Dish alum Zack Beauchamp illustrates the consequences of the West Bank’s two-tiered criminal justice system on young Palestinians:
Take stone-throwing, a historically common Palestinian attack on Israelis that some Jewish settlers have adopted. 45 percent of all Palestinians arrested were convicted, and exactly zero of the 54 arrested Israelis were. … Now, since most stone-throwers are likely Palestinians, it makes sense that many more Palestinians would be arrested for that particular crime. However, it turns out that Palestinians are also more likely to be indicted (conviction data wasn’t available) than Israelis in general. Once again, the difference in legal system is the clearest explanation. It’s much easier to arrest and detain Palestinians in military courts than Israelis in civil ones. That makes it correspondingly easier for prosecutors to get what they need for indictments.
Roi Maor provides more background that complicates the picture a little:
The most important fact overlooked in the article is that the Israel Police, which provided the figures, does not investigate crimes committed by Palestinians against other Palestinians. These investigations are carried out by the Palestinian Authority. On the other hand, the Israel Police investigates all crimes committed by Israelis in the West Bank, regardless of the nationality of the victim. It is only natural then, that Israelis will be massively overrepresented in its arrest statistics. This overrepresentation is exacerbated by the fact that many crimes committed by Palestinians against Israelis are also investigated by the Palestinian Authority, depending on the nature of the crime and the residence of the perpetrator.
Second, Beauchamp seems to have missed the fact that the figures provided to AP are solely about minors. Admittedly, AP does not do a good job of highlighting this distinction, but it does mention it twice in the same short piece. Why does it matter? Because until October 2010, Israel defined the age of minority differently for Israelis and Palestinians. For the former, it was up to the age of 18, for the latter it ended at 16. The figures provided by the Israel Police are for 2008-2013, and it is unclear which definition the police used. Knowing their record-keeping practices, I would venture to guess it is based on a chaotic mix of both definitions.
An interactive feature from Al Jazeera explores the matter of youth detention in more depth:
About 700 Palestinians under the age of 18 are detained in the occupied territories annually. Since 2000, more than 8,000 Palestinian youth have been arrested. Most are detained on charges of throwing stones. As of March 1st, 210 Palestinian youth were held in Israeli detention. A 2013 UNICEF report concluded that the mistreatment of Palestinian children in Israel’s military detention system is “widespread, systematic and institutionalised”.
The Dish 