30 May 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
A leading
human rights activist
from
Israel’s
Palestinian Arab minority was charged yesterday with
the most serious security offences on Israel’s statute
book, including espionage.
Prosecutors indicted Ameer
Makhoul, the head of Ittijah, an umbrella organisation
for Arab
human rights groups
in Israel, with spying on security facilities on
behalf of
Hizbollah
after an alleged meeting with one of its agents in
Denmark in 2008.
Mr Makhoul, who had been
held incommunicado by Israel’s secret police, the Shin
Bet, for much of the time since his arrest three weeks
ago, appeared in court and pleaded not guilty. In his
first public statement, he told the court: “The Shin
Bet controls the Israeli justice system.”
As a gag order was lifted
on the case, his lawyers said Mr Makhoul had been
tortured during his detention, including being told by
interrogators that they would leave him “disabled”.
The three lawyers said he had been forced to make a
false confession,
which they would argue was inadmissible.
Mr Makhoul’s arrest had
angered many in Israel’s Palestinian minority, nearly
a fifth of the population, who suspect he is being
persecuted for his leading role in promoting
internationally the boycott movement against Israel
and his prominent opposition to Israel’s attack on
Gaza
nearly 18 months ago.
He has been backed by human
rights groups abroad, including
Amnesty International,
which declared him a
prisoner of conscience
and accused Israel of “pure harassment”.
Mr Makhoul’s brother,
Issam,
a former MP for a joint Jewish-Arab party, told Israel
Radio yesterday that Mr Makhoul had been threatened by
the Shin Bet back in January 2009, shortly after he
organised protests against the Gaza attack. The Shin
Bet had told him that they would frame him and “make
him disappear”,
Issam Makhoul
said.
Mr Makhoul’s wife, Janan,
who saw her husband in court for the first time since
he had been arrested, said he was in constant pain and
had impaired vision. She added: “He is very exhausted
and he told me about the torture he underwent in his
interrogation. Thirty-six hours without sleep tied to
a chair stuck to the floor.”
Mr Makhoul, 52, is charged
with assistance to the enemy in a time of war,
conspiracy to assist an enemy, aggravated espionage
and contact with a foreign agent. According to the
indictment, he passed on “strategic intelligence” to
Hizbollah agents on at least 10 occasions via
encrypted e-mails.
The militant Lebanese group
is said to have used Mr Makhoul, whose organisation is
based in the northern city of
Haifa, to
provide information on security installations in the
north.
Mr Makhoul is alleged to
have provided details of the locations of two Shin Bet
facilities, a Mossad office, a military base and a
Rafael armaments factory, as well as trying
unsuccessfully to gather information on the security
arrangements of
Benjamin Netanyahu,
the prime minister, and
Ehud Barak,
the defence minister.
A senior Shin Bet officer
told the liberal
Haaretz newspaper:
“Part of the information that Makhoul transferred
could be delivered by anyone with a pair of eyes and
Google Earth
[a computer program providing satellite images]. But
Makhoul, as an Israeli Arab, has
freedom of movement
and access across Israel.”
Prosecutors also accused
him of passing on the names of six Israelis as
potential spies and providing analysis of trends in
Israeli politics and society.
Hizbullah,
prosecutors suggested, was especially keen to learn
about its success in hitting Israeli security
installations with rockets during its military
confrontation with Israel in 2006.
In a related case, Omar
Said, 50, a pharmacologist and political activist, was
charged yesterday in a Nazareth court with contacting
and transferring information to Hizbollah after
meeting an agent in the Sinai resort of Sharm El
Sheikh. He denied the allegations and said he too had
been forced into making a confession.
Hassan Jaja, a Lebanese
businessman living in Jordan, is alleged to have
initiated contacts between Hizbollah and Mr Said and
Mr Makhoul.
The Adalah legal centre,
which represents Mr Makhoul, said his indictment was
based on a confession extracted during nearly two
weeks in which he was denied a lawyer, kept in a small
isolation cell, deprived of sleep and food, and
shackled in a painful position to a small chair.
The combination of methods,
known in Hebrew as the “Shabeh”, created high levels
of mental stress and acute, continuous physical pain,
said Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah. The
interrogation method violates international law and
was banned by Israel’s supreme court in 1999.
Hasan Jabareen, head of
Adalah, said that, when Mr Makhoul complained of
serious pain, the interrogators tied him even tighter,
threatening that he would be “left disabled”.
Issam Makhoul said the
family was concerned that the court had denied his
lawyers the right to see a medical report from a state
physician who visited him twice during his
interrogation.
Ms Baker said recent
amendments to Israel’s security laws had given the
Shin Bet “dangerous powers” to deny suspects the right
to see a lawyer for up to 21 days, with limited
judicial oversight.
Such powers were being used
almost exclusively against Palestinian citizens held
in detention, she said, though the state had refused
to provide figures on how frequently the law was being
employed.
She said, during periods
when suspects could not see a lawyer, interrogators
were more likely to use illegal torture methods.
A report by the Abu
Dhabi-based National newspaper in January 2009
supports Issam Makhoul’s claim that his brother was
threatened in an earlier Shin Bet interrogation. Mr
Makhoul told the paper at the time that a Shin Bet
officer “called me a rebel threatening the security of
the state during time of war and said he would be
happy to transfer me to Gaza”.
Mr Makhoul’s case, said
Mohammed Zeidan, head of the
Human Rights Association
in Nazareth, had left everyone in Israel’s
human rights community
“afraid”. “The Shin Bet wanted to take him out of the
game and they have succeeded,” he said. “Ameer has
been disappeared.”
Mr Zeidan added that the
case had strong echoes of what he called recent
“unwarranted legal assaults” by the Shin Bet on two
other Palestinian leaders in Israel.
Sheikh
Raed Salah,
of the popular Islamic Movement, was arrested in 2003
and spent two years in jail awaiting trial on charges
of assisting a terror organisation before he was
released in a
plea bargain
in which he admtted only financial misdemeanours.
Since 2007
Azmi Bishara,
the leader of the Balad party, has been in exile after
he was accused of espionage while out of the country.
Critics say the Shin Bet effectively silenced him
without having to produce evidence.
“It has become clear over
the past few years that this could happen to any of
us,” he said.
On Wednesday, in a related
development, the parliament passed the first reading
of a “loyalty bill”, introduced by the far-right
Yisrael Beiteinu
party, that would strip anyone found guilty of
espionage of their citizenship.
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran
and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East”
(Pluto
Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website is
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