Above the Law

by Stephen Lendman

Like its US paymaster, apartheid Israel operates exclusively by its own rules — in flagrant breach of international law.

It's been this way throughout Jewish state history.

A fantasy democracy, never the real thing, being Muslim in Israel or Occupied Palestine is hazardous to health, welfare, safety, freedom and the ability to stay alive.

Since June 1, the Bennett regime killed four Palestinians in cold blood, the latest on Thursday.

Teenager Odeh Mohammad Odeh threatened no one.

Playing with his friends west of Ramallah near the separation wall, he was fatally shot for not being Jewish — the 16th Palestinian teenager to be murdered by Israel in cold blood this year.

On the same day, during a state terror raid on a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem, Ayman Mahmoud Muhaisen was killed in similar fashion.

On June 1, so were Bilal Awad Tawfiq Kabha in Jenin and journalist  Ghufran Warasneh en route to work.

In Israel and Occupied Palestine to date this year, Israeli soldiers and security forces killed 65 Palestinians.

Yet US/Western MSM don't consider mass murder important enough to write about, let alone condemn.

Clearly not when Jews kill defenseless Arabs, not when Ukrainian Nazis kill Donbass civilians, not when the empire of lies assassinates or otherwise eliminates invented enemies for invented reasons.

Separately at this time — according to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association — 600 Palestinians are administratively detained by Israel uncharged and untried.

They can be held indefinitely at the Jewish state's discretion, despite  no evidence of having committed a criminal offense.

At the same time, the Jewish state currently imprisons 170 Palestinian children and 32 women — 4,650 Palestinian political prisoners in total.

Explaining how Israeli injustice works against Palestinians, Addameer said the following:

Israeli military courts administer it extrajudicially.

Enforcing ruthless apartheid rule in flagrant breach of international humanitarian law, they "prosecute Palestinians of all ages and backgrounds based on Israeli military orders issued by the Israeli military commander in the West Bank." 

These orders criminalize virtually "all Palestinian rights, including fundamental freedom of expression and association."

Throughout Jewish state history since 1948, "hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been tried and convicted in farcical court proceedings.

Considered guilty by accusation, rarely ever are charged Palestinians exonerated, no matter their innocence of any crime.

During interrogations and detentions, they're "subjected to brutal conditions, (including) torture, prolonged incarceration, and gross violations of their rights and dignity" — for not being Jewish.

Draconian military courts are "Kafkaesque, kangaroo" and grotesque.

In minutes, guilty as charged is almost automatic because it's "predetermined."

Verdicts are handed down by "an Israeli military-settler judge and prosecutor."

The draconian system includes "profound humiliation and degradation."

It "imposes absolute legal, physical, and psychological control over" Palestinians, their rights under international law denied.

Israel's military judicial system for Palestinians alone, not Jews, is a core element of enforcing apartheid viciousness.

Examples abound individually and collectively.

Last month, Israel's so-called Supreme Court ruled extrajudicially for Israel like many times before.

It OK'd the dispossession and expulsion of around 1,000 Palestinians from their West Bank South Hebron Hills homes and land to make way for exclusive Jewish development and use.

Years of effort by attorneys for their rights were in vain.

The petition of 1,000 Palestinians to remain in their homes on their own land was denied.

According to the Court's extrajudicial ruling, Israel's military commander may at his discretion declare Palestinian land a firing and training zone, dispossessing its residents.

According to Justice David Mintz, expressing the Court's opinion, Israel's "military commander is competent to declare closed zones and prohibit entry into them without a permit" — even for Palestinian owned land.

Citing so-called "Emergency Defense Regulations enacted by the British Mandate in 1945, Mintz added:

"(B)road power (is) designed to serve military-security interests, including the assignment of training grounds for the purpose of training combatants and maintaining their fitness."

He defied reality by falsely claiming that Israeli military commander power does not contravene international law.

And he claimed that when Israeli and international law are at odds with each other, the former takes precedence over the latter (sic).

According to US constitutional law under its Supremacy Clause, international law is automatically constitutional law.

In reality, law in the US and Israel is what their ruling regimes claim it to be — no matter how flagrantly in breach of the letter and spirit of the rule of law.

Mintz also falsely claimed that expelling Palestinians from their own land is not in breach of Fourth Geneva's Article 49, stating:

"Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive."

According to his convoluted reasoning, Israel is not obligated by "a treaty law provision," adding:

Fourth Geneva's Article 49 "is designed to prevent mass expulsions in an occupied territory for purposes of extermination, forced labor or for various political ends, (so) has nothing whatsoever to do with the case at hand (sic)."

On the issue of whether decades of Palestinian residency on the land in question is "permanent," he dubiously claimed that their longstanding "perman(ence)" wasn't "permanent" enough.

He and other justices ignored that longstanding Israeli policy throughout the Occupied Territories dispossessed Palestinians from their own land to make way for exclusive Jewish development and use.

The Jewish state was established on stolen Palestinian land, more of it stolen through the years.

Israel intends to continue land theft until nothing is left for Palestinians but isolated cantons of worthless scrubland. 

Then Israeli land-grabbing policy may drive Palestinians out of their historic homeland altogether — with rubber-stamping approval by its High Court of injustice on all things related to non-Jews.

What Israel wants, it gets.

Where there's a will, there's a rubber-stamp Supreme Court ruling backing it if judicial action is required.