Administrative detention, a sentence of up to six months in prison with no charge or trial, and indefinitely renewable, is a draconian measure Israel uses against political activists and Palestinians en masse.
Ayman Ghrayeb is a Palestinian human rights activist who is documenting Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley at risk of being expelled. He has been held in administrative detention in the Megiddo Prison for the past month on charges of incitement against the state and endangering the security of the area.
An entire month is apparently not enough time to file an indictment against Ghrayeb and his ticking camera. This week, his administrative detention was extended for another five months.
This is not the first time that Ghrayeb has been detained and arrested, but most of the time, he has been quickly released. His friends say that on the day of his most recent arrest, two Shin Bet operatives spoke with him by telephone and told him that they were fed up with his activities and “incitement,” and told him that he would be sent to prison. That is what happened.
Administrative detention is a draconian act – an arrest without trial. In a properly run country, it is not supposed to be used except as a last resort and only when a person is believed with high certainty to be a security risk, in popular terms, a ticking time bomb. In such a case, there is no other way to prevent the danger from occurring. Being “fed up with your incitement” does not come anywhere close to the threshold required to justify such a heavy-handed action. Even so, the army responded by saying that “the arrest was carried out in accordance with procedures.”
The protesters calling for him to be freed call his detention “a clear case of political persecution, since a significant part of Ghrayeb’s work involves advocacy through social media.” But in the military dictatorship that Israel has created in its backyard, the occupied territories, the Israeli public is indifferent to the lives of Palestinians, let alone their basic rights. It makes no difference whether it is a terrorist carrying a bomb or a human rights activist with a camera. The latter is branded a security threat that justifies the use of a tool used only in the most exceptional circumstances.
In the Shin Bet’s view, one picture is worth a thousand attacks. In the eyes of the majority of the Israeli public, as long as it’s not Jewish terrorists burning a child or a village, the perpetrators should be given collective administrative detention without a time limit.
Indeed, Israel is using administrative detention on a wholesale basis. According to HaMoked, the Center for the Defence of the Individual, the number of administrative detainees has tripled over the course of the Gaza war, and it has reached 3,350, as of this month. That’s right, 3,350 Palestinians are being held in Israeli detention facilities without being charged.
If the state has evidence against Ghrayeb, file an indictment against him and bring him to justice. Otherwise, it must release him immediately and stop politically persecuting a man whose only apparent offense was that he dared to document Israel’s crimes in the West Bank.
The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.
Haaretz is Israel’s oldest daily newspaper and one of its most influential media outlets. It was founded in Jerusalem in 1919 by Zionist immigrants, primarily from Russia.
RELATED:
- Israeli forces issue administrative detention order against youngest Palestinian child on record
- Freed Palestinian prisoners tell of horrific rape, torture in Israeli detention
- Released From Detention, Owners of East Jerusalem Bookstore Still Don’t Know Why They Were Arrested
- Detention without charge of Palestinian children hits record level
- Palestinian prisoner reaches deal with Israel to end his detention, concludes hunger strike
