In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and expanded the boundaries of East Jerusalem by annexing approximately 70 square kilometers to the municipal boundaries of West Jerusalem. It also extended Israeli civil law to East Jerusalem, thereby de facto annexing it to the state of Israel, a move considered illegal under international law.¹

Since the de facto annexation of East Jerusalem, Israel has attempted to change the demographic and geographic makeup of the city in order to achieve a Jewish majority and has created and implemented discriminatory policies that favor the Jewish population. This began with Israel’s granting of “permanent residency” status to East Jerusalem residents, which relegates Palestinians who were born and raised in East Jerusalem to the status of foreigners in their own home and affords them very little in the way of rights.² This system places Palestinians under constant threat of losing their Jerusalem residency, which, in addition to Israel’s implementation of other discriminatory policies and practices, seeks to force the Palestinian population out of the occupied city.

Over the last few months, Israel has used the recent rise in violence as a pretext to implement extreme measures in East Jerusalem aimed at expediting its goal of eradicating Palestinian presence from the occupied city.³ This has been achieved through a variety of new laws and amendments to existing laws that target and oppress the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem, particularly children. Many of these new measures bring Israeli national law in line with Israeli military law, which is in force in the West Bank. There, Israel operates a dual legal system: military laws applicable to the Palestinian population and Israeli national laws applicable to the Israeli settler population.⁴ While there is no official dual legal system operating in East Jerusalem as in the rest of the West Bank, Israel’s creation of discriminatory laws and its biased application of otherwise facially neutral laws has created a de facto parallel legal system that applies to the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem and Palestinians who are citizens of Israel — although the latter are not the focus of this article.⁵

Current Situation and Recent Legislation

The recent unrest experienced across the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), including East Jerusalem, and beyond the Green Line, is the outcome of Israel’s oppressive occupation. While Israel’s violent responses to Palestinian resistance reverberate across the OPT, they have been especially felt in occupied East Jerusalem, specifically through recent legislation.

Israel has framed much of the recent legislation against the backdrop of a so-called “wave of terrorism.”⁶ During a cabinet meeting on October 13, 2015, Israel passed a series of measures including imposing arbitrary closures in “centers of friction and incitement in Jerusalem,” the demolition of alleged terrorists’ homes, the confiscation of their property and the revocation of their permanent residency status, among others.⁷ In light of various comments made by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who stated that Israel was “waging a fight to the death against Palestinian terror,”⁸ it is clear that the measures are to directly target the Palestinian population generally, and those of East Jerusalem specifically.

With these measures in place, Israel also moved swiftly to introduce bills, pass new legislation and amend existing legislation. This includes amendments to open-fire regulations to allow for the use of live fire against unarmed demonstrators, which is inconsistent with international standards that only allow for the use of lethal weapons in extreme and very exceptional circumstances.⁹ In addition, Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan proposed a stop and frisk bill, which has now been passed into law that allows for the police to conduct a physical search on any person without reasonable suspicion that the person is armed or dangerous, severely infringing on an individual’s rights.¹⁰ There were also amendments to both the Penal Code and Youth Law, aimed at imposing harsh punishments on children who throw stones, contradicting the spirit of the Youth Law, which seeks to protect the rights of minors and assist in their rehabilitation.¹¹ Each piece of legislation was introduced and passed under the pretext of security, but this excuse proves hollow when the application of and legislative intent behind these laws are examined.

Youth Law

The Youth Law, enacted in 2008, seeks to guarantee that a child who is suspected or accused of committing a crime is treated in accordance with his or her rights as reflected in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.¹² More specifically, the law establishes special safeguards for minors during the entire legal process, from arrest to detention and interrogation, to ensure that their welfare is protected, and that they are rehabilitated — the underlying objective of the law.¹³ Despite the existence of these safeguards, it has been well documented that the Israeli police regularly violate the Youth Law in East Jerusalem, improperly employ exceptions, and thereby deny Palestinian minors their rights under the law.¹⁴ For example, section 9f(a) of the law requires the police to issue a summons for interrogation and 10(a) outlines that detaining the minor must be a measure of last resort.¹⁵ However, in practice, the Israeli police often do not apply these rules in East Jerusalem.¹⁶ Instead, Palestinian children in East Jerusalem are routinely arrested during violent nighttime raids and subjected to interrogation without the issuance of a summons, often without the presence of a parent or attorney.¹⁷

Arresting a child during a nighttime raid solely for the purpose of interrogation strongly suggests that detention was not used as a last resort. Instead, Israeli police seek the use of the most extreme and exceptional measures in order to instill fear in and intimidate East Jerusalem youth.

Recent Amendments to Penal Code and Youth Law

Recent amendments to the Penal Code and the Youth Law reveal that they are intended to discriminatorily apply to and punish Palestinian minors of East Jerusalem.

In 2014, the Israeli government issued Decision Number 1776, entitled “Strengthening Enforcement in Offenses of Stone Throwing.”¹⁸ It required the Ministry of Justice to enact an amendment to the Penal Code in order to create a new, specific offense for stone throwing and instructed the State Prosecutor’s office to amend the State Prosecutor’s Guidelines of December 2009 relating to the enforcement policy for stone throwing. The committee responsible for the decision found that the Guidelines did not “provide an optimal response for the prevailing security reality in East Jerusalem.”¹⁹ A review of the amendments reveals that Decision 1776 is blatantly aimed at increasing the punishment for stone throwing to include actual imprisonment.²⁰

In line with Decision 1776, on July 29, 2015, Amendment Number 119 of the Penal Code was published, adding new offenses: 1) the offense of throwing a stone or other object at a police officer or vehicle, punishable with a five year prison sentence; and 2) the offense of throwing a stone or other object at a moving vehicle that endangers the safety of a person or causes fear, punishable with a 10-year prison sentence, that can be doubled if intent to cause harm is found.²¹ The goal of Amendment 119 was to create a separate offense for stone throwing, as offenders were previously accused under the offense of “willfully endangering human life on a transportation route” and to ensure that stricter penalties could be imposed.²² It is worth noting that this new amendment brings Israeli national law in line with Israeli military law in force in the OPT. Military Order 1651 prescribes that a Palestinian minor convicted of stone throwing with the intent to harm can be imprisoned for up to 20 years.²³

Discussions surrounding the law in the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, confirm that these amendments were proposed to specifically target and punish the Palestinian youth of East Jerusalem for resisting the occupation.²⁴ Chairman MK Nissan Slomiansky opened the discussion by referring to stone throwing as a “national plague.”²⁵ Attorney Nurit Blobstein, director of the Criminal Department in the Jerusalem District Prosecutor’s Office, expressed the need to deter minors from throwing stones with imprisonment because “there is a mass, a phenomenon, a plague,” of stone throwing by minors in Jerusalem.²⁶ Knesset Member Osama Sa’adi pushed backed during discussions, asking the committee to admit that the only purpose of the amendments was to increase punishment for stone throwing.²⁷ MK Sa’adi also reminded the members that East Jerusalem was considered occupied territory, where Palestinians were fighting for their liberation, and that a change in sentencing guidelines would not address what is ultimately a political matter.²⁸

Amendment Number 20 to the Youth Law, also passed in early November of 2015,²⁹ allows for the imposition of fines, legal expenses and payments of compensation on the parents of a minor convicted of any offense, and provides the offense of stone throwing as an example.³⁰ This law allows for the parents of minor convicts to be punished for the actions of their children. This constitutes collective punishment and is in clear violation of international law and basic criminal law principles, as punishment for an offense may only be imposed on the individual convicted of the offense.³¹

In addition, a bill amending section 25(d) of the Youth Law to allow for minors under the age of 14 and as young as 12, convicted of “nationalistmotivated” or terror offenses to be sentenced to imprisonment, passed a preliminary reading in the Knesset on November 25, 2015.³² It was expanded to cover minors who are convicted of the offenses of manslaughter, murder and attempted murder.³³ Once again, if passed, this amendment would bring Israeli national law in line with Israeli military law in force in the West Bank.³⁴

When proposing the bill, Knesset Member Anat Berko stated, “Palestinians recruit minors while knowing that Israeli law does not have a real response” to Palestinian children accused of nationalist-motivated offences.³⁵ The bill was introduced following Israeli prosecutors charging 13-year-old Ahmed Manasra with attempted murder on Oct. 30, 2015, for allegedly carrying out a stabbing attack in the settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev in Jerusalem. Video evidence shows the minor being subjected to a verbally abusive interrogation without the presence of his lawyer.³⁶ If this bill is passed into law, it will negatively affect the Palestinian youth of East Jerusalem, especially within a criminal justice system that is already so heavily stacked against them.³⁷

Amendments to National Insurance Act

As a part of Israel’s sweeping measures aimed at suppressing Palestinian resistance to the occupation, on November 5, 2015, the National Insurance Act was amended to allow for the denial of benefits to the parents of minors who were convicted of committing security offenses, including stone throwing, and were sentenced to prison time.³⁸ The intent to collectively punish Palestinians is made clear by Knesset Member Oren Hazan, who stated the following during the first reading of the proposed amendment:

[i]f you think we have done enough by stiffening the punishment, you are wrong. It’s time we realize that the Palestinians only understand force. No more returning the bodies of terrorists; no more demolishing homes two years after (a terror attack), but at the exact moment. We are doing you a big favor by only taking away your insurance stipends. I plan to submit a proposal that the families of terrorists will be banished to Gaza. It’s time we internalize the fact that terror cannot be fought with democratic tools.³⁹

The effects of these amendments have already been strongly felt in East Jerusalem. According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Center for Studies, Israeli forces detained more than 1,900 Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem in 2015 — around two-thirds of whom were minors.⁴⁰ Figures show that during a three month period — from Sept. 13, 2015 through December 15, 2015 — 398 Palestinians minors from East Jerusalem were arrested.⁴¹ According to police figures, 792 Palestinian minors from East Jerusalem were arrested in 2014.⁴² These figures once again suggest the presence of a separate and discriminatory legal system aimed at oppressing certain portions of the population.

Passage of Stop and Frisk Law

On February 1, 2016, the Knesset passed a law expanding police powers to stop and frisk individuals — Amendment Number 5 to the Power for Maintaining Public Security Law.⁴³ Prior to the amendment, police could only search an individual if there was reasonable suspicion that the individual was armed.⁴⁴ Amendment Number 5 significantly expands police power, allowing police to stop and frisk individuals when there is “reasonable suspicion that he is about to commit a violent offense, in order to check whether he is carrying an illegal weapon.”⁴⁵ This provides police free rein to search individuals based on a more general suspicion. The amendment also allows police to search anyone that is present in an area that the regional police commander “declared temporarily as a location where such searches can be made … if he has reasonable suspicion that the peace could be disturbed by an act of violence in that place.”⁴⁶ This effectively allows the police to deem any area, such as Palestinian neighborhoods, as prone to violence, and therefore justifies the search of any persons in that area.

Similar to other measures, the proponents of Amendment 5 claim that its purpose is security. This is undermined by the fact that the bill was originally proposed five years ago but did not pass into law and was re-tabled during the recent rise in violence.⁴⁷ In support of the bill, Israel’s Minister of Public Security expressed that Israel was paying a high “blood price” due to limited police powers.⁴⁸ During discussions surrounding the bill in the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, several members expressed their concern that the law was an infringement on the human rights of individuals and minority groups.⁴⁹

Taking into consideration the timing, substance and legislative intent gleaned from Knesset committee discussions on these new laws, the argument that Israel employs and seeks to broaden its de facto parallel legal system to oppress the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem becomes ever more apparent.

The discriminatory nature of the Israeli justice system has been well documented over the years. A study from Haifa University found that a Palestinian with no criminal record is twice as likely to be convicted and sentenced to jail time as compared with a Jewish Israeli in a similar situation.50 Juveniles were also discriminated against. A study from the Hebrew University showed that “the court used more lenient standards against Jewish youth but harsher standards against Arab citizens of Israel. Even for the same charge and for similar crimes, the punishment imposed on Arab youths was harsher than for Jews.”51 So while the full effect of these pieces of legislation is yet to be seen, history has revealed a pattern of Israeli oppression of and discrimination against Palestinians.