Who cares they’re only Palestinians

by Greg Barns

If you are an Israeli citizen living in the West bank towns of Samaria and
Judea and you beat up a Palestinian, even kill him or her, there’s a 90
percent chance you will get away with it.

The latest Data Sheet (attached) from Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din,
confirms what many have long suspected to be the case – that the system of
law enforcement in Israel treats Palestinians in much the same way as black
South Africans were treated by that country’s police force when the
apartheid regime was in place.Yesh Din has tracked police 205 investigation files opened in recent years.
81 of these files relate to attacks on Palestinians by Israeli civilians and
this includes 2 cases of shooting that led to death, and 9 cases of serious
injury. The remainder deal with incidents where Palestinians were assaulted
with sticks, knives, rifle butts, as well as attacks on their houses and
vehicles.

Then there are 79 cases of criminal trespass which involve cutting down,
uprooting and setting fire to Palestinian crops and stealing olives during
the harvest season. The remainder of the cases involve theft and
vandalising agricultural equipment.

Yesh Din reports that of these 205 investigations “police processing and
prosecutorial review have concluded in 163 files. Out of those 163, only in
13 (8%) of the cases were indictments filed against defendants. One case
file was lost and never investigated, and 149 (91%) investigation files were
closed without filing any indictments against suspects.”

And what reasons are given for the closure of a staggering 91 percent of
files - 91 were closed on grounds of "perpetrator unknown" (61%) and 43
cases were closed on grounds of "lack of evidence" (28%).

The methods used in investigations by the Israeli Police in the Samaria and
Judea districts are designed to ensure failure. Yesh Din observes that
“victims' complaints and testimonies were recorded in Hebrew rather than
Arabic, the language in which they were given; the police investigators
rarely visited the crime scenes, and in the cases when they did arrive on
site, defects were noted in documenting the events; in many cases testimony
was not collected from key witnesses, including suspects and both
Palestinian and Israeli eyewitnesses of the incident; live identification
line-ups of Israeli civilian suspects were hardly ever carried out,” Yesh
Din reports.

The Yesh Din findings are not an aberration. The group reports that when in
2006 it first examined the record of the Israeli Police in the Samaria and
Judea districts it found that the rate of closure of files without any
further action being taken was 90 percent. In other words, there has been
no improvement in the 2 year interregnum.

One of the loudest claims of the pro-Israel lobby is that it is, as Kevin
Rudd wrote on December 10 2004, “a vibrant, democratic state in a region
where democracy remains far from the norm.”

But in genuine democracies law enforcement authorities do not discriminate
on the basis of race. And Mr Rudd there can be no excuses for a nation that
calls itself a democracy allowing so many serious criminal investigations to
go into the ‘who cares, they are only Palestinians’ basket.