Opinion: With a court system like Israel’s who needs enemies?

Israel’s court system delivers three shocking decisions.

By David Isaac, World Israel News

Have Israel’s courts jumped to the other side? Sure feels like it.

This week saw a trifecta of decisions giving aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies.

Even more frightening, it’s only Monday.

First, the Supreme Court on Sunday reversed the Central Elections Committee’s Feb. 17 ban against Ibitisam Mara’ana, an Arab candidate for the Labor party.

Among her disgusting comments were those in 2008 when she told an interviewer: “You are naturally frightened. You are a frightened people. Fear [is] in your genetics.”

By “you” she meant Jews.

She continued, “It did not start in the Holocaust and has nothing to do with the Arabs. You are a terribly possessive and domineering people.”

If that’s not anti-Semitic, then we don’t know what is.

She wasn’t done.

“If I would order an apocalyptic script, I would destroy Zichron Yaakov… so they’d go back to the United States or Poland,” she told the interviewer.

Zichron Yaakov, on the Carmel range, is one of the prettiest cities in Israel. It was founded in 1882 at the start of the First Aliyah, the initial wave of Zionist immigration.

The soft-minded would argue she just has something against Zichron Yaakov, where she and her mother once cleaned houses.

That kind of argument reminds us of the famous remark by Zionist leader Max Nordau who said that when you spit on the Jews, they call it rain.

No, this is what’s called in the business a synecdoche – “a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole” – with the part here being Zichron Yaakov and the whole being Israel.

This would-be Knesset member for the Labor party (heaven help us) is saying she wished Israel had never been born and if she had the power, she’d go back and stop it from ever being born.

Even members of her own Labor party said not to help her in her appeal. She didn’t need help. The Supreme Court reversed the ban, saying “no sufficient evidentiary basis was presented” for her disqualification.

If that decision was not bad enough, the Central District Court of Israel on Sunday handed down the lightest of sentences to a 15-year-old Palestinian who stabbed a Jewish woman while she waited at a bus stop.

For seriously injuring her in the head and shoulder, he received four years in prison.

Incredibly, the court based its decision on the fact that he didn’t attempt murder solely out of “nationalist” (read: hates Israel) motives, but also for religious reasons.

“His choice to harm another person, a Jewish Israeli, as a way to bring about his death, is related to a religious ban on suicide and his desire to bring honor to his family as a ‘martyr’ and to reach heaven after his death,” the judges wrote.

To which we say, why are Israeli judges making excuses for an Arab who only missed being a murderer because he sliced a little to the left?

We foresee terrorist lawyers fastening onto this ruling in the future. “My client shot him, you see, because he is religious.”

If these two cases weren’t enough, on Monday an Israeli military court sentenced Khalida Jarrar, one of the leaders of the terror group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), to only two years in prison. The sentence, in reality, will be only seven months because of time served.

Jarrar’s group is responsible for the death of Jewish teenager Rina Shnerb, 17. She was killed on Aug. 23, 2019 when the PFLP remotely detonated a bomb it planted along a path Rina, her father and brother were walking. Her father and brother were badly injured but survived.

It emerged after her death that Rina’s family embodied the best Israel has to offer – volunteering in community groups, giving to charities, and astounding Israel’s public with their fortitude in the wake of the tragedy.

Rina doesn’t get to go home. But Jarrar does.

They say the law’s an ass. In Israel’s case, the law is a lunatic.

David Isaac is managing editor of World Israel News.

Israeli Supreme CourtMilitary courtPFLPTerrorism