How the occupation seeped into Israel's judicial system
Case 4000 has exposed the use of detention by Israeli police and court officers in Israel to pressure suspects into breaking, a tactic typically used by the Shin Bet on Palestinians in the occupied territories.
On Feb. 25, Channel 10 revealed that a judge and a state investigator had coordinated via text messaging to extend the detention of suspects arrested in connection with Case 4000, the investigation involving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s relations with the telecommunications tycoon Shaul Elovitch. For many, the revelation immediately brought to mind the findings of a recent Amnesty International report, “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 2017/2018.”
In fact, it is hard to ignore the similarities between Amnesty’s report — which determined that Israel is holding hundreds of Palestinians in administrative detention for long periods without trial — and the ease with which arrests were made in Israel by Israel Police in the Netanyahu-Elovitch case. The “storm of arrests” resulting from Case 4000 has finally put this item on Israel’s public agenda.
Shlomi Eldar, in a Feb. 26 article for Al-Monitor, detailed the main points of the Amnesty report almost at the same time as the “storm of text messages” were sending shockwaves through Israel's legal system, leaving Israelis stunned. Most Israelis are typically apathetic to the human rights of Palestinian detainees, who are held for extended periods without trial, in many cases without being told what information the state might have against them. These methods, practiced for years in Israel’s backyard, on the West Bank, have now come to light as also being used within the Green Line. While the situation in Israel is not quite as severe, it is nonetheless disturbing.
Channel 10’s reporting on the judge and the investigator in Case 4000 revealed that they colluded using WhatsApp. Journalists and politicians alike were left aghast by the revelation that Justice Ronit Poznansky-Katz had apparently reached an agreement with an Israeli Security Authority attorney, Eran Shacham-Shavit, over how many days the arrest of three suspects would be extended before they were even brought before her to present their defense. That this is such a sensitive and high-profile case, which is expected to lead to the investigation of the prime minister himself, made the news all the more alarming. The investigations into Netanyahu’s affairs are already underway, replete with his claiming that he is being persecuted by the police. The texts between the judge and the investigator appear to prove that the way the investigation is being conducted is not so squeaky clean after all.
