Justice and occupation are as opposed as truth and hypocrisy, writes Abdallah Al-Ashaal* A US military court has passed a light sentence on a soldier convicted of torturing Iraqi civilians in Abu Ghraib -- apparently because the soldier was carrying out orders from above. Compare this with the Nuremberg trials when Nazi war criminals faced either execution or life sentences for crimes committed against enemy forces and local Jews. Then consider the case of Marwan Barghouti. The Palestinian parliamentarian and struggler was sentenced by an Israeli court -- a court that should not have jurisdiction over the case of a foreign diplomat abducted from a foreign land. I am referring here to the occupied territories, for this is a liberated Palestinian land under the Oslo Accords that Israel has not officially annulled. According to the accords, only Palestinian courts have jurisdiction over Barghouti. But Israeli law claims jurisdiction on acts that take place outside Israel, even on acts committed before Israel was created, and on foreign individuals kidnapped in foreign land. This is a legal aberration that the UN Security Council condemned in the case of the notorious Eichmann. Barghouti was sentenced for resisting occupation, a charge punishable under Israeli law but not under international law. What Israel should have done, had it had any respect for international law, would have been to pass the case on to the Palestinian Authority. Should the latter find any of the charges punishable under Palestinian law, it would act accordingly. The analogy is more painful once one considers the case of torture in Abu Ghraib. US soldiers who perpetrate war crimes in Iraq are faced with 12- month imprisonment. Barghouti received five life sentences to run successively for leading resistance against occupation -- an act that is legal under international law. Meanwhile, Israel is doing all it can to obstruct efforts to end occupation. It is telling the world that Palestinian groups do not recognize Oslo, that they want all of historic Palestine, that they are bent on destroying Israel, none of which is true. Israel is doing so in order to justify its crimes. If there is one thing in common between the US military court and the Israeli court, it is that both are occupation courts. German courts had no jurisdiction on the "crimes" of the French resistance against German invaders. The Americans who rose against British occupation in the eighteenth century (at a time when invasion was a common practice and occupation a trophy) were acting legitimately, or at least this is what the French government told the British when the latter protested against French naval assistance to American insurgents. France once treated the Algerian revolutionaries as terrorists but, following Algerian independence, French courts ruled that acts of resistance were legitimate and that French courts had no jurisdiction over Algerian rebels. The Allies tried German and Japanese war criminals according to international law, not according to the laws of the countries that occupied Germany and Japan. So why is not the free world outraged over Israeli trials of Palestinian strugglers? Why does it overlook the fact that Israeli courts are usurping a jurisdiction that is not theirs (something which the allies refrained from doing in the past)? Why are not human rights groups and the UN Commission on Human Rights raising hell about such rulings? But then, why should they? After all, the world has so far stood in silence as Israel committed acts of genocide against the Palestinians. After World War II, the victors set down international norms that remain applicable to Palestine. Moreover, German defendants were from a country that launched aggression against its neighbours, whereas Barghouti is a man who acted in defence of a nation under occupation, a nation faced with genocide. The legal aberration is stark and legal experts, here as elsewhere, must tell the world about it. * The writer is former assistant to the Egyptian Foreign Minister
