Innocent Jewish Criminals

In the increasingly darkening reality we live in, it's hard to make distinctions between various injustices. And yet, one of the places where the erosion of the rule of law has been worn down to the bone is in the almost total separation between Jews and Arabs when it comes to the law's treatment and its enforcement. Remember civics lessons? Remember how we all learned and knew how to recite that "everyone is equal before the law"?

This principle – the principle of equality before the law – is very basic, and also very simple. As its name implies, it means that every person, regardless of religion, race, gender, nationality, social class, or any other characteristic, is supposed to receive equal legal treatment from the state and the courts. It's the simplest and most intuitive understanding – after all, it's obvious that a law should apply equally to every person, right? There are no exceptions here. It can't be that "this law applies to everyone except people whose names start with B," right? This principle is crucial and essential to democracy and the rule of law because it prevents corruption and discrimination, stops the rich or the connected from "buying" justice, and protects the "weak" from the power of the "strong."

It seems to me that in principle, the public, for the most part, would understand and agree on the need for this principle. It's truly basic.

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So where does it not work?

It doesn't work when it comes to crimes against minorities, usually Arabs, but not only.

In the occupied territories, there have always been two different legal systems in operation – one for Jews and one for Arabs. The sovereign is the same sovereign, right? The State of Israel. After all, the settlers, who don't live inside Israel but in the occupied territories, are still subject to Israeli law. They are tried in Israeli courts by judges who have gone through a legal process and been appointed as such. Palestinians, who sometimes live in exactly the same patch of land, are tried – even in cases of completely civilian offenses – in military courts by lawyers who function as judges during reserve duty. This of course has implications for the proportionality of punishments and the source from which the judgment is derived, but the page is too short for that here.

Since the days of the Bennett government, settler violence in the West Bank has been steadily increasing. Since the rise of the Smotrich-Ben-Gvir government, this settler violence has intensified even further, both in frequency and in the severity of the acts. And since October 7th, this violence has become a harsh and terrifying daily reality, exacting a terrible toll through property destruction, theft, assaults and injuries to people, and sometimes even murder. In this daily reality, the settlers, the army, and the police are one and the same – not only is there no equality before the law, but there is simply no law. The settlers do as they please; they command the soldiers in the field; and most of the time, when they arrive in Palestinian villages, attacking, destroying, burning, or stealing, it is the Palestinians who end up being arrested or restricted. One of the most horrific cases, among the few that did make it into the Israeli media, is the murder of peace activist Odeh al-Hadalin in Umm al-Khair by a settler named Yinon Levi, who was released within a few days and returned to terrorize the residents of Umm al-Khair.

And now, like an overflowing fountain, we are seeing this blatant violation of the law more and more even within Israel's official borders. For example, just from the last few days, there was a case of young people who caught an Arab cleaning worker in Jerusalem and beat him until his bones broke. And another, of an assault on a bus driver in Hadera. And yet another, of a pregnant woman and her children who were attacked in Jaffa. As mentioned, like an overflowing fountain. And so, the aggression is okayed. No trigger is needed; it's enough to be Palestinian, whether an Israeli citizen or not, for your blood to be more expendable, and anyone who feels like it can harass, curse, beat, or even kill you just because they feel like it, with the clear knowledge that they won't pay any price.

And that's not all. For years now, crime rates in Arab towns and villages in Israel have been rising, and the police do nothing about it. We've already written about this here, and I'll just note that it appears to be almost deliberate inaction when it comes to the police's handling of crime. Nothing is truly being done, and the country's citizens are left vulnerable, open to aggression, just because they are Arabs.

And that's not all 2 – in the background, the government is promoting Limor Son Har-Melech’s death penalty bill for terrorists, which is worded in such a way that it will apply only to Palestinians. It won't apply to Jews who murder people, unless, as Smotrich says, they are "traitor Jews." And who will decide who is a terrorist? Or a traitor Jew? In other words, in practice, this law is intended for one thing only – to kill Palestinians.

Now, there is no official tracking of the punishments that Jewish criminals receive for harming Palestinians, neither within Israel nor in the occupied territories. But there are organizations like Yesh Din or OCHA that monitor and keep records on the matter. They report conviction rates of about 3-4% when it comes to Jewish attackers, usually involving light punishments like fines or suspended sentences. In other words, in about 95% of cases where Jewish terrorists attack Arabs, the terrorists don't pay for their crimes.

Now let's return to the principle of equality before the law. Or even just the "principle." A principle expresses some basic, profound thinking, a foundational and comprehensive value, from which rules and laws are derived, those that govern and regulate our lives as a society. It's like a lighthouse that lights our way; it helps us understand what is "right" and what is "wrong."

The principle of equality before the law stands today empty of content in the face of reality, and we, as a society, act like fish and stay silent. No one rises up, neither against the settler and army riots in the West Bank, nor against the assaults on Palestinian citizens of Israel, nor against the horrifying testimonies of violence that are starting to seep out from the prisons where Palestinians are held. The Israeli-Jewish public is tired, and beyond being tired, at the end of the day, most of it isn't entirely opposed to this phenomenon. It seems that the silence in the face of all this is a silence of "Well, go ahead and do it; we'll look the other way and whistle in the meantime" – consent through silence. Consent born from years of brainwashing, in which we all learned the axiom "Arabs are bad," and today, especially after October 7th, almost all of us put that gear into action and let it guide the way, without realizing that this steering wheel is actually held by a small, frightened child who has taken over our consciousness, and it's time for the responsible adult in us to set a boundary there and take the wheel into our own hands.

Under the harsh arm of the current disaster government, we are disintegrating from deep social principles, those that connect us to the Western world, without any real public discussion, but only through the power of the poison machine, the regime's reality-distorting propaganda, and its authoritarianism. If there is one massive, sweeping, tone-setting victory for this regime, it is this silence in the face of the loss of such a basic and important principle.

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Ayala Shalev is the editor of That's About Us.