A Gaza flotilla activist was raped and tortured by a foreign military; her own country ransacked her luggage, seized her phone and laptop. Andrew Brown with Juliet Lamont’s story.
Hold two images in your head at once.
The first. An Australian citizen, face down on the deck of an Israeli naval vessel in international waters, cable tied and shackled, soldiers standing on her legs, a rifle butt smashing into her head each time she turns her face away, water thrown at her until it fills her mouth and nose and she is certain she is drowning. Waterboarding without the board.
Then a darkened shipping container. Five soldiers. Raped from behind, bent double in a chokehold, while one soldier rips fistfuls of hair from her scalp. She fixed her mind on his boots and pushed everything behind her far away, until it was happening to a woman she could watch from somewhere else.
It was the only way to live through it.
The second image. An Australian citizen who served in the Israel Defence Forces, the army, before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide, strolled off a flight at Sydney Airport. Nobody stops him. Nobody asks what he did. He gets his coffee in Double Bay by mid-morning.
Now guess which one Australian Border Force detained, searched, and threatened with arrest.
Juliet Lamont came home from being raped and tortured by a foreign military, and her own country ransacked her luggage, seized her phone and laptop, and told her she was under arrest unless she surrendered her passcodes.
Her government did not protect her. Her government investigated her.
Planned and systematic. Right from the top.
Call the crime by its name. The seizure of 42 unarmed civilian boats carrying medicine and prosthetics, 270 nautical miles out in international waters, is piracy.
Flotilla detainees. Images supplied.
What followed was an industrial process. Four hundred and twenty-eight civilians from thirty countries fed one by one through a container the survivors called the torture tunnel, by soldiers in balaclavas who hide their faces because they know The Hague is coming.
They knew Lamont’s name. Out of 428 people, hers. “Welcome to Israel, Juliet,” an officer purred. “You’re gonna really enjoy this.”
Weeks later, at a forensic examination in Tweed Valley Hospital, it was the nurses’ latex gloves that broke her. She had seen them before. Her rapists wore them. No DNA. No evidence of their crimes. The men who broke her coccyx gloved up before they touched her, so that this exact examination would come up empty.
That is not soldiers losing control. That is planning, and it comes from the top. Israel has denied everything through a spokesperson. A denial from a military whose soldiers glove up before a rape is not a denial. It is a confession of method.
The violence followed the survivors into the desert. On the night of 20 May, Lamont’s daughter Isla, a 25-year-old Australian youth worker, was dragged shackled from her Naqab prison cell to a room of armed soldiers. Her own published words: “They pulled down my pants to my ankles, where the shackles were, and my underpants, and took off my top, unclipped my bra. That’s when there were, like, four soldiers in there with a gun to my head,
saying they will shoot me if I don’t say I love Israel.
A loyalty oath, extracted at gunpoint, from a stripped and shackled Australian woman. Her mother was somewhere in the same prison. Neither knew what was being done to the other.
At every stage, the fear was the product. Lamont believed she was drowning twenty minutes into captivity. Cable tied in stress positions for five hours in the midday heat, the Israeli anthem on a loop, she calmly concluded they would all be lined up, shot, and thrown in the ocean. A soldier strolled the lines saying, I feel like killing somebody today, it’s going to be one of you.
A worthless passport
An Australian passport is supposed to mean that the government stands behind you. Lamont carried hers through the container, through Kesiot Prison, and home, and at every point it was worth precisely nothing. DFAT officials photographed survivors hugging for the website and refused every actual request. Then Border Force gave her a homecoming interrogation.
Meanwhile, roughly 800 Australians have returned from IDF service without one phone seized or one question asked. Australia arrests citizens who flew drones for Ukraine, an ally. It jailed people for a decade for merely talking about joining ISIS. Service in a military facing genocide charges earns a sunny walk through customs.
The double standard is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.
When 34 Australian women were invasively searched at Doha airport in 2020, Canberra erupted within days. Flying rights threatened, a major deal killed, and no proof demanded first. Qatar could be punished. Israel must be protected, even from the testimony of raped Australians.
Penny Wong, champion of women, would not raise her eyes to the survivors in Parliament House, then called for the Israeli government to investigate itself. The rapists will audit the rapes. She offered a meeting with some of the victims after 11 pm. It never happened.
The media completed the abandonment. CNN and the New York Times found this story. The SMH and the Telegraph could not. And when ABC‘s 7.30 sat survivor Neve O’Connor before Sarah Ferguson, the very morning she landed, Ferguson cross-examined her like a hostile witness.
The same interviewer was rightly hailed for the dignity of her Gisèle Pelicot interview. The difference was not the credibility of the women. It was the identity of the perpetrators.
Make it cost
The survivors’ demands are the bare minimum of a self-respecting nation. Expel the Israeli ambassador. An independent investigation, not a perpetrator’s self-audit. End the two-way arms trade. Sanctions. Bar dual citizens from IDF service. All ignored, and they will stay ignored exactly as long as ignoring them remains free of consequences.
So make it cost. Ring your federal MP and ask one question. Do you believe Juliet Lamont? Make them answer on the record, because every evasion is an answer too. Say her name. Say Isla’s. Say Neve O’Connor’s. The lobby’s entire strategy is silence, and
silence cannot be manufactured without your cooperation.
The gloves were meant to erase the evidence. They cannot erase the witness. No glove has ever been made that fits over a story.
Believe her. Then make Canberra act as it should.
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Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist