Yossi Schwartz, ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 20.12.2022
You have to be a real stupid or a hypocrite not to know that the political and the military leaders of the Zionist apartheid state are committing war crimes. The latest war crime of Israel is the deportation of the human right activist Salah Hamouri, 39 years old from East Jerusalem occupied in 1967 and annexed a few years later. In July 1980, the Zionist parliament – the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Law as part of the country’s Basic Law, that declared unified Jerusalem the capital of Israel, formalizing its effective annexation. The United Nations Security Council ruled the law is “null and void” in United Nations Security Council Resolution 478. This has not moved Israel.
Prior to his deportation Salah Hamouri was in prison in administrative detention on suspicion of participation in terror activities due to his alleged affiliation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) group, but he was not charged or convicted in the proceedings against him. As a matter of fact, he was activist in the Palestinian human rights organization Addameer, that defends the rights of Palestinian prisoners which was deemed by Israel without a proof to be a terror organization, together with several other NGOs, in October 2021. Addameer – along with the UN, several European nations and a number of Israeli human rights groups – have all strongly rejected the designation. This also has not moved Israel.
Administrative detention is a device the Zionist state uses to put people Israel cannot prove that they violate the Zionist laws in jail. When the State of Israel was formed in 1948, the Provisional Council of State adopted the Law and Administration Ordinance, which included the adoption of the Mandate Law that governed Palestine during the period of the British Mandate. In that framework Israeli law inherited Regulations 108 and 111 of the Defense Emergency Regulations – 1945. These regulations authorized the High Commissioner and Military Commander to issue a detention order against a person for purposes of preserving public safety, state security, or public order. The Detention Act, enacted in 1979, replaced the arrangements under Regulations 108 and 111.
During the Zionist para-military organization attacks against the British mandate after the government in London issued a white paper that restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine and promised independence with Arab majority in Palestine, it issued the law of 1945 emergency. “A set of regulations enacted by the High Commissioner for Palestine, under his authority under the Palestine (Defence) Order in Council, 1937, and published in the Palestine Gazette on 27 September 1945. The purpose of the regulations was to give the Mandatory government and security forces additional authority to act against Jewish and Arab underground organizations. They enabled the government to put restrictions on movement and free speech, establish a military court system, expropriate and demolish houses, place suspects under administrative detention and more. The regulations remain in effect in Israel and the Palestinian Territories under Israeli law, apart from several that were repealed over the years, with the application of some dependent on the official existence of a state of emergency, that has been continuously declared since 1948″ [1]
The emergency act of 1945 when it was applied to the Zionists, “of course, explains the attack on them by the Jewish lawyers in 1946. At the 1946 lawyers’ conference, Dov Yosef stated: “With regard to the security regulations the question is: Will we all be subject to official terrorism?” At the same meeting, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira proclaimed: The regime built in Palestine on the Defense Regulations has no parallel in any civilized nation. Even in Nazi Germany there were no such laws” [2]. However, with typical narrow-minded nationalist hypocrisy; notwithstanding these attacks, the Emergency Regulations were incorporated into the legal system of the newly born “Home of the Jewish People,” supposedly the realization of the prophets’ dream of justice and equality. Thus, the Zionist morality succeeded in reconciling “Nazi” methods with the prophets’ dream [3]. Since the founding of the Zionist state, these : “Administrative detention is incarceration without trial or charge, alleging that a person plans to commit a future offense. It has no time limit, and the evidence on which it is based is not disclosed. Israel employs this measure extensively and routinely, and has used it to hold thousands of Palestinians for lengthy periods of time. While detention orders are formally reviewed, this is merely a semblance of judicial oversight, as detainees cannot reasonably mount a defense against undisclosed allegations. Nevertheless, courts uphold the vast majority of orders” [4]
By November 12 this year 850 Palestinians were held in administrative detention by Israel, the highest record since 2015. “Deporting a protected person from occupied territory is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, constituting a war crime,” UN human rights spokesman Jeremy Laurence said in a statement, referring to East Jerusalem.
Indeed article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states:
“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive” [5]
“On January 1, 2022, the nearly 500 administrative detainees held in Israeli prisons at the time launched a collective boycott of military courts and called on lawyers not to attend court sessions nor to engage in judicial processes related to their detention. This boycott, which ended on June 27, 2022,1 is a continuation of decades of Palestinian struggle against Israel’s carceral policies — including through hunger strikes, demonstrations against prison authorities, and certain forms of cultural production from captivity” [6]
Michael Lynk, a UN special rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967 stated:
“Administrative detention is an anathema in any democratic society that follows the rule of law,” Lynk said. “When the democratic state arrests and detains someone, it is required to charge the person, present its evidence in an open trial, allow for a full defense and try to persuade an impartial judiciary of its allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.”… “Administrative detention, in contrast, allows a state to arrest and detain a person without charges, without a trial, without knowing the evidence against her or him, and without a fair judicial review,” he said. “It is a penal system that is ripe for abuse and maltreatment.” International law allows a state to use administrative detention only in emergencies, and only if a fair hearing can be provided where the detainee can challenge the allegations against her or him. In an occupation, Article 78 of the Fourth Geneva Convention only permits an occupying power to employ administrative detention “for imperative reasons of security.” [7]
“Israel also regularly incarcerates its Palestinian administrative detainees in Israeli prisons, a violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which says protected people under occupation should be detained in the occupied territory” [8]
“I also call upon Israel to abolish its practice of administrative detention, release those detainees it presently holds, and strictly follow international law in the application of its security operations” Lynk said” [9]
Israel has been regularly criticized by human rights organizations for its promiscuous use of administrative detention. Even France denounced the deportation:
“France on Sunday condemned Israel’s deportation of French-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri. “We condemn today the Israeli authorities’ decision, against the law, to expel Salah Hamouri to France,” the French foreign ministry said in a statement. The French foreign ministry said Paris had been “fully mobilized, including at the highest level of the state, to ensure Salah Hamouri’s rights are respected, that he benefits from all possible assistance and that he can lead a normal life in Jerusalem, where he was born, resides and wishes to live”. France also took several steps to communicate to the Israeli authorities in the clearest way its opposition to this expulsion of a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem, an occupied territory under the Fourth Geneva Convention,” the statement read.” [10]
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), where war crimes can be prosecuted, follows the definition set out by the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which were ratified by 196 states.
This definition includes acts of: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury, extensive destruction and appropriation of property which is not justified by military necessity, compelling a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of a hostile state, willfully depriving a prisoner of war of the rights of fair and regular trial, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement.
Nevertheless, no punitive measures have been imposed by the imperialist states which love to present themselves as champions of freedoms while in the real world their hands are full of the blood of the workers and the poor peasants. They may pay lip service and say that what Israel does is not very nice, but they will stand with Israel as long as Israel will stand in the front line of imperialist control of the region and help rotten local corrupted rulers to oppress their own people.
As a matter of fact, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has never prosecuted leaders from the imperialist state but only leaders from the semi colonies like for example Jean-Pierre Bemba – President of the Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) and commander-in-chief of the MLC’s military branch, Armée de Libération du Congo (ALC) – in the Central African Republic. Sometimes the ICC issues warnings for arrest for war crimes but is unable to arrest the war criminal. For example, the ICC issued two arrest warrants in 2009 and 2010 against the former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. He was overthrown in 2019, however, he remains free and at large.
Thus, if you believe in Pinocchio that became a living child you can believe that the imperialist institutions will bring justice to the working class and the oppressed nations.
Free all Palestinian political prisoners!
Down with the bloody Zionist apartheid state!
For a Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[1] https://ecf.org.il/issues/issue/1471
[2] Dov Yosef became Israel’s first Minister of Justice; his judicial adviser was Shapira,
[3] The Other Israel chapter 8 The Emergency Regulations
[4] https://www.btselem.org/topic/administrative_detention
[5] International Humanitarian Law Databases
[6] https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/the-prison-intifada-supporting-palestinian-administrative-detainees/
[7] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/10/un-expert-calls-israel-end-practice-administrative-detention-and-immediately
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] https://www.timesofisrael.com/france-slams-israel-for-deporting-palestinian-over-alleged-terror-against-the-law