Israeli Police Simply Ignore Court Order to Release Palestinian –

Jewish Co-defendants Tried Under Different Legal System

The police took Nasser Nawaj’ah out of the West Bank and into Israel to face trial. When that didn’t work, they ignored a court order to release him and smuggled him back to the West Bank and into military custody.

Despite calling itself the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ Israel behaves very much like a police state when it comes to Palestinians.  In the saga below, a Palestinian, Nasser Nawaj’ah, is charged with making a complaint to Palestinian police about another Palestinian.  Apparently that is an offence under Military Regulations which are not published, still less translated, into Arabic.

The two Jewish co-defendants, who are alleged to have also informed the Palestinian police about someone who fraudulently sold land to settlers, who would therefore be subject to imprisonment, are being tried under Israeli law.  In fact there was no land seller.  It was all a set-up by a right-wing Zionist NGO to entrap Jewish human rights workers who opposed the sale of Palestinian land to Zionist settlers.

Khirbet Susiya

When the Israeli police produced Nasser Nawaj’ah in question before the Jerusalem Magistrates Court it was ordered that he be released as the Court had no jurisdiction in the case, because he was a Palestinian.  The Police promptly appealed and the Jerusalem District Court also ruled that Nasser Nawaj’ah should be set free.  What did the Police do?  Instead of releasing him they kidnapped him and took him to the West  Bank where they charged him before a Military Court, where the rights of defendants are non-existent.  The courts have a conviction rate of 99.7%.

One of the essential prerequisites of a bourgeois democracy is the rule of law.  In Israel the Police choose which legal system with which to charge someone.  If they can’t do it under one system they choose another!

Tony Greenstein

By Haggai Matar

|Published January 22, 2016

Israeli police smuggle Palestinian suspect out of the country

Palestinian anti-occupation activist Nasser Nawajah is led into the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, January 21, 2016. (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

What happened to a Palestinian man named Nasser Nawaj’ah on Thursday could fill an entire chapter of a textbook about the Israeli justice system, or rather, about its military occupation.

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By Dahlia Scheindlin | January 15, 2016

Nasser was arrested in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers on suspicion of filing a complaint to the Palestinian police about another Palestinian. The soldiers hand him over to Israeli police, who take him from the West Bank to Israel. There, a Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court judge rules that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over Palestinians, and orders him released unconditionally. The police appeal the judge’s decision, but the Jerusalem District Court also rules that it doesn’t have jurisdiction, and once again orders the police to release the man unconditionally.

The Israeli police ignore the Israeli court’s decision, take the Palestinian man outside Israel’s sovereign borders and bring him to the Ofer Military Court in the occupied West Bank. There, Israeli authorities ask a military judge (who is actually a major in the army) to extend the Palestinian man’s remand. The man’s lawyer is not present this time. She is still back in Israel, in Jerusalem, busy filing an emergency petition to hold the police in contempt of court.

Nasser Nawaj’ah explains to the military court that all he did was to report to the Palestinian police a Palestinian man who he thought was trying to harm him, and that he doesn’t understand why that could possibly be illegal.

The military court judge says he feels “uncomfortable” with how this is all happening, and with the fact that Israeli authorities transferred a Palestinian man from a court “in Israel” to a court in “the region” (the West Bank). In other words: this is the opposite of the normal scenario, in which Palestinians are brought only to military courts in “the region.” Nevertheless, the military judge rules that Nawaj’ah be kept in custody until Sunday, using the charming logic that in military courts — as opposed to civilian courts — four days in jail isn’t anything to get worked up about.

WATCH: Anti-occupation activists brought to J’lem court

Meanwhile, the petition to hold the police in contempt of court is still pending. Recall that the police completely disregarded and mocked the District Court’s order to unconditionally release Nasser Nawaj’ah, instead smuggling him out of the country and out of the court’s jurisdiction.

All of this happened while two other arrestees in the same case, suspected of the same crimes, and who happen to be Jewish, are processed though an entirely different legal system.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Update: On Friday morning, Nawaj’ah’s attorney filed an emergency petition for writ of habeus corpus to the Israeli High Court of Justice.

Israeli Military Court Gaols Khalida Jarrar, an elected Palestinian parliamentarian

If you want to know why Israel is not, contrary to its claims, a democracy, then the case of Khalida Jarrar says it all.  Khalida, a secular and left-wing Palestinian, a member of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is an elected member of the Palestinian legislative assembly.

But she is a member of an ‘illegal organisation’ presumably the PFLP and therefore she is imprisoned by a military Tribunal, another quaint example of Israeli democracy.  Settlers are subject to normal Israeli public law.  Khalida, being a Palestinian

under occupation, is subject to Military Law, which of course lacks even the slightest element of justice.  Military courts have a conviction rate of over 99%.

A good leading article by Israel's only sane newspaper, Ha'aretz.

Tony Greenstein

What Does Jailing a Palestinian Politician Say About Israeli Democracy?

 Haaretz Editorial               Dec 09, 2015

Khalida Jarrar was sentenced to 15 months in prison this week for membership in an illegal organization and incitement, but was her trial in a military court just?

Khalida Jarrar is a political prisoner. The Ofer Military Court, which on Monday sentenced the Palestinian parliamentarian to 15 months in prison for membership in an illegal organization and incitement, is a political court that punished her for her political activity, and for that alone. Thus Israel, which pretends to be a democracy, has political prisoners, political arrests and political prison sentences, at least in the occupied territories.

Jarrar’s trial once again proved the intolerable contradiction between the rule of law and the principles of justice, on one hand, and the military justice system on the other. The latter has no relationship to the former.

Jarrar was arrested at her home in Al-Bireh in April. The defense establishment claimed at the time that the reason for the arrest was her violation of a military order that allowed her to live only in the Jericho area, far from her home. No other crime was mentioned. Later, she was indicted on 12 different counts, some of them ridiculous and even outrageous, like attending a book fair and paying condolence visits. In the end, she was convicted on two counts in a plea bargain. 

One military court judge ordered her freed long ago; another ordered her kept in prison until the end of her trial; and the military prosecutor threatened her – and essentially the court as well – by saying that if she were released, she’d be thrown in jail without trial, in other words placed in administrative detention. This is not how the legal system of a properly run state conducts itself.

Even the fact that Jarrar is a legislator, a member of parliament, an elected representative of her people – a post that ought to grant her immunity from political charges – didn’t give her a moment’s protection. Israel treated her brutally, just as it treats every Palestinian it deems suspect. 

First it tried to keep her away from her hometown with a draconian military order. Then it tried to put her in administration detention, which is no less arbitrary. Finally, and only after public and international pressure for her release had intensified, members of the military justice system were forced to fabricate an indictment against her – most of which, as noted, collapsed. Essentially, this was a Band-Aid, based at least in part on dubious evidence, including vague hearsay evidence and testimony obtained under pressure.

The fact that Jarrar was thrown into prison because of her political activity on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is first and foremost an indictment of the State of Israel, which puts politicians on trial because of their legitimate opposition to the occupation and even sentences them to jail. Jarrar and her attorneys decided to accept the plea bargain in order to shorten her trial, and thereby the length of her detention until the end of proceedings. But the black flag that flies over the shameful imprisonment of a Palestinian member of parliament will continue to fly over the State of Israel, tarnishing her jailers and, above all, those who are responsible for them.