Democracy?

I'm new here so perhaps I'm projecting my American experience onto Israel, but in America we have a concept called innocence until guilt is proven. The idea is that police make arrests on the basis of probable cause and the courts take over from there. Police have a tendency to see guilt in everything. Some policemen will blame the ocean tide on beach sand. Judges (and in America juries) strive to be impartial and to render judgment through weighing of facts, testimony, evidence, and arguments made by prosecuting attorneys and defense attorneys. Each side has a chance to speak. Forgive me for the lesson in civics, but it's not clear to me that such mechanisms are in place in Israel so I feel that I actually need to explain the concepts.

As far as I can tell outside the veil of gag orders and secrecy, the defendants in the Duma arson case have not had their day in court, another American phrase. Yet, they are being subject to something else that is banned from by the American constitution - cruel and unusual punishment. That's something we are not supposed to do even to the guilty.

Certainly, the American justice system falls short of these goals on a regular basis. However, the President and his cabinet members would never brag about it. They might cover it up, they might look away, but they'd never say, Oh yes, we are torturing these citizens because we just know that they are guilty. How we know? The police told us.

One of the reasons I moved to Israel is because it seemed to me that the American system is crumbling. I wanted to be part of a real democracy again and that is how the State of Israel was sold to me. Yet suddenly, my appreciation and yearning for my birth country has grown immensely.

The Israeli cabinet has their little rationale of course. They are dealing with terrorists, one said. They are a threat to the existence of the State. The Jewish Hamas said another.

I see three teenage boys and an isolated incident. In the USA, we'd get them a psychiatrist, give them their day in court, and send them to jail if a jury deemed them guilty. Then we'd get them another psychiatrist and hope they get better and get away from whoever has confused them and lead them on this sad path. It's hard to believe that these three teenage boys are a threat to the mighty IDF.

We have another expression in America. When your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. I understand that the State of Israel regularly contends with real life terrorists of the worst sort. And the security apparatus and leaders have developed certain attitudes and methods of dealing with it. However, authentic leaders need a mix of tools, each to be applied to different situations. Unless we are facing epidemic terrorism by Jewish settlers, the hammer is not the right tool for this situation. We need something else, like a court system, with rules, rights, impartiality, and maybe even a little compassion. These things are sort of fundamental to democracies. Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Mideast, a claim I have come to view with genuine suspicion.