The Supreme Court on Sunday rejected the appeal of three Jewish men arrested on unspecified “grave” suspicions, against the decision of the Shabak and the Judea and Samaria District Police to prevent them from meeting with their lawyers. The security apparatus shows how serious they consider the suspects’ crimes that on top of keeping them from seeing an attorney, they are yet to even release their names, and the petition text refers to them as “Plonim,” Hebrew for John Doe’s.
The only Arab Supreme Court Justice, Salim Joubran, was deposited with the questionable task of writing the decision, which was unexpectedly published on the courts’ website, despite the sensitivity of the case and without specifying the allegations against the detainees. The decision acknowledges that one of the suspects was arrested two weeks ago, on November 30, and another a few days before, on November 26. According to the Joubran decision, neither of the three men were allowed to meet with their attorneys because of a special decree issued by the Shabak and approved by various courts—for fear that such a meeting would sabotage the investigation of the incident which remains nameless.
Of course, the entire Israeli public knows at this point that the three Jewish detainees are residents of Judea and Samaria who are believed to have carried out an arson attack on a home in the Duma Village near Hebron, where almost an entire family perished. At this point, the only publicly known proof of Jewish responsibility for the attack are two lines of graffiti in Hebrew sprayed on the walls of the burnt house. Some have since pointed out that in an internal war between rival clans in the village five homes and a car have been incinerated since February 2015, the most recent one, in August, by a Molotov cocktail, favorite weapon of Palestinian terrorists. Others in Israel have pointed out that many Arabs are quite capable of writing Hebrew slogans.
The high court’s decision also revealed that two of the detainees are minors. The three suspects’ attorneys appealed to the Supreme Court to allow them to meet with their clients on the grounds that they do not pose a tangible risk, or, as they put it, “do not constitute a ticking bomb.” The Shabak argued in its response to the Supreme Court that “in light of the seriousness of the acts attributed to the appellants, it is of great importance to continue to keep them in incommunicado detention and prevent their meeting with a lawyer.”
The Supreme Court of Israel accepted the Shabak’s argument, and Justice Joubran, who made news in the past for refusing to stand up for the singing of Israel’s national anthem Hatikvah, wrote that he is convinced, based on classified material, of the need to continue the incommunicado detention.
“Given the picture that emerges from the privileged material brought before me, the fact that two of the appellants are minors does not tip the scales at this time toward allowing a meeting with their representatives,” Joubran wrote. “Given the seriousness of the acts attributed to the three appellants and the fear of disrupting the investigation, as well as the investigation of others involved in the case, the balance has not yet changed,” he added.
By “balance,” the judge was presumably referring to equation of security issues versus civil rights. Attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, who represents one of the suspects, on Friday cited legendary former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, who ruled regarding dozens of decisions on Arab terrorist cases, that while investigations of security issues are important, at the same time there is a duty to set limits on the actions of Shabak interrogators: “This is the plight of a democracy, that not all the means are acceptable in it, and not all the practices which are employed by its enemies are available to it. A democracy must sometimes fight with one hand tied behind its back,” Barak stressed.