“But regarding the hilltop youths, it appears that those statements of the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court have been forgotten by today’s Israeli judges,” Ben-Gvir wrote in Makor Rishon, adding, “The problem is not only the severe harm to the detainees’ civil rights, but most importantly it is the fact that any such interrogations are contrary to the purpose of finding the truth, and may cause a terrible miscarriage of justice. When interrogators abuse, threaten and harass a suspect—all for the sake of forcing him to admit his guilt—it is possible that an innocent person would confess to crimes he did not commit. Such things have happened.”
Ben-Gvir warned that the Shabak interrogators “have crossed boundaries and red lines. Unfortunately, I can’t expand on this issue because of the gag order imposed on the case—in the future we will reveal the truth about these dark days for civil rights in Israel.”
It is becoming clear why the security services and the courts, all the way up to the last hope of a citizen in a democracy, the Supreme Court, are willing to trample the rights of a group of Jewish suspects languishing in the cellars of the secret police without an indictment, and without the most elementary respect to their civil rights.
Since there is no cut and dry evidence in the Duma arson case, either an eyewitness’ testimony or circumstantial proof, the only way of moving ahead in the investigation is by getting a confession from even one of the suspects. It is very highly doubtful that such a confession is being offered at this point. And so, hoping to literally squeeze such a confession out of two teenagers and one adult, the courts are prepared to betray the entire foundation of Israel’s democracy to facilitate such a confession.
Since the case at hand is arson, the most severe charge — in a democratic legal system — against the accused can only be manslaughter. So why does the entire system harness itself to this travesty, without much of an objection on the part of anyone from the political realm?
The answer might be that should the suspects be released for lack of evidence against them—which is where the case should have ended without the state apparatus trampling the suspects’ civil rights—the entire territory of Judea and Samaria would catch fire. There would be no recognition of how far the hated Zionist system was willing to go to try and indict the suspects. The Arabs want those three heads on a stick, and anything short of that would surely mean the eruption of the third intifada Israel has been fearing since Rosh Hashanah.
Israel is deathly afraid of upsetting its Arabs, in and out of the green line, and for the sake of appeasing them it is prepared to stop being Israel.