Assia Ladizhinskaya and Eitan Diamond Opinion To Israelis a Child Is a Child, Unless He Is a Palestinian
Trump has
come down from the tree. Horrifying pictures and numbers of children
separated from their parents and penned in cages did the trick. Hundreds
of thousands of Americans signed manifestos
and joined demonstrations, refusing to ignore the situation and get on
with their lives at a time when their beloved country treats children
inhumanely. The moral line was drawn and reemphasized: Children are a
red line that is not to be crossed.
Time will pass and
the shock from this affair will fade away, and only the children who
were torn away from their parents and experienced this trauma will
continue to carry the wound in their souls for years.
In Israel people
didn’t remain indifferent either: We are a nation that loves children,
and the sight of children in cages gave us no rest either. Children’s
rights are enforced here zealously and justly, and many fields –
especially by welfare, education and health – are even more meticulous
about observing them. Our children are our most precious possession,
personally and collectively.
And in spite of that, there are children who are unable to touch the hearts of Israeli Jews: Palestinian
children. At any given moment, hundreds of Palestinian children are
filling the prisons and the interrogation facilities, beaten and
humiliated, isolated and thrown into cages. And still the Israelis are
not taking a stand nor mobilizing to change the situation.
After all, we all know that these are not thousands of ticking bombs,
and that most are children accused of participating in demonstrations or
throwing stones. Some of them were walking along a street where stones
were thrown and “someone saw them,” wore a green shirt or had the
misfortune of being born in the wrong village and to the wrong family.
The absolute majority of the detainees have no idea why they were seized
from their home in the middle of the night (and, according to studies
by human rights organizations, violently, and with additional harm
caused to other children living in the house), and why they were
brutally dragged to the military jeep and thrown to the floor
The numbers are alarming: At any moment there are
hundreds of Palestinian minors in the detention centers, prisons and
interrogation facilities. Some are under administrative detention. In
2017 alone, the United Nations documented 185 instances of abuse of
minors in detention – widespread and consistent abuse, which goes far
beyond keeping them in a cage far from their parents:
After being seized
from their beds in the middle of the night (Israel doesn’t believe in
summoning Palestinian children for investigation in an orderly manner,
by means of summonses), the children are taken with their hands tied
behind their backs, often painfully. They are blindfolded for hours on
end (an activity that adversely affects orientation and creates a
petrifying fear of violence that sometimes does in fact arrive). They
experience physical violence, threats, curses and humiliation. They are
subject to body searches while naked. In a large percentage of cases
they are denied sleep, food, drink and access to toilets. Sometimes they
are left in painful positions for a long period of time, sent back and
forth for hours on end among various facilities, and are subject to the
good graces of the soldiers and policemen who are holding them.
While the children
are being violently tormented, their parents often have no idea where
their child is and what is happening to him. Only when the child is
registered in some police station, hours after the detention begins,
does the information appear on one of the computers, and even that is
very hard to come by, due to problems of language and access.
he children usually receive treatment reserved
for terrorists, and nobody stops for a moment to think – just a moment,
this is a child! Nor do the military courts show mercy to
schoolchildren. The former president of the West Bank Military Court of
Appeals, Col. Aharon Mishnayot, noted that the protections that Israeli
law grants to minors don’t apply to Palestinians in the West Bank, and
that there are lacunae in the military law when it comes to minors.
Still “a minor is a minor is a minor.” This refreshing but vague ruling
recognizes that minors are a population that deserves special protection
from abuse.
But in spite of the
proper rhetoric, Mishnayot (like his fellow military judges) cooperated
daily with the usual system – the one that dragged frightened children
into his court, children whose confessions are often taken after abuse,
humiliation and threats, without the presence of parents or a lawyer,
and without their knowing what they are signing. (The confession is
usually written in Hebrew.) This is a system that is meant to guarantee
convictions, and that sometimes puts children into interrogation rooms
without any evidence against them, but ensures that they will leave them
after signing a confession or acting as an informant.
In addition, the
military courts don’t really treat the children as minors deserving
protection: They sweepingly recommend that the children be detained
until the conclusion of proceedings against them. Lawyers and parents
are well aware of this pattern, and because they are in a race against
time to minimize the physical and emotional damage to the child, and are
determined to bring their child home as quickly as possible, they agree
willy-nilly to plea bargains in which the pleas are not necessarily
true and the bargains are certainly not just.
A country is supposed
to promote the welfare of children, and not to subvert the principle of
the best interest of the child, which is integral to the Israeli
justice system. Denying their freedom should be a last resort and a
practice reserved for very rare and exceptional cases. There must be an
end to the common practice of detaining Palestinian children, and a
start to the promotion of the welfare of all children.
The writers are members of the NGO Parents
Against Child Detention, which works to stop the detention of children
in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.
Assia Ladizhinskaya
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