Pot Apartheid - pot for me (jews) but not for thee (Palestinians)

[yankeedoodle]

POT APARTHEID
Jewish Israelis Smoke Weed Without Fear. Their Palestinian Neighbors Face Harsh Penalties.
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/30/israel-palestine-weed-cannabis/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter

IN BARS AND cafes across Israel, the air is thick with cannabis smoke. For years, smoking weed has been socially permissible in Israel despite being technically illegal. Patio tables in cities like Tel Aviv are dotted with people openly rolling joints and lighting up without a second thought. Ironically, smoking pot is tolerated in more public places in Israel than in countries like Canada, where recreational cannabis is legal. In Israel's trendy cafes and middle-class Jewish neighborhoods, police often turn a blind eye.

As is true of many of the freedoms enjoyed by Israeli citizens, however, the open consumption of cannabis stops at Israel's separation wall, beyond which Palestinians are economically, militarily, and legally denied many of their most basic rights.

While there is a budding cannabis culture in the West Bank — tobacco stores there openly sell weed paraphernalia like rolling papers and grinders — Palestinians, who live under military rule, face serious legal jeopardy if they are caught firing up.

In the dusty occupied hills west of the Jordan River, segregation shapes the smoking experience of Palestinians as much as every other aspect of Palestinian life. For Israelis, the police's relaxed attitude toward weed carries over to the occupied West Bank. Rather than face military justice, Israelis living in Jewish West Bank settlements are protected by an entire legal system built on inequities so rife that it has contributed to Israel being accused of the crime of running an "apartheid" system.

The disparity in treatment for Palestinians and Israelis when it comes to cannabis constitutes a facet of this system that might be called weed apartheid. A Palestinian and Israeli breaking the same law in the same place in the West Bank, for instance, will be dealt with by different security forces and processed in different legal systems.

"You have an underlying reality in which Jewish Israelis, no matter where they live, are governed under a single regime and have the same legal rights," said Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch's Israel and Palestine director, "while at the same time Palestinians living in the same territory are governed under different sets of legal rules."

Shakir was deported from Israel because of his work with Human Rights Watch, an organization that has accused Israel of the crime of apartheid. He said the discrepancies in legal treatment of Palestinians and Israelis in the occupied territories for minor crimes such as cannabis possession stand as an embodiment of Israel's system of segregation.

Israel, he said, "has to use creative legal mechanics to apply criminal law individually to Jewish Israelis living in a territory, while Palestinians living in the same territory are governed under draconian military law." He added, "This is done as part of a comprehensive policy to privilege one people at the expense of another."

Carved-Up Jurisdictions
Even former Israeli military officers acknowledge the reality of the dual legal systems for cannabis. "In many circumstances there is parallel jurisdiction and then it is a question of policy as to where that is applied," said Lt. Col Attorney Maurice Hirsch, a top official at the right-wing group Palestinian Media Watch, who served as Israel's chief military prosecutor from 2013 to 2017.

Hirsch was the top lawyer in a system in which cases get argued in front of military officers rather than civilian judges and convictions can send Palestinians civilians to military prisons. He contends that much of the time, however, a Palestinian arrested for cannabis in a case where there is no perceived Israeli victim will be handed over to the Palestinian Authority police.

The former prosecutor gave an example of two people in the West Bank, an Israeli and a Palestinian, who get caught with cannabis. "The Israeli will be subject to a fine according to whatever the process may be," said Hirsch, who also served as legal council for the right-wing pro-Israel organization NGO Monitor. "The Palestinian will not be dealt with by the Israeli law enforcement."

The Oslo Accords split the West Bank into three areas. Roughly two-thirds of the West Bank is Area C, under full Israeli control. Area B is divided between Israeli security and Palestinian administrative control. Area A, which denotes major Palestinian population centers, falls under the administrative and security control of the Palestinian Authority, the body that administers limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territory.

In practice, however, the bifurcated legal system exists across the West Bank: Israel's military can operate freely in all parts of the territory, regardless of who's officially in charge, which means that Palestinians in Area A can still be subject to Israeli military law. Israeli civilians, on the other hand, are always subject to Israel's civil justice system; even if they are detained by Palestinian police, they cannot be prosecuted by the Palestinian Authority and must instead be handed over to the Israeli authorities.

While Palestinians can be handed over by Israeli forces to the Palestinian Authority, for more serious drug offenses considered to have an impact on Israel — like cannabis smuggling or large-scale cultivation — they are likely to end up in military court where conviction is almost a forgone conclusion. (The Israeli military, Israeli national police force, and Palestinian Authority police all declined to comment for this article or provide any statistics on cannabis-related offenses.)

No matter which system they end up in, Palestinians charged with cannabis-related crimes face harsh sentences. Hirsch noted with pride that the Palestinian Authority's stiff anti-drug laws are taken from Israeli military law. Palestinians charged with minor possession by the Palestinian Authority, for instance, regularly face three- to six-month prison sentences.

Growing in the West Bank
For Palestinians, weed apartheid in the West Bank is all downside. Not only do they live under a harsher criminal justice regime for cannabis, but access to quality bud is also a complicated process. Ali, a 30-year-old West Bank Palestinian who asked that his real name not be used for fear of legal repercussions, used to rely on friends from occupied East Jerusalem to connect to a dealer and then risk crossing a checkpoint to bring him the contraband.

Because Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, along with Palestinian citizens of Israel, are allowed to travel freely between the West Bank and Israel, they had access to the same weed as Jewish Israelis. Palestinians from the West Bank, however, need permits to cross the checkpoints that separate them from both East Jerusalem and Israel.

When Ali became fed up with choosing between the risk and the inconsistency of the product, he decided to grow himself. Saving seeds found at the bottom of a few eighth bags, he grew plants in his closet and then crossbred his own strain called "Umm Ali" — denoting a familial relationship in Arabic — with a mix of other strains. "I know of at least three people who are growing. Most are just growing plants in their windows," Ali said. "It's more stable than dealing with dealers."