Israel’s Supreme Court is and always has been a Court of Ethnic Cleansing, Colonialism and Zionism
80,000
people, almost all of them Jewish, demonstrated
last weekend against the judicial reforms of the new Coalition Government which
would allow the Knesset to override any Supreme Court judgment by a one vote
majority and which would enable the government to hand pick new Supreme Court
judges.
Conspicuous
by their absence were Israeli Palestinians. The message that went out was that
this demonstration was
about ‘protect(ing) democracy in Jewish and Zionist Israel – and not
democracy in Israel.’ In other words, Jewish Democracy.
It
had already been made clear the previous week, when there were two
demonstrations in Tel Aviv, that slogans such as ‘End the Occupation’ were not
welcome. Mansour Abbas of the United Arab List, an Islamist Party which accepts
that Israel is a Jewish State, in return for minor concessions, called
for people not to bring the Palestinian flag.
The
Supreme Court has always been a Zionist court. Although it has a token Arab
judge that is for the sake of appearance. Not once has the Supreme Court struck
down a racist piece of legislation whose purpose was to reduce the rights of Arab
citizens. The Supreme Court is fully wedded to the idea of a Jewish Supremacist
state.
From
the Law of Return, which granted Jews a right to ‘return’ to Israel at the same
time as Palestinian refugees were excluded, to the Absentee Property Law 1950,
whose sole purpose was to confiscate land from Palestinians, the Supreme Court
has been consistent in supporting anti-Palestinian laws.
Jeremy
Corbyn, when asked,
during the debate against Owen Smith in 2016 for leadership of the Labour Party,
what he most admired about Israel and its achievements, said:
“I admire the
verve and spirit of the towns and cities in Israel. I admire the separation of
legal and political powers in the system of democratic government that’s
there.”
It
was one more act of appeasement by Corbyn, thus demonstrating his ignorance of
the supremacist nature of the Israeli state.
The
Supreme Court has presided over the theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank
using a variety of legal tricks. In July 2022 it ruled
that the Mitzpeh Kramim settlement could stay because the land
was stolen in ‘good faith’.
The
Supreme Court has create the legal architecture of Israeli Apartheid. The most
notable cases are those involving the question of whether Israel is a state of
all its citizens or whether it is a state of the Jewish ‘nation’.
In
1972 this question was decided in George Tamarin
v State of Israel.
Tamarin wanted his nationality changed from ‘Jewish’ to ‘Israeli.’ Justice
Agranat ruled
that
‘the
desire to create an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a
legitimate aspiration. A division of the population into Israeli and Jewish
nations would… negate the foundation on which the State of Israel was
established. ‘There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish People. The
Jewish People is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of
Diaspora Jewry.’
Why
is a nationality embracing all of a State’s citizens, as opposed to the
metaphysical ‘Jewish nation’, not legitimate? The Supreme Court did not say. In
the process the Supreme Court clung to the Zionist fiction that Jews, from
China to Argentina, India to Brazil, are members of a single Jewish Nation.
In
2013, in Uzzi Ornan v the State of Israel,
the Supreme Court confirmed the Tamarin ruling
that there was no such thing as an Israeli nationality. It stated
that ‘there is no proof of the existence
of a uniquely 'Israeli' people’, ignoring the fact that every other state
in the world accords the same nationality to those possessing the same
citizenship and living within its borders.
What
the court was doing was ruling that Israel is not a state of all of its citizens
but only of its Jewish citizens and notionally Jews living outside Israel. The
idea that Israel is a state of Jews, wherever they live, is the fiction that
underpins Israeli Apartheid. Effectively it was saying that Jews are a race.
Today
Zionists don’t talk openly of a Jewish race except for overt racists like the
new ‘Culture’ Minister Miki Zohar MK who opined
that ‘the “Jewish race” is the smartest
in the world and possessing of the “highest human capital,”’
A
mythical Jewish nation/race trumped the rights of Israel’s Palestinian
citizens, which is why Israeli citizenship is meaningless because Jewish and
non-Jewish citizens have very different rights in a Jewish state.
If
there was any doubt about this then Netanyahu made this explicit when he said, in
2019, in response
to Israeli actor, Rotem Sela, who had protested that even Arabs are human
beings, that
Israel
is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we
passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.
In
2018 this was codified in the Jewish
Nation State Law which made any notion
of equality in Israel redundant. This law held that:
1 (a) The Land of Israel is the
historical homeland of the Jewish People, in which the State of Israel was established.
1 (b) The State of Israel is the
nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural,
religious and historical right to self-determination.
1 (c) The realization of the
right to national self- determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to
the Jewish People.
Section 4(b) relegated Arabic from the
status of a recognised language to one with a ‘special status’ which in
practice has meant no status. Section 7 originally supported the creation of
Jewish only settlements and communities but, with an eye to how this would be
interpreted overseas this became
‘The State views the development
of Jewish settlement as a
national value, and shall act to encourage and
promote its
establishment and consolidation.’
Even though Israel has been established
for nearly 75 years, Jewish settlement, i.e. colonisation and displacement of Israeli
Palestinians, is still a ‘national value’. Judaisation of the Galilee,
Negev/Naqab and East Jerusalem is an ongoing process of house demolition, land
theft and the eviction of Palestinians. In nearly every case the High Court (i.e.
the Supreme Court) has ruled in favour of Jewish settlement and applied the
Absentee Property Law which allows Jews to ‘reclaim’ properties that they owned
prior to 1948 whilst at the same time denying Arab citizens or residents any
equivalent right to reclaim homes that they once owned.
In
July 2021 the Supreme Court held, by 10-1, that the overtly racist Jewish
Nation State Law was constitutional even though it explicitly discriminated
against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. In the process they affirmed that that Arab
citizenship was all but worthless.
The
one Supreme Court justice who ruled against the law was its only Arab member,
George Karra. Not one Jewish judge was prepared to leave their Zionism and
racism at home. This is the Supreme Court that thousands of Israeli Jews are
taking to the streets for.
Adalah,
the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, issued the following statement
at the time:
The Israel Supreme Court
approved a law that establishes a constitutional identity, which completely excludes
those who do not belong to the majority group. This Law is illegitimate and
violates absolute prohibitions of international law… the Attorney General and
the Knesset decided to ignore and disregard these violations in their responses
to the case….
The Israeli Supreme Court has not protected Palestinians from
the most racist laws in the world since World War II and the fall of the
apartheid regime in South Africa. Rather, the Court upheld the Citizenship Law,
banning Palestinian family unification in Israel; the Admissions’ Committees
Law, which allows small communities built on state land to discriminate against
Palestinian families using the criterion of “social suitability”; the Nakba
Law, which prohibits any groups or schools that receive state funding from
commemorating the Nakba (the Catastrophe); the Boycott Law, which makes calls
for boycott a civil tort, actionable for damages; and now the Jewish
Nation-State Basic Law. Adalah will continue to work internationally to expose
the discriminatory and racist nature of this law, a law which clearly shows the
Israeli regime, as a colonial one, with distinct characteristics of apartheid.
Those who are protesting in Israel are demonstrating for Jewish
rights in a Jewish state not for the democratic rights of all Israeli citizens.
That is why Israel’s Arab minority, apart from a few professional Arab
politicians, ignored these demonstrations.
Below I summarise some of the more egregious decisions of the
Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has never hesitated to defer to Israel’s
internal security police, Shin Bet and the Israeli army. There isn’t a single
instance in which the Court challenged the judgement of the army or police when
it came to infringing on the liberties of Palestinians.
Ha’aretz described how, last September,
the court rejected a petition to release a hunger-striking
administrative detainee Khalil Awawdeh whose body weight had dropped to 38
kilograms (under 84 pounds). He was going blind and his consciousness was
blurred. His hunger strike had lasted at that point for 172 days.
Justices Daphne Barak-Erez, Ofer Grosskopf and
Alex Stein wrote that after having reviewed confidential
material that Awawdeh’s lawyer could not see, there exists “firm and substantial justification” for
Awawdeh’s continued detention.’
As Awawdeh’s condition deteriorated even further another petition was
submitted to the High Court and Justice Anat Baron, a ‘liberal’ judge by
Israeli standards, ruled that no significant change had occurred in the
circumstances that would justify court intervention.
Along with Justices Stein and Chaled Kabub,
Baron ruled that the fact that no indictment had been filed had no bearing on
the strength of the evidence. Revealing the evidence “might severely harm state security.” In other words, the High
Court of Justice decided that the dying man must not be released because of the
danger he posed.
And
then what happened?
24
hours later, wonder of wonders: The Shin Bet security service agreed to release the detainee upon his completion of the current period of detention,
at the beginning of October. Until then he will stay in the hospital as a free
man.
Administrative Detention is imprisonment
without trial. It is repugnant in any democratic society. Internment Without Trial was last introduced in the
UK in 1971 in Northern Ireland and abolished in 1975 yet in Israel it is a
permanent feature of the legal system.
Israel routinely locks up Palestinians without
trial, for 6 months at a time, renewable indefinitely, without the High Court
saying a word. It accepts, without question, the word of Shin Bet. The ‘evidence’
is not seen by either the prisoner or his legal representatives. The High Court
acts as a military court when it comes to Palestinians. Jews rarely experience
Administrative Detention, however heinous their offences, because Israel’s
Supreme Court is Israel’s Colonial Court.
Ha’aretz commented:
The justices of the High Court must now hang their heads
in shame. If further proof were needed that in matters of the occupation the
court is nothing more than a hollow rubber stamp, a body that automatically and
blindly submits to every Shin Bet caprice, this case is incontrovertible proof.
On Tuesday, Awawdeh was still dangerous, on Wednesday he was no longer
dangerous, and all this with the approval of the High Court of Justice that, as
in many other cases, was led up the garden path by the Shin Bet.
The role of the High Court is to oversee and restrain the
Shin Bet, not to become its abject servant. This week the court showed it fails
in this duty, and also made a laughing stock of itself.
In September 2022 it was revealed that Israel's Supreme Court Had 74 Interns in the Past Two Years. Only One Was
Arab. A Supreme Court
internship is highly prestigious, and is considered a springboard to advanced
studies at prestigious universities abroad, and to positions at leading law
firms and the State’s prosecution. Every Justice among the 15 serving may
choose two interns for an internship period of 12 or 18 months. Some become
fully-paid legal assistants to the judges following their internship.
Professor Muhammad Watted, Dean of Safed
Academic College Law School explained that
an intern doesn’t sit at the Supreme Court to make
coffee. They speak their mind, persuade, and can provide the judge for whom
they work with a different perspective.
Prof.
Yuval Elbashan, formerly Dean of the law school at the Ono Academic College
commented that
Since time immemorial, it has been university graduates
interning at the Supreme Court, mostly from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew
University. It is sad to see that nothing has changed. It’s the same old song….
A Supreme Court internship is very prestigious and highly-regarded.
It enables admission to advanced studies at the leading American universities.”
Gideon Levy’s in A Hostile Take Over of a Hostile
Institution wrote that:
This
pathetic battle over the character of Israeli democracy, a democracy intended
solely for the privileged, is the joke of the year. It’s a tempest in an
apartheid teacup: Our democracy-for-Jews-only is in danger. Save it! All of the
pathos and every piece of artillery has been pulled out to save this fake
democracy.
But it is also not a democracy when 5 million people are living under
its auspices with no citizenship and no rights, with the approval of the High
Court of Justice – that is, the Supreme Court sitting as a constitutional.
Consequently, the hysteria that has erupted over the planned injury to the
Supreme Court is bizarre and even outrageous….
Through its support for the occupation, the court sowed the poisonous
seeds whose fruits we are reaping today. If it had refused to legitimize the
occupation back when it had the power to do so, there would be no Itamar
Ben-Gvir, there would be no settlements and there might even be no occupation.
It’s impossible to view it as a democracy with the exception of the
occupation: The occupation has become an inseparable part of the state, that
defines its evil system of government – apartheid with the High Court’s
approval.
What did the High Court do to protect democracy against the occupation?
Almost nothing. What could it have done? Almost anything. …
the Palestinian people, which lives under occupation, received no
relief from this court, the court betrayed its trust. A court that never took a
position in principle against the legality of the settlements; that approved
administrative detentions, aka detention with trial; that delayed for years
before graciously agreeing to take a stand against torture; that approved mass
deportation… and home demolitions; and that turned its face against
international law is a court that sabotaged democracy.
It’s
actually rightists and settlers who ought to be grateful to this court for
having legitimized the occupation for them. The left should have come out
against it long ago….
The
Supreme Court functioned more like a military court than like a gatekeeper. It
was the obedient servant of the executive branch. It’s impossible to sing
paeans of praise to it now and mourn the fact that it is being weakened.
Great
danger now lies ahead for civil rights, freedom of expression and other
freedoms in Israel. For instance, we will quickly find ourselves with a Knesset
for Jews only, and that will be only the beginning.
Demolishing
the Homes of Palestinian ‘terrorists’ but not Jewish terrorists
Perhaps the most egregious example of the ingrained racism of Israel’s Supreme
Court concerns its ruling
that the homes of Palestinians engaged in resistance to the occupation which
kills an Israeli should be demolished but that the homes of Jewish terrorists should
not be demolished.
Demolishing a home because a member of that family engages in ‘terrorism’
is itself illegal under international law because it is a form of collective
punishment. However the Supreme Court regularly disregards international law.
The argument that is used to justify this state of affairs is that Arabs
are deterred from attacking Israelis by demolishing their family homes whereas Jews
are not deterred.
So in the case of Mohammed
Abu Khdeir, a 16 year old Palestinian boy who had petrol poured down his
throat which was then set alight, the homes of Yosef Haim Ben David, 33, and two minors were not
demolished. If however the roles had
been reversed, then the perpetrators’ family homes would have been demolished.
The bogus
argument is made that Palestinian ‘terrorism’ is far higher than Jewish terrorism. It is bogus because of course most Jewish terrorism
is by the army. In other words it is
legal as befits an occupying arm.
Whatever sophistry is employed the fact is that there are two standards
of justice in Israel – one for Palestinians and another for Israelis.
The May 21 Riots and Pogroms
In May 2021 a series of riots and pogroms erupted as the Israeli state
attacked the Gaza Strip. True to form the Israeli judicial system, just like
the Czarist authorities over a century ago, gaoled the victims of the violence
and dealt kindly with the pogromists. Except that in Czarist Russia the victims
were Jewish whereas today they are Arabs.
Alan Dershowitz, whose career has included
defending Jeffrey Epstein and American neo-Nazis, said that:
“It
will make it much more difficult for people like me who try to defend Israel in the international court of public
opinion to defend them effectively, It would be a tragedy to see the Supreme
Court weakened.”
But it was Aharon Barak who clinched the argument.
The High Court has acted as a kind of legal “Iron Dome,”.
Without a credible independent court, deemed as ensuring Israel’s democratic
functioning, including in its treatment of the Palestinians, “our chief of
staff and government ministers will immediately be arrested when they travel
overseas… The leaders of the country
will be put on trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”
In a speech in January 2019 Supreme Court President Esther Hayut said that
one of the important side
effects of judicial review is its contribution to Israel’s international
legitimization.” Its intervention helps “bolster
Israel’s claim of ‘complementarity’ when it deals with criminal proceedings in
foreign courts, whether international or those of other countries.”
Hayut was right. The last time Israel dealt with the International Court
of Justice in the Hague, the government hid behind the High Court’s apron. The
Foreign Ministry argued that the High Court’s rulings (which ordered the state
to change the route in some places) prove Israel’s ability to scrutinize
itself.
In response to the ICJ’s ruling that the separation fence is a form of
annexation and is therefore illegal, the Likud-led government headed by Ariel
Sharon said that “Israel will continue
acting in accordance with the decisions of the High Court, which has exclusive
authority to discuss this issue.”
It is no surprise that Hayut has broken with tradition and entered the
political arena with a fierce attack on the proposed legal reforms. As
Akiva Eldar wrote:
Castrating the High Court would destroy the warped legal edifice created by Justice Meir
Shamgar when he served as the military advocate general. He invented the term
“administered territories” as a replacement for “occupied territories” and
proposed throwing the High Court’s doors wide open to Palestinian residents of
the territories, even though they aren’t Israeli citizens.
Baker Zoubi described a series of cases where the courts
dealt leniently with Jewish pogromists and harshly with Palestinian Israelis.
In June 2021 Ya’akov Cohen was convicted of violently assaulting Said Musa, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, in
Bat Yam. The prosecution sought a sentence of 4-7 years for Cohen, who kicked
Musa while he was lying helpless on the ground after having been dragged out of
his car by several Jewish assailants, including Cohen. The judge however sentenced
him to only 15 months in prison, justifying his ruling by arguing that Cohen “believed in the moment that the victim of
the crime [Musa] was trying to carry out a car-ramming attack.”
In November
2021 Adham Bashir was convicted of taking part in an attack on Mor Janashvili,
a Jewish Israeli, in Akka. The prosecution requested that Bashir, who threw a
stone at Janashvili’s car and broke its windshield, be sentenced to 10-13 years.
The three judges agreed and sentenced him to 10 years in prison explaining
that: “This was an ugly and dark attack
that requires significant punishment.”
Sabrin
Bashir, the mother of Adham Bashir, said that a Jewish man rammed his car into
several Arab youths, and her son “went to
see the youth who was run over and he was a relative of ours.” After he had
been arrested
We were
prevented from seeing him for several months. They kept telling us that the
indictment talks about throwing a stone at the ramming vehicle, even though the
driver got out of it and fled. Do you get such an indictment for throwing a
stone at an empty vehicle? The sentence does not match the act.
The
prosecutor’s office decided not to file charges against Jewish Israelis who were
suspected of involvement in the shooting of Musa Hassona in Lydd/Lod in May
2021. At the same time, seven Arabs from the same city were indicted for the
killing of Yigal Yehoshua, after they admitted to throwing stones at his car.
According
to Mossawa Center, a Haifa-based human rights organization, the police and the
Shin Bet arrested about 3,600 Israeli Palestinian citizens since the events of
May 2021. Around 360 were indicted, and more than 100 were convicted and sent
to prison. In the rest of the cases the accused are under house arrest or in detention until the end of the proceedings.
According to Mossawa, in cases where appeals were filed, the Supreme Court
increased the sentence.
Data
provided in June 2021 to Aida Touma-Suleiman MK from Hadash showed that the
prosecutor’s office requested the arrest of 190 Palestinian citizens and 17
Jewish citizens as a result of the unrest. The Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights
reported that 77% of indictments for crimes of incitement to violence and
racism filed by the prosecutor’s office in recent years were filed against Arab
citizens.
At the
end of November 2022, four residents of Tamra received prison terms of between
five and seven years, after they were convicted of throwing stones and beating
a Jewish Israeli who entered Tamra during the May events. Unusually, the Jewish
man, Shir Alkalay, actually requested that his attackers receive a lighter
sentence after signing a traditional “Sulha” (forgiveness) agreement with them,
but the court ruled that
“the harm to the public interest must be considered
more broadly here… the personal security and right to freedom of movement of
the Jewish population are damaged to the core.”
When has an Israeli colonial court given a moment’s
consideration to the freedom of movement of the Arab population?
Muhammad Agbaria from the village of Mu’awiya was convicted
after confessing to firing a gun at police officers in Wadi Ara, as well as
throwing bricks at police and Shin Bet officers from the roof of his house when
they came to arrest him the next day, injuring them. His family claimed that
the confession was extracted from him by force.
Ilham
Agbaria, Muhammad’s sister, said that her brother had been in detention for a
year-and-a-half before being sentenced.
“We’re
appealing to the Supreme Court, but we don’t expect his sentence to be reduced.
Criminals and murderers aren’t sentenced to 15 years, but when a guy goes out
and shouts about respect for him and his people, he gets such an unjust
punishment.
“We see how
they punished Jews who attacked Arabs, and how they punish armed criminals in
our society,” said Nassim Qabha, Agbaria’s son-in-law. “They think they can
prevent youths from going out to protest the next time, but it won’t help them,
because force doesn’t work against our people.”
In
December 2022 dozens of mothers from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East
Jerusalem organized a protest in front of the Jerusalem District Court, where
the mother of prisoner Bilal al-Jabari said that her 19-year-old son has been
detained for a year without trial, with the prosecution demanding an eight-year
prison sentence.
The
authorities insist on unfair punishments against young people, despite the
daily harm to the residents of Sheikh Jarrah from settlers, all under the
auspices of the police.
Balad
chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh said that the
unfair rulings are a clear testament to
the fact that this system is part of Israel’s apartheid regime, which allows
the murderers of Musa Hassuna and Muhammad Qiyan
(a Palestinian citizen of Israel who was killed by undercover police in Umm
al-Fahm in May 2021) roam free, while the victim who protected his home is
being put on trial.
According
to Al-Mezan, although there are similarities in the details of the indictments
filed against Jews and those filed against Arabs, the sentences against the
Arab defendants were specifically tailored to punish young Arabs for their
participation in the events of May 2021.
This is a double
standard between Jews and Arabs in rulings on indictments regarding national
issues… the severe punishments are a dangerous precedent and indicate that the
Israeli justice system is racing toward extremism and discrimination.
In May 2022 Ha’aretz described
the High Court as ‘the Occupation's Rubber Stamp’ before going on to describe it as
the kashrut department of the settlement
enterprise and the slaughterhouse where petitions against the occupation’s
injustices were sent to die. Our supreme legal institution upholds land theft,
supports home demolitions as a punitive measure, signs off on detentions
without trial, allows the prolonged blockade of two million people in the Gaza
Strip and hasn’t prevented entire communities from being evicted from their
homes.
It described the High Court as a
‘whitewasher
of the injustices of the occupation. In a ruling issued in the dead of night –
ironically, between Memorial Day and Independence Day – the court permitted the
expulsion from their homes of about 1,000 Palestinian residents of Masafer
Yatta… for the benefit of Israel Defense Forces training. As a result, eight
Palestinian villages whose residents have lived in them for generations will be
destroyed.
David Mintz, Ofer Grosskopf
and Isaac Amit, rejected the petitioners’ argument that they had lived there before it was declared a
firing zone in 1981. Miraculously, none of the hundreds of Jewish settlers
living in the area (most of whom came later) has been asked to leave his home
or his settlement for the army’s firing zone. And so, with the imprimatur of
the High Court, Israeli apartheid has been legitimized in this area of the
South Hebron Hills.
In view of the selective
expulsion based on nationality, it will no longer be possible to refute the
argument that an apartheid regime has replaced the military occupation in the
territories. Occupation is temporary by definition; apartheid is liable to
persist forever. The High Court approved it….
These 1,000 residents, over
whose heads the sword of expulsion now hangs, were born and raised in this land
of caves, in which shepherd communities live in very harsh conditions, without
electricity or running water, all while remarkably preserving their traditional
way of life. This doesn’t only involve expelling people from their homes but
also destroying a living culture. The High Court lent a hand to this.
The court also rejected the
argument that the prohibition in international law against forced population
transfer is binding on the court or that it applies to Israel…. Justice David Mintz, who is himself a settler, in effect ruled that international law on this
matter, and perhaps also regarding other matters, is not binding on one country
in the world – Israel – and depends upon its consent….
The fact that it was
published in the dead of night may indicate that even within its walls there
are those who recognized the disgrace this verdict brings upon the court and the country.
Amira Hass described Masafer Yatta as home to traditional Palestinian cave-dwellers since at least the beginning of the 20th century. The Prosecutor described the area and the structures that have been built alongside the original residential caves – including schools, mosques, and a medical clinic. Because Palestinians are never granted planning permission they were all ‘illegal’.
The Palestinians’ lawyer, Shlomo Lecker, attempted to correct this misrepresentation,
fearing the judges would get the wrong impression. The clinic is a tent, Lecker
noted. As for the schools, he said,
it’s a shame there are no
photos showing how pitiful they are, since Israel has been repeatedly denying
Palestinians permission to build.’
The argument that Palestinians rarely if ever receive planning
permission, unlike Jewish settlers, made no impression on the ‘justices’. After
all that is what Zionism is about.
Lecker told the judges that there was no escaping the conclusion that in
the eyes of the state, there are legal people (who are entitled to live
comfortably in recently built settlements) and illegal people, who aren’t
entitled to the same comfort as the settlers, despite having lived in the
region long before them. It is they that the state demands permanently leave
their homes.
Removal of Palestinians was precisely the intention of Ariel Sharon in
the early 1980’s. Preventing the spread of the Arabs in the area required that
it be declared a firing zone, Sharon told the army, according to minutes from a
1981 meeting of the Ministerial Committee on Settlement Affairs. There, like in
the Jordan Valley, the genetic code of the firing zones is halting the process
of natural Palestinian rural development that has been ongoing for many
generations.
Another measure to halt the natural development was the transfer of
Palestinian land reserves and water sources to the settlements, contrary to international
law. In the early 1980s, Israel built the settlements of Carmel, Maon, Metzadot
Yehuda and Susya in the Masafer Yatta area. With the support of Israeli
authorities, these settlements have been joined over the years by additional
illegal and unauthorized outposts: Havat Talia, built in the 1990s, followed by
Avigayil, Havat Maon, and Mitzpeh Ya’ir - all built in the early 2000s.
Prosecutor Bart is a resident of the settlement of Neveh Daniel, east of
Bethlehem, in the Gush Etzion Settlements Bloc. One of the three justices
considering the petitions is David Mintz, a resident of the settlement of
Dolev, west of Ramallah. As a Palestinian folk proverb asks: ‘When the rooster’s the judge, what kind of a
ruling can a grain of wheat expect?’
Tony Greenstein
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