TEHRAN – Israel’s Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman from the Likud Party has acted in accordance with the wishes of National Security Minister Itamar Ben- Gvir to use crocodiles as prison guards where Palestinians are kept.
Silman’s legally questionable decision, reported on by several Hebrew outlets, was made on July 15 despite longstanding protest from the Nature and Parks Authority against Ben- Gvir’s plans to surround detention facilities with the large reptile, The Times of Israel reported.
Ben-Gvir, a notoriously bloodthirsty minister, first proposed jailing Palestinian security inmates in crocodile-surrounded facilities in a December meeting with Prison Service chief Kobi Yaakobi.
Reclassifying crocodiles as tended, which, in this instance, refers to providing some level of management or care to an otherwise wild species, will allow them to be held in facilities other than licensed zoos or sanctuaries.
“We need to protect them; they don’t need to protect us. This isn’t the spirit of the law,” one official in the environment ministry told the two right-wing ministers, according to Ynet.
According to Hebrew reports, Ben-Gvir is seeking to first introduce the crocodiles to Ketziot Prison, a facility in southern Israel, holding Palestinian inmates.
A few weeks ago, Ben-Gvir and Silman met with Nature and Parks Authority chief Raya Soraki and the Environmental Protection Ministry’s legal adviser, where they insisted on the plan to use crocodiles in prison facilities.
According to Ynet, the ministry’s legal adviser warned Silman that she had no authority to unilaterally lay the groundwork for the use of crocodiles in prisons, but the Likud minister issued a decision nevertheless.
Israeli extremists leave no stone unturned to terrorize Palestinians psychologically. They seek to keep Palestinian prisoners in a constant state of fear by exposing them to the threat of attacks by these wild animals.
While prison guards have used dogs to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners, it is not far-fetched to imagine them deliberately placing detainees in situations where they could be mauled by crocodiles.
Also, given that Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, has been held in detention for 18 months without charge or trial and has reportedly been subjected to routine beatings with hammers and batons, the decision to use crocodiles as prison guards is not entirely unexpected.
In an opinion piece on July 18, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said, “Ben-Gvir is taking Israel to the next stage in its development: barbarism as a legal and explicit state policy. In tandem, the minister of national security is bringing sadism out of the closet as well. Sadism is no longer just for deviants; it is the new political correctness.
“After years in which barbarity and sadism toward Palestinians were hidden as something shameful and repressed – and mainly as the exception to the rule – Ben-Gvir is moving them to center stage to great applause from some of the crowd and silence from the rest.”
The newspaper added, “Ben-Gvir has passed his latest crackpot idea of employing crocodiles as part of the Israel Prison Service’s roster through all the required legal stages. In regimes in which characters such as Ben-Gvir are cabinet members, anything could be made completely legal.”
The legal adviser at the Environmental Protection Ministry did oppose the move, but her minister, Idit Silman, managed to change the status of the crocodile into a “wild animal fostered for security purposes.” This is an important breakthrough for her partner in the cabinet, who wishes to inaugurate the first crocodile prison in Israel.”
The newspaper also compared Ben-Gvir’s decision to introduce crocodiles as prison guards to Theodor Herzl’s convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. “Herzl founded the Jewish state in Basel and Ben-Gvir improved it at Ketziot Prison,” it said.
The newspaper also said Ben-Gvir’s crocodile prison has nothing to do with national security, saying, “This is but one more display of evil for the sake of evil, a performance meant to satiate the darkest impulses of the masses, orchestrated by Ben-Gvir.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: tehrantimes.com
