Differing Legal Status and Treatment of Israeli Settlers and Palestinians
Unlike Palestinians, Israeli civilians living in the Palestinian Territories are not subject to military or local law, but are prosecuted according to Israeli penal law. This originates in the Emergency Regulations bill enacted in 1967 and extended since which gives extraterritorial rights to Israelis in the occupied territories. B'TSelem has said that the difference in legal status of Israelis and Palestinians in the territories has led to a double standard in which Israelis are given more legal rights and are punished more lightly than the Palestinians who are subject to military and local law. B'Tselem notes the system violates the principles of equality before the law and territoriality.
Referring to settler violence during the police evacuation of the "Federman Farm" near Kiryat Arba, Haaretz has stated in an editorial "Israeli society has become accustomed to giving lawbreaking settlers special treatment", noting that no other group could similarly attack Israeli law enforcement agencies without being severely punished. Haaretz has characterized settler violence on soldiers and policemen who participated in the evacuation of the "Federman Farm" as "terrorism".
In response to the violence directed towards Israeli security forces, Israel declared it would no longer fund any illegal outposts from November, 2008.
After the evacuation of settlers from Hebron in December 2008, a riot ensued and a Jewish settler, Ze'ev Braude, was recorded on video shooting two unarmed Palestinians after Palestinians had hurled rocks at him. The victims were shot on their own property, which Braude had entered, and later needed surgery. The Israeli State Prosecutor's Office decided to abandon the prosecution of Braude after the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that the prosecution must give the defendant access to "sensitive information". The prosecutor's office had earlier said that some of the evidence against Braude was classified for security reasons, due to "the Shin Bet's sources and methods of operation, and identifying details about its units and people." Braude had petitioned the High Court for access.
The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict reported on rioting and violence in the West Bank in the period preceding the Israeli military operations in Gaza. The report said "Little if any action is taken by the Israeli authorities to investigate, prosecute and punish violence against Palestinians, including killings, by settlers and members of the security forces, resulting in a situation of impunity. The Mission concludes that Israel has failed to fulfil its obligations to protect the Palestinians from violence by private individuals under both international human rights law and international humanitarian law.
Read more about this topic: Israeli Settler Violence
Famous quotes containing the words differing, legal, status, treatment, israeli and/or settlers:
“The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“At all events, as she, Ulster, cannot have the status quo, nothing remains for her but complete union or the most extreme form of Home Rule; that is, separation from both England and Ireland.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“...I want to see a film, they send the Israeli army reserves to escort me! What kind of life is this?”
—Golda Meir (1898–1978)
“When old settlers say “One has to understand the country,” what they mean is, “You have to get used to our ideas about the native.” They are saying, in effect, “Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you.””
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)