From the Liveblog of
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Controversial bill curbing administrative detention, seen to favor far-right extremists, passes ministerial committee
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Ignoring objections by the Shin Bet security service, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation gives its backing to a bill to severely curb authorities’ power to hold Israeli citizens in administrative detention while reserving the right to use it against Palestinian Arabs.
Administrative detention is a controversial tool whereby Palestinian terror suspects and, more rarely, Jewish terror suspects, are detained without charge or trial. The tool is typically used when authorities have intelligence tying a suspect to a crime but do not have enough evidence for charges to stand up in a court of law.
The proposed legislation would forbid the use of administrative detention or administrative restraining orders against Israeli citizens, unless they are members of a certain list of terror groups, which would be decided on and approved by the committee.
The bill is seen as an attempt to prevent the administrative detention practice in the case of right-wing extremists accused of plotting attacks on Palestinians.
“The current bill seeks to strengthen the protection of human rights in Israel by establishing a stricter procedure for issuing administrative arrest warrants against the country’s citizens,” a spokesman for hard-right Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman, who proposed the measure, says in a statement.
Defending his proposal, Rothman asserts that it is a “basic and democratic demand” and bemoans the fact that there are those “who are trying to portray it as if it is a proposal dealing with Jews or Arabs when in fact the proposal does not differentiate between Jewish and Arab citizens of the State of Israel and states that the use of this tool will be limited when it comes to citizens of the State of Israel regardless of religion, race or gender.”
“The first obligation of a state is to the lives and freedom of its citizens, therefore, the use of the tool of administrative detention against the citizens of the state must be done in the most limited way possible,” he insists.
The measure, which is set to be debated in the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, which Rothman chairs, is also welcomed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
During the Ministerial Committee for Legislation’s deliberations, Ben Gvir argued that the bill was “not a proposal about the residents of [the West Bank] nor about the residents of East Jerusalem,” a spokesman for the minister states.
According to Ben Gvir, a third of those placed in administrative detention are members of the so-called Hilltop Youth and rightwing activists and “it is not acceptable to me for boys to be placed in administrative detention because of graffiti and markers.”
Anti-Arab violence in the West Bank has surged in recent years, prompting pushback from rightwing lawmakers who have decried what they have termed a “comprehensive and false campaign” against Israeli settlers.
