You Bet It’s Apartheid
Monday, March 26, 2018 at 02:42PM https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-you-bet-it-s-apartheid-1.5939683
With Ahed Tamimi's sentence to jail, the truth has come out about Israel
by Gideon Levy 24 March 2018 Haaretz: Opinion
Mohammed Tamimi, Ahed Tamimi's 15-year-old cousin. January 5, 2018.AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed
They might not have intended it – this is too big for them, and perhaps even too big for their arrogance, but they are the initiators of the regime, or at least its harbingers. They studied law and went to work (“to serve”) in the military courts. They were promoted and became military judges. That’s what they call the clerk-officers who work for the moral army as judges of the occupied in the occupied territories. They work in a military unit with a biblical name: the “Judea Military Court,” and they decide people’s fate. No doubt they’re certain they’re working in a legal system, like they were taught at university. There are, after all, prosecutors and defense attorneys in it. There’s even a translator.
Most of the work attracts no attention. In Israel, who cares what happens in the prefabs at the Ofer military base? They have sent thousands of people to an aggregate tens of thousands of years of imprisonment, and almost never exonerated anyone; at their workplace, there’s no such thing. They have also approved hundreds of detentions without hearings, even though there is no such thing in a country of law. Day after day, it’s just another day at the office.
And then Ahed Tamimi came to them. Almost 2 million people around the world signed a petition calling for her release. And the forces of Israeli military justice just kept at it, clerks devoted to the system. Now they must be thanked. This time they exposed to the world the naked truth: They are working for an apartheid system. They are its harbingers. They are its formulators. They are its contractors, small cogs in a big machine, but reflective of reality.
The three officers who judged the teenage girl in various military courts, Col. Netanel Benishu, president of the Military Court of Appeals (there’s no shortage of titles here), who approved the hearing in the dark behind closed doors; Lt. Col. Menahem Lieberman, president of the Judea Military Court, who approved the plea bargain by which Tamimi and her mother would serve eight months in prison for nothing, or for her heroism, and Lt. Col. Haim Balilty, who approved her remaining in custody throughout the trial. One day they’ll be appointed to the Supreme Court. A colonel, and two lieutenant colonels who told the world: There’s apartheid here.
Only by chance were the three all religious, a kind of innocent coincidence. We don’t know who among them is a settler, but that of course means nothing either. They went to work in a military court of the occupation to protect human rights in the territories, in the name of the Lord of Hosts.After their rulings on Tamimi, there are no fair-minded people left in the world, not even in brainwashed Israel, who can seriously claim that an apartheid regime does not exist in the territories. The BDS movement should congratulate the officers who lifted all doubt from those who still had any doubts. The legal system that has one law for Jews and another for Palestinians, without apology, without whitewashing, should be appreciated for its honesty. A legal system that sentenced a soldier who shot a wounded man to only one more month than its sentence for a teenage girl who slapped a soldier – this is a system that openly admits it considers slapping the occupier equal to the murder of a person under occupation. Only one month separates the two.
A system that could not conceive of arresting, interrogating, indicting and certainly not sentencing to many months in prison a girl from the settlements who slapped a soldier, threw garbage at him, punctured the tires of his vehicle, threw stones at him or struck him – such a system sent Tamimi to eight months in prison. Need we say more? Her attorney, Gaby Lasky, could do nothing but agree to the plea bargain. Lasky, too, like two million people around the world, wants to see Tamimi free.
And perhaps Tamimi’s sentence is proper. Thanks to it, Israeli propaganda can no longer argue with the world against the charge of apartheid without ridicule. The colonels from Judea have exposed the truth, which has long been known. You bet it’s apartheid.
by Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent
*********************************************************************************
Palestinian Teen Ahed Tamimi Reaches Plea Bargain, to Serve 8 Months in Israeli Prison
Tamimi's cousin, mother reach plea bargains as well ■ lawyer says agreement is proof army wanted to 'settle scores
by Yotam Berger 21 March 2018 Haaretz
File - In this Thursday, Dec. 28, 2017 file photo, Ahed Tamimi is brought to a courtroom inside Ofer military prison near Jerusalem. Tamimi, 16, from the village of Nebi Saleh on Monday for attacking Mahmoud Illean/AP
Palestinian teen Ahed Tamimi reached a plea bargain with military prosecution on Wednesday, according to which she is to be sentenced to eight months in prison. The military court handling her case approved the plea agreement on Wednesday, making it an official court order.
As part of the agreement, the 17-year-old pleaded guilty to four counts of assault, including the videotaped slapping of an Israeli soldier. In addition to the eight month jail sentence, she is to pay a fine of 5,000 shekels ($1,437).
The prosecution also reached plea agreements with Nur and Nariman Tamimi, Ahed Tamimi's cousin and mother, both of whom were involved in the videotaped slapping of the soldier. The agreement, which the court has also approved, sentences Nur Tamimi to time served -- 16 days in prison -- and a 2,000 shekel ($575) fine. Nariman Tamimi's sentence is eight months in prison and a fine of 6,000 shekels ($1,725).
>> Israel Must Free Ahed Tamimi | Editorial ■ Analysis | Palestinian Girl in Viral Video Arrested for Making the Occupation Look Bad
Ahed Tamimi's case has been conducted behind closed doors. The military court rejected a request that she made this week to hold proceedings in public.
Earlier Tamimi's lawyer, Gaby Lasky, confirmed that a plea agreement had been reached. "The fact that the plea agreement provides for the dropping of all of counts of the indictment that made it possible to detain her until the end of legal proceedings is proof that Tamimi's arrest in the middle of the night and the legal proceedings against her were steps designed to settle scores," Lasky said.
Before the ruling was confirmed by the court, sources told Haaretz that according to the plea bargain, Tamimi would be found guility of the assault that was videotaped in December, incitement to violence for the posting of the video, and two other assaults on soldiers. Additional charges for assault and stone-throwing were to be dropped.
According to one source, the punishment in Ahed Tamimi's case is not considered particularly lenient or particularly severe. The Israeli military felt the need to end the legal matter, the source said, as it damaged the army's reputation in the media and internationally, which may be why the plea bargain was intensively promoted.
Tamimi's initial January indictment included 12 charges going back to 2016. The indictment included five counts of assault against security forces, including stone throwing. She was charged with assaulting a soldier, threatening a soldier, interfering with a soldier in the line of duty, incitement and throwing objects at a person or property.
Tamimi's mother, Nariman Tamimi, was also charged with incitment on social media– she filmed the slapping incident– and with assault. Tamimi's cousin, Nur, was indicted on charges of aggravated assault.
Nur Tamimi said she and Ahed slapped the soldiers in part because they had invaded Ahed's yard on December 15, the day they were filmed – but the main reason was that they had just read on Facebook that a cousin, Mohammed Tamimi, had suffered an apparently fatal head injury from an Israeli soldier's buillet. He actually survived the shooting.
Bassem Tamimi, Ahed's father, said that his wife and daughter had done nothing wrong and are "fighting for freedom and justice."
**********************************************************************************
Reader Comments