Israel extends administrative detention for 2 Jewish extremists

Jewish far-right extremists Meir Ettinger and Eviatar Slonim will remain in administrative detention for a further three months, Lod District Court Judge Avraham Tal ruled Tuesday.

Tal’s decision came after several weeks of court hearings over the ongoing detention of the two, the Hebrew-language NRG website reported. Representatives of the Shin Bet security service and the State Prosecutor’s Office said both should remain in custody at the moment, when terror attacks are occurring on a near-daily basis.

Slonim and Ettinger were arrested in August for suspected extremist activity.

The security cabinet expanded special anti-terror rules in early August, following the firebombing of a Palestinian family home in the West Bank by suspected Jewish extremists. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has intimated that suspects in the Duma firebombing, in which three members of the Dawabsha family were killed, may be in Israeli custody.

Administrative detention allows a terror suspect to be held indefinitely without trial in six-month renewable increments. While detainees can appeal the detention itself to the High Court of Justice or lower district courts, the suspects do not receive full trials or have access to the evidence against them.

Ettinger’s lawyer, Yuval Zemer, said Tuesday that the decision shows that the activists’ arrests were politically motivated, as the judge wrote in his ruling that based on the material presented to him, Ettinger still holds the same “extremist ideology.”

“This is another decision in a chain of decisions permitting the arrest of citizens solely for their opinions,” NRG quoted Zemer as saying.

Zemer is retained by Honenu, an NGO providing legal counsel to settlers and right-wing activists. Slonim is also represented by a Honenu-hired lawyer, Aharon Rosa.

Zemer criticized the “anti-democratic” process of administrative detention, saying that from the moment the security forces are instructed to carry out an arrest, the detainee “has no way of objecting to various ‘intelligence assessments’ about which they know nothing at all.”

He added: “You cannot call this process anything but anti-democratic.”

Police suspect that Ettinger, the grandson of assassinated Israeli American extremist Meir Kahane, was involved in the arson attack at the Church of the Bread and Fishes, on the shores of the Kinneret, not far from Safed.

Both Ettinger and Slonim were barred from entering Jerusalem and the West Bank before they were placed in administrative detention.