Documentary Explores Israeli Legal System in Palestinian Occupied Territories. Oded Balilty/Associated PressActivists demonstrating against the construction of Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin in 2005.
BILIN, West Bank — Earlier this month, I finally watched “The Law in These Parts,” a documentary by the Israeli film director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, at the 7th International Conference for Popular Resistance. The film describes the legal system that Israel has applied in the Palestinian Occupied Territories since 1967, and it does so exclusively through interviews with members of the Israeli military legal corps who wrote and implemented the system. I saw the film in the Palestinian village of Bilin, just west of Ramallah. This was a fitting setting for the occasion. In 2007, a local councilor secured a rare judgment from Israel’s highest court that ordered the army to reroute the separation wall and return to the villagers hectares of land that had been taken away from them. Others were proud of their contribution. The law in these parts. The Law In These Parts - שלטון החוק. Can a modern democracy impose a prolonged military occupation on another people while retaining its core democratic values?
Since Israel conquered the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war, the military has imposed thousands of orders and laws, established military courts, sentenced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, enabled half a million Israeli "settlers" to move to the Occupied Territories and developed a system of long-term jurisdiction by an occupying army that is unique in the entire world.
The men entrusted with creating this new legal framework were the members of Israel's military legal corps. Explores this unprecedented and little-known story through testimonies of the military legal professionals who were the architects of the system and helped run it in its formative years. The Law In These Parts is sponsored by: (Israel Producer) Former managing director and senior producer at Belfilms, Israel. (Co-producer, USA) Ms. (Cinematographer) Mr. How the Occupation Became Legal by Eyal Press. This is the second in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.
In 1979, a group of Palestinian farmers filed a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice, claiming their land was being illegally expropriated by Jewish settlers. The farmers were not Israeli citizens, and the settlers appeared to have acted with the state’s support; indeed, army helicopters had escorted them to the land—a hilltop near Nablus—bringing along generators and water tanks. The High Court of Justice nevertheless ordered the outpost dismantled. “The decision of the court… proved that ‘there was justice’ in Jerusalem and that Israel was indeed ruled by Law,” exulted one Israeli columnist. But the frustration of the settlers did not last very long. Surprisingly little is known about the legal apparatus that has enabled and structured the occupation. The Israeli documentary putting military rule in Palestine on trial. The Law In These Parts, an Israeli documentary awarded this year's Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury prize, examines how the country created a military-legal system to control the Palestinians in the lands Israel occupied in 1967.
And at some point during the film, it becomes clear that it's the judges who are on trial. The documentary, which just screened as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival, features forceful archive footage, alongside a line-up of Israeli legal experts, explaining how they made Israel's occupation laws. Each judge sits in a black leather chair at a heavy wooden desk intended, you might first assume, to evoke a serious courtroom. But then, each is quietly interrogated by the film's narrator; asked to explain the military rule that they created. Why did Israel even need hundreds of new laws for occupied Palestinians?
This film successfully depicts the dense, crushing absurdities of Israel's military rule in a way that words don't always manage.