes around comes around,” he said. “What happens in Palestine right now is gonna bite you and me in the ass sooner or later.”