Terrorists' rights vs Israeli lives By Evelyn Gordon Jerusalem Post September 10, 2002 The across-the-board condemnation by human rights organizations and Western governments of last week's High Court of Justice ruling on "assigned residence" speaks volumes about these groups' hypocrisy and about their values. The court ruled that two Palestinians who actively aided a relative's terrorist activity could be relocated from the West Bank to Gaza for a two-year period. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, echoed by several Western governments, promptly termed this a violation of international law. Amnesty International, and some Israeli human-rights groups, went even further, charging that it was "a war crime under both the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court." Since all these groups are presumably familiar with the contents of the Fourth Geneva Convention, such responses require a shocking level of hypocrisy because Article 78 of the convention, on which the court based its ruling, explicitly permits such relocations. That article reads: "If the Occupying Power considers it necessary, for imperative reasons of security, to take safety measures concerning protected persons, it may... subject them to assigned residence or to internment." It later clarifies that "assigned residence" means being "required to leave their homes." Thus there are only two ways to argue that the relocation of Kifah and Intisar Ajouri from the West Bank to Gaza violates international law. The first is to argue that the convention is simply inapplicable to these territories (a claim that Israel actually does make, but one with no practical ramifications, as it has nevertheless pledged to abide by the convention's humanitarian guidelines). The court's critics, however, unanimously deem the convention applicable and if so, there is no way to deny Israel's right to make use of Article 78. One cannot apply the convention's contents selectively. The second possibility, which was in fact attempted by the Ajouris' lawyers, is to argue that the West Bank and Gaza are distinct legal entities, and that relocation from one to the other is therefore equivalent to expulsion to a foreign country. According to Article 49 of the convention, deportation outside an occupied territory as opposed to assigned residence within it is indeed forbidden. But this argument, as the court correctly noted, is patently absurd. Not only have the West Bank and Gaza de facto been under the same government, the Palestinian Authority, for the past eight years, but the Oslo Accords state explicitly that both Israel and the Palestinians "view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit," and the entire world has adopted this position. Indeed, the only way to argue that they are distinct entities would be to claim that legally, they actually belong to the states that controlled them prior to 1967: Jordan for the West Bank and Egypt for Gaza. Since this would effectively invalidate any Palestinian claim to these areas, it is hard to believe that any of the court's international critics all of whom view both areas as integral parts of the nascent Palestinian state seriously support this argument. The apparent refusal to acknowledge Article 78's existence, however, is only the tip of the hypocrisy. The US State Department raised the art of doublespeak to possibly even greater heights by charging that Israel was "punishing the innocent." In fact, both Israel's government and the court independently concluded that only people actively involved in terrorism may be subjected to assigned residence. The court even set an almost impossibly high standard for "active involvement": It forbade the relocation of a third man, who both transported and lent his car to a known terrorist, because he only knew that he might be abetting terrorist activity, and not that he definitely was. But even the State Department ought to blush at defining a woman who sewed explosive belts for her brother to give to suicide bombers, or a man who acted as lookout while his brother loaded explosives into his car, as "innocents." Perhaps the most insidious criticism of the ruling, however, was the one seemingly serious one: Amnesty's claim that the Ajouris were deprived of "one of the most basic principles of international human rights law" a fair trial. True, the evidence against them was reviewed by the nation's highest court. But if it was really that strong, why were they denied a full trial in open court? The answer is that most of the information on the Ajouris (and many other captured terrorists) came from informants. And at a time when Palestinian terror groups have been torturing and killing suspected "collaborators" by the dozen, an informant who testified in open court would be literally signing his own death warrant. Not only would no informant agree to do so, but Israel would have no moral right to ask it of him. Thus by saying that no action against captured terrorists is permissible without a full trial, Amnesty is effectively saying that Israel can do nothing against them at all. That, apparently, is Amnesty's view of morality: efforts to prevent the slaughter of innocent Israeli civilians take second place to the blanket prohibition on acting against a suspected terrorist without a courtroom level of proof. But anyone who truly values human life must side with the High Court's view instead: Action aimed at impeding a terrorist's activity is permissible as long as it is commensurate with the lower level of proof. And confinement to the Gaza Strip is a far less severe measure than confinement to a prison cell.