The Battilo file: a non-story
Tom Segev (transl. by Prof. Israel Shahak)
Haaretz, 19 July 1991
The building of the Military Court in Ramallah looks neater now. True, stench still comes out of the toilet at the end of the corridor, but the huge hall in which court sessions are heid has been renovated. The judges sit now behind a wooden barrier. A newly laundered Israeli flag, once dirty and dilapidated, [adorns] the wall. Emblems of the state of Israel have been repainted and look like new. It looks now as a real courtroom.
A trial before the Military Court of Ramallah is right now in progress. This fact deserves a mention, since the overwhelming majority of cases end up with a deal [between the prosecution and the defense]. The rule according to which the defendant is to be considered innocent until proven guilty, may be acknowledged in the [Occupied] Territories, but if it is, then in [legal] theory only. The operating assumption is that all the defendants are guilty.[1] Accordingly, the Israeli authorities avoid wasting their precious time for reviewing evidence or for meeting other customary preconditions of convicting people. This would be too tiresome and superfluous anyway. Punishment is therefore fast. Usually, its extent is determined by negotiations between the prosecution and the defense, sometimes with a judge participating. In Gaza, one talks in this connection of "a little price list". The [Israeli] military apparatus is being helped in meting out penalties by Israeli advocates, seemingly honest lawyers, serving in reserves. Outside observers are hardly ever present in such trials.
The story [under this investigation] began in the afternoon on May 8, 1990. In the village of Harbata in the Ramallah District a rumor spread that the settlers of the nearby settlement, Nili, had been burning a wheat field belonging to one of the villagers.[2] Tension [in the village] heated up, and the villagers convened a meeting. A white Volksvagen car passed by, driven by Danit Rom from Nili. The court file contains several versions of what actually happened afterwards. But all versions agree that stones were thrown at the car, hitting it and breaking its windows.
The driver was also hit. According to her husband’s testimony, her head was lightly wounded. She herself drove to the ”Asaf Harofeh" hospital, where she was treated, according to her own testimony, for about half an hour, after which she returned home, all by herself. She did not complain to the police, and she continued to drive through the village as usual.
Next day, her husband, Ra’anan Rom, went to the Jerusalem Police in order to file a complaint as is required by law. Incidentally, filing such a complaint is also a prerequisite for having the costs of the car’s repair defrayed by the insurance. In his complaint, Mr. Rom claimed that during the incident he was present in the car with his wife. The wife subsequently testified in the court that she was then alone.
Four months passed. In September 1990 the army detained 15 young men from the village. When they were brought for the remand of detention, the charge was ,"membership in a hostile organization". The charge against them submitted to the court was already different, but this happened after an additional lapse of several months. With one exception, all defendants are detained until the end of the legal process.[3] The decision to this effect was taken by [administrative] orders, issued by two [Jewish] advocates from Jerusalem, Yosef Eilon and Yonathan Livni, both serving as military judges during the stints of their reserve service. Eilon is the son of the Supreme Court Judge Menahem Eilon [4] while Livni gained notoriety as a result of his charity work for Soviet Jewry. Only one defendant brought before them [for a remand] was represented by a lawyer.
The charge was that the defendants were guilty of throwing stones at a vehicle used for puposes of transportation. Six defendants signed confessions, in which they incriminated other defendants who refused to confess. In the court all pleaded not guilty. The prosecution proposed a deal.[5] The lawyers for the defense rejected the proposal. More months passed, but the defendants remain in detention.
At some stage the file was referred to another prosecutor, lieutenant Ariel Attari, an aggressive slim-looking officer, articulate in verbal skills. Attari talked several times to Danit Rom, the settler from Nili. In the sequel of these conversations, he obtained from her a letter in which she described in rather dramatic terms, what had happened to her:
" … Even after all the windows were already broken, the mob kept throwing stones, obviously aiming at me. I felt that they wanted to kill me, not just to hit. At that time I was alone in the car, in the third month of pregnancy. I was hit in my head by a stone. I was bleeding profusely, so I needed a treatment in a hospital. Usually, I was travelling away from the settlement together with my older boy, then 10 months old. Luckily, a miracle happened and that particular time he remained with his father at home.
"The thought that my son could have then been with me generates hallucinations and anxiety spells which last until this very day. Just as they showed no mercy for me ? a completely innocent woman – they would not have shown any mercy for my son. The incident continues to haunt me. My anguish reached a level at which it disturbs my sleep and deters me from driving my car alone to return home".
The new prosecutor submitted an amended charge-sheet. Instead of stone throwing the new charge was attempted murder or major injury. According to the amended indictment, the defendants were awaiting Rom’s car, in the conscious intention to injure her.
Representing the majority of the defendants, lawyer Shlomo Leker protested against the amended indictment. In a letter to the Chief Military Prosecutor, colonel Menahem Finkelstein, Leker pointed to the identical version appearing in all incriminating confessions, in which the event was presented as due to a spontaneous escalation of tensions rather than to any premeditation. Evidence does not warrant the attribution of an intention to kill the driver to the defendants. In fact they all ran away from the site of the incident, after which some locals offered Ms. Rom some medical relief. The testimony of the woman settler, produced 7 months after the incident, contradicts the testimony of her husband submitted to the police the next day after it occurred, in which her injury was described as minor. No medical certification of her injury was submitted.
As if these arguments were not sufficiently convincing, Leker added the following observation in his letter to the Chief Military Prosecutor: "You will certainly agree with me that considerations of a prosecutor drafting a charge-sheet may have relevance. A prosecutor acting on behalf of the public interest should not be allowed to act out of personal, sectarian or political considerations". The prosecutor Attari lives in the settlement of Efrat. The Legal Adviser for Judea and Samaria (sic), colonel Moshe Rosenberg, did not like Leker’s argument. "I forcefully deny your transparent hint that the prosecutor who drafted the charge-sheet may have been acting out of personal, sectarian or political considerations", he wrote, adding that, as a lawyer, Leker could have been better advised not to raise such claims in his letter at all. Yet Rosenberg did instruct the prosecutor to redraft the charge-sheet. Its third version resembles the first. It charges the defendants with stone throwing, without imputing to them an intention of waiting for that particular car as a target.
The trial could finally begin. The defendants who had confessed asked the court not to accept their confessions as a proof, because they had been obtained through the use of force. A "little trial" [to test this claim] began. It all looked orderly. The chief judge, colonel Hakri, is a stockily built person with a knitted skull-cap on his head.[6] Two very young officers sit on each side of his. One of them finds it difficult to keep his eyelids open. The lawyer for the defense must keep reminding him. to listen to the proceedings. All claims of the defendants are rejected with dispatch, one after another. All their confessions have already been accepted as proofs. By this week only one defendants’s claim was still under consideration.
An individual who interrogated the defendants is a well-built male. He appears on the witness stand in a T-shirt and jeans, with a small revolver attached to his belt. He identifies himself only by an assumed name. He interrogated a defendant twice – and it happened by chance that both times this particular defendant needed medical help. Once because he became hysterical and the second time because he had breathing difficulties. Sheer chance, clarifies the interrogator. No, he does not know why: all he knows is that it could not have pappened as a result of any beatings, because he had never hit him. The lawyer for the defense shows to him the drawings of torture which appeared in the recent "B’tzelem" report. No, says the interrogator, it was not like that, it could not be like that, because that is against the regulations.
He is a nice-looking man in his twenties. From time to time, he glances at a defendant who claims to have been tortured by him, and then a sort of a wink can be detected in his eyes. Next to the prosecutor, an unidentified individual is sitting, also with a revolver attached to his belt. Each time the lawyer for the defense details the kinds of blows befalling the defendant, a sarcastic smile can be seen on this man’s face.
A short but athletic-looking man with curled hair on the back of his head suddenly enters the hall. He is a sergeant-major serving in the Dahariye Police Station [where an ill-famed prison is located]. The researchers who authored the "B’tzelem" report mentioned him by name. He whispers something to the fellow sitting next to the prosecutor and then leaves the hall.
The defendants are seated compressed. Some are teenagers, others in their twenties. Most of them worked in Israel before their arrest. Three are students, one is a shepherd. Only one knows English. He acts as an interpreter between Leker, who does not know Arabic, and other defendants. At one point the chief judge admonishes him for disturbing the proceedings, and threatens him with an on-the-spot sentence of two years in prison for contempt of the court in case he continues to talk to other defendants.
At some stage of the proceedings the lawyer for the defense learned that the chief judge had in his chamber talked with one defendant, who also happens to be a witness for the prosecution. Their conversation, held beyond the framework of court proceedings without the presence of the lawyer for the defense,[7] concerned the clarification of various details of the the incident. Leker requested the judge to disqualify himself. His request was rejected on the spot. Leker could have appealed to the Supreme Court. An appeal, however, would have stalled the proceedings for a long time, while the defendants have already been in detention 10 months!
Also present in the court are a girl-soldier who takes the minutes, and a soldier who translates the proceedings into Arabic. He talks loudly, while the proceedings go on in Hebrew. A big fan, of the kind used in old-fashioned Israeli restaurants, hangs from the ceiling. The benches for the public are empty. I was sitting alone there, thinking to myself what the story was about. The Battilo file, so named after one of the defendants, by itself does not make a story. It is just an application of a routine.
This week the trial was postponed again at the request of the prosecutor, so that he may go on vacation.
Notes:
1. No Jewish settler is ever brought before an Israeli Military Court. The settlers are charged and tried (but very rarely) by Civil Courts in Israel itself. This is a feature of the Israeli Apartheid regime in the Territories.
2. The wheat field was indeed burned, but the Israeli authorities never bother to investigate such "minor offenses" when committed by Jewish settlers. Since many years an iron-clad rule holds that the settlers are to be charged for violence against the Palestinians only if it ends up in death or severe injury. No other crimes of the settlers are prosecuted.
3. According to an amendment to the Jordanian law enacted by one of the Israeli military governors (who act in the joint capacity of the only legislative, executive and judicial authority in the Occupied Territories), the detention of Palestinians charged with any offense whatsoever can be prolonged indefinitely.
4. The father "represents" the religious Jewry in that Court. The son, also religious, is known to be close to the "Gush Emunim".
5. Such deals can be made only if the defendant had confessed to whatever he was charged with.
6. The distinct badge of "Gush Emunim" and their sympathizers.
7. This kind of abuse is very common. I will hazard a guess that it has occurred in most cases heard during the last two years. It happens so often, because some defendants willing to betray their co-defendants by perjurious testimonies incriminating them, no longer trust the promises of leniency when given by the military prosecutors, who are known to have broken such promises in the past. But the reassurances of a judge are regarded as reliable, because the sentence is usually going to follow soon thereafter, and also because such defendants then presume, probably for good reasons, that the very illegality of a judge’s action will bind him to keep his promises.