Eighty-one days have passed since the day that revealed what has been hidden for 75 years. 81 days since the majority living in this place have confirmed what we Palestinians of ‘48 have always debated. Two months of war have been able to burn bridges that took 75 years to build, and I can’t help but wonder if there is any coming back from all this.
For 75 years, we have ignored the facts before our eyes. As if budget discrimination, home demolitions, unrecognized villages, police brutality, and the nationality law were not enough to answer the world’s question: are Palestinians of ’48 really second-class citizens in the country of Israel? The last 81 days have made the answer clear.
As a new lawyer, I ought to stay optimistic about the judicial system, to believe that if we know how to interpret the law, we should be able to use it. I ought to believe in humanity and that we will be able to see justice at the end of this very dark tunnel. Then war happens, a war that ignores all the rules of war, and it manages to prove that what really is at the end of that tunnel is a train that is going to crush us all.
Since October 7, Palestinian lawyers in Israel have been getting attacked by extremist Jewish Israeli lawyers. It started the day after the events. Arab lawyers have been verbally attacked in WhatsApp groups and asked to immediately condemn Hamas. This was followed by an announcement by the bar association amending its bylaws and regulations to allow it to immediately dismiss any lawyer for “publishing, supporting, praising, or incitement to…Terrorist acts and other crimes stipulated in the Anti-Terrorism Law.”
The incitement campaigns against the Palestinian lawyers have not stopped there. Lawyers have found themselves called terrorists and questioned about old pictures and social media posts connected to Palestine that are not related to current events. These posts have been misinterpreted and mistranslated, their words taken out of context and published in different groups, along with pictures of the lawyers and their family members who have been called terrorists and Hamas supporters and told to go live in Gaza. In addition, complaints have been filed against these lawyers to the bar ethics committee, demanding to disbar them. These slander campaigns have directly damaged lawyers’ reputations with their clients. Several lawyers have even been unlawfully arrested over Facebook posts, with some of them still in prison today, accused of supporting and encouraging terrorism.
Until today, Palestinian society in Israel has not been granted permission to a peaceful protest against the war, and motions have been made to the Supreme Court to cancel this unfair decision and to allow the public to practice their freedom of expression. The Mossawa Center organized a meeting for Arab lawyers to discuss the current situation and suggest different solutions to end the silence, and Adv Khaled Mahag’ni shared his worry regarding the incitement campaigns against Arab lawyers.
“Incitement against Arab lawyers is based on coordination between the Israeli political and security establishment with extremist Jewish groups in order to prevent Palestinian lawyers from carrying out their professional and national duty,” he said. “This is happening in the face of the unprecedented arrest campaign that Israel has initiated since the beginning of the war to prevent any Palestinian political activity or discourse and to limit the rights of Palestinians, who have the right to express their opinion, such as calling for an end to the war and demanding an end to the killing of innocent people.”
Silencing the Palestinian public in Israel is one thing, but silencing lawyers and other voices of justice is just another sign the state of Israel is not the democracy it claims to be. Palestinian lawyers will keep advocating for the rights of the Palestinian people despite the vicious campaigns against them and the continuous attempts to silence them out of a belief in the sanctity of the law, equal rights for all citizens, and that nothing can silence our voices against injustice.
Democracy? Democracies don’t imprison people without trial.
Behaviors, as reported, on 10-7 were contrary to international laws and norms and deserve to be condemned. To do so, it would be helpful to reliably know details and also the orders issued that day.