"Disengagements": From Gaza and Israel's Justice System
By Dr.Joseph Lerner, Co-director IMRA

Israel Harel's op-ed "When courts become political" , which follows,
concludes with the assurance that abuse of the justice system from police
through the Supreme Court will eventually "float to the surface" for
significant attention after being deliberately submerged. Perhaps. Far
more likely, those abuses will become automatic for circumstances such as
the Gaza departure. That it is already submerged with negligible complaint
will buttress the adverse developments. And, it may well infuse the justice
system in general.

Unfortunate elements to which Harel refers didn't spring anew with the Gaza
experience. For example, the police and justice system have cultivated the
art of exaggerating dangers. It has become routine to characterize
allegations as "tips of icebergs".

Israelis, being champions at forgetting, it won't even be necessary to
forgive.

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HAARETZ 20 Oct.'05:"When the courts become political" By Israel Harel

QUOTES FROM TEXT:
"cooked up various yarns about expected armed resistance on the part of
the settlers,
mass refusal to serve in the army and the intention to blow up the
mosques on the
Temple Mount"

"The hiding of information will cleanse them of their sins"

" 'The disengagement arrests ... were intended to make the arrestees serve
as a
deterrent to others' "

"Did the president of the Supreme Court, in the wake of this report, order
an
investigation ...? "

"This disregard of conscience and professional integrity will yet float to
the surface"
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EXCERPTS:
. . .
... the media - with a few exceptions, such as a number of interviews ...
with families that were uprooted from Gush Katif - have disengaged from the
memory of the uprooting too. Just like before the disengagement, when in
order to rally the public against the settlers and for Ariel Sharon, it
cooked up various yarns about expected armed resistance on the part of the
settlers, mass refusal to serve in the army and the intention to blow up the
mosques on the Temple Mount, it is now trying to erase, by means of mass
amnesia of the traumatic results of the uprooting, its own sins and those of
the governmental bodies that participated in these outrages.

The hiding of information, they are convinced, will cleanse them of their
sins. In vain. The sins of the uprooting will reverberate, despite the
conspiracy of silence, as long as Jewish history exists. The justice system,
like the media, was conspicuous in its eagerness to provide backing for the
act of uprooting. In doing so, it desecrated the most important assets that
such a system has, that it ought to have: its integrity, credibility,
independence and professionalism, until the Public Defenders Office ...
dared to expose some of the legal system's misdeeds.

In an internal report of the Public Defenders Office, first made public ...
by Amotz Shapira on Israel Radio, attorney Dr. Avital Muller pointed to the
creation of "`new' laws for the purpose of the disengagement." For example,
when the prosecution requests a remand, the case of each suspect is normally
debated on an individual basis. But not for the disengagement arrestees.

"The court did not examine the part played by each of the detainees in the
specific event," she writes, and instead arrested them in groups, without
asking the prosecution as required by law, the reasons for the arrest of
each and every individual suspect.

"The disengagement arrests ... were intended to make the arrestees serve as
a deterrence to others."

In almost all cases involving arrest warrants for minors, judges elect to
make use of alternatives to prison detention. But not with these minors. The
judges did not even ask for the professional opinion of the Juvenile
Probation Service, a procedure built-in to the system. Moreover, the public
prosecution and the police took "overly stringent steps when they submitted
an appeal in almost every case in which it was decided to release
detainees."

In one case, writes Muller, after a minor was released on bail in the south,
he was subsequently "abducted" by a police officer and brought to a court in
Kfar Saba to have an arrest warrant issued for him there. And these are just
a few examples out of many others, in which judges collaborated with a
hostile public prosecution, in particular against teenagers. And the
indictment is clear: "The legal treatment of the disengagement arrestees
bolsters the feeling that the need to deter anyone that might interfere with
the execution of the disengagement took precedence over the fundamental
rules required to carry out a proper legal proceeding."

Moreover, in the procedures carried out in the court, "there was a
conspicuous deviation to the side of stringency from the prevailing arrest
policy in normal times." The bottom line: "The reality demonstrates that
there was selective enforcement of the law based on political affiliation."

In an enlightened, democratic country, the first few sentences of the
report, and certainly the final ones, would be enough to shake the very
pillars of the legal, and perhaps even governmental system. Because if there
was "selective enforcement of the law based on political affiliation," then
the rulings of the judges were political rather than judicial.

Did the president of the Supreme Court, in the wake of this report, order an
investigation into judges that handed down rulings that reflected "selective
enforcement of the law based on political affiliation?" Did ... Justice
Minister Tzipi Livni - whom the going spin describes as "straight as an
arrow," and someone unafraid to go up even against the president of the
Supreme Court - order a thorough investigation of the system that she is
responsible for?

. . .
This disregard of conscience and professional integrity will yet float to
the surface, just like other suppressions of conscience that make themselves
known when they can no longer be suppressed. And when that day of justice
comes to the justice system, then we will see a real trauma.