Court Protocol
- - - - by Batya
I received this and think you may find it interesting.
Court Judge: Yitzhak Shioni, Vice President 24/5/2005
State of Israel vs. Shai Yishaiayu Malcha Ariel Weingruber
The defendants represented themselves.
Protocol
Defendents: We are representing ourselves and do not wish to be represented by a lawyer.
Prosecuting Attorney: The defendants were arrested on the 15/5 during a search of the headquarters of the National Home on Reines Street. They are suspected of establishing and organizing a civil disobedience movement for struggling against the disengagement, for instigating revolt in such that they organized activities to block roads and forbidden gatherings, and as a result of that endangered human life on public thoroughfares throughout the country on the day that was designated try 'tryout.' The suspects were arrested one day prior to the demonstrations. We requested an extension of arrest and the courts gave us one day. After that we requested a further extension and the court rejected our request and ordered that the suspects be freed with restrictions. We appealed to Justice Inbar who reversed the decision of the lower court and in his decision declared that the two suspects endangered the public, and there was reasonable cause to suspect interference with the continuing investigation and extended their detention for another four days as per the original request. Afterwards we submitted a request for an addition extension last Friday and we were granted a five day extension until today. The respondents submitted an appeal to the District Court through their attorney Wertzberg which was rejected unconditionally. Yesterday they appealed to the Supreme Court and we spent the entire day there, though at the last moment they withdrew their appeal. Today we are again before the Court to request an additional extension of seven days to complete the investigation. I submit all previous protocols for extension of detention. I submit records of all the investigations that we intend to complete and that we completed from the first extension and all the extensions. I submit a document which details all the investigations which we have carried out until today and those that we wish to undertake as a result of developments resulting from the investigation as well as the cause of arrest that we are requesting. I note before the Court that I will point out to the Court whatever it wishes to see. I would like to add two points. The deeper we get into the investigation the more we discover and the wider the circles get of people we need to investigate. In general there is no cooperation, certainly not from the suspects who refuse to respond because they claim that this is a political investigation, and because of this the police are experiencing difficulties in conducting an investigation in these circumstances. The suspects have been interrogated twice. Since the last extension they have not been interrogated. We have detailed the investigations that we intend to carry out in the future, and let me add just two things in conclusion. First, since the arrest we have spent almost every day in court because of one action of ours and two of theirs. Last Friday, Sunday, and yesterday we were rushed to the Supreme Court twice for no purpose. Lastly, concerning the cause for arrest, this has been before the lower court twice, and there it was decided that the activities that the suspects intend to perform in the future endanger the public. This in light of the fact that the 'tryout' is a disturbance of public order and future activities will be determined on the basis of prevailing conditions. Tomorrow or any other time they may decide again to block thoroughfares, and the local court accepted the police's argument that there is a possibility that they will disrupt further investigations if they are released. In conclusion: I repeat our request and ask the court to grant an extension for an unspecified number of days, but I believe this will be our last request for an extension.
First Respondent: I would like first refer your Honor to the opening words of Oded (the prosecutor) who says we are suspected of creating an organization against the disengagement and in my opinion that is the reason that we are here. I refer the judge to what we feel is an attempt by the police to drag the entire discussion of this case towards this story and away from the level of public good and the question of freedom of speech into the realm of the criminal. We see this as a severe crippling of the basis of Israel as a democratic state with the rights of freedom of expression and the right to protest and to demonstrate. By virtue of bringing this as a criminal case we see a mortal injury to the foundations of the State. It is our feeling that they are attempting to turn one side of the political debate into criminals, by virtue of bringing them to investigations in handcuffs, before the cameras of the press. This is an attempt to label those leading the fight against the disengagement as violent criminals. I refer the court to the first instance of such a demonstration in Israel, which I believe was Menachem Begin's protest against accepting compensation from Germany. There the demonstration was declaredly violent, including entry into the Knesset. He was not detained for even one moment, nor was he investigated, nor did he enter the investigator's rooms. In the most extreme cases individuals were arrested on a individual basis and charged on a one-to-one basis with what they had done. In more recent history I point toward the students' battle, who also committed acts similar to those we are accused of, namely blocking roads. In addition the taxi drivers protest, the Histadrut labor union under Amir Peretz which closed down the entire nation in a much more extensive manner than that which we saw on Monday. I intend by this to show that our arrest is in contravention to all precedents, and this at a time when the demonstrations, and they were masses of people who are not willing to continue to be ostracized and outcast and rose up to protest a government that it feels is leading it to disaster. We are speaking of a disruption of the flow of life of the State- a disruption that is the side effect of every demonstration in a democratic state and part of the price that a democracy pays in order to continue to be free, and not to strip the claim of democracy from anyone who disagrees with the legitimacy of acts of the government. As far as endangering the public (the claim that blocking the roads inhibits the ability of rescue vehicles to travel and therefore is a threat to human life), the doctors struck and lives were lost and they were not considered a public threat. Lifeguards struck- which endangers peoples lives directly, and this was not considered a public threat. The only thing here that is endangered is the political endangering of the disengagement process. The strikes I have mentioned up until now were undertaken for salaries. People shut down the nation because of their financial claims, for the price of gasoline, for additional budgets. Here we are not talking of individual earnings or sectorial budgets, but an issue that we see as fatal decision of the State that will affect the lives of everyone who lives here. We are talking about a process that in our eyes is dangerous, and poses an immediate threat to lives in the State of Israel, and against this threat we are crying out. We are not a danger to the public, but an attempt to save it from the process that we are being threatened with. All of our activities, every the materiel that now in the hands of the police, was publicized to the media and on our site. Nothing was done underground. Everything we have said was public record, and that is known to the police. An additional point that I would like to make is that there is a deliberate attempt by the prosecution to attach to our entire struggle a label of violence, of violent people. There was mention in one of the prosecutions arguments of an incidence of an attack on Arabs who worked in the vicinity of one of the demonstrations. I would like to repeat a statement that was made to me by one of the investigators in one of the interrogations: He said that if the Prime Minister is injured in the near future they intend to nail me for ten years. In all of our proclamations and advertisements we call for an avoidance of violence. We repeat this all the time and in every document, as it is one of the fundamentals on which we act. I warn of the danger of the inhibition of speech which we are seeing here. Every democracy pays a price in order to continue to be called a democracy. One of the costs, even the disturbance of the normal way of life, comes when a a large body of the public is trampled and feels that all the normal 'legitimate' means are denied them. Even when they vote for a specific thing and then the policy is changed on them, after such a public invests all its energy and time in legitimate protest, there are other legitimate processes of protest in a democracy after all the steps outline by the law are exhausted. I am speaking of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a practice accepted in every proper democracy. It has been performed in France, in the USA, and in Russia. It appears that Israeli democracy is not yet aware of it and doesn't know how to apply the tools of democracy to such acts. The danger is that this too will be repressed as all other protest has, and a vacuum will be created that could lead to the kind of unfortunate violence that we saw ten years ago when protest was violently repressed and we found ourselves speechless before the political murder of the prime minister of Israel. I would like to explain to your Honor what we are requesting. We are honest faithful citizens of the State of Israel. We do not see ourselves as violent people attempting to overthrow the law of the State, but rather the opposite: people who are concerned about the State, love it, and are attempting to protect it from an authority that is attempting to destroy it. Therefore we will not agree to release with any restrictions. We request to be released like any other honest citizen of the State of Israel; to grant us our rights, including the right to freedom. We are also asking for the police to return to us all the equipment removed illegally from our offices. Material from the National Home, which they are claiming is incitement, which they claim is illegal material and should remain in their hands. The material they seized fits none of those categories and we request its immediate return. In a democracy there is civil disobedience, and in a dictatorship there is revolt and revolution. We request the Honorable Judge to reject the request of the police and to aid us in rescuing what remains of Israeli democracy. We have been treated like prisoners in the detention center, but have been denied basic rights which accrue to any prisoner. We have been denied access to prayer services, access to a courtyard, and kosher food we were only granted after four days in detention. It is worthy of the Court to know this as well. Second Respondent: It is impossible to look at everything that is happening here as just two individuals accused of violation of this or that law. The broader question is what causes a large segment of the population to go to the streets. What causes two exceptional soldiers who give the State everything they can, as well as a public between 7 and 70 to go out and get arrested in a protest against the authorities. I don't know exactly where this leads. Is it freedom of expression or where there are limits put on freedom of speech is it permitted for an individual to act against the injustice of a government. All protest by us and everything that we have done fits in the category of opening the eyes of the public to the political corruption, whether that means the buying of votes, the security aspects of those that claim there will be a disengagement from terror, the lack of compensation, the fact that the Prime Minister will leave thousands refugees without a roof over their heads and not knowing what will happen to them after the disengagement plan, as they have not been included in the budget, as the Minister of Finance has stressed that this does not fall under any article of the budget. There's no way to evaluate how much this all will lead to just like the train from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv which was supposed to cost X and in the end costs X squared. Shai and I are doing all this to attempt to enlighten the public to all this. The only public endangerment that is involved here is the danger we pose to the government in that we will succeed in convincing people. Beyond that, I repeat what Shai said that it is a fundamental cornerstone of democracy, as opposed to what happens today, that if a public who does not accept what the government is doing are trampled and not allowed to express themselves and are not allowed the venue of civil disobedience, there is a danger that it will explode in other manners that we are not interested in them at all. We are the last vent that exists for the public. Everything that we thought to do is in documents which we have signed or given public interviews. We have done nothing secretly and expressed ourselves publicly and therefore what the investigators claim regarding additional days of questioning are meaningless since everything we have done is public knowledge.
Decision
Before me is the request for continuation of the detention of the respondents, residents of the settlement Otniel, who have been under arrest since 15/5/2005, who's arrest has been extended several times, both by this court and the Court of Appeals in Jerusalem in an appeal that they heard. The respondents are accused of the crime of creating an organization and movement to encourage civil disobedience and revolt, incitement to revolt by advertisements, and being in possession of revolutionary proclamations, and endangering human life in public thoroughfares. I have reviewed the investigatory material, in the protocols of previous hearings and from the statements of the respondents, in particular the secret document which relates to the investigations that the police intend to complete. From these it is possible to conclude, as my fellow judges have concluded, that there is a reasonable suspicion that the respondents committed the crimes they stand accused of and there is pretext for extending their arrest for the purpose of continued investigation. The basis of this is public endangerment, as decided by Justice Inbar, in addition to the suspicion of obstruction of the investigation if the respondents were released. It is noted that the respondents, in their statements, as well as their arguments before the court, made a principled argument that this is a political investigation, and raised various points regarding the right to demonstrate, to protest, and freedom of speech, and relating to previous demonstrations that were violent in their opinion, and against whom no legal measures were taken as have been taken against them. I will also note that the police were restrained from competent and ongoing investigation by appeals and legal procedures that the respondents have instigated, including an appeal to the Supreme Court which was withdrawn at the last moment. In light of all the above, and based on the secret material which was submitted to me, I accept the request of the police and rule on the extension of the arrest of the respondents until Sunday the 29/5/2005 at 12:00.
As a footnote to the decision I instruct the protocol of the decision to be passed to the Officer of the Jail who will examine the claims of the respondents regarding the conditions of their imprisonment and other claims that were raised in the course of this hearing.
Justice Yitzhak Shimoni Vice President of the Court
Court Judge: Yitzhak Shioni, Vice President 24/5/2005
State of Israel vs. Shai Yishaiayu Malcha Ariel Weingruber
The defendants represented themselves.
Protocol
Defendents: We are representing ourselves and do not wish to be represented by a lawyer.
Prosecuting Attorney: The defendants were arrested on the 15/5 during a search of the headquarters of the National Home on Reines Street. They are suspected of establishing and organizing a civil disobedience movement for struggling against the disengagement, for instigating revolt in such that they organized activities to block roads and forbidden gatherings, and as a result of that endangered human life on public thoroughfares throughout the country on the day that was designated try 'tryout.' The suspects were arrested one day prior to the demonstrations. We requested an extension of arrest and the courts gave us one day. After that we requested a further extension and the court rejected our request and ordered that the suspects be freed with restrictions. We appealed to Justice Inbar who reversed the decision of the lower court and in his decision declared that the two suspects endangered the public, and there was reasonable cause to suspect interference with the continuing investigation and extended their detention for another four days as per the original request. Afterwards we submitted a request for an addition extension last Friday and we were granted a five day extension until today. The respondents submitted an appeal to the District Court through their attorney Wertzberg which was rejected unconditionally. Yesterday they appealed to the Supreme Court and we spent the entire day there, though at the last moment they withdrew their appeal. Today we are again before the Court to request an additional extension of seven days to complete the investigation. I submit all previous protocols for extension of detention. I submit records of all the investigations that we intend to complete and that we completed from the first extension and all the extensions. I submit a document which details all the investigations which we have carried out until today and those that we wish to undertake as a result of developments resulting from the investigation as well as the cause of arrest that we are requesting. I note before the Court that I will point out to the Court whatever it wishes to see. I would like to add two points. The deeper we get into the investigation the more we discover and the wider the circles get of people we need to investigate. In general there is no cooperation, certainly not from the suspects who refuse to respond because they claim that this is a political investigation, and because of this the police are experiencing difficulties in conducting an investigation in these circumstances. The suspects have been interrogated twice. Since the last extension they have not been interrogated. We have detailed the investigations that we intend to carry out in the future, and let me add just two things in conclusion. First, since the arrest we have spent almost every day in court because of one action of ours and two of theirs. Last Friday, Sunday, and yesterday we were rushed to the Supreme Court twice for no purpose. Lastly, concerning the cause for arrest, this has been before the lower court twice, and there it was decided that the activities that the suspects intend to perform in the future endanger the public. This in light of the fact that the 'tryout' is a disturbance of public order and future activities will be determined on the basis of prevailing conditions. Tomorrow or any other time they may decide again to block thoroughfares, and the local court accepted the police's argument that there is a possibility that they will disrupt further investigations if they are released. In conclusion: I repeat our request and ask the court to grant an extension for an unspecified number of days, but I believe this will be our last request for an extension.
First Respondent: I would like first refer your Honor to the opening words of Oded (the prosecutor) who says we are suspected of creating an organization against the disengagement and in my opinion that is the reason that we are here. I refer the judge to what we feel is an attempt by the police to drag the entire discussion of this case towards this story and away from the level of public good and the question of freedom of speech into the realm of the criminal. We see this as a severe crippling of the basis of Israel as a democratic state with the rights of freedom of expression and the right to protest and to demonstrate. By virtue of bringing this as a criminal case we see a mortal injury to the foundations of the State. It is our feeling that they are attempting to turn one side of the political debate into criminals, by virtue of bringing them to investigations in handcuffs, before the cameras of the press. This is an attempt to label those leading the fight against the disengagement as violent criminals. I refer the court to the first instance of such a demonstration in Israel, which I believe was Menachem Begin's protest against accepting compensation from Germany. There the demonstration was declaredly violent, including entry into the Knesset. He was not detained for even one moment, nor was he investigated, nor did he enter the investigator's rooms. In the most extreme cases individuals were arrested on a individual basis and charged on a one-to-one basis with what they had done. In more recent history I point toward the students' battle, who also committed acts similar to those we are accused of, namely blocking roads. In addition the taxi drivers protest, the Histadrut labor union under Amir Peretz which closed down the entire nation in a much more extensive manner than that which we saw on Monday. I intend by this to show that our arrest is in contravention to all precedents, and this at a time when the demonstrations, and they were masses of people who are not willing to continue to be ostracized and outcast and rose up to protest a government that it feels is leading it to disaster. We are speaking of a disruption of the flow of life of the State- a disruption that is the side effect of every demonstration in a democratic state and part of the price that a democracy pays in order to continue to be free, and not to strip the claim of democracy from anyone who disagrees with the legitimacy of acts of the government. As far as endangering the public (the claim that blocking the roads inhibits the ability of rescue vehicles to travel and therefore is a threat to human life), the doctors struck and lives were lost and they were not considered a public threat. Lifeguards struck- which endangers peoples lives directly, and this was not considered a public threat. The only thing here that is endangered is the political endangering of the disengagement process. The strikes I have mentioned up until now were undertaken for salaries. People shut down the nation because of their financial claims, for the price of gasoline, for additional budgets. Here we are not talking of individual earnings or sectorial budgets, but an issue that we see as fatal decision of the State that will affect the lives of everyone who lives here. We are talking about a process that in our eyes is dangerous, and poses an immediate threat to lives in the State of Israel, and against this threat we are crying out. We are not a danger to the public, but an attempt to save it from the process that we are being threatened with. All of our activities, every the materiel that now in the hands of the police, was publicized to the media and on our site. Nothing was done underground. Everything we have said was public record, and that is known to the police. An additional point that I would like to make is that there is a deliberate attempt by the prosecution to attach to our entire struggle a label of violence, of violent people. There was mention in one of the prosecutions arguments of an incidence of an attack on Arabs who worked in the vicinity of one of the demonstrations. I would like to repeat a statement that was made to me by one of the investigators in one of the interrogations: He said that if the Prime Minister is injured in the near future they intend to nail me for ten years. In all of our proclamations and advertisements we call for an avoidance of violence. We repeat this all the time and in every document, as it is one of the fundamentals on which we act. I warn of the danger of the inhibition of speech which we are seeing here. Every democracy pays a price in order to continue to be called a democracy. One of the costs, even the disturbance of the normal way of life, comes when a a large body of the public is trampled and feels that all the normal 'legitimate' means are denied them. Even when they vote for a specific thing and then the policy is changed on them, after such a public invests all its energy and time in legitimate protest, there are other legitimate processes of protest in a democracy after all the steps outline by the law are exhausted. I am speaking of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a practice accepted in every proper democracy. It has been performed in France, in the USA, and in Russia. It appears that Israeli democracy is not yet aware of it and doesn't know how to apply the tools of democracy to such acts. The danger is that this too will be repressed as all other protest has, and a vacuum will be created that could lead to the kind of unfortunate violence that we saw ten years ago when protest was violently repressed and we found ourselves speechless before the political murder of the prime minister of Israel. I would like to explain to your Honor what we are requesting. We are honest faithful citizens of the State of Israel. We do not see ourselves as violent people attempting to overthrow the law of the State, but rather the opposite: people who are concerned about the State, love it, and are attempting to protect it from an authority that is attempting to destroy it. Therefore we will not agree to release with any restrictions. We request to be released like any other honest citizen of the State of Israel; to grant us our rights, including the right to freedom. We are also asking for the police to return to us all the equipment removed illegally from our offices. Material from the National Home, which they are claiming is incitement, which they claim is illegal material and should remain in their hands. The material they seized fits none of those categories and we request its immediate return. In a democracy there is civil disobedience, and in a dictatorship there is revolt and revolution. We request the Honorable Judge to reject the request of the police and to aid us in rescuing what remains of Israeli democracy. We have been treated like prisoners in the detention center, but have been denied basic rights which accrue to any prisoner. We have been denied access to prayer services, access to a courtyard, and kosher food we were only granted after four days in detention. It is worthy of the Court to know this as well. Second Respondent: It is impossible to look at everything that is happening here as just two individuals accused of violation of this or that law. The broader question is what causes a large segment of the population to go to the streets. What causes two exceptional soldiers who give the State everything they can, as well as a public between 7 and 70 to go out and get arrested in a protest against the authorities. I don't know exactly where this leads. Is it freedom of expression or where there are limits put on freedom of speech is it permitted for an individual to act against the injustice of a government. All protest by us and everything that we have done fits in the category of opening the eyes of the public to the political corruption, whether that means the buying of votes, the security aspects of those that claim there will be a disengagement from terror, the lack of compensation, the fact that the Prime Minister will leave thousands refugees without a roof over their heads and not knowing what will happen to them after the disengagement plan, as they have not been included in the budget, as the Minister of Finance has stressed that this does not fall under any article of the budget. There's no way to evaluate how much this all will lead to just like the train from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv which was supposed to cost X and in the end costs X squared. Shai and I are doing all this to attempt to enlighten the public to all this. The only public endangerment that is involved here is the danger we pose to the government in that we will succeed in convincing people. Beyond that, I repeat what Shai said that it is a fundamental cornerstone of democracy, as opposed to what happens today, that if a public who does not accept what the government is doing are trampled and not allowed to express themselves and are not allowed the venue of civil disobedience, there is a danger that it will explode in other manners that we are not interested in them at all. We are the last vent that exists for the public. Everything that we thought to do is in documents which we have signed or given public interviews. We have done nothing secretly and expressed ourselves publicly and therefore what the investigators claim regarding additional days of questioning are meaningless since everything we have done is public knowledge.
Decision
Before me is the request for continuation of the detention of the respondents, residents of the settlement Otniel, who have been under arrest since 15/5/2005, who's arrest has been extended several times, both by this court and the Court of Appeals in Jerusalem in an appeal that they heard. The respondents are accused of the crime of creating an organization and movement to encourage civil disobedience and revolt, incitement to revolt by advertisements, and being in possession of revolutionary proclamations, and endangering human life in public thoroughfares. I have reviewed the investigatory material, in the protocols of previous hearings and from the statements of the respondents, in particular the secret document which relates to the investigations that the police intend to complete. From these it is possible to conclude, as my fellow judges have concluded, that there is a reasonable suspicion that the respondents committed the crimes they stand accused of and there is pretext for extending their arrest for the purpose of continued investigation. The basis of this is public endangerment, as decided by Justice Inbar, in addition to the suspicion of obstruction of the investigation if the respondents were released. It is noted that the respondents, in their statements, as well as their arguments before the court, made a principled argument that this is a political investigation, and raised various points regarding the right to demonstrate, to protest, and freedom of speech, and relating to previous demonstrations that were violent in their opinion, and against whom no legal measures were taken as have been taken against them. I will also note that the police were restrained from competent and ongoing investigation by appeals and legal procedures that the respondents have instigated, including an appeal to the Supreme Court which was withdrawn at the last moment. In light of all the above, and based on the secret material which was submitted to me, I accept the request of the police and rule on the extension of the arrest of the respondents until Sunday the 29/5/2005 at 12:00.
As a footnote to the decision I instruct the protocol of the decision to be passed to the Officer of the Jail who will examine the claims of the respondents regarding the conditions of their imprisonment and other claims that were raised in the course of this hearing.
Justice Yitzhak Shimoni Vice President of the Court