Ministers aim to curb administrative detention of Israelis, despite Shin Bet warning
Ministerial Committee for Legislation also advances bill to have politicians choose the state ombudsman who oversees judges, cutting the judicial system out of the process
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"
The government on Sunday gave its backing to two controversial bills proposed by hard-right Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman limiting law enforcement’s power to detain Israelis and giving elected politicians more influence over the judicial system.
The committee’s approval means that the government will lend its support to the two bills as they go to the Knesset, where each must pass three readings to become law.
Administrative detention
The first bill 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 — 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 bill is seen as an attempt to prevent the practice in the case of right-wing Jewish extremists accused of plotting attacks on Palestinians, a sore point for many far-right lawmakers.
Anti-Palestinian 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 settlers.
“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 Rothman said in a statement.
Defending his proposal, Rothman asserted that it is a “basic and democratic demand” and bemoaned 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 insisted.
For Palestinians, administrative detentions must be renewed by a military court every six months, and prisoners can remain in jail for years under the mechanism. Some have resorted to life-threatening hunger strikes to draw attention to their detentions.
Israelis, by contrast, can only be remanded in administrative custody by a district court judge.
The new measure, which is set to be debated in the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, which Rothman chairs, was 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 stated.
According to Ben Gvir, a third of those placed in administrative detention are members of the so-called hilltop youth and right-wing activists and “it is not acceptable to me for boys to be placed in administrative detention because of graffiti and markers.”
The bill has been met with alarm by the Shin Bet security agency, which reportedly cited concerns that its ability to thwart terror would be hampered should it pass into law.
According to the Walla news outlet, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar’s office sent a letter to a number of government officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s military secretaries, in which he stated that banning the measure for Israelis “will result in an immediate, severe, and serious harm to the security of the country,” in cases where there is clear information that a suspect may carry out a terror attack.
Speaking to Walla, an anonymous security official charged that Rothman was seeking only to prevent the use of administrative detention against Israeli Jews “to flatter his voter base and the seven Jewish administrative detainees,” but said it would also “severely limit the Shin Bet’s ability to thwart Palestinian terrorism.”
Limiting the power of the courts
The second bill, also proposed by Rothman — one of the architects of the government’s deeply controversial judicial overall proposals — would dramatically change how the state ombudsman for judges is chosen.
The ombudsman provides oversight and investigates complaints against judges and has until now been chosen by the Judicial Appointments Committee — a body that includes representatives of the High Court, Knesset and Bar Association — following a joint nomination by the justice minister and the president of the High Court.
Under the new legislation, the ombudsman would by appointed by the president following a vote in the Knesset, with representatives of the judicial system cut out of both the nomination and selection process. Instead, a group of 10 lawmakers or the justice minister would be empowered to nominate candidates.
For a long time, Justice Minister Yariv Levin refused to convene the Judicial Appointments Committee, due to his stated desire to change the composition of the panel to give the government control over appointments before filling empty positions on the court benches.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara voiced objections to the measure on Sunday, with her deputy stating that “such a fundamental change to the selection procedure for an important and sensitive position, and the criteria for this selection, should be made from a broad and in-depth perspective,” and “not from a narrow view of momentary interests, by way of a practical dispute regarding the upcoming appointment.”
Last month, outgoing State Ombudsman for Judges Uri Shoham was sharply critical of the failure to appoint a replacement for him, in a thinly veiled attack on Levin.
Levin has refused to appoint a retired Supreme Court justice to replace Shoham, with his ally Rothman describing such an appointment as a “conflict of interest.”
In a parting letter to his office, Shoham, a former Supreme Court justice himself, wrote that this will be the first time in over two decades since the department was established that there will be no serving state ombudsman for judges.
“I see there to be a severe injury to the rule of law and public trust in the judicial system by the fact that a new ombudsman for public complaints for judges has not been appointed,” he wrote.
Anger at the attorney General
During Sunday’s cabinet meeting, several ministers attacked the Attorney General’s Office, according to Hebrew media reports, with Regional Cooperation Minister David Amsalem calling Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon “the most dangerous man in the country” and calling for him and Baharav-Miara to be fired.
Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli is reported to have accused Baharav-Miara of supporting “institutionalized political violence” while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told him that his “legal opinion is not at the level of a first-year law student.”
Jeremy Sharon and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
