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<font size=2>Court System Provides Little Justice for
Palestinians<br><br>
</font><h1><font size=4><b>How Israel Stacks the Legal
Deck</b></font></h1><font size=2>by GEORGE BISHARAT<br><br>
Palestinian baker and activist Khader Adnan captured headlines recently
for a 66-day hunger strike that led him to the brink of death. His ordeal
began in the dead of night on Dec. 17, 2011, when Israeli soldiers broke
down the door of his West Bank home. Adnan was arrested before his
terrified wife and daughters, and was reportedly abused verbally and
physically upon detention and later in interrogation.<br><br>
Adnan was never tried but instead faced administrative detention. Israeli
prosecutors presented secret evidence to a military judge, who then
ordered a four-month detention. Adnan is widely believed to be a leader
in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which Israel considers a terrorist
organization. The government, however, lacked evidence that he was
directly involved in terrorist attacks. Adnan’s protest against Israel’s
unjust legal practices ended after an agreement between his lawyers and
prosecutors to release him April 17 barring substantial new
evidence.<br><br>
Adnan’s case was unique for the extreme sacrifice he offered and the
public attention it earned. Yet Israeli military courts, established
after Israel’s 1967 seizure of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza
Strip, have imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including
men, women and children, in similarly unfair proceedings, as documented
by Lisa Hajjar in her book, “Courting Conflict: the Military Court System
in the West Bank and Gaza.”<br><br>
To Palestinians, Israeli military courts are sites of repression, not
houses of justice. Palestinian defendants facing trial in 2010 were found
guilty in 99.74% cases, according to Israel Defense Forces documentation.
Proceedings are conducted in Hebrew, which few Palestinians speak. Judges
and prosecutors answer to higher military authority, denying military
tribunals full independence. Courts may renew administrative detentions
in six-month increments indefinitely. Some Palestinians have been so
detained for years, never having enjoyed the right to confront and
cross-examine witnesses nor even to know the evidence against
them.<br><br>
Such evidence is frequently provided by Palestinian informers recruited
by Israeli authorities, often through exploitation of the vulnerable. For
example, Palestinians seeking advanced medical care that is unavailable
in their own less-developed hospitals are sometimes pressured to
collaborate in exchange for permits to enter Israel for treatment,
according to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. Credible allegations of
torture and physical abuse of detainees gathered by such groups as the
Public Committee Against Torture in Israel also continue to dog the
military court system, despite a 1999 Israeli High Court of Justice
decision barring four forms of torture previously used by interrogators.
Evidence derived through informers is notoriously unreliable. Physically
coerced statements are no more reliable: Those undergoing torture often
say anything to alleviate their pain.<br><br>
The quip often credited to Georges Clemenceau “Military justice is to
justice as military music is to music” springs to mind. Yet the
injustices of Israel’s legal treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank
cannot be so blithely dismissed. The crude procedures of military courts
may be tolerable during brief military occupations. Israel’s occupation
of the West Bank is anything but brief.<br><br>
Moreover, Palestinian litigants have fared scarcely better in Israeli
civilian courts, including its vaunted High Court. There, suits to defend
Palestinian rights routinely fail. Most recently, the High Court denied a
petition that would have barred Israeli corporations from exploiting West
Bank natural resources such as water, gravel and stone for Israeli
use.<br><br>
In the Jordan Valley, 10,000 Israeli settlers were allocated 18 times the
water per capita that native Palestinians were allocated in 2008,
according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. Restricted
access to water and other natural resources has doubtless contributed to
the dwindling Palestinian population in the Jordan Valley, from as many
as 320,000 in 1967 to 56,000 in 2009. In leaving discriminatory
allocations of resources undisturbed, the High Court functions as a tool
of colonization.<br><br>
Israel is a colonial power that is still expanding in an era of human
rights and mass-media scrutiny. Its methods for clearing land for
settlement are necessarily different than those of earlier colonial
powers, which sometimes employed genocide and ethnic cleansing. Israel
made the most of its opportunities by denying return to hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians who fled from their homes or were forcibly
expelled by Israeli forces in the wars of 1948 and 1967. Thereafter, its
inexorable takeover of Palestinian lands and other resources has assumed
primarily bureaucratic form, with its courts providing a veneer of
legality. But the end result the displacement of a native population in
favor of settlers is the same.<br><br>
Israeli courts may provide justice to Jews living in Israel or the
occupied Palestinian territories. But a legal system that is fair to one
ethno-religious group while trampling the rights of others deserves to be
recognized for what it is: a handmaiden to apartheid.<br><br>
Our own government, by running diplomatic interference for Israel and
providing it billions in military aid, is complicit in the entrenchment
of Israel’s variant of ethno-religious discrimination. Why we support
practices that subvert our interests and defy our values is a question
that every American should ponder.<br><br>
<b><i>George Bisharat</b> is a professor at UC Hastings College of the
Law in San Francisco and writes frequently about law and politics in the
Middle East.<br><br>
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