Administrative detention and Israel's moral imperative

In fact, the entire international community holds Israel to a double standard, expecting it to bend over backwards in its treatment of other humans precisely because of what the Jews have endured over many centuries of persecution, expulsion, detention, and death.

Whereas these unfathomable historic experiences are justifiably ingrained in the mind and soul of every Jew and give rise to Israel's deep concerns about its national security, many hard-core Israelis believe that because of these horrifying historical experiences, they have the license to treat others the way the Jews were treated.

This sense of trying to correct a historical wrong became a sort of national mantra, disregarding the fact that ill-treatment of the Palestinians by successive Israeli governments has alarmingly degraded the country's moral principles and exasperated rather than mitigated its national security dread.

By what measure then, one might ask, could subjugating Palestinians, expropriating their land, building settlements, demolishing Palestinian homes, uprooting olive trees, engaging in systematic night raids, unduly restricting their movement, and indefinitely detaining Palestinian suspects (often without charging them with any crime) possibly enhance Israel's national security?

The irony here is that while Israel seeks to contain Palestinian extremism, which is necessary to safeguard its national security, by its own very actions against the Palestinians Israel is undermining its legitimate national security concerns and fostering even more extremism.

Paradoxically, just about every security official and many ordinary Israelis are quick to point at any violent incident perpetrated by a Palestinian as proof that the Palestinians are and will always be a security risk. They conveniently ignore the harsh reality of fifty years of occupation and its poisonous effect on every Palestinian.

Any Israeli government can indefinitely detain tens of thousands of Palestinians and adopt any counter-terrorism bill, but it will still never be able to contain the Palestinians' vehement resistance as long as the occupation persists.

Israel's legitimate national security concerns do not rest on building more settlements, expropriating more Palestinian land, or erecting walls and fences, and certainly not by indefinite incarceration of Palestinians, however violent they may be.

On the contrary, these measures, not to speak of the ministers in the current government who openly call for the annexation of much of the West Bank, only exasperate Israel's national security and endanger its future as a democracy and a safe country for those Jews who choose to make it their home.

Israel's national security ultimately rests on the moral imperative on which the state was created, and an amicable solution to the conflict with the Palestinians remains central to Israel's moral resonance as a democracy with a Jewish national identity.