Policing Palestinians Out of Israel
Photo by Cole Keister on Unsplash
Photo par Cole Keister sur Unsplash
Dana Dallal
(FR) Le texte qui suit porte sur le conflit israélo-palestinien en ce qui concerne la discrimination raciale de la part de la police israélienne. Les Palestiniens sont discriminés par la police parce qu’ils font partie d’un groupe rejeté par l’État d’Israël. Afin de soutenir cette argumentation, des exemples de violence policière, de maintien de l’ordre public sélectif et des méthodes d’intimidation, seront élucidés. Telle que déclarée par Dallal, la discrimination raciale contre les Palestiniens en résulte à cause de leur ethnicité. Somme toute, les Palestiniens subissent de l’injustice par la police israélienne en raison de la discrimination raciale.
Introduction
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been ongoing since Israeli rule began in 1948 (Gelkopf et al. 2008). This conflict is motivated by Israel’s desire to occupy and colonize conflicted territory by displacing Palestinians. This desire stems from Zionism, which is the belief that the land in question belongs to the Jewish people as deemed by God. Throughout this conflict, the Palestinian population has been and continues to be marginalized by the Israeli justice system, including through its mistreatment by Israeli police officers. The geographical area this paper will focus on is the area with the most tension and the most value: occupied East Jerusalem (OEJ). In what follows, I will argue that Israeli police officers systematically discriminate against Palestinians in OEJ as Palestinians are a vulnerable group that is undesired by the Israeli state. Police strategies of brutality, selective law enforcement, and intimidation are used against Palestinians as discriminatory tools to further Israel's political agenda. Although one may argue that this police misconduct may be a result of internal job stressors rather than discrimination, ethnicity remains the main contributing factor in the harsh policing of Palestinians. This is because the harm posed by arrested Palestinians has, in many cases, been trivial, in contrast to harmful cases involving Israeli suspects which have been dismissed. This paper will provide a brief background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before dividing into three sections. The first section will analyze the Israeli police strategy of brutality while taking into account police job stressors. The second section will evaluate selective law enforcement based on ethnicity rather than justice. Finally, the third section of this paper will consider intimidation methods such as surveillance and invisibility.
Background
The long-rooted history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has created a unique context within which Israeli police act. The expansion of Israel that occurred as a result of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 is not accepted by the international community (Alyan et al. 2010). This prohibits the settlement of Israelis in East Jerusalem, including in the Old City. In contrast, Israeli law denotes that the appropriation of land brings it under full Israeli jurisdiction (Alyan et al. 2010). There have been negotiations to look for a solution favourable to both the Palestinians and Israelis regarding the future of the conflicted areas, such as East Jerusalem. Some of these talks include the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Process and the Annapolis Process. However, it should be noted that all talks have failed to result in agreement between both parties, and the future of East Jerusalem remains conflicted (Lehrs 2016). While Palestinians in OEJ wish to protect their side of Jerusalem from further colonization, the Israeli state wishes to “Judaize” East Jerusalem (Alyan et al. 2010:4). Thus, the cultural tension is derived from a “colonial context” (Grassiani and Volinz 2016:110), and is continually heightened as the Israeli police actively discriminate against Palestinians and not their Israeli counterparts. The Israeli police force in Jerusalem is a combination of general police officers and military officers, and some of the latter belong to an “elite undercover unit” (Dumper 2013:1255), which will be expanded upon in the third section of this paper.
Palestinians in OEJ are a vulnerable group because they are undesired by the Israeli state which allows Israeli officers to easily discriminate against them. The vulnerability of Palestinians is enforced by their abandonment by the Israeli and Palestinian governments, as they do not receive the adequate education, health, and community resources that their peers do (Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016). Moreover, alienation further contributes to the vulnerability of Palestinians as they are perceived as enemies and terrorists who pose a threat to the Israeli public. This batches innocent Palestinian people together with radical organizations such as Hamas. This vulnerability allows the police to prioritize the safety of the public, rather than the rights of Palestinians (Cook 2015), and to deploy strategies of brutality, selective enforcement, and intimidation among Palestinians.
Section One: Police Brutality and Police Stressors
The Israeli police discriminate against Palestinians by engaging in brutality, in hopes of displacing them from OEJ. Police brutality refers to unjustified violence and the breaching of human rights, and in Israel’s context, it carries out the “dirty work” of fulfilling the Israeli state’s societal desires (Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016). Evidence of Israeli police brutality against Palestinians has been found in the violent and illegal processes of child arrest, the unnecessary killings of “terrorists”, and even sexual torture of men and boys during arrests and interrogation. Simple everyday interaction can lead to small quarrels in which Israeli officers use unnecessary violence against Palestinians. For example, Ahmad Qare’en, a local Palestinian resident in the Old City of East Jerusalem confronted an Israeli settler for beating up neighbourhood children. Qarae'en, who was unarmed, was left crippled for life, as the settler turned out to be a military officer on leave and shot Qare’en’s legs multiple times (Alyan et al. 2010). The brutal arrests of Palestinian children are not uncommon in OEJ as not only are children more vulnerable, but they also made up over 40% of the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem at the end of 2009 (Alyan et al. 2010).
The style of arrests of Palestinian children in Jerusalem by police does not follow Israeli law (Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016). Many child arrests thus involve illegal components in which children are violently removed from their beds at night, interrogated without their parents, threatened, and abused during their arrest and interrogation (Alyan et al. 2010). About 60% of Palestinian child arrests occur “between midnight and 5 am” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014:7). Once the child is apprehended, their hands are typically “tied painfully behind their backs with plastic ties” and they are taken to a local police station for interrogation, while they are yet to be told what they have been arrested for (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014:7). During interrogations the officer uses coercion to force information or a false confession out of the child (Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016). Keren Tzafrir acknowledges the extreme violence that officers have used amongst Palestinian children as she describes the treatment they receive upon arrival at the police station: “they are not even given sanitary wipes to clean their blood and their broken bones are often not treated” (Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016:126).
Although unnecessary violence against children by Israeli police is common, such violent treatment extends to Palestinian adults as well. The Israeli police works to oppress all Palestinians, not just Palestinian children. Beyond the everyday risks of police brutality due to interaction on the streets, “Israeli authorities are systematically involved” with sexual torture and mistreatment of the Palestinians during arrests and interrogation (Weishut 2015). Sexual torture and mistreatment are common, yet concealed issues that have been accepted as a norm by Palestinians and yet unreported because of a lack of justice and compensation (Weishut 2015). The priorities of Israeli police are not true law enforcement, but rather the protection of Israeli settlers by maintaining public order (Dumper 2013). Thus, over the decades, the Israeli police has systematically disregarded any efforts to right the violent abuse of Palestinians.
While there is a clear correlation between Israeli police brutality and Palestinians, one may argue that the use of violence by police derives from job stressors rather than discrimination against individuals of Palestinian ethnicity. Keinan and Malach-Pines found that during a Palestinian uprising (Intifada), Israeli police were more impacted by the internal factors of their job, than by any external factors they encountered on the job, such as terrorism (2007). According to a cross-sectional study, Palestinians are the most effected by long-term terrorism as they are more likely to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than Israeli civilians and police officers (Gelkopf et al. 2008). The internal job stressors that the Israeli police are affected by include “low salary, unfair treatment by commanding officers, overload, and lack of resources” (Keinan and Malach-Pines 2007:160). While this finding may explain hostility towards apprehended criminals, it does not explain the mistreatment of Palestinians. The explanation for the latter lies in the context of an Intifada, in which Palestinians are perceived as terrorists who pose a threat to society. In fact, this image of Palestinians does not just occur amid an Intifada, it is the image that all Palestinians have been tainted with based on their ethnicity since the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Grassiani and Volinz 2016). Thus, even though internal police job stressors may contribute to the unnecessary violence that Israeli police officers use amongst Palestinians, the main contributing factor of brutality is ethnicity.
Section Two: Selective Law Enforcement
The discrimination of Palestinians in OEJ by Israeli officers has been reinforced through selective law enforcement which favours Israeli settlers at the expense of Palestinian communities. A former police commander of the Jerusalem district, Arye Amit, admitted that the police force in OEJ “took the form of a small army, and its main role was protecting [Israelis] from East Jerusalem residents [Palestinians] and not protecting these residents” (Dumper 2013:1260). This is done through policing strategies such as use of selective law enforcement in which the harm posed by arrested Palestinians has mostly been trivial. In contrast, harmful cases involving Israeli suspects are commonly dismissed due to a “lack of public interest” or a “lack of evidence” (Alyan et al. 2010:8). Israeli police officers have rearranged the cases of Palestinian victims so that they are “always a suspect” (Alyan et al. 2010:9), and can therefore be arrested. Raisah Musa al-Karaki, a Palestinian in OEJ shares: “whenever I go to file a complaint with the police, I am the suspect. They always yell at me and bang on the table, and they always make me cry out of bitterness” (Alyan et al. 2010:7). Palestinians who have been arrested for arbitrary reasons have been forced by interrogation officers to sign documents in Hebrew, which some cannot read (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014). In the case of child arrests, 30 percent of children reported “being shown or made to sign documentation written in Hebrew” (Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016:120).
The freedom of Israeli police to selectively enforce laws enables them to categorize Palestinians as criminals. For example, when Palestinians file complaints about violence from Israeli settlers, police often respond that the Palestinian complainant is lying (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014). A Palestinian resident, Saleh Dhiab, was accused, without sufficient evidence, of lying by the police when he informed them of being jumped and threatened at gunpoint. The Israeli officers explained to Dihab that all Jews are religious and “they wouldn’t touch or use such things [guns] on the Jewish Sabbath” (Alyan et al. 2010:8). This is an example of selective enforcement because while the Israeli police arrest Palestinians for minor or false charges, they choose to refrain from charging Israeli suspects, even in cases where they have caused major harm. Furthermore, police officers criminalize the Palestinian victim by responding that they are lying and therefore making false accusations. This trend is increasingly troubling when accounting for the armed private security guards employed by the state to guard public areas and Israeli residences. This is because security guards have more freedom in deploying their weapons than police officers (Dumper 2013). Often security guards harm Palestinian children who play outside and the guards are favoured by the police should the situation be reported. In these cases, police choose to not enforce the law on private security guards, who have physically or verbally abused Palestinians. Rather, the police help frame the Palestinian as a suspect by allowing the security guard to file a complaint first and thus place the Palestinian victim under investigation (Alyan et al. 2010).
Section Three: Intimidation Methods
Israeli police use strategies of intimidation through surveillance and invisibility to continually discriminate against Palestinians. These strategies are useful when tourists are a factor, as visible police presence is undesired by the state in order to make tourists feel comfortable (Grassiani and Volinz 2016). The method of invisibility is used by officers through a special undercover unit. In this unit, known as “mista'arvim, meaning ‘Arabized’” (Dumper 2013:1255), officers are disguised as Palestinians in order to seamlessly fit into the Old City of East Jerusalem without catching the attention of tourists (Grassiani and Volinz 2016). This intimidates Palestinians as they are unable to feel comfortable in their own community. Anyone a Palestinian comes into contact with could be an officer who perceives them as a threat to the community. This leads Palestinians to become further isolated and less involved in their community. Invisibility is a discriminatory method as it is used by police to intimidate the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem through developing emotions of unease.
Surveillance cameras are additionally used as an intimidation tactic to allow for the policing of Palestinians while minimizing the physical presence of police. Although surveillance cameras are commonly used among Israeli private security companies, police also use surveillance cameras throughout East Jerusalem’s Old City which is a popular destination for tourists (Dumper 2013). Furthermore, footage from cameras has been deliberately used by the police to show evidence of violence by Palestinians, while ignoring preceding footage that would have reduced such acts to those of self-defence. This is what happened to Tamr Qarae'en, whose acts of self-defence were criminalized when he and his family were beaten by security guards. (Alyan et al. 2010). Surveillance cameras also act to further isolate Palestinians from their sense of belonging in the Old City. It should be noted that there have been cases in which surveillance cameras have been placed to directly monitor Palestinian homes by private security companies. These cameras violate the right to privacy, especially for Muslim Palestinian women who feel that they have to remain in modest dress, even in the comfort of their own home (Alyan et al. 2010). While these surveillance cameras are placed at Palestinian homes by private security companies and not by the Israeli police (Dumper 2013), the police are blameworthy. This is because they choose to resist criminalizing the invasive use of surveillance cameras by private security companies.
Conclusion
The Israeli police discriminate against the undesired Palestinian population in OEJ in order to adhere to their role in promoting public order in accordance with the state’s political agenda. I have argued that the Israeli police has deployed discriminatory strategies of brutality, selective law enforcement, and intimidation against Palestinians to alienate them from the community. To evaluate harsh action taken by Israeli police, job stressors were considered. The relevant effect of internal job stressors explain general harsh behaviour, however, they do not explain the discriminatory fashion of the mistreatment of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Thus, the primary contributing factor of ethnicity remains the basis of discriminatory policing strategies in OEJ.