Israel-Palestine: The Law In These Parts

[Elvis]

2 days ago at the Sundance Film Festival, the Israeli documentary The Law In These Parts, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, i.e. named best foreign documentary.

This film also won the 2011 best documentary award at the Jerusalem Film Festival. It is directed by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, who also directed the documentary Inner Tour.

The trailer for the film:


Description from the film's website:

Can a modern democracy impose a prolonged military occupation on another people while retaining it's core democratic values?

Since Israel conquered the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war, the military has imposed thousands of orders and laws, established military courts, sentenced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, enabled half a million Israeli "settlers" to move to the Occupied Territories and developed a system of long-term jurisdiction by an occupying army that is unique in the entire world.

The men entrusted with creating this new legal framework were the members of Israel's military legal corps. Responding to a constantly changing reality, these legal professionals have faced (and continue to face) complex judicial and moral dilemmas in order to develop and uphold a system of long-term military “rule by law” of an occupied population, all under the supervision of Israel's Supreme Court, and, according to Israel, in complete accordance with international law.

The Law In These Parts explores this unprecedented and little-known story through testimonies of the military legal professionals who were the architects of the system and helped run it in its formative years.

The film attempts to ask some crucial questions that are often skirted or avoided: Can such an occupation be achieved within a legal framework that includes genuine adherence to the principals of rule-of-law? Should it? What are the costs that a society engaged in such a long term exercise must bear? And what are the implications of the very effort to make a documentary film about such a system?

The team that worked on the film and it's funders can be seen here:
http://www.thelawfilm.com/eng

On Jan. 24th, The NYTimes published an OP-ED by the director, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, w/ a kind of 'excerpt'/synopsis video that is around 10 minutes. It is essentially an introduction to the documentary.

Link to the OP-ED and video synopsis:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/...ccupation.html

Reviews so far:

New York Review of Books:

Excerpt

It is the closest any of the film’s subjects come to admitting to a troubled conscience, and it made me wonder whether the experience of being cross-examined in the studio had forced Livny to grapple with the compromises he’d made. “Yes,” he told me when I reached him recently by phone, “it’s become an educational moment in my life. It enabled me to sit for three hours and really look inwardly and go through a process of understanding and come to grips, through the questioning, with my emotions, my feelings, with trying to understand the role I played.” I asked him if he ever looked back and thought he should have followed the lead of the hundreds of Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the occupied territories. “Never,” he said. “Because I realized that if I wouldn’t do it and somebody else would be in my place, that person would not even have the qualms that I showed.” Many of his colleagues viewed the settlements favorably, he told me. Some even lived in them. Few understood Arabic, which he spoke fluently. Still, he said, he regarded the system in which he’d served as a place where cultivating respect for the rule of law was impossible. “It is a kangaroo court.”

We spoke in early January, a week after Israel’s High Court ruled on a petition challenging the right of Israeli companies to mine in eight quarries situated across the Green Line. The materials are sold overwhelmingly to Israelis —“looting the West Bank,” in the words of Dror Etkes, a researcher formerly with the organization Yesh Din, which submitted the complaint—in seemingly clear violation of a provision of the Hague Convention requiring an occupying power to serve only as the “administrator” of such resources. The High Court rejected the challenge, ruling that the occupation has gone on for so long that the situation has acquired certain “unique characteristics.” About this, at least, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz might agree.

Collider Magazine:

Excerpt

Divided into five chapters, The Law in These Parts goes through the legal history of Israel’s occupation of Arab territories. Alexandrowicz interviews a handful of judges who were responsible not for implementing the justice of a democratic society, but for carrying out the orders of a military commander. Only judges who presided over occupation-related cases are interviewed, and as Alexandrowicz notes, “This film is not about the people who broke the law. It’s about the people who wrote the law.” The chapter structure does a fantastic job of explaining the various and shocking ways the laws were written and constructed to protect a democratic society at the cost of denying justice to another society.

[...]This is a cruel irony, but the great tragedy presented by The Law in These Parts isn’t the civil and human rights violations. It’s how judges twisted the law to change the definition of “justice” until it met the satisfaction of commanders and politicians. But the most pathetic, infuriating, and deplorable aspect of these men was how they justified their actions. They claim that history will be their judge. The Law in These Parts is the trial for these men, and History has made its ruling. The verdict is “Guilty.”

------

A partial list of the Israeli judges and military personnel (w/ their credentials cited) interviewed in the film:

http://www.thelawfilm.com/images/img1tn.jpg

• Justice Meir Shamgar (Brigadier General, Retired)
• Military Advocate General 1963-1968
• Judge, Supreme Court of Israel 1975-1995
• President of the Supreme Court 1983-1995

http://www.thelawfilm.com/images/img2tn.jpg

• Justice Amnon Strashnov (Brigadier General, Retired)
• Deputy Military Advocate General 1985-1987
• Military Advocate General 1987-1991

http://www.thelawfilm.com/images/img3tn.jpg

• Dov Shefi (Brigadier General, Retired)
• Legal Advisor,West Bank Military Command 1967-1968
• Military Advocate General 1979-1984

http://www.thelawfilm.com/images/img4tn.jpg

• Alexander Ramati (Lieutenant Colonel, Retired)
• Legal Advisor, West Bank Military Command 1973-1979
• Military Judge 1980-1981

http://www.thelawfilm.com/images/img5tn.jpg

• Jair Rabinovich (Major, Retired)
• Military Prosecutor 1977-1982
• Military Judge 1988-1992

http://www.thelawfilm.com/images/img6tn.jpg

• Jonathan Livny (Lieutenant Colonel, Retired)
• Military Judge 1976-1999

http://www.thelawfilm.com/images/img7tn.jpg

• Abraham Pachter (Lieutenant Colonel, Retired)
• Military Prosecutor 1967-1970

[Elvis]

I'll start this thread off by saying I didn't read a word of your post elvis and I seriously doubt anyone else will. however I'm going to israel next month so I'm wondering if there's anything you'd like me to pick you up, maybe some vials of israeli jewish blood and dust from the wailing wall to burn in a ritual to curse israel off the face of the planet?

How about you check yourself into a psychiatric clinic. That would be good for us both.

[solanis]

you have so much anger (you did make me laugh though)

[Elvis]

Why did you edit your post, lol?

[solanis]

it didn't convey my emotions properly

[Elvis]

Oh right, the first comment you made in the thread was far too subtle.

If you really are going to Israel though, check out the movie. Just practice some guided meditation before you go - I wouldn't want you to bust a vein over all those antisemitic former Israeli judges and military personnel!

[Ragnus]

Hmmm... probably going to be an interesting watch for me and the girlfriend since I'm generally pro- Palestine and she's generally pro- Israel.

[Kuya]

Are these the posts solanis got banned for?

[archibaldcrane]

Are these the posts solanis got banned for?

If not, an easy argument could be made for this one.

I'll start this thread off by saying I didn't read a word of your post elvis and I seriously doubt anyone else will. however I'm going to israel next month so I'm wondering if there's anything you'd like me to pick you up, maybe some vials of israeli jewish blood and dust from the wailing wall to burn in a ritual to curse israel off the face of the planet?

[Athas]

I don't get it. So a film with Isreali bias won acclaim at an Isreali film festival?

[Elvis]

I don't get it. So a film with Isreali bias won acclaim at an Isreali film festival?

Israeli bias? It won an award at Sundance and another at the Jerusalem Film Festival.

[Churchill]

I would like to make a film documented the impossibility of the holocaust occurring in such exaggerated numbers while still documenting the fact that it did happen and was a terrible thing to have happen.

Then I would segue into Post-WWII Palestine in a sort of X-Men metamorphosis. Possibly like a transformer.

"Once nearly exterminated by the Nazis...but the Nazis didn't account for one thing...THEIR POWERS BEING STOLEN" /movievoice.

[Mazmaz]

Hmmm... probably going to be an interesting watch for me and the girlfriend since I'm generally pro- Palestine and she's generally pro- Israel.

How does this even happen?

[archibaldcrane]

Which part?

[Correction]

Which part?

probably how pro-palestine can date pro-israel.

Clearly he just needs to watch Don't Mess With The Zohan.

[archibaldcrane]

Most people aren't so caught up in their IP politics that it's a make or break situation. Are either of you jewish?

[Mazmaz]

Most people aren't so caught up in their IP politics that it's a make or break situation.

More like why would I wanna keep dating someone who can't recognize human rights abuses, let alone supports them.

[Elvis]

More like why would I wanna keep dating someone who can't recognize human rights abuses, let alone supports them.

The angry sex. See: Curb Your Enthusiasm, in the episode titled "Palestinian chicken."

[Andalusian girls]

More like why would I wanna keep dating someone who can't recognize human rights abuses, let alone supports them.

why would you wanna keep dating someone who can't recognize terrorism, let alone supports it

[Demosthenes11]

why would you date someone that takes a side so strongly in a conflict where jews and muslims blow each other up to make points, let alone support one