Judges say defense minister’s decision to deny entry permits to 90participants in coexistence event ‘unreasonable’ and insensitive The High Court on Tuesday ordered Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman to grant entry permits to Israel to 90 Palestinians who are slated to attend an Israeli-Palestinian memorial service in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening, saying his decision to ban them was “unreasonable” and “imbalanced.”
Liberman rejected the ruling, saying it created an equivalency between “terrorists” and bereaved families.
The Palestinians were invited as participants at the annual ceremony, organized by the Combatants for Peace and the Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace groups as an alternative to the standard Israeli Memorial Day events.
“The defense minister’s decision fails to take into account the reality created over the years and the legitimate expectations of the participants in the ceremony,” the court wrote. “It completely ignores the harm to the bereaved families and the public who wish to carry it out in the manner in which it took place in previous years.”
The court said in its ruling that Liberman’s decision was “unreasonable” and “imbalanced” to such an extent that it had to intervene.
The Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories unit had told Liberman that the Palestinians who wereinvited posed no security threat and recommended that he grant thementry permits, but Liberman rejected the application, saying thatthe joint Israeli-Palestinian service was in “bad taste.”
“This is not a memorial ceremony, but a demonstration of bad tasteand insensitivity that hurts the bereaved families that are mostprecious to us,” he tweeted last Tuesday.
In its initial response against the petition challenging Liberman’sdecision, the state claimed that some of the Palestinians who weredue to attend had family members who were terrorists, butsubsequently admitted that it had no evidence to that effect andthat the participants did not pose a security threat.
The court had suggested that the parties work out a compromisewhereby only the Palestinians who were speaking at the event begranted entry permits, but that too was rejected by the defenseminister, the court document said.
Therefore, the court ruled that the army must grant entry to 90participants from the West Bank, the same number who were allowed toattend in 2016. In 2017, Palestinians were not allowed to attend.
The organizers welcomed Tuesday’s ruling, saying, “We are pleasedthat the court has made it clear that the defense minister also haslimits and that he has to keep his sense of taste to himself.”
Liberman slammed the court’s decision, saying it was equating“bereaved families with terrorists, victims with murderers.”“The ruling of the court damages the most unifying day for theIsraeli people,” he tweeted. “The final result is that instead ofunity, there is division.”
Speakers at the joint Israeli-Palestinian event will include authorDavid Grossmann, whose son was killed in the Second Lebanon War, andAmal Abu Sa’ad, whose husband Yaqoub Mousa Abu al-Qia’an was shotdead by Israeli police in Umm al-Hiran a year ago.
The organizers had argued that Liberman’s decision was made “withthe sole intent of hurting bereaved Israeli and Palestinian familieswho want to mark Memorial Day together through mutual respect andrecognition that pain and suffering are not theirs alone and do notbelong exclusively to any side.”
It is the thirteenth year the memorial service is being held, andPalestinians from the West Bank have attended every event apart fromlast year’s, which took place shortly after a Palestinian teenagerwho entered Israel with a one-day pass for a “Natural Peace tour”attacked four people in a Tel Aviv hotel with a pair of wire-cutters, lightly injuring all of them.
Last year, the West Bank Palestinians who planned to attend theceremony in Tel Aviv instead gathered in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem,to watch the proceedings on a television screen. The twoPalestinians slated to speak at the event delivered their remarksthrough pre-recorded videos.
On Tuesday night and Wednesday, Israel marks its Memorial Day, knownin Hebrew as Yom Hazikaron, honoring the thousands of fallensoldiers and terror victims.
The country observes moments of silence during the wailing of twosirens, one at 8 p.m. on Tuesday and another at 11 a.m. onWednesday. On Wednesday night, the country switches to celebratingIndependence Day.
Times of Israelhttps://www.timesofisrael.com/court-overturns-decision-to-bar–
palestinians-from-memorial-day-service/