Daoud Kattab: Begin was right, deportation is a Nazi policy

[ProgressiveMuslim]

- Daoud Kuttab

There is a reason for the fact, that in modern times laws are written by representatives of the people to whom they are applied: Governments and parliaments come and go, but laws often outlive them.

Except in dictatorships, laws are not written by the executives who enforce them or the judges who interpret them. Even some totalitarian rulers create a symbolic legislature, made up of people's representatives to write new laws into existance. Laws were not mean to be written by foreign rulers, and certainly not by foreign military rulers. Well, everywhere except in the occupied Palestinian territories.

When the Israeli army occupied Palestinian lands in 1967, the Israeli military commander issued an order giving himself the sole right to legislate for the people under his army's control. Military order number one combined executive, legislative and judicial powers regarding Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Since then, thousands of laws have been issued by successive military commanders who single-handedly amend existing laws or issue totally ones without discussion, debate or even a public announcement.

The orders are issued in Hebrew and the Palestinian public is by and large unaware of their existence.

As a responce, the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq began, in the 1980s, the hard work or translating and publishing these laws. One of the co-founders of the human rights organization, Raja Shehadeh, wrote an entire book on the process of Israeli control of the West Bank. The mechanisms of occupation, he wrote, turn around the concept of the "rule of law" to "rule by law."

This long introduction is meant to highlight the Kafkaesque legal structure that Palestinians under occupation are subject to. They have an elected Palestinian parliament whose laws are argued by civilians coming from the communities where the laws are to be implemented. Local press and electronic media cover the debates, often publish draft laws and announce the agreement on these laws once voted on. Once signed by the Palestinian president, the laws are published in the Official Gazette and have the power of laws that local Palestinian judges can enforce using local lightly armed police, on the condition that they only serve the court decisions within areas designated as "A" under the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, aproximately 17% of the area of the West Bank...


please read on:
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=276913

[ProgressiveMuslim]

1. Excellent analysis of the role of "law" in sustaining Israel's illegal violent military occupation.

[stray cat]

2. Does the same apply to deporting people from America?

[Scurrilous]

3. Israel deports West Bank prisoner to Gaza

<snip>

"Israel deported a Palestinian prisoner to the Gaza Strip instead of releasing him to his West Bank home, the man and Palestinian officials said, charging Israel with using controversial new military orders.

The prisoner, Ahmad Sabah, 40, was refusing to leave the Palestinian side of the main crossing between Israel and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

"It is inhumane what they are doing. He has no connection to Gaza, no relatives there, nothing," said Issa Qaraqi, the minister of prisoner affairs in the government of the Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

Qaraqi claimed Israel was implementing a new set of military orders that critics fear could lead to mass deportations from the occupied West Bank."

more

[ConsAreLiars]

4. I think "sadistic" applies here.

As well as to many other actions against Palestinians over that long history.