Content area
Full Text
The Nakba Continues
FOR THE FIRST time in its history, an interrogator from Israel's much-feared secret police agency, the Shin Bet, is to face a criminal investigation over allegations of torture.
It will be the first probe of the Shin Bet since Israel's Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling nearly two decades ago prohibiting, except in extraordinary circumstances, the use of what it termed "special methods" of interrogation. (See December 1999 Washington Report, p. 49.)
Before the ruling, physical abuse of Palestinians had been routine, and resulted in a spate of deaths in custody.
According to human rights groups, however, the Supreme Court ban has had a limited impact. The Shin Bet, formally known as Israel's general intelligence service, has simply been more careful about hiding its use of torture, they say.
More than 1,000 complaints from Palestinians have been submitted to a government watchdog body over the past 18 years, but this is the first time one has led to a criminal investigation.
Many Palestinians are jailed based on confessions either they or other Palestinians make during Shin Bet questioning. Israeli military courts almost never examine how such confessions were obtained or whether they are reliable, say lawyers, contributing to a 99.7 percent conviction rate.
In December, in freeing a Palestinian man who was jailed based on a false confession, an Israeli court accused the Shin Bet of using techniques that were "liable to induce innocent people to admit to acts that they did not commit."
But rights groups said the current investigation of the Shin Bet agent is unlikely to bring an end to the long-standing impunity of interrogators, or a change in its practices.
Instead, they noted, December's updated decision on torture from the Israeli Supreme Court, revising 1999's landmark ruling, had moved the goalposts significantly in the Shin Bet's favor.
Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalah, a legal rights group representing Israel's large Palestinian minority, said: "This case is the exception that proves the rule-one investigation after many hundreds of complaints have been ignored.
"It will be promoted to suggest-wrongly-that the system has limits, that it respects the rule of law."
That view was shared by Rachel Stroumsa, head of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, which has submitted...