Anxiety, genuine or false, has seized the heads of the military and the judiciary: The judicial revolution puts Israel Defense Forces soldiers at and their commanders by realistically putting them at concrete risk of prosecution abroad. It’s unclear whether the wave of briefings that engulfed the media over the weekend was meant only as a threat in the fight against the government coup or whether the apprehension is real. In any case, suddenly IDF commanders, fearful for their future, are telling it like it is as never before, presenting a truth they never before admitted.
According to these fearful people, up to now IDF service members benefited from an effective protective suit in the form of Israel’s world-renowned courts. Now that this has begun to crack, the soldiers are vulnerable to prosecution in The Hague and other courts abroad. For the first time, Israel’s defense and judicial establishments admit there is reason to suspect that the IDF commits war crimes, and that only the renown of Israel’s courts has protected it thus far.
But the courts’ prestige with regard to these issues is a total fabrication, whose disseminators knew full well that it was false. There is no system in Israel that investigations the crimes of the occupation. The military courts are obviously a pathetic joke, and the prestige enjoyed by the High Court of Justice is justified, as long as it is not facing the defense establishment.
Decades of the occupation, without a single day during which war crimes were not committed, have not led to even one worthy investigation, one that was not whitewashed and muzzled, to one indictment that was commensurate with the facts, and certainly not to one penalty that fit the crime. A state in which the trial of Elor Azaria – who shot dead a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian assailant – ends in an 18-month prison sentence for manslaughter, shortened to 14 months for “reasons of compassion and consideration,” which are later reduced by one-third, and the affair is considered a national trauma – is a state that does not investigate, does not prosecute and certainly does not punish people for war crimes.
The Azaria trial should have been a light unto the nations and the International Court of Justice: It was the exception that proves the rule. And the rule is that Israel does not investigate or punish soldiers or commanders for war crimes. The files collect dust in the office of the military advocate general, becoming covered in the lies and deceits of the soldiers and their commanders, until they are shelved.
And so, someone else must do the job for the state. It was convenient for The Hague and the world to cling to the sweet illusion that Israel is serious in its investigations of service members. Along came the judicial coup, and suddenly we no longer have a military advocate general who investigates or a High Court of Justice that fights war crimes.
There is no evil without some good. Just as the coup attempt aroused an enormous number of Israelis from their slumber and brought them into the streets, perhaps it will also cause the world to wake up from its coma.
After more than 35 years of reporting on the occupation, after hearing thousands of hair-raising stories that always end the same way: with army snipers shooting children and other innocent civilians, with live fire at demonstrations, with airstrikes on helpless civilians, with morbidly ill people denied entry to Israel for medical care, with collective punishment, detention without trial, brutal searches in the homes of innocent people, in front of their children, with humiliations, beatings, abuse, the use of attack dogs, with strip searches and a myriad of additional offenses, all of which end the same way.
“We are not aware of claims about violence by soldiers. Any such claims that are submitted will be examined”; “We are not aware of the claim that soldiers used toddlers as human shields”; “We are aware of the claim of a minor’s death. The circumstances are under investigation.”
Judges of the world: These “investigations” last forever and are not meant to do anything besides to deceive the world and maintain the sacred and absolute immunity of IDF soldiers. Perhaps the repeal of the reasonableness standard will finally arouse you to action, in which case the judicial coup will have one nondestructive result: the end of the era of the lie that Israel and its military investigate themselves. They never intended to do so.