Israel tortured me: I write not because this is exceptional but because it’s ordinary

Andrew Francisco, a US citizen, was captured by the Israeli navy on May 18 alongside more than 430 activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla.

About 46 hours had passed since our abduction when the masked woman with the megaphone appeared above us on the catwalk of our Israeli prison ship.

By that point, more than a few comrades had managed to peek out from beneath one of our makeshift dormitories and catch a glimpse of a long green strip of land. For two days we had read the sun like an omen, trying to figure out if they were taking us toward Egypt, Cyprus, Greece or Israel. South meant one kind of hope. North meant another. East meant something none of us wanted to say too loudly.

In the final hours of the journey, the ship was going unmistakably eastward. And yet, a part of us continued to hope that we were wrong. Then the woman looked down from her perch and announced: “Good morning, and welcome to Israel.”

A silent confirmation came with those words. Heads bowed. Some people's eyes filled with tears. We knew – or thought we knew – where they were taking us. But hearing it announced from above, in that almost cheerful tone, made the terror official.

There were more than 200 of us, crammed into an open-air steel rectangle. Six shipping containers had been arranged to create a prison yard on the ship’s deck. Razor wire crowned the top. A dozen portable toilets filled the empty space. Above us, masked soldiers patrolled with assault rifles. Two water cannons remained trained on us.

From a container beneath the bridge, our captors emerged with coffee and snacks, sitting on plastic chairs to watch us, photograph us and laugh, as if we were animals in a menagerie.

Through the megaphone, the masked woman told us the ship would soon dock in Ashdod. We would be taken away and subjected to immigration processing. She urged us to cooperate. Do not resist. Do not sing. Do not chant “Free Palestine.” Obey orders, she said, and no harm will come to you.

One of my comrades, Marco, an Italian activist of extraordinary courage and moral clarity, demanded that she give us her word. He wanted more than an instruction. He wanted a guarantee. She gave it to him. If we obeyed, she promised, we would not be harmed.

Some of us wanted to believe her. Ours was the “better” of the two prison ships carrying the 430 members of our flotilla toward an uncertain fate. “Better” is an obscene word to use, but it was true. On our ship, people had been beaten and maimed. We had been drenched in foul water. Our warm clothes had been taken from us. We had been forced to sleep exposed to the elements, crammed inside filthy containers on the ship’s deck, which flooded whenever the amphibious vessel submerged beyond a certain depth. We had been denied adequate food, water, sanitation, medical care and shelter.

But compared to our comrades on the other vessel, we had been spared. We had not all been beaten, repeatedly tased until we lost consciousness, or forced to listen hour after hour to the screams of people whose ribs and other bones had just been broken. This was the moral universe Israel had created: a place where being beaten, stripped, frozen, starved and locked up could still count as the “better” fate.

When the masked woman promised that obedience would protect us, some of us believed, or desperately wanted to believe, that a limit still existed.

We never saw her again.

After the Israeli sailors moored the ship, we were herded behind a line made with tape on the deck. Armed and armored men appeared in front of us, perhaps six feet away, with assault rifles and shotguns pointed at our faces. I was sitting cross-legged near the front row, with only one or two rows of people between me and these newly arrived men, even more heavily geared up than the others.

A soldier held a stack of passports and began calling out names. At first, the process seemed almost orderly. A name was called. The person stood up, collected their passport and disappeared through the open door into one of the containers. The first name called was that of a French woman whose thigh had been slashed open two days earlier. We clapped for her. We clapped for the others too, offering the smallest public gesture of courage to people walking into an unknown that we could not see.

The soldiers grew impatient. Maybe people were moving too slowly. Maybe the applause irritated them. Maybe nothing in particular was needed to set them off. The soldier holding the passports halted the process and ordered everyone out onto the deck of the ship.

As people exited the containers, he pointed to a slender, handsome, dark-skinned man – seemingly Arab, with a light beard and graying hair. Unlike those whose names had been called from the passports, he was not selected by a document or a procedure. He was selected with a gesture.

When he came within reach, several soldiers grabbed him, shoved him through the open door and dragged him out of our sight.

Immediately afterward, we heard blood-curdling screams. They were not just cries of fear. It was the sound of animal suffering, of that man being brutalized beyond what we could even imagine from behind a thin sheet........

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