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Israel Holds Children Hostage
The Routine Decade-Long Practice Before October 7th
The profound frustration. Your child does not come from dinner. You don’t see them at all and worry all night. There is no sign. You have to go through checkpoints that take an hour, patted and frisked down unceremoniously by young, untrained soldiers, sometimes from foreign countries, until you arrive at a police station. The authorities stonewall and say they don’t know anything.
Days and days go by, you go through inquiry after inquiry, terrified that your child is dead. Then, finally, after a week, the authorities tell you they have your child, and you need to calm down.
Israel holds that most of these children were held in euphemism that stands for no human rights, no civil rights, and an absence of habeas corpus: “pre-trial detention.” This is an obvious authoritarian program against the norm for democracy, which is based on the foundational ideal of the law of habeas corpus, where these children have not been convicted of any offense.
This is the West Bank. The police station is the “Palestinian Authority,” another euphemism for an administrative apparatus that is not a government but controlled by the Israeli government, through laws that Israel has constructed. Those Palestinian administrators reliant on Israeli…
