recommendations.
I remember talking to Mona Rishmawi, a lawyer for the human
rights organization Al Haq in Ramallah on the West Bank. She told
me that when she would go to court, she wouldn’t know whether
the Israeli prosecutor would prosecute her clients under British
mandate emergency law, Jordanian law, Israeli law or Ottoman law.
Or their own laws. There are administrative regulations, some of
which are never published. As any Palestinian lawyer will tell you,
the legal system in the territories is a joke. There’s no law—just
pure authority.
Most of the convictions are based on confessions, and everybody
knows what it means when people confess. Finally, after about
sixteen years, a Druze Israeli army veteran who’d confessed and
was sentenced was later proven to be innocent. Then it became a
scandal.
There was an investigation, and the Supreme Court stated that
for sixteen years the secret services had been lying to them. The
secret services had been torturing people—as everybody knew—
but telling the Court they weren’t.
There was a big fuss about the fact that they’d been lying to the
Supreme Court. How could you have a democracy when they lie to
the Supreme Court? But the torture wasn’t a big issue—everyone
knew about it all along.
Amnesty International interviewed Supreme Court Justice
Moshe Etzioni in London in 1977. They asked him to explain why
such an extremely high percentage of Arabs confessed. He said,
“It’s part of their nature.”
That’s the Israeli legal system in the territories.
Explain these Orwellisms of “security zone” and “buffer zone.”
In southern Lebanon? That’s what Israel calls it, and that’s how
it’s referred to in the media.
Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. It was all in the context
of the Camp David agreements. It was pretty obvious that those
agreements would have the consequence they did—namely, freeing
up Israel to attack Lebanon and inte - grate the occupied territories,
now that Egypt was eliminated as a deterrent.
Israel invaded southern Lebanon and held onto it through clients
—at the time it was Major Sa’ad Haddad’s militia, basically an Israeli
mercenary force. That’s when Security Council Resolution 425 was
passed.
ann
(Ann)
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