Israel's judicial attack on Palestinians cuts both ways

With their blindfolds just removed and 1,000-shekel ($212) "adjustment grants" in hand, Intisar and Kifah Ajouri wandered onto a fig farm and deeper into the controversy surrounding Israel's new weapon against the intifada. Palestinians alleged to have helped their relatives plan attacks on Israel can now be legally banished from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.

And Thursday, just a day after this sister and brother of a slain militant from the West Bank city of Nablus were taken in Israeli tanks to an undisclosed location in the Gaza Strip and told to live there for two years, Israel started an even more controversial trial against intifada leader Marwan Barghouti.

Mr. Barghouti, a young secretary general in the Fatah movement who is often touted as a potential successor to leader Yasser Arafat, has been charged with 37 counts of orchestrating attacks that killed 26 Israelis and wounded many others. But in a packed Tel Aviv courtroom, a defiant Barghouti declared that he did not recognize the court and that it had no right to try him.

The two proceedings suggest an increased tendency in Israel to turn to unconventional uses of its court system as a way to discourage attacks on its civilian population – and to demonstrate Israel's argument that acts of terrorism have been directly planned by senior Palestinian Authority officials. And while Palestinians and human rights groups have denounced these moves, some critics in Israeli society itself argue that these attempts to give legal teeth to an otherwise exasperating military and political battle could backfire.

Barghouti's is "a show trial in a sense that the main judge here is world opinion," says Moshe Negbi, a prominent legal affairs commentator in the Israeli media. "The evils and wrongs done by the occupier will always look worse than the evils and wrongs done by the occupied," he says. "It's a no-win situation."

Indeed, while Israeli officials may feel they have ample evidence to convict Barghouti, legal experts here say, he could succeed instead in putting the Israeli occupation of Palestinians on trial before the eyes of the international media.

And in the case of the Ajouri siblings, the court action allowing their deportation to Gaza may actually constrain the Israeli army more than free it. The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the army could not hurt innocent people who were not shown individually to be a security threat – evidence was presented to show that the Ajouris were – and this potentially sets a precedent for preventing the army from making mass deportations in the future.

Although it appears at the outset to give the army the right to punish relatives of suicide bombers – something already commonly done by the demolition of a known bomber's house – this week's court decision to transfer the Ajouris actually suggests that collective punishment is not acceptable in Israel courts.

This, for example, could lead to a ruling on a pending case on whether the army is allowed to use human shields, euphemistically dubbed the "neighbor procedure" by the army, in which Israeli soldiers have forced innocent bystanders to accompany them on missions. The tactic is meant to prevent troops from being shot or hurt in booby traps when they raid Palestinian homes.

"Basically, the picture we're looking at is not a legal one. These are political measures used within legal restraints," says Ruth Gavison, a professor of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a human rights activist with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Page: 1 | 2