The issue of Palestinian child prisoners in Israeli jails has become something of a cause célèbre in Australian political and media circles of late. Now, the New Matilda adds its own one-sided contribution to the debate. It opens:
More than 400 children are being held in Israeli military jails, for crimes as minor as throwing rocks. Australia needs to speak out, writes Kristen Zornada.
Just how “minor” is the crime of throwing rocks? When they are thrown at people or vehicles, they have the potential to kill. Kristen Zornada downplays the threat that even children can pose as she avoids addressing the question as to why there are currently over 400 Palestinian children in Israeli military jails, which is really the crux of the problem.
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Even the New York Times covered this issue in April 2016 in a more thorough and informed manner than the New Matilda, where it discusses
a surge in Palestinian minors incarcerated during a wave of violence that has killed about 30 Israelis in the last seven months. Assaf Liberati, a spokesman for the prison service, said the number of Palestinian prisoners under 18 more than doubled, to 430 from 170 before the stabbings, shootings and vehicular attacks began on Oct. 1. Of them, 103 were 16 or younger, up from 32.
“It’s the biggest number that we know,” Mr. Liberati said.
The increase reflects a broad Israeli crackdown on young Palestinians who throw stones or otherwise confront soldiers and civilians amid an outbreak of attacks in which nearly half the suspects are teenagers. It has renewed a debate over how Israel’s military justice system, which prosecutes Palestinians from the West Bank, differs from the courts that cover Israeli citizens and Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, and especially how it handles very young offenders.
Zornada states that there has been a 91% increase in the number of Palestinian minors in custody. Doesn’t she find it strange that there has been such a dramatic increase? The fact that Palestinian minors have been involved in a wave of terror and violence conveniently escapes Zornada’s notice leaving the impression that Israel arbitrarily arrests Palestinian kids for the flimsiest of reasons.
The sad reality is that young Palestinians have been incited to carry out serious acts of violence by their media, politicians and terror organizations. But for Zornada, it’s all about Israeli mistreatment of innocent children.
Zornada refers to a 2013 UNICEF report that was critical of Israel yet does not acknowledge that changes have been made since that report was published. The age at which suspects can be prosecuted as adults was raised to 18 from 16; a separate youth court was created; and the amount of time minors can be detained without appearing before a judge was cut from 96 hours to 48 hours for 15-year-olds and 24 hours for those 14 and under.
According to Zornada, Israel has created “a legal system in which Palestinian children receive worse treatment than Israeli children, Israel is violating its international law obligations to respect and ensure the rights of each child within its jurisdiction without discrimination.”
Obviously this ignores the fact that Israeli children are not carrying out equivalent acts of violence on a comparable scale. Ultimately, however, there is a clear explanation as to why Israeli children (or Palestinian residents of Jerusalem) would be brought before a civil court while Palestinians would face a military court.
The two legal systems in operation are divided between Israeli citizens (which, of course, includes both Jews and Arabs) and non-citizens. This is not a division based on race, ethnicity or religion but on the legal status of the disputed territories. The reason why Palestinians, both children and adults, are not subject to Israeli civil law is that Israel has never annexed the West Bank and therefore, Israeli law does not apply to the area. Instead, military law is applied.
Given that Zornada teaches international law, it is clear that she has been cherry picking which parts of so-called international law she wants to use to make her case. Wouldn’t she protest if all Palestinians were prosecuted under Israeli law were it to be administered throughout the disputed territories, which she would consider to be illegal?
But it’s not only Israel that is grappling with the issue of how to prosecute young terror suspects. As The Times of Israel reports:
The United Kingdom in October sentenced its youngest-ever terror suspect to life imprisonment for organizing, via the internet, an attack at Australia’s Anzac Day parade. The boy was 14 years old at the time of his arrest; the terror attack — which urged the beheadings of Australian war veterans — was successfully foiled. In May, Austria handed down a two-year jail sentence to a 14-year-old boy who contacted IS militants and had downloaded bomb-making plans onto his Playstation console. The 13-year-old brother of the Paris terror attacks mastermind, Abdelhamin Abaaoud, has joined the Islamic State in Syria on his brother’s urging, making him of the youngest jihadists in its ranks. And Australia in October admitted that it was monitoring terror suspects as young as 12.
“We know that ISIL has been grooming young Australians. Initially, they started with people in their 20s, they then moved on to … people in their late teens, and now we’re seeing them move on to people in their early teens,” Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Counterterrorism Michael Keenan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
“We’re shocked that a 12-year-old is on police radar for these types of matters,” added Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin. “This threat has evolved; it’s become younger.”
TOI also states:
In the United States, said to be the world leader in child imprisonment, “fourteen states have no minimum age for trying children as adults. Children as young as eight have been prosecuted as adults. Some states set the minimum age at 10, 12, or 13,” according to the US-based Equal Justice Initiative NGO.
Israel passed a “Youth Bill” in August 2016 which will allow the authorities to imprison a minor convicted of serious crimes such as murder, attempted murder or manslaughter even if he or she is under the age of 14.
“The seriousness that we attach to terror and acts of terror that cause bodily injury and property damage, and the fact that these acts of terror are being carried out by minors, demands a more aggressive approach including toward minors who are convicted of offenses, particularly serious offenses,” the explanatory introduction to the bill reads.
MK Anat Berko, who proposed the legislation said, “This law was born of necessity. We have been experiencing a wave of terror for quite some time. A society is allowed to protect itself. To those who are murdered with a knife in the heart it does not matter if the child is 12 or 15. We’ve witnessed numerous cases where 11-year-old children were suicide bombers. Perhaps this law will also do something to protect these children from being used to slaughter people.”
Nobody wishes to see children imprisoned. Israel continues to try to improve both the legal and physical conditions for Palestinian minors who carry out acts of terror and violence. Kristen Zornada, however, appears to be less concerned with the rights of the child and more concerned with appropriating the issue in order to promote her anti-Israel agenda.
