IT tells you a lot about a nation when it creates such places and allows a culture of impunity to prevail in the face of terrible human rights abuses.

Think of Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, firstly under the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, then under the control of the US military and you will get what I mean by that.

Then of course there was Guantanamo Bay detention camp, another American creation that quickly too became a symbol of US hypocrisy shattering the country’s repeated claims that it was a bastion of human rights.

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If the then US president George W Bush and secretary of defence Donald H Rumsfeld are to be believed, what happened in Abu Ghraib back during the Iraq War in 2004 was simply “an exceptional, isolated case” the result of “disgraceful conduct” carried out by a “few bad apples” acting without orders.

History though as we now know, tells a very different story, showing that what in fact happened in Abu Ghraib – the physical and psychological torture, abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees – were in fact war crimes resulting from decisions made by the Bush administration to bend, ignore, or cast the rules aside in the so-called “war on terror.”

Fast forward from 2004 to 2024 and the world today has a new name to add to the list of such infamous prisons – Israel’s notorious Negev desert detention facility of Sde Teiman.

Over the past few days, Sde Teiman has made headlines of a sort after Israeli military police detained nine army reservists from the prison for questioning in connection with the sexual abuse of a Palestinian arrested in the Gaza Strip. Such were the prisoner’s injuries from alleged forcible sodomy that he was rushed to hospital for treatment.

For some on the Israeli far right though, quite clearly the victims in this instance were the detained soldiers. The result was that a number of protesters – including far-right members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset – stormed into the facility, linking up with other reservists before finally being ousted by the army.

The anarchic scenes at the mass break-in sparked angry condemnation from Israel Defence Force (IDF) chief Herzi Halevi, who said they harmed the army, Israel’s security and the war effort. But Israel itself, polarised and divided on almost every level these days as a country is already well into the process of self-harm.

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As journalist Amos Harel pointed out in the Israeli daily Haaretz, “this is not a case of emotional identification with soldiers who got into trouble. The extreme right is trying to force a different set of values on the IDF, values that would allow unrestrained vigilantism in the West Bank while preventing any internal or external supervision of the soldiers’ and settlers’ actions.”

But while the incident at Sde Teiman has thrown the facility into the spotlight, what has been going on there has been known for some time to human rights groups and is part of what they say is a deeper, systemic crisis in Israel’s penal system to which Palestinians have been subjected for years.

For the moment though it’s Sde Teiman, set up specifically to hold Palestinian detainees from Gaza and manned by Israeli soldiers dubbed Force100, that is gaining infamy, resulting in it being dubbed “Israel’s Guantanamo.”

Referring to those who this week stormed the facility in support of the detained soldiers, the Israeli rights NGO, Breaking the Silence, noted that those right-wing protesters were “essentially issuing a full-throated endorsement of unimaginably brutal abuse of Palestinians”.

In a statement on social media, the NGO, made up of army veterans who have cast a telling light on abuses committed during the Israeli occupation, also described the dire conditions in Sde Teiman for Palestinian prisoners.

“Tens of dead detainees; indefinite restraints resulting in amputations; medical procedures with no anaesthesia; sleep deprivation; brutal beatings; sexual torture,” were among some of the abuses it highlighted.

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Other rights groups have also confirmed that conditions in other jam-packed Israeli prisons have also deteriorated dangerously since the Hamas attacks on Israel last October.

Back in 2004, it was Bush who sought to present a particular logic of the “war on terror” that continues to justify similar abuses today. Bush was forever making his case on the basis of moral equivalences, especially using the notion of America’s moral “superiority” of itself in the way it fights war.

For Bush, prisoner abuse under Saddam was torture, but when it came to US troops in Abu Ghraib it was simply “disgraceful conduct.” Bush also talked a lot about “our values,” even if his administration was well aware of what was going on in Abu Ghraib.

Again fast forward to today and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounds much the same. Netanyahu is on the record as saying that unlike the “evil” of Hamas, Israel’s army “is the most moral in the world,” when that same world knows full well from what it has been witnessing in Gaza that this outright lies.

Netanyahu’s wrongdoings are all symptoms of the same root cause, this being his absolute prioritisation of “managing the conflict” and deferring any real solution, no matter how many civilians – Palestinian or Israeli – are harmed.

What is happening at Sde Teiman is just another symptom – albeit a terrible one – of that same “management.”

Around 4000 prisoners have been brought to Israel since the ground offensive into Gaza began last October. Since then more than 40% of them have been released and returned to the coastal enclave.

As Tal Steiner the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, pointed out in Haaretz this week, that means that many were not Hamas fighters and thus were confined and tortured at Sde Teiman without any “security” justification – echoes once again of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Steiner is right too when she says that Israel is at a “crossroads,” and that as events at Sde Teiman have starkly highlighted, this is now a country “that must decide whether it’s one where the rule of law remains, or it becomes one controlled by armed gangs of right-wing settlers who come to the defence of soldiers even when they’re suspected of shocking crimes”.

As I said before, you can tell a lot about a nation when it creates such places as Sde Teiman and allows a culture of impunity to prevail in the face of terrible human rights abuses – and Israel is clearly no exception.