"When a citizen sees one of the most senior figures [in his country] brought to jail, he can wave his finger at the world and say, 'We have justice here!'"
By REBECCA MONTAGUpdated: AUGUST 8, 2017 23:51Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert(photo credit: YOTAM RONEN)
A senior columnist for the Saudi daily Al Jazirah – not to be confused with Al Jazeera – praised Israel’s justice system in his column last month. Dr. Jasser al-Harbash’s article, translated from Arabic by the Middle East Media Research Institute, stated that the justice system is the “secret of the Zionist entity’s advantage over his neighbors.”According to Harbash, Israeli citizens can be certain that they have justice because the most senior leaders of Israel have been imprisoned. Everyone is held accountable, even presidents and prime ministers.“When a citizen sees one of the most senior figures [in his country] brought to jail, he can wave his finger at the world and say: ‘We have justice here!’”Harbash went on to write that this is a key difference between Israel, which he called “the oppressor,” and the neighboring Arab nations, “the victims.”“When I saw the former Jewish prime minister in his small cell (from which he was released after serving two-thirds of his sentence), I looked away, not because I pitied him, but because it reminded me of the difference between the justice in the society of the oppressor [Israel] and the injustice in the societies of the victims [the Arabs] that surround it.”Israel’s Arab neighbors, however, have no such justice in their nations. This difference, the column concluded, allows Israel to maintain its status as an “honorable” nation despite accusations of injustice from the Arab world.
