A special session took place on Wednesday, as part of the 8th Jerusalem Conference, on the Israeli Supreme Court ruling which authorized the 2005 expulsion of Jews from their homes in Gush Katif.
Following the session, Dr. Haim Shain, a lecturer in the Shaare Mishpat College, spoke toIsrael National News TV about the Supreme Court’s failure to stop the expulsion.
“In Israel we now have a division between two sectors: the small sector that would like to see Israel as a state like any other, and another, majority sector that wants to see Israel as a Jewish state,” said Dr. Shain. “The Supreme Court in Israel, however, leads the small group that would like to see Israel be like every other state, what they call a "country of all its citizens". Nobody there cared about what happened in Gush Katif. In other cases that I see, the Supreme Court keeps getting involved of its own volition, but in the case of Gush Katif it decided not to get involved.”
The Supreme Court Judges were asked by its residents to come to see Gush Katif for themselves before their decision on whether the expulsion violated citizens' rights, but they refused to do so.
Dr. Shain noted that if the expulsion had occurred in an Arab city, the Supreme Court would have been quick to stop it.
“If it was Umm al-Fahm, I can assure you that the Supreme Court would not allow that, even if the Knesset decided on it,” he said.
The session opened with an address by Shir Lev Ran, a teen who was expelled from his home in Gush Katif. He spoke of how difficult it was for him and his friends to cope with the expulsion. Lev Ran burst into tears during his talk as he recalled the emotional experience of being expelled from his home.
Deputy Finance Minister, Yitzhak Cohen, noted during the session: “The greatest fear is that such a thing could happen again. All the legal systems in Israel worked together to commit this crime. Even when illegal things took place during the disengagement, the Supreme Court went along with the government.”