Ofrah is the extreme example. The army database assembled by Brigadier General Baruch Spiegel lists others. At Beit El, north of Ramallah, “the northern neighborhood . . . was erected mainly on private [Palestinian] land,” the Spiegel Report states. The northeast neighborhood—including twenty residential buildings, a school, and an industrial park—stands entirely on stolen land. At Ma’aleh Mikhmas, east of Ramallah, Spiegel found a new development on Palestinian property. The full list is much longer. The state stood by and let the theft take place.
Theft was only one of the offenses that went unpunished. In 1981, attorney general Yitzhak Zamir appointed a high-level team headed by his deputy, Yehudit Karp, to monitor investigations of offenses by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank. The Likud’s settlement drive was still in its early stages. Just 16,000 settlers lived in the West Bank, about one-twentieth of today’s figure, but the contagion of lawlessness was already blatant. A year later, Karp wrote a strongly worded, despairing report, a window on that one early year in the occupation.
Incidents of Israeli civilians shooting and wounding Palestinians had been on the rise, Karp wrote. But the police said “they were unable to keep track” of such cases, so they did not investigate. They did little more when a Palestinian was shot dead. After an apparent murder in the village of Bani Na’im, near Hebron, a delegation of settlers, including the mayor of Kiryat Arba and one of the suspects, arrived at a police station and announced that settlers would not cooperate with the investigation. The police did not bother to detain or question the suspect. Kiryat Arba, on the edge of Hebron, had been built by the government to house the Orthodox activists who had tried to settle inside the Palestinian city. It was known for its particularly intense mix of religion and nationalism, and appears several times in Karp’s report as the apparent home of perpetrators of violence against Palestinians.
Karp detailed fifteen cases out of a much larger number of failed investigations. She attributed the “ambivalence” of the police about tracking down offenders to “the natural complexity of the situation,” a polite way to describe Palestinians living under Israeli military rule while the government sponsored settlement of Jews in their midst. The police, she wrote, did not relate to suspects as “criminals in the normal sense.” Worse yet, officials of the military government often interfered in investigations, ordering the police to drop cases or free suspects. The chief of investigations for the police’s Judea District—the southern half of the West Bank—had reported “his impression” that someone high up in the army or Defense Ministry had let settlers understand that they were “soldiers for all practical purposes,” not subject to the authority of civilian police. Karp concluded that there was no point in the team continuing to monitor the police. It would only serve as a fig leaf for a failed system that required “radical rethinking of what the rule of law means.”
Even when Jews were tried for attacks against Palestinians, the justice system showed a split personality—treating the perpetrators as criminals, but also as misguided patriots and sometimes as victims of Palestinian violence. In 1988 Moshe Levinger went on a rampage after Palestinians threw rocks at his car in Hebron. Levinger walked down the street firing his pistol wildly and killed a shopkeeper standing in front of his shoe store. In a plea bargain, he was convicted of “causing death by negligence.” Sentenced to five months in prison, he served three.
The Jewish terror underground of the early 1980s serves as the most extreme example of schizophrenic justice. The group’s twenty-eight members, most of them settlers, crippled two Palestinian mayors and an IDF sapper with explosive booby traps, murdered three
Theft was only one of the offenses that went unpunished. In 1981, attorney general Yitzhak Zamir appointed a high-level team headed by his deputy, Yehudit Karp, to monitor investigations of offenses by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank. The Likud’s settlement drive was still in its early stages. Just 16,000 settlers lived in the West Bank, about one-twentieth of today’s figure, but the contagion of lawlessness was already blatant. A year later, Karp wrote a strongly worded, despairing report, a window on that one early year in the occupation.
Incidents of Israeli civilians shooting and wounding Palestinians had been on the rise, Karp wrote. But the police said “they were unable to keep track” of such cases, so they did not investigate. They did little more when a Palestinian was shot dead. After an apparent murder in the village of Bani Na’im, near Hebron, a delegation of settlers, including the mayor of Kiryat Arba and one of the suspects, arrived at a police station and announced that settlers would not cooperate with the investigation. The police did not bother to detain or question the suspect. Kiryat Arba, on the edge of Hebron, had been built by the government to house the Orthodox activists who had tried to settle inside the Palestinian city. It was known for its particularly intense mix of religion and nationalism, and appears several times in Karp’s report as the apparent home of perpetrators of violence against Palestinians.
Karp detailed fifteen cases out of a much larger number of failed investigations. She attributed the “ambivalence” of the police about tracking down offenders to “the natural complexity of the situation,” a polite way to describe Palestinians living under Israeli military rule while the government sponsored settlement of Jews in their midst. The police, she wrote, did not relate to suspects as “criminals in the normal sense.” Worse yet, officials of the military government often interfered in investigations, ordering the police to drop cases or free suspects. The chief of investigations for the police’s Judea District—the southern half of the West Bank—had reported “his impression” that someone high up in the army or Defense Ministry had let settlers understand that they were “soldiers for all practical purposes,” not subject to the authority of civilian police. Karp concluded that there was no point in the team continuing to monitor the police. It would only serve as a fig leaf for a failed system that required “radical rethinking of what the rule of law means.”
Even when Jews were tried for attacks against Palestinians, the justice system showed a split personality—treating the perpetrators as criminals, but also as misguided patriots and sometimes as victims of Palestinian violence. In 1988 Moshe Levinger went on a rampage after Palestinians threw rocks at his car in Hebron. Levinger walked down the street firing his pistol wildly and killed a shopkeeper standing in front of his shoe store. In a plea bargain, he was convicted of “causing death by negligence.” Sentenced to five months in prison, he served three.
The Jewish terror underground of the early 1980s serves as the most extreme example of schizophrenic justice. The group’s twenty-eight members, most of them settlers, crippled two Palestinian mayors and an IDF sapper with explosive booby traps, murdered three
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