Shin Bet dogs attack MK Rothman’s bill to prevent Jews from being detained without trial | The Jewish Press – JewishPress.com | David Israel | 24 Sivan 5784 – Sunday, June 30, 2024

Photo credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90

On Sunday, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation is scheduled to discuss a draft law to prohibit the administrative detention of Israeli citizens. The draft, submitted by Mk Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism), chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Legal Affairs and Judiciary Committee, points out that last year, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Likud) was in charge of the security forces, more Israeli citizens were placed in administrative detention than ever before.

Administrative detention, the imprisonment of a person without stating the charge and without trial, received its authority from the emergency decrees of the British Mandate of 1945. When this law was first applied by an Israeli government in 1951, then-MP 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 is immoral. The law you applied is Nazi law, it is immoral, and an immoral law is also illegal. Therefore, the arrest is illegal. You had no right to do this as long as there is a court, as long as you have an investigative system.”

MK Rothman noted: “Israel is fighting for its life and that of its citizens in the face of terrorist organizations that seek to destroy it. Therefore, powers were needed that would allow the security system to sometimes use ‘unconventional weapons’ such as administrative detention or injunctions under the emergency defense provisions. However, the primary obligation of the state is to its citizens, their security, their peace and their freedom. The freedom of will that is intended to serve these basic rights must be preserved to the greatest extent possible.”

“Therefore,” Rothman added, “this bill establishes that Israeli citizens may not be placed in administrative detention unless the Minister of Defense has reasonable grounds to believe that the person is a member of a terrorist organization whose goal is to harm the existence of the state or to carry out terrorist acts against its citizens.”

“This distinction is a fundamental necessity of a defense-oriented democracy that is not obligated to protect those who seek to disrupt the political framework or are enemies of the state,” Rothman said.

It goes without saying that the security apparatus is not happy with the idea that the only excuse to arrest someone without telling them why or putting them on trial is that they hate Israel and want to destroy it. This is largely because so many of the 24 Israeli Jews who were illegally detained love Israel, and many of them served in the Israeli army and in the Gaza war.

And so the security apparatus, led by the Shin Bet, has enlisted the services of the dogs of tyranny in the Israeli media. First and foremost, Ben Caspit, a man popularly considered a police-Shin Bet collaborator. Writing in his column for Maariv on Saturday, he was one of many in the media who quoted the Shin Bet’s claim: “The proposed amendment to the law will lead to immediate, severe and serious damage to the security of the state, as it will remove the possibility of using clear deterrent tools against those for whom the intelligence gathered in their case indicates an intent to commit an attack.”

Caspit also quoted an anonymous member of the secret police as telling him: “In order to flatter their electoral base and seven Jewish administrative detainees, they are endangering all Israeli citizens and causing a sharp decline in the Shin Bet’s ability to thwart Palestinian terrorism. It will lead to bloodshed, it will cause many casualties, it will be a cry for generations.”

Apparently, the Shin Bet’s PR courses do not emphasize the value of understatement.

What matters is identifying who a terrorist is, and in an environment where the settler response to rampant Arab violence in Judea and Samaria is classified as “settler violence,” there is no room for Rothman’s view that being a terrorist fundamentally means acting against the good of the Jewish state.

The uproar by the Shin Bet and its media agents over Rothman’s bill, which would prevent the detention of Israeli Jews for three consecutive months, obscures the fact that Israeli law gives security authorities broad freedom to restrict the freedom of suspects, provided they can present their case to a judge. In extreme cases where the Shin Bet can demonstrate a substantiated case, suspects, including Jewish ones, have been detained with judicial approval for 28 days without access to a lawyer.

The fact is that DM Gallant and the Shin Bet have no respect for our democratic institutions and fear the day when they will no longer arrest the usual suspects in the Jewish settlements but will be required by law to explain their reasons. They also fear the inevitable contradictions to their view that a Jewish terrorist is an Israeli citizen who disagrees with them.

One thing is certain: Ben Caspit and the rest of the supposed watchdogs of democracy in Israel have proven once again that what they are guarding is definitely not democracy.