Daily Alert Archives

To Defeat Terror, Lenient Sentences for Terrorists Must End

(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch - Many terrorists are being arrested in Gaza, as well as in Judea and Samaria. Arresting terrorists poses a particular problem: whereas a terrorist who has been killed cannot return to terror activity, a terrorist who has been temporarily detained does not lose his murderous ideology, and once released, he returns to action in the terror group. If the terrorists and infrastructure are destroyed in Gaza, but in Judea and Samaria the terrorists are not killed or arrested and the terror infrastructure is not dismantled, Israel will fail in its task of toppling these organizations. The question is, what must be done to ensure that these terrorists do not go back to business as usual and rebuild the terror infrastructure? In the Israeli legal system, including in the military courts, whereas the punishments for terror offenses stipulated by legislation are generally severe, in practice, the punishments handed down to the terrorists are very light. For example, the law - in Israel and in Judea and Samaria - authorizes judges to hand down a 20-year prison sentence to a terrorist convicted of stone-throwing. In actuality, if the terrorist gets a one-year term, it is a considerable achievement. Judges do not distinguish between cases in which it is appropriate to let the offender be rehabilitated and cases in which the offender, an enemy terrorist, is not interested in "rehabilitation" because he does not see his terror activity as morally flawed. So, for decades, thousands of terrorists have benefited from light punishments that are designed for common offenders and not for terrorists. Daily, thousands of terrorists benefit from lenient punishments, which defeats the whole purpose. Essentially, all that is needed to change the situation is a different approach by the State Prosecutor and the Military Prosecution in Judea and Samaria. For terror offenses, the prosecution's demand for punishment must differ from its demands for ordinary offenses. The prosecution must petition to sentence the convicted terrorist to the maximum sentence instead of beginning with punishment at the lowest level and then ascending level by level according to the severity of the offense. If this change does not start with the prosecution, it will not begin at all, as it will certainly not change on the initiative of the judges. There is no need to revise legislation, only to make a policy change that can be carried out immediately. The writer served for 19 years in the IDF Military Advocate General Corps and was director of the Military Prosecution in Judea and Samaria.
2023-12-25 00:00:00
Full Article