AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with Part 2 of our conversation with Jasper Nathaniel. He’s a New York-based writer and reporter who covers Israel’s occupation of the West Bank on his Substack, Infinite Jaz.

In Part 1 of our conversation, we talked about Jasper and Palestinian farmers being attacked by Israeli settlers in the West Bank in October. In Part 2 of our conversation, we’re going to look at the case of Mohammed Ibrahim, the Palestinian American teenager who was released from an Israeli military prison in late November after more than nine months in custody without trial.

You reported, Jasper, extensively on his detention, and also you were just in Florida with him and his family after he returned from the West Bank and came home to the United States. Mohammed was just 15 when Israeli forces arrested him in the occupied West Bank. He turned 16 in an Israeli prison. His family said they had almost no direct contact with him through his detention. He and his father, Zaher Ibrahim, spoke to PBS NewsHour for an exclusive interview after Mohammed’s release.

MOHAMMED IBRAHIM: I feel safe now. And I miss everyone and everything.

ZAHER IBRAHIM: The truth, when we first gave him a hug — you know, when we gave him a hug, you can feel his — you can feel his body, his back. You know, he’s very, very, very skinny. And we took him to the hospital to have him — have him checked, you know, and he even asked us, “Am I dreaming? Am I really out?”

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Mohammed and his father, Zaher Ibrahim, on the PBS NewsHour. Jasper Nathaniel, you’ve just returned from Florida, where you saw them. Can you talk about his detention? Can you talk about how it was that, as a 15-year-old, Mohammed was arrested?

JASPER NATHANIEL: Press! Press! American press! American press! Press!

They’re literally right behind us. He’s right here. He’s about to smash our window. There he is. Here he is. Get ready. There it is. Are the doors locked?

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about this and Israel’s de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank, we’re joined now by Jasper Nathaniel, New York-based journalist who covers Israel’s occupation on his Substack, Infinite Jaz. He’s written extensively on state-backed settler violence and Israel’s use of archeology, interestingly, as a tool of annexation. His latest piece is “Israel’s archeological apartheid.”

I want to go back to that day. When was this that this took place, the attack on you and the attack on the woman who was left unconscious?

JASPER NATHANIEL: Yeah. You know, I was watching the report on CECOT right before this, and, frankly, there are some similarities. I mean, you know, Mohammed was abducted in the middle of the night from his home, zip-tied, blindfolded, without even knowing what he was being taken for.

AMY GOODMAN: And where was his home?

JASPER NATHANIEL: His home is in a town in the West Bank called al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, which is another one of these Palestinian American villages, actually. So, his family has a home in Florida, and they have a home in the West Bank.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain for people who didn’t hear Part 1, when you say these Palestinian American villages in the West Bank.

JASPER NATHANIEL: Yeah, so, the town is about 80 to 90% dual citizens, who have citizenship in America, too. And so, a lot of the time the parents or the father will, like, own a small business in the U.S., and then they’ll, you know, maintain their home in their ancestral homeland, in many cases a home that they’ve had for generations. And so, they were at their home in al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya when he was abducted.

They later found out that he was being accused of throwing stones at a car, not of injuring anybody or of causing an accident or anything, but just of throwing stones at a car. Mohammed denies that he did this, that he took part in this at all. But he says that he was severely beaten on the way to the detention center, during the investigation, and they told him that “until you confess to this, we’re going to keep beating you.” And eventually he said that he threw a rock.

So, after that, they actually charged him, and he spent almost 10 months in not just prison, but Israeli military detention, run by military guards, in a small cell with about 10 other kids, where he was starved. He lost about a third to a quarter of his body weight while he was there. I mean, he described to me that all day every day for 10 months, him and the other kids were just in pain — headaches, stomachaches. I mean, they were all losing weight. They had — scabies sort of tore through their cell. So, you know, these were really sick kids.

They would — I think the most disturbing thing that I heard, of all the, you know, ways that they were tormented — we’re talking about 15-, 16-year-old kids here. If the guards caught them — they had cameras in the cell. If the guards ever caught them playing, you know, laughing, smiling, doing push-ups, having fun in any sort of way, they would come in and pepper-spray them. So, Mohammed talks about how they tried to carve little chess pieces out of stale bread, or another time they tried to make a deck of playing cards out of toilet paper. And when the guards caught them playing, sitting quietly like kids playing, they came in and pepper-sprayed them, and they took their mattresses away, so they had no beds to sleep on.

And so, you know, when I was in Florida, we went fishing one day, actually. And, you know, Mohammed maybe cast it out, cast his line out, two or three times. And then he was like, “I’m bored. Why aren’t we catching any fish?” And I was just thinking, like, “Yes, this is what it’s like to be 16. You know, you need constant stimulation. He can’t even sit here and, you know, fish for long enough to catch a fish. And he was in prison for almost 10 months not able to do anything.” And so, it’s just — yeah, I mean, it’s — 

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the campaign for Mohammed’s release?

JASPER NATHANIEL: Yeah. So, the story broke in July when a great reporter at The Guardian named Joseph Gedeon was actually reporting on Mohammed’s first cousin, Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in June.

AMY GOODMAN: How old was Sayfollah?

JASPER NATHANIEL: He was 20 years old. And he’s from the same town. I’ve spent time with his family. So, Mohammed was in prison when that happened. The story broke after his cousin was beaten to death. And by the way, Mohammed did not know about that. He found out on the day he got out that his cousin had been murdered. So, the — 

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how he died.

JASPER NATHANIEL: Saif was in the olive fields that belong to the family, which is where they spend their time — I mean, these fields have been in their families for generations — when a lynch mob, like the one that, you know, I was chased by, showed up, coming from all different directions, and shot somebody dead, beat lots of them with metal poles and wood bats. In the case of Sayfollah, he was beaten severely.

But then, the Israeli military would not let an ambulance get to him. So, for two hours — over two hours, two-and-a-half hours, Sayfollah’s brother was sitting with him, on the phone with his father, begging him to do something, to get help there. And the Israeli military would not let ambulances in. By the time paramedics got there, he was dead. And so, this all happened in June. That whole time, Mohammed was in prison, not even aware that this had been happening.

AMY GOODMAN: What kind of access did his family have to him?

JASPER NATHANIEL: No access whatsoever. After the case started getting some attention — and the attention came from, basically, a grassroots campaign of people learning about this and, you know, calling their senators and their congresspeople and demanding that they do something. After there was enough pressure, the U.S. Embassy sent somebody in to check on him. And the report was really bleak. You know, they reported on the weight loss and the beatings and, you know, that he said he was coerced into confessing to it.

There was one time where Mohammed was able to deliver a message through the embassy to his family, where he asked his father to buy his sister a gold chain, and said he would pay him back when he got out. But other than that, the only other time the family was even able to see him was at a trial one day, when the trial didn’t even happen. It got canceled. So, at a hearing, I should say. Mohammed waved at the security camera, because he assumed that his father was watching. And the soldier slapped his hand down, and they turned the camera off. So, there was no direct access.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to November. He’s still in prison. You posted a video online of your mother calling Senator Gillibrand’s office, the New York senator. Let’s play it.

SHARON NATHANIEL: Yeah, hi. I’m glad to get somebody. My name is — and just for context, I’m a 76-year-old Jewish grandmother, a lifelong New Yorker and a lifelong Democrat. I have voted for Senator Gillibrand for every election she’s been in, including when she was pregnant.

So, I have two questions: one — which you should have, because I’ve been calling every single day for a month trying to get an answer, which I think it’s kind of difficult for a constituent not to be able to get an answer from her own senator. So, the first question is why she didn’t sign on to the letter of October 21st from Congress that went out to Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee asking for the release of the American teenager — American teenager — Mohammed, M-O-H-A-M-M-E-D, Ibrahim, I-B-R-A-H-I-M, who’s been held incommunicado, without any contact with his family, since last February, when he was abducted by the IDF. This is a child who’s in an Israeli torture camp. There’s evidence he’s been beaten. He’s lost a quarter of his bodyweight. I’d like Senator Gillibrand to imagine, if this were her child, what she would want done in a foreign prison.

And the second is why she didn’t sign on to the November 6th letter that went out to Benjamin Netanyahu, asking him to rescind the demolition orders for this small, little village, Umm al-Kheir, and why she sees fit not to comment on any of this, when we give billions of dollars to Israel every year. So, I’d like the answer to those two questions.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Jasper Nathaniel, that is your mother calling, asking, “What’s happening to Mohammed?” Did they respond?

JASPER NATHANIEL: Well, after that, after that clip went somewhat viral, Gillibrand’s office actually responded to Drop Site News and said that they had basically received the message, and they called the embassy to check on Mohammed’s condition. But, you know, my mom was doing that for months. She was calling Senator Gillibrand, Senator Chuck Schumer and her own representative, George Latimer. And she never got a meaningful response from any of them.

But, you know, what we basically think happened is that, you know, there were thousands of people like my mom making these calls, and it just, at some point, created a big enough headache for these offices, getting these calls every day, that they started to apply some sort of pressure on Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: How many kids was Mohammed imprisoned with in these various military prisons?

JASPER NATHANIEL: There’s at least 350 minors in Israeli military detention. Mohammed, his cell, he would have about 11 kids in it. But he was transferred a few times, so he saw hundreds of them. Many of them are not even being charged with anything. They’re being held on what’s called administrative detention, which basically means there’s no charge at all. You have no due process.

And, you know, I think what the family really cares about is that it’s great that Mohammed is out, and, you know, actually, three of his friends who were arrested with him that day also got out, but the only reason people knew about Mohammed’s case was because he’s American. And, you know, that does not make his life any more precious or valuable than any of the other kids or, frankly, any of the other adults who are still in these prisons. And I think that it’s just a real — it’s one of the great failures of the mainstream media in the last two years, that they have just — for all of the breathless coverage of, you know, the hostages in Gaza — coverage for good reason, I would say — there’s been just virtually no coverage at all of these kids and these grown-ups who are being held without charge in what Israeli human rights organizations have called a network of torture camps.

AMY GOODMAN: On this issue of calling U.S. congressmembers, since the U.S. provides so many millions of dollars in weapons to Israel and has a tremendous influence on what Israel does, I wanted to go back to what happened to you in October. In Part 1, you described in full. You were there with a Palestinian American. You were attacked by Israeli settlers — not just attacked, you know, one guy with a major club smashing the window of your car. Because, well, you are an American journalist, you are a Jewish American journalist, and you videotaped this, it started to get attention when the video went viral. That’s in Israel. What happened with U.S. congressmen? Who is your congressman and, of course, your senators?

JASPER NATHANIEL: Yeah. Well, I live in New York. My senators, so, of course, are Senator Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer. My representative is Dan Goldman. The short answer is: Nothing happened. So, the first thing that happened was I contacted the U.S. Embassy after that attack, and I was very clear —

AMY GOODMAN: And let’s be clear: You were attacked. Your car was smashed. Then, when you got out of the car, you saw the same man with a club, an Israeli settler, beating on the head a woman in her fifties unconscious, beating her with this club, and she was in a coma. For how long?

JASPER NATHANIEL: About a week, I think, yeah. So, I called the U.S. Embassy, and I told them, “I’ve just been attacked.” And I told them that, you know, the Israeli military had, at the very least, been negligent, you know, led us into an attack. And I said — 

AMY GOODMAN: Because you had gone to the Israeli military.

JASPER NATHANIEL: And asked for help. And they —

AMY GOODMAN: You saw a man with a gun, a settler with a gun, and they took you to him and then abandoned you.

JASPER NATHANIEL: Correct. The U.S. Embassy literally said to me — I have the text messages — “We cannot protect you.” They said, “It is the host country’s responsibility to protect you.” And when I said again it was the military of the host country that led me into this, they basically just said — well, actually, what they said was, “If the host country fails to protect you, we will pull our embassy.” And I said, “Are you going to pull the embassy?” And then they connected me with media relations. And that was the last I heard from the embassy.

As for my own representatives, I was calling or emailing, texting, tweeting at Schumer, Gillibrand and Goldman every single day. My mom was calling them every single day. We never heard back. We never heard back. You know, just to be blunt, I think that they completely abandoned me. And again, this is to say nothing of the fact that there are thousands of American citizens living in these villages who are getting no protection whatsoever from their representatives. I mean, Mohammed’s own representative, Mike Haridopolos, did nothing, did absolutely nothing, to secure his release.

AMY GOODMAN: In Florida.

JASPER NATHANIEL: In Florida. The two senators there did nothing. You know, DeSantis, of course, did nothing. Marco Rubio, who’s from Florida, did nothing. I mean, these people just — you know, on the one hand, I think it’s clear sort of bias against Palestinians. But the fact that they wouldn’t even help me shows that what it actually is is pure deference to Israel. Israel is allowed to abduct, to brutalize, to murder American citizens, and our representatives in the U.S., who are funding this brutalization, will do nothing to stop it.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about your latest piece for The Drift, headlined “Israel’s archeological apartheid.” Can you talk about it?

JASPER NATHANIEL: Yeah, so, I mean, just to take a quick step back, archeology has really played a central role in the Zionist project, from its earliest days, from the late 19th century. And if you think about why, it’s because, you know, when Jews were going to what was at the time Palestine, the justification — or, part of the justification was that we’re returning to our ancestral homeland. And to prove this, archeology developed as not just like a discipline, but almost like a national hobby, of people digging through the dirt, finding, you know, a piece of pottery with Hebrew lettering, and using that as proof that the Jews used to live there, and so they get to come back now. After the West Bank was occupied in 1967, those archeologists just hopped right over the Green Line into the occupied territory and continued doing the same thing.

So, what eventually happens is archeology, in addition to being a discipline that’s used for, frankly, propaganda to cement sort of the feeling that this is Jewish land, it actually is enshrined into law in ways that are just directly dispossessing Palestinians from their land. So, for example, a recent order was passed that gives the Israeli military authority over heritage sites in Area B. Now, just according to the Oslo Accords, Israel does not have any authority in Area B; they have authority in Area C. But now they’re able to go into heritage sites in Area B and basically do whatever they need to do, under the guise of protecting heritage.

And so, what’s happening right now is, a town called Sebastia, which is in the northern West Bank, it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I mean, the town is literally built among these ancient ruins from at least 10 major civilizations. So, it is certainly true that the ancient Israelites were here at one point. But there were also — you know, the Byzantines were there. The Romans were there. There were Islamic empires there, Christian empires, pagans. The Israeli state has determined that this one sliver of history, not even the first civilization — of course, not the last one — it should be privileged above all the others.

And so, now Israel has literally poured millions and millions of dollars into turning the town of Sebastia into a tourist destination for Jewish people to go and feel a deeper connection to the land there. So, Sebastia just had about 40% of its land confiscated to be turned into a park. And what it looks like on the ground is people being forced out of their homes, being blocked from getting to their own fields, children being shot and killed, people being just attacked every single day. And if you see how it’s covered in the mainstream Israeli press, it’s, you know, building a new park for them, for people to go from around the world and understand the Jewish roots in, you know, what they know as Judea and Samaria.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does this compare to the settlements that are being built, the outposts that are being built, that then become settlements?

JASPER NATHANIEL: It’s directly connected. You know, there’s a settlement right next to Sebastia called Shavei Shomron, which hosts a lot of this sort of archeological activity. They just built a dirt-filtering facility there, where they are literally combing the dirt and filtering through it, and, again, you know, putting out this content and this messaging, showing that, “You see? This is actually our land.” And it’s just — you know, the archeology is constantly sort of feeding into this propaganda machine that is supposed to be, you know, demonstrating that the Palestinians are not actually native here; it’s only the Jews that are native here. And, you know, if you look at every single settlement across the West Bank, and just the settlement movement as a whole, and you look at the language they’re using, it’s all about the connection to the land, just like it is in 1948 Israel. And archeology is basically a weapon that’s been used to turn that sentiment, frankly, and this interpretive science into law and enforcement.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Jasper Nathaniel is a New York-based writer and reporter who’s just back from the West Bank. He writes about the occupation on his Substack, Infinite Jaz. And we will link to your piece in The Drift called “Israel’s archeological apartheid.” To see Part 1 of our conversation, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.