On Sunday, the Ministerial Legislation Committee is scheduled to debate a proposed bill to ban the administrative detentions of Israeli citizens. Submitted by Mk Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism), Chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Judgment Committee, the bill points out that in the past year, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Likud) has been in charge of the security establishment, more Israeli citizens than ever before have been subject to administrative detention.
Administrative detention, meaning placing a person in jail without telling them on what charge and without a court hearing, received its authority from the British Mandate’s emergency defense regulations of 1945. When the law was applied for the first time by an Israeli government in 1951, then MK Menachem Begin attacked it, proclaiming: “There are tyrannical laws, there are immoral laws, there are Nazi laws. […]. Don’t ask me who determines which law is Nazi and which law is immoral. The law you used is Nazi, it is immoral, and an immoral law is also illegal. Therefore, the arrest is illegal. You had no right to do this, when there is a court, when you have an investigation system in your possession.”
MK Rothman noted: “Israel is fighting for its life and the lives of its citizens in the face of terrorist organizations that seek to destroy it, and therefore powers were required that would allow the security system to sometimes use ‘unconventional weapons’ such as administrative detentions, or restraining orders, by the emergency defense regulations. However, the primary commitment of the state is to its citizens, their security, peace, and freedom, and the deliberative rights that are intended to serve these essential rights must be preserved for them as much as possible.”
“Therefore,” Rothman added, “this bill states that Israeli citizens cannot be detained in administrative detention – unless the Minister of Defense has reasonable grounds to believe that this is a person who is a member of a terrorist organization, who has set for himself the goal of harming the very existence of the state or committing acts of terrorism against its citizens.”
“This distinction is required by the very principle of a defensive democracy that is not obligated to protect those who seek to destroy the very political framework, or who are enemies of the state,” Rothman said.
Needless to say, the security apparatus is not happy with this notion that the only excuse to arrest someone without telling them why or letting them see a judge must be that they hate Israel and wish to destroy it. This is mostly because so many of the 24 Israeli Jews who have been detained extra-legally are lovers of Israel, and many of them have served in the IDF and the war in Gaza.
And so, the security apparatus, most notably the Shin Bet, has enlisted the services of the dogs of tyranny in Israel’s media, chief among them a popularly presumed collaborator with the police and the Shin Bet, Ben Caspit, who wrote in his Maariv column on Saturday, was one of many in the media who cited the Shin Bet claim that “The proposed amendment will result in an immediate, severe and serious damage to the security of the state, this given the elimination of the possibility of using clear deterrence tools against those that information collected in their case indicates an intention to cause an attack.”
Caspit also quoted an anonymous member of the clandestine police who told him that “In order to flatter their electoral base and 7 Jewish administrative detainees, they endanger all Israeli citizens and cause a steep decline in the Shin Bet’s ability to thwart Palestinian terrorism. It will result in bloodshed, it will result in many casualties, it will be a cry for the generations.”
Clearly, they don’t stress the value of an understatement in Shin Bet PR courses.
It comes down to identifying who is a terrorist, and in an environment where settlers’ response to rampant Arab violence in Judea and Samaria is classified as “settler violence,” there is no room for Rothman’s view that to be a terrorist fundamentally means acting against the welfare of the Jewish State.
The Shin Bet and its media agents’ bruhaha over Rothman’s bill that aims to prevent the jailing of Israeli Jews for consecutive three-month stretches obscures the fact that Israeli law offers security agencies broad freedom to curtail the freedoms of suspects, provided they can present their case to a judge. With judicial approval, in extreme cases where the Shin Bet can show merit, suspects, including Jewish ones, have been detained for 28 days without access to a lawyer, based on judicial approval.
The fact is that DM Gallant and the Shin Bet have no respect for our democratic institutions and fear the day when instead of rounding up the usual suspects in the Jewish settlements they would be obligated by law to explain why. They also fear the unavoidable challenges to their notion that a Jewish terrorist is an Israeli citizen who disagrees with them.
One thing is for certain, Ben Caspit and the rest of Israel’s supposed guard dogs of democracy have proven once again that whatever it is they are guarding, it definitely isn’t democracy.
