The absence of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria leads to an absurd situation where it is not possible to assure that the people representing terrorists, who receive information from imprisoned terrorists, are indeed attorneys.
The decision to leave Judea and Samaria outside the scope of Israeli sovereignty has many costs, in the political, security and Zionist aspects. It now seems that the absence of sovereignty leads to surprising and previously unrecognized security dangers as well.
Former military chief prosecutor Lieutenant-Colonel (res.) Morris Hirsch addresses one of these issues.
Atty. Hirsch, being familiar with the legal sphere in Judea and Samaria and dealing with terrorists’ attorneys, says that under the Oslo Accords, one of the authorities that was transferred to the PA, is the authority to award attorneys’ licenses. Although this permission should deal solely with professional issues, it has extremely serious security ramifications.
“This is a historical arrangement that is based on relating to Judea and Samaria as an area that is not under Israeli sovereignty, and even if it is under our control, we allow the local population to appear before military courts, including the attorneys”.
Hirsch’s comments indicate that the situation where military courts recognize the status of terrorists’ representatives as attorneys, allows them to enter the prisoners’ cells, meet with terrorists and converse with them on matters that do not necessarily relate to their function as representatives, to pass information from the imprisoned terrorists to parties outside of the prison and from parties outside of the prison to the imprisoned terrorists and among the prisoners themselves.
All of this is being done without Israeli supervision and no one from the Israeli authorities checks whether these are indeed attorneys or are parties who are involved with terror, and that the entire purpose of their visits to detention cells and prisons is to promote terrorist goals.
As mentioned, the situation is unsupervised and current mode of oversight is a result of the Oslo Accords, in which Israeli willingly chose to transfer authorities to the leadership of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, while in the past, the Palestinian Bar Association worked together with the Civil Administration and at least there was some sort of regulation. Currently, there is no way to know if the person to whom the Palestinian Bar Association has granted a license to practice law has actually studied law”.
Atty. Hirsch’s admonitions are consistent with the situation in which it has been discovered that Arab attorneys were supposedly representing terrorists but actually served as couriers for terrorists and as contact people between terror organizations and senior terrorists, and have aided in carrying out terror attacks, attempted terror attacks and in transferring monies to terrorist goals.