Israel supreme court president's answers, Mazin B. Qumsiyeh

Opinion, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Israel supreme court president's answers

Mazin B. Qumsiyeh

Jordan Times, Saturday, September 27, 2003

AHARON BARAK, the president of Israel's highest court, came to Yale University to speak at a Morse college “tea”. Yes, literally, we had tea and cookies for him. His talk was titled “The Legal Framework of the Fight Against Terror: The Israeli Experience”. Barak spoke about attempts to “balance” the rule of law and the “fight against terror”. I had lots of questions for him. Since I was not “selected” to go to dinner with him, I had to be content with one question in public and one I managed to ask in private, afterwards.

My question, revolving around international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concerned Barak's statement that the Israeli highest court prohibited the Israeli military from “relocating” relatives of those who engaged in violence unless the relatives themselves had direct involvement in violence.

Barak hadn't mentioned the house demolitions of relatives, for instance, or that deportations are illegal per international law. He had also failed to mention that six million of the nine million Palestinians are refugees or displaced people, and that over a quarter of the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens are also, by Israeli law, considered “present absentees”.

My question was trying to elicit Barak's reaction to this statement from Amnesty International about Israeli laws: “In Israel for example, several laws are explicitly discriminatory. These can be traced back to Israel's foundation in 1948 which, driven primarily by the racist genocide suffered by Jews in Europe during World War II, was based on the notion of a Jewish state for Jewish people. Some of Israel's laws reflect this principle and as a result discriminate against non-Jews, particularly Palestinians who had lived on the lands for generations.

“Various areas of Israeli law discriminate against Palestinians. The Law of Return, for instance provides automatic Israeli citizenship for Jewish immigrants, whereas Palestinian refugees who were born and raised in what is now Israel are denied even the right to return home. Other statutes explicitly grant preferential treatment to Jewish citizens in areas such as education, public housing, health and employment.” (`Racism and the Administration of Justice', Amnesty International report, 2001; also found at http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/racismreport.pdf)

Everyone has laws, even Nazi Germany had laws, but there are international norms and international laws which transcend local law.

Barak repeated his statements that in a democracy [sic], there should be a balance between the demands of human rights and the demands of society. He said his court looked at house demolitions and determined that they were “legal”. He said that that was the decision they reached because the perpetrators lived there before they killed themselves and since they care about their families, the government has decided that this would be a deterrent. He said he could not comment on the other issues other than to say the Law of Return is why Israel was established and indeed it gives any Jew, anywhere, the right to just show up and be considered a citizen immediately (unless they pose a threat to the society).

A student asked him about the fact that judges in apartheid South Africa resigned rather than enforce apartheid. He answered that many judges also remained and did their judicial duties (!).

After the public part of the talk, I had the chance to talk with him for a few minutes, and so I asked about the Israeli supreme court decision of 1951, which told the government to allow the Palestinian villagers to return to the two villages of Iqrit and Birim (see http://www.badil.org/Refugees/Documents/2000/1-00.htm). For 52 years, the government has refused to implement this decision.

Barak said that he knew the case well and he thought they would be allowed to return “after we sign the peace treaty”.

I told him that this is hypocritical as these are ostensibly Israeli citizens and he had earlier said that anyone who is within the border is treated equally. Here he was whisked away by the master of Yale's Morse college who arranged this event.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once said: “The Jewish state cannot exist without a special ideological content. We cannot exist for long like any other state whose main interests is to insure the welfare of its citizens.” (New York Times, July 14, 1992).

Indeed, that is the source of all the conundrum and Barak and his court have really little control. The violence is but a symptom of this disease whose cure was obvious in South Africa and is just as obvious in Israel/Palestine.

The writer is co-founder of the Palestine Right to Return Coalition (http://Al-Awda.org). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).