Detention without trial, determination against Iran

Israel’s imprisonment of Jewish terror suspects without trial following a deadly attack on a Palestinian home in the West Bank makes front page news in the Hebrew press on Wednesday.

Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz both report on the first case of administrative detention (imprisonment without trial) of a Jewish Israeli by the security forces. Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein approved the Shin Bet security agency’s request to imprison Mordechai Ma’ayer for six months on suspicion of involvement in Jewish terrorist activities, along with two other Jewish suspects, Haaretz reports. The move comes after the firebombing of a Palestinian home last week in a terrorist attack believed to have been perpetrated by Jewish extremists.

Yedioth Ahronoth reports that the police are asking the public’s help in tracking down the perpetrators of last week’s attack on a Palestinian home, which killed a baby and left the parents and sibling seriously hurt.

Ma’ayar, 18, originally from the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim, was arrested after the torching of the Church of the Multiplication of Fishes and Loaves on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Yedioth Ahronoth reports.

For those less familiar with the procedure, the tabloid offers a primer: administrative detention is a procedure by which, under the approval of the defense minister and a district court judge, someone can be placed in prison for a limited period of time without trial. “The period of the detention is half a year, but also at the end of the period the minister can sign on its extension,” the paper writes. “It’s a common procedure in the framework of the efforts of the security agencies against Palestinian terrorist groups, but the use of it against Jews is extremely rare — and has been employed just once in several years.”

Amir Fuchs writes an op-ed in Haaretz against the use of administrative detention by the Israeli defense establishment altogether. He arguesthat so long as it exists in the Israeli legal system, it must be used without discrimination, “but the principle of its existence contradicts the basic enlightenment of the rule of law. Negation of human freedom, when sometimes he isn’t even aware of what he’s suspected (and therefore isn’t able to defend himself), on the basis of concealed and ex parte testimony is fundamentally unacceptable.”

Shockingly, the right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper doesn’t report on the move by the Defense Ministry until page 17, after a brief article calling on the public to report potential leads in the attack on the Dawabsha home.

Israel Hayom’s front page report covers the death of an IDF soldier Tuesday from heatstroke while touring the Old City of Jerusalem with his unit. Eighteen-year-old Dan Sela died and eight others were hospitalized due to the extreme heat that has been plaguing Israel and the region the past week, causing several massive wildfires and breaking an all-time Israeli electricity usage record. The paper reports that the IDF has launched an investigation into the circumstances of Sela’s death and the decision to take the soldiers on a tour in the midday heat.

Above all, however, is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appeal Tuesday to American Jews to oppose the Iran nuclear deal reached between the P5+1 world powers and Tehran last month. The prime minister spoke via video uplink, just hours before President Barack Obama met with American Jewish leaders from across the political spectrum at the White House about the same issue.

“This is the time to oppose the deal,” Israel Hayom quotes the prime minister saying on its front page.

“This deal will bring war,” its quotes Netanyahu saying in its main coverage. Writing in the tabloid, commentator Boaz Bismuth says that Netanyahu “was elected in May, among other things, to fight the Iranian nuclear program. Not to clap his hands for Obama.” He says “America needs to understand that Israel is not trying to stir up war — quite the opposite.”

“It is a matter of principle between Israel and the regime of the ayatollahs,” Bismuth says. “The administration is signing a deal with a terrorist regime that calls for Israel’s destruction; a Holocaust-denying regime with anti-Semitic leanings; a regime that over the past two decades has secretly built nuclear facilities for military purposes, which could lead to another Holocaust.”

Yedioth Ahronoth also interviews the woman injured in a firebombing attack on an Israeli car in northern Jerusalem the other night. Inbar Azrak, 27, recounts how when driving on a highway through the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina, “we suddenly heard a large explosion and the car filled with flames.”

The paper interviews the soldier who raced to the rescue, helping Azrak and her husband to safety. Sergeant David Omansky, 20, says that he “doesn’t feel like a hero, I did what anyone else would do.”