Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz’s Nov. 22 decision to end administrative detention against residents of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria was celebrated by those opposed to the practice, which they considered a gross miscarriage of justice.
Administrative detention, meaning imprisonment without trial, is an instrument granted to the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) as a preventative measure against the worst actors, such as terrorists, who threaten Israel’s national security. However, critics argue that it was misapplied against Jews in Judea and Samaria.
Perhaps the most blatant example is that of Ariel Danino, a resident of Yitzhar, a town in Samaria near Nablus (biblical Shechem). He spoke with JNS about his experience.
At about 2:00 a.m. on Oct. 29, 2023, Danino was taken from his family by masked police armed with rifles. Presented with an arrest warrant, the regular kind, not an administrative detention order, he told JNS that no crime was listed. It contained only his name and the signature of the judge. He turned to his wife in the doorway to tell her the warrant was illegal before being whisked away.
The investigatory part of his detention, which took place that morning at about 6:30 a.m., lasted 15 minutes, he said. An intelligence officer entered the room where he was being held and told him he had been arrested on suspicion of committing violence.
“I asked when and where and she said she couldn’t provide details,” he said. When he said it was a political arrest, she became agitated and left the room, ending the interview, he added.
Danino said that as he hadn’t participated in any violence, at that point he wasn’t overly concerned. People are taken in for questioning, mistakes are made and he would be free in a day or two, he thought.
He remained in prison for the next seven months. Danino was never charged with a crime or informed exactly why he was being held.
“For the entire seven months I was in jail, [the Shin Bet] never spoke to me at all,” he said, barring one incident in which he said several Shin Bet members pretended to be lawyers seeking to help him. Danino refused to speak with them.
He said he was treated well by the authorities at one prison, who knew the story and understood he had done nothing wrong.
Danino’s administrative detention is the longest of its kind in recent memory. Meir Ettinger, another Jewish resident of the territories, was held for 10 months and released in 2016.
“Administrative detention is detention without charge for a period of time that the defense minister decides,” Itzhak Bam, an Israeli attorney specializing in areas of criminal and administrative law, human rights and freedom of expression, told JNS.
“The state presents its evidence in camera and the detainee has no right to examine the evidence. In many cases, the detainee does not even know what the suspicion is; what they really think he has done,” he said. “It’s everything but habeas corpus. It’s everything but due process.”
Administrative detention orders against Jewish Israelis skyrocketed during the two years of former defense minister Yoav Gallant’s term. He applied them at least 30 times.
“During the whole history of the State of Israel, there were less than 30 administrative detentions against Israeli citizens. During Gallant’s [tenure at] the Ministry of Defense, there were more administrative detentions than in the previous 74 years,” said Bam.
The reason, he said, is that Gallant and the Shin Bet lowered the threshold for administrative detention, applying it not just to those who were “really dangerous” but to those who were just “really annoying.”
In Danino’s case, the original detention order was for four months. The day before his release, he was informed that the Shin Bet had extended his detention by three months.
It came as a shock, Danino said, admitting that it almost broke him. “If I hadn’t been in a cell with two friends, two other administrative detainees at that time, I don’t know if I would have made it through.”
Although administrative detention is intended to halt imminent terrorist threats, the irony of Danino’s case is that it appears he was helping national security. He had set up an emergency information center together with friends following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
“I can’t say for sure that I was arrested because of the information center, because it doesn’t say on the official arrest warrant why I was arrested. But when I was released from administrative detention, they handed me an order prohibiting me from contacting seven people, and those seven people are the seven people who were involved in the information center,” he told JNS.
The information center would seem worthy of a good citizenship award, not imprisonment. The volunteer group collected information about terrorist activity and incitement in Judea and Samaria by monitoring what was coming out of the Palestinian Authority and the social media of Arab municipalities.
The incitement that they discovered forced the Israeli army to take action, he said. It never occurred to Danino and his friends that they were doing something the authorities maybe wouldn’t appreciate. In the seven months he’s had to think about it, he said, he’s come to believe that the Shin Bet was working under the conception, false in his view, that taking action against terrorism incitement only invited more ferment and more trouble.
“They didn’t want these things investigated,” he said.
When he was finally released, he was hit with a six-month restraining order forbidding him to enter Judea and Samaria. That order had just expired when JNS spoke with him. Danino said he’d soon return to his home in Yitzhar.
He praised Katz’s decision to end administrative detentions of Israeli citizens, which he described as “courageous.” Danino accused Gallant of acting like a rubber stamp for what he said was the Shin Bet’s abuse of the practice.
Danino is against administrative detention altogether, whether applied to Arabs or Jews, though for different reasons.
“On the same day Gallant extended my administrative detention, he released 40 Arab detainees,” Danino said. “The initial reason given was that there was no room in the prison. When the prison service contradicted this, a new reason was offered—it was a gesture for Ramadan. If the terrorists are so dangerous, then why release them as a tribute to Ramadan? What is the logic? It really seems that it has become a political tool,” he added.
Several Knesset members tried to help him following his detention, chief among them Otzma Yehudit Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech, who acted like an adoptive mother to the detainees and often spoke of their plight to the press, he said. Others who helped were Likud MK Amit Halevy and Religious Zionism Party MK Simcha Rothman.
Legislation proposed by Rothman contributed to Katz’s decision, said Danino. The legislation would have forbidden security services from placing an Israeli citizen under administrative detention if that citizen wasn’t a member of a specified list of terrorist organizations. As there are no Jewish terrorist organizations, it would have brought the number of Jewish detainees to zero.
However, not everyone praised Katz’s decision.
Knesset member Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff and current member of the National Unity Party, called it a “dangerous error.”
Katz’s decision is “another step on the way to a serious escalation in Judea and Samaria, for which we will all pay … The target of the orders is not a law-abiding Jewish population, but extremist terrorist elements that tarnish and endanger us as a society,” he said.
MK Gilad Kariv of the Democrats Party said Katz’s decision “is giving an impetus to Jewish terrorism.”
Rothman however praised Katz’s decision as “moral, just and right,” telling JNS, “The State of Israel gave [the Shin Bet] this offensive tool because it deals with terrorist organizations with serious backing, such as Hamas, Islamic State and other murderous terrorist organizations. Other use constitutes an abuse of this tool.”