Israel to Revive Deportation as Anti-Terror Move

Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday deferred for the second time a decision on a proposal to broaden the death penalty for terrorist crimes, but it resolved to revive other, long-unused sanctions against terrorism-related activities.

The moves, announced after the regular weekly Cabinet meeting, appeared to be a minimal response by Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ national unity coalition to three recent killings apparently motivated by Palestinian nationalism and resulting in a public clamor for harsher measures against terrorism.

The Cabinet decided to revive administrative detention and deportation of Palestinian Arabs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip who are deemed to be security risks. Jewish settlers in the occupied territories are subject to Israeli, rather than military, law and will therefore not be liable to the same penalties.

Already Available

Cabinet Secretary Yossi Beilin explained that the decision involved applying “the laws which are (already) available to the Israeli government.”

“There were no changes in the law itself,” he added.

A Cabinet communique released after the six-hour meeting said that the sanctions will be applied according to existing procedures for a trial period, during which the procedures will be evaluated.

Administrative detention is a sanction under which authorities can imprison indefinitely an Arab resident of the occupied territories without formal charges and without trial. Detention orders must be approved by a military judge.

Authorities used the procedure for the first time in four years last week, when they detained a West Bank Palestinian who had been freed in May as part of a prisoner exchange. The man, Ziad abu Ein, had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1982 for killing three people and wounding 30 in a bomb assault in Tiberias in 1979.

In the decade before 1981, about 700 Palestinian Arabs were jailed without trial under the procedure.

Nearly 900 Palestinian Arabs were deported in the years immediately after Israel’s capture of the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War. But none are believed to have been expelled since May, 1980, when two former West Bank mayors--Mohammed Milhem of Halhoul and the the late Fahd Kawasmeh--were deported after the slayings of six Jewish settlers in Hebron.

Right to Appeal

That incident resulted in clarification of the accused’s right to appeal a deportation order to the Israeli Supreme Court. Beilin emphasized Sunday that the appeal option remains, but he added that the state attorney’s office will do what it can to expedite judicial proceedings in expulsion cases up to the final stage.

Cabinet members split on a proposal to make the death penalty mandatory in at least some terrorist murder cases, Israel radio reported. As a compromise, they resolved to pass on to the Ministerial Legislation Committee “various points made in the debate on this issue.” The committee is then to report back “for the Cabinet to decide.”

The issue of capital punishment came up at a Cabinet meeting a week ago, when the ministers put off a debate until Sunday’s session.

Israel radio said that arguments for the death penalty were led by Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Industry and Trade Minister Ariel Sharon, Transportation Minister Chaim Corfu and Moshe Arens, minster without portfolio--all from the rightist Likud bloc.

Group in Opposition

Leading the opposition to the proposal were Health Minister Mordechai Gur, Economic Planning Minister Gad Yaacobi and Ezer Weizman, minister without portfolio, all of the Labor alignment, and Tourism Minister Avraham Sharir of Likud.

Israel radio quoted Peres as saying during the debate, “I’m proud that the only gallows ever erected in Israel was for (Nazi archcriminal Adolf) Eichmann.”

In other moves to deter terrorism, the Cabinet resolved to expand prison facilities in the occupied territories and pledged to close down Arab-language newspapers that violate censorship laws.

The Israeli actions come in the wake of the killings of three Israeli Jews from Afula, south of Nazareth, in the last two weeks. Three West Bank Arab youths are in custody on charges of killing two Afula schoolteachers July 21. An Afula man was shot to death in the West Bank city of Nablus on July 30, but no one has yet been arrested for that crime.