Judge Rules Arab Teens Need Protection from Israeli Justice
By JONATHAN COOK
Counterpunch
November 17, 2009
An Israeli judge made an historic ruling last week when he
decided that an Arab teenager needed “protection” from the justice system and
ordered that he not be convicted despite being found guilty of throwing stones
at a police car during a protest against Israel’s attack last winter on Gaza.
Prosecutors had demanded that the juvenile, a 17-year-old from
Nazareth in northern Israel, be convicted of endangering a vehicle on the road,
a charge that carries a punishment of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, as a way to
deter other members of Israel’s Arab minority from committing similar offences.
But Judge Yuval Shadmi said discrimination in the Israeli legal
system’s treatment of Jewish and Arab minors, particularly in cases of what he
called “ideologically motivated” offences, was “common knowledge”.
In the verdict, he wrote: “I will say that the state is not
authorised to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological’ felons, and flog
with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological’ felons.”
He referred in particular to the lenient treatment by the police
and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West
Bank and who violently resisted the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005,
and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to
prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem.
Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal
group for Israel’s 1.3 million-strong Arab minority, said the ruling was the
first time a judge in a criminal court had ackowledged that the state pursued a
policy of systematic discrimination in demanding harsher punishments for Arab
citizens.
“We have known this for a long time, but it has been something
very hard for us to prove to the court’s satisfaction,” she said. “Now we have a
legal precedent that we can use to appeal against convictions in similar cases.”
The youth was arrested during a protest on a road near Nazareth a
few days after Israel launched its operation in Gaza last December.
Dozens of demonstrations took place in Israel during the
four-week attack, leading to the arrests of 830 protesters in what human rights
groups described as often brutal Israeli police action.
The overwhelming majority of those arrested, say the rights
groups, were Arab citizens, despite the participation of Israeli Jews. Adalah
reported that 250 protesters were subsequently indicted, almost all of them
Arabs and half of them minors.
Judge Richard Goldstone, in his United Nations fact-finding
report into the Gaza assault published in September, wrote that he had been
“struck” by the fact that despite many counter-demonstrations by right-wing Jews
that had turned violent the police appeared to have made “no arrests” in those
cases.
He also noted that, according to the information he had seen,
most Arab protesters had been refused bail and held in detention for lengthy
periods, even in cases where they faced relatively minor charges.
Of the court system, Mr Goldstone concluded that “the element of
discrimination between … and differential treatment of Palestinian and Jewish
citizens of Israel by the judicial authorities, as reflected in the reports
received, is a substantial cause for concern”.
The ruling by the Nazareth juvenile court appeared to confirm
those findings.
Mr Shadmi wrote in his verdict that, in recent years, the Israeli
authorities had been “working on two fundamentally different enforcement levels
in relation to crimes perpetrated by [Israeli] minors”.
He pointed out that in cases of violence by Jewish youths against
the security services, legal proceedings were usually frozen or cancelled before
the indictment stage. He said he had not heard of a single instance of a Jewish
minor being sent to prison for such offences, even though most Arab minors were
convicted and jailed.
The judge admitted that he had nearly been swayed by prosecution
demands for a lengthy jail term for the youth, who cannot be named because of
his age. But ultimately, he said, he had been persuaded by the defence’s
argument that similar cases of “ideological violence” involving Jewish youths --
such as settler attacks on soldiers -- rarely, if ever, merited jail terms.
“If the state feels that ideological offences justify relatively
forgiving enforcement for minors, then this should be the policy towards all
minors regardless of nationality or religion.”
Earlier this year the justice ministry recommended that 40 Jewish
settlers convicted of resisting the disengagement from Gaza be pardoned on the
grounds that their acts “were prompted by an unusual historical event and that
the perpetrators are not felons”. According to Israeli media reports, many of
the settlers arrested over the dissengagement will never be brought to trial.
Mr Shadmi ordered the Nazareth youth to refrain from committing
any offence against the police for two years against a bond of $1,300. In a
procedure mainly reserved for juvenile offences, he sentenced the youth to 200
hours of community service without convicting him.
The verdict was greeted with surprise by the youth’s family. The
father told the Israeli media: “Thank God we had a judge like him, who is not
motivated by racism. This may lead the state of Israel to understand that it’s
time to stop treating the Arab population like enemies.”
The prosecution announced that it would appeal against the
decision.
Gideon Fishman, a sociology professor at Haifa University who has
made a study of criminal sentencing policies in Israel, said he was not aware of
research into discriminatory policies by prosecutors towards juvenile offenders.
However, he said he was sure that there was systematic bias.
“The judge is right to raise his voice against a policy that is
more lenient towards Jewish offenders. This is a policy being pursued by state
prosecutors intentionally and not by accident, and it undermines trust in the
system.”
Judge Shadmi referred only to discrimination in sentencing in
Israeli criminal courts.
Palestinians from the occupied territories are tried in Israeli
military courts under different legal rules and procedures that have been
severely criticised by human rights groups.
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in The
National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
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