Israel Confronts Its Other Kind of Justice : A System Tailored Only for the Palestinians Touches Home

It was with great relief and surprise that Israelis greeted last Sunday’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of a Muslim army officer who had been imprisoned for espionage and treason largely on the strength of forced confessions. The release of Izat Nafsu, who had served 7 1/2 years of an 18-year sentence, left many of us Israelis thinking “at last, justice was done”--a cliche, but a welcome truth.

I have no doubt in my mind that when Nafsu was convicted for crimes he did not commit, the same phrase came to use: “Justice was done.”

Israel is a democracy where the law is cherished and doing justice is taken for granted. But somehow, it seems, Israelis have taught themselves to accept that justice might be relative when it comes to security--that nothing is wrong when some people have to settle for less justice than others.

In the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, for instance, Palestinians experience three kinds of “justice”: the one inscribed in the Jordanian law that prevailed before occupation, the one forced on them by Israeli military decrees, and the one that combines elements of those two according to the occupiers’ convenience.

The usual excuse for this legal stew is “security.” In other words, Israel is ready to apply measured justice, the quantities of which are to be determined by its security needs.

Israelis seldom question the application in occupied areas of practices that don’t go by the book--lack of due process, evidence kept from defense lawyers, harsh interrogation methods, torture perhaps. All these, and others, are accepted by most Israelis as a necessity because of “the special situation”--namely, that Palestinians in the occupied territory are only the enemy, and therefore should be satisfied to have any justice at all. Many Israelis tend also to be more lenient about legal misbehavior because it is practiced “out there,” not in Israel, not against Israelis.

Occupation and the daily need to thwart terrorist activities has long been a rational, if not totally justifiable, explanation for many cases of legal abuses. But all of a sudden something went wrong, unexpected, not according to common habit. That was the case of Lt. Nafsu.

Nafsu was not living in the occupied territories; he is a proper Israeli citizen from a northern Galilee town of Circassian Muslims, a minority community that originally came from the Caucasus.

Nafsu’s only crime, the Supreme Court found, was that while serving in southern Lebanon in the late 1970s he met with a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and did not report it to the military authorities.

This is a “crime” that I and many of my colleagues committed in past years, one that some of us still find it difficult to refrain from, because there is no clear definition of who is a member of the PLO or who is a leader. But that is beside the point.

The main issue is that Nafsu’s interrogators, members of the security force, Shin Bet, imported their methods from the occupied territories into Israel. It has long been understood that certain tools for making justice could be used only in one area--the occupied territories--not in the state of Israel where the law protects citizens. The Shin Bet fellows got muddled up. According to the court, they tortured Nafsu, intimidated him, threatened his family, applied illegal and inhuman methods in order to squeeze from him a confession, and they even succeeded in hiding their actions for a while--for seven years.

But maybe the interrogators are not to be blamed. It is the unfortunate reality in Israel that makes it very easy to be confused. Twenty years of occupation, tens of thousands of interrogations, a lot of success in preventing bloodshed, the fact that unjust things were done out of sight in Israel’s backyard and not to Israelis, and for the good purpose of keeping the state of Israel safe--all these are enough to confuse silence with permission. After all, the common belief is that such behavior was uniquely devised to be directed only against the enemy, never against Israeli citizens.

The case of officer Nafsu showed Israelis, to their surprise and, at first, disbelief, that no one is immune. All of a sudden it looked as if a justice system tailored for the enemy had crept into and tainted the “other” system, the one where torture is not allowed and human rights are thoroughly observed. The shock was complete.

It is very difficult to explain sometimes the range and scope of the damage inflicted on Israel by the occupation. Philosophical examples are usually not the ones to make a point with. The Nafsu case does it.

After the verdict, President Chaim Herzog said he felt ashamed that such a thing could happen to an innocent man and called for an inquiry into Shin Bet’s behavior.

It took too long, but justice did work. Now we shall see if this is a turning point in justice for non-citizens under Israel’s control.