A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  The boy was an Israeli citizen and had a working knowledge of Hebrew. His parents had decided he would need it if they were to remain in Israel. During the interrogation, Shin Bet officers handed him a piece of paper and asked him to write ‘price’ and ‘tag’ in Hebrew. He knew ‘price’, but not ‘tag’.

  For 16 hours, different interrogators tried different approaches – sometimes threats, sometimes sympathy – to get him to confess. But he simply did not know the Hebrew word for ‘tag’. They let him go, but Shin Bet had made it difficult for journalists to write that ‘Price Tag’ had come to Jerusalem and, secondly, should they have any concern about this youth in future they could argue that he was a risk, as they had previously had to interview him.

  Such interrogations of children occur every day in the West Bank.

  In 2012, a British delegation of lawyers and judges, including former British Attorney General Baroness Patricia Scotland, called for Israel to video-tape interrogations to reduce the chances of assault. As a result, Israel introduced audio-visual recording in ‘non-security’ cases – but it soon emerged that they were using a system of double interviews.

  It became clear that in some cases the first interview was the ‘real’ interview, in which the child continued to be threatened or tortured until agreeing to confess. Some children told human rights lawyers they were tortured with hand-held electrical devices, or threatened with rape, until they either confessed or provided information about others, and were asked to become regular informants. Children reported that they were then brought back for a second interview, which was conducted lawfully and video-taped: the child was read his rights before, usually, confessing.4 A UNICEF report stated: ‘In the majority of cases, the principal evidence against the child is the child’s own confession … although many children reported providing confessions as a result of ill-treatment, few raise this matter before the court for fear that their complaints would lead to harsher sentences, even though international law prohibits the use of evidence obtained under duress by a court’.5

  When it came to detaining Palestinian children for questioning, in most cases soldiers would force their way into a house at two or three in the morning. Children as young as 12 were routinely taken by soldiers from their beds to unknown locations, denied access to a parent or lawyer and sometimes kept in solitary confinement.

  Enough Palestinian children have talked about the notorious Cell 36 in Al Jalame children’s prison in the north of Israel for lawyers to have built up a picture. Harriet Sherwood of the UK’s Guardian newspaper carried out an investigation into the cell. She reported: ‘The room is barely wider than the thin, dirty mattress that covers the floor. It is one of a handful of cells where Palestinian children are locked in solitary confinement for days or even weeks. One 16-year-old claimed that he had been kept in Cell 36 for 65 days.’6

  The Guardian’s investigation was based on affidavits by minors to Defence of Children International. Most of the children were accused of throwing stones and most maintained their innocence, even though they signed confessions. Australian lawyer Gerard Horton, who through his group Military Court Watch monitors this situation, said the quickest way to get out of the system is to plead guilty. He said: ‘The system, particularly the solitary confinement, breaks the spirit of the child and what we find is that the children often say that after a week of this treatment they confess simply to get out of the cell.’7

  Again, under international pressure, Israel agreed to a trial whereby a summons would be issued in lieu of night arrests – as occurred with Jewish children in neighbouring settlements. But after media attention had died away, Israel stopped the pilot program altogether. The army claimed that no statistics were kept during the program to enable assessment.8

  I saw the boy from Jack’s school shortly after his ‘Price Tag’ interrogation; he seemed traumatised. For Israel, that was one more way in which their policy worked – in the short term, at least. After such experiences, youths tend to retreat into themselves. But there was another possibility. One day they could snap.

  The ultimate authority over the 2.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank is the Israeli Army. For the 600,000 Israeli settlers it is the Israeli civil courts. Since 1967, at least 770,000 Palestinians – including children – have been detained, and many of them prosecuted in the military court, whose judges are soldiers.

  I was interested in how a country could operate two different legal systems in the same area: a civilian law for Israelis and a military law for Palestinians. I would research the operation of the West Bank military court for more than a year, and finally the IDF would give Sylvie and me rare access. They would at last accept my argument: if you’re proud of your system, why not let us visit?

  November 22, 2010. A brilliant sunny morning when we picked up Captain Arye Shalicar and made the 25-minute drive to the military court at Ofer, in the West Bank. (Following that visit, Sylvie and I conducted a year of research into the military court system, before returning for a second visit to check our information with the Israeli Army prosecutors.) It was a grim place, with an entrance of barbed wire. Twice a week they had ‘children’s days’, when children as young as 12 faced army judges.

  As we waited to go in, Captain Shalicar said he thought foreign journalists needed to do more positive stories about Israel – such as features on its booming wine and hi-tech industries. Just at that moment we heard the clink of metal. Through a gate came a Palestinian man, shackled and handcuffed.

  We entered the courtroom. The guards were clearly trying to keep the doors shut until the last moment, but one opened them too early and I caught a glimpse of what Israel’s long-term grip on the West Bank looked like.

  Four young boys, in small brown prison overalls, shuffled across the courtyard. They were handcuffed and shackled at the feet. At that moment I thought: If the most powerful army in the Middle East thinks it’s acceptable to treat children like this, then something has gone badly wrong.

  That was not to say, of course, that some of these children should not be seriously dealt with. I had gone to hospital to visit a three-year-old Israeli girl, Adele Biton, who had suffered brain damage from rocks thrown by Palestinian youths as her family drove to their West Bank settlement. She later died.

  But it could not be denied that these Palestinian children were not being given the same justice before the law as would be guaranteed to a Jewish child who lived in a settlement next door.

  The most stunning aspect of the military court was its conveyor-belt nature. So quick were the appearances that sometimes the judge did not even look at the children. Some of the cases I witnessed lasted less than 60 seconds – just long enough for the child to plead guilty and to hear their sentence. A lawyer told me how even though one boy banged his head repeatedly against the metal rail, the judge did not look at him.

  Sometimes the children didn’t even have a chance to talk to their lawyer. Those who did were usually advised to plead guilty: in 99 per cent of cases – the IDF’s statistic – there was a conviction. These must be the most guilty children in the world.

  If police or soldiers in Australia took Aboriginal children from their beds at three in the morning and did what Israel does there would be an uproar. So why did those who financially support this army have no problem with it? Even Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told me that the military court system was a ‘wart’. He quipped: ‘Let’s face it – military courts are to justice what military bands are to music.’

  As we finally left the military court, Captain Shalicar remarked: ‘It’s not a very nice place, is it?’

  More than two years after Sylvie and I began researching this story, and after two visits to the military court, I sat down and wrote the following words:

  You hear them before you see them. The first clue that a new group of children is approaching is a shuffle of shoes and a clinking of handcuffs and shackles. The door to the courtroom bursts open – four boys, all sha
ckled, stare into the room. Four boys looking bewildered. They wear brown prison overalls and they trail into the room where their fate is to be decided by a female Israeli Army officer-judge, who is sitting at the bench, waiting. The look on the face of one of the boys changes to elation when he sees his mother at the back of the court. He blows her a kiss. But his mother begins crying and this upsets the boy. He begins crying too …

  This courtroom has become a front line of one of the oldest conflicts in the world, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It is Israel’s conveyor belt of justice, but it is a world away from Israel: in Israel a child cannot be sent to prison until 14; in Israel there are laws against a child being taken away at night; and in Israel a child cannot be interrogated without a parent.

  The Israeli Defence Forces, concerned at the growing debate about Israel’s treatment of children, has given The Weekend Australian Magazine rare access to the court. They say too many journalists write about it without visiting it. They are keen for me to spend time with the army prosecutor in charge of the cases who will be my guide during three visits to the court. I have a briefing with him before the trials begin. The main point he wants to emphasise is that, two years ago, the army set up this military juvenile court to take note of children’s needs. If a child needs a welfare officer or a psychologist, they are available.

  Inside the courtroom, the army’s public relations unit wants the IDF guide to sit next to me to explain each case. I’m told I can quote him as ‘my guide’ but not name him and we are allowed to photograph some of the older children but not the younger ones. Nor will they allow us to photograph children handcuffed and shackled trying to walk – ‘absolutely not’, my guide says. The army obviously realises that such a photo would be enormously damaging. After September 11 I’d seen images of alleged terrorists walking like this but I’d never seen children treated this way. It’s not surprising that Israel doesn’t want this image out there – it would look uncomfortably like a Guantanamo Bay for kids.9

  CHAPTER 7

  Dirty Tricks

  August 2009

  IT WAS ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY ‘DIRTY TRICKS’ operations I’ve ever witnessed. Over 35 years in journalism, I’ve reported on a few, as they tend to make intriguing stories. But there was something very different about this one: the target was me.

  The saga began with a story I’d written for the Weekend Australian Magazine, published on 22 August 2009. It was about a man called Nasser Jaber, a Palestinian travel agent whose family had lived in the Old City of Jerusalem for generations. In 2009, he moved out of his house so it could be renovated. A group of seven armed Jewish settlers living nearby saw that he had moved out, and, at 2.30 in the morning, broke in and changed the locks. They refused to leave. A few days later they put Jaber’s furniture onto the street, and to this day he has not been able to return to his house.

  What appealed to me about doing this story for an Australian audience was that it helped explain the daily battle in the Old City of Jerusalem. The aim of some Israeli hardliners is to ‘Judaise’ the Palestinian parts of the Old City – to get as many Jewish families as possible into houses currently occupied by Palestinians. By doing this, they can improve the ‘demographic balance’ of the Old City. There are powerful groups behind this Judaisation, such as Ateret Cohanim, whose funding comes from Jewish groups in countries such as Australia and the US. Ataret Cohanim operates in the shadows – run by an Australian, Daniel Luria. It works to create a Jewish majority in the Old City as well as in East Jerusalem.

  My interest in the general issue of evictions had been increased by the eviction a couple of weeks earlier of several Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish families. The families had lived in their homes for generations and the evictions meant 19 children were left homeless. Both British and US officials had issued statements of concern. The British Consulate in Jerusalem said: ‘We are appalled by the evictions in East Jerusalem. Israel’s claim that the imposition of extremist Jewish settlers into this ancient Arab neighbourhood is a matter for the court or the municipality is unacceptable. Their actions are incompatible with Israel’s professed desire for peace. We urge Israel not to allow extremists to set the agenda.’

  The US State Department said: ‘We urge that the government of Israel and municipal officials refrain from provocative actions in East Jerusalem, including home demolitions and evictions.’

  I started following the story of Nasser Jaber 12 hours after his home was invaded by armed settlers and spent four months researching the story, which included going to all the court hearings. I interviewed Jaber, and approached the lawyer representing the settlers at the court hearings. His clients did not want to comment. But I viewed the documents he produced for the court, as well as Jaber’s title deed for the house. The settlers were claiming they had bought the house, but where was their record of purchase? Did they trust this Palestinian man so much that they had paid him a large sum of money but had not asked him for a receipt?

  I discovered that the ownership of the house had been challenged in court by Israeli settlers nine years earlier. In that dispute the judge had ruled that under Israeli law the property belonged to Jaber. I interviewed people who lived in the same part of the Old City who confirmed that Jaber’s family had lived there for decades.

  The court process seemed to be going Jaber’s way. The judge told the settlers she had two questions for them: what time did they enter the house, and how? Jaber told me after that hearing, ‘When we heard those questions we thought everything would be OK. Obviously if you have good documents you can enter in the light of day.’

  But Jaber’s faith in the Israeli legal process was soon eroded. In subsequent hearings, those two questions were never asked again, and at the end of each hearing the judge ordered that the status quo be maintained. This meant the settlers would be able to remain in the house until the case was heard in full. But in Jerusalem these cases often go on for years, so Jaber was locked out of his home indefinitely. ‘If I was Jewish and seven armed Palestinians had broken into my house, the case would have been dealt with within the hour,’ said Jaber.

  Jaber’s lawyer argued that in the lead-up to the break-in the Israelis had offered to buy the house. During one court hearing, Jaber’s lawyer asked the settlers: ‘If you say you own the property why are you still making offers to buy it?’ The settlers did not respond.

  Three lawyers from the UK were monitoring the case, and one of them remarked to me that given the settlers had entered the property at 2.30am and could not produce any evidence that they had bought the property, the case would be thrown out in almost every jurisdiction in the world. At the very least, he argued, the presumption of ownership would have been given to the man who had lived in the house for 38 years and had produced titles to the property for an Israeli court nine years earlier. On that occasion the judge ruled that the documents the settlers were presenting were fakes and they were ordered to leave immediately. Jaber produced the deeds again in this case.

  I realised that the Israeli lobby in Australia was not going to like this story. But early in my posting, when those first attacks had started arriving, I’d decided that if I were going to pull my punches for fear of the inevitable attacks by AIJAC and other groups then I would be acting as a diplomat rather than a journalist and would be short-changing the readers of The Australian.

  I’d written the story and it was going through the production process for the Weekend Australian Magazine. The Editor of the Weekend Australian, Nick Cater, dropped by the office of Steve Waterson, the Editor of the magazine. Waterson told me later that Cater warned him about the possible reaction of Colin Rubenstein, the head of AIJAC: ‘If there’s one mistake in this article Colin will come down on us like a ton of bricks.’

  Waterson resented the warning, and said he responded: ‘I was Editor of Time Australia for more than ten years. I check everything. We’re aware of how sensitive this subject is, and we�
�ve been through the story very carefully. John is a hugely experienced editor and correspondent, and I have no doubt his piece is accurate in every respect. Besides, I don’t report to Colin, I report to Chris [Mitchell].’

  As expected, AIJAC was not happy with the story. It unleashed an attack against me, declaring on its website that a key fact in the story – that Israeli police had provided food to the settlers who had moved into the house – was wrong. I began receiving emails from members of the Australian Jewish community who questioned whether Jaber even existed – despite the fact that his photo appeared alongside my article. One emailer told me he believed Jaber was a fake because he’d checked on the internet and could find no reference to his travel agency, and ‘obviously a travel agency would have a social media presence’.

  The Israeli Embassy in Canberra joined the attack. Hearing that SBS’s Dateline was soon to run a story by Sophie McNeill on the same issue, Dor Shapira, the embassy’s Political Officer, phoned the Executive Producer of Dateline, Peter Charley. Shapira asked Charley whether he was proceeding with McNeill’s story on Nasser Jaber. Charley was somewhat taken aback but insisted that he was. Shapira told Charley that my story in the Weekend Australian Magazine was ‘inaccurate’ and that he wanted to provide McNeill with contacts in Jerusalem to give the Dateline story ‘balance’. Charley asked McNeill to communicate with Shapira to get these contacts but stressed that she should report the story exactly as she saw it.

  Fresh from ringing SBS, Shapira went to Nick Cater and asked that The Australian publish a letter stating that the story contained factual errors. When I heard through a colleague on the paper that Cater was planning to publish it, I contacted Chris Mitchell.

  I explained that the letter – which was meant to detail the errors I had made – was itself full of errors. I talked Mitchell through them. Shapira had even got Nasser Jaber’s name wrong, calling him ‘Naber Jasser’. Shapira repeated the criticism made against me by AIJAC: ‘The police never cooperated with the Jewish residents and never supplied them with food.’ I explained to Mitchell that what Shapira didn’t know was that Sophie McNeill had spent several days in the Old City filming the police as they helped the Israelis move goods into the house and took them food. I’d gone through the footage frame by frame. SBS was about to broadcast the vision. The story, ‘Hot Property’, aired on Dateline on 1 November.