First, the good news: Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the government Aug. 26 to allow five critically ill Palestinian women from the Gaza Strip to leave immediately for life-saving treatment in an East Jerusalem hospital. Their only sin, according to the state’s affidavit, was being immediate relatives of a Hamas member. Originally, several human rights organizations (Gisha, Al-Mizan, Adalah and Physicians for Human Rights) petitioned the court on behalf of seven women banned from traveling for medical care in Israel. In the wake of the petition, the state admitted it had mistaken two of the plaintiffs for immediate relatives of Hamas members. The two plaintiffs were instructed to apply again for a permission to leave the Strip, but one was so drained that she gave up on re-starting the exhausting bureaucratic process of applying for permission to access critical medical care.

The head of the three-judge panel, Justice Uzi Vogelman, wrote of the decision to deny the women access to medical care in East Jerusalem, "It does not place appropriate weight on the value of human life nor on the absence of any involvement by said patient in illegal activities of any sort. Therefore, the decision does not fall within the bounds of reasonableness." His colleague Justice Isaac Amit concurred. “The decision to cause the death of a woman, pure and simple, for the sins of her brother or husband, contradicts the basic Jewish principle that each man shall die for his own sins,” he wrote.

In a civilized state, cancer patients would not have had to knock on the doors of the nation’s top court to obtain the medical treatment that every human being deserves. A state that occupies the lands of another people and violates their rights to freedom and equality while invoking the excuse of “national security” is not a civilized one. At one time, no one would have considered a Supreme Court decision to allow sick Palestinian women access to a Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem particularly unusual. These days, as government ministers and Knesset members, chief among them Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked advocate a wild campaign against the Supreme Court itself, any judicial criticism of a government decision is commendable. 

Israel’s bleeding democracy had cause for modest celebration this week. As Mordechai Kremnitzer of the Israel Democracy Institute wrote, “The High Court of Justice saved itself, the security cabinet and all of us … from responsibility for the deaths of five Gaza women with cancer.”