Incisive award-winning doco interrogates the framing and persistence of the military legal system that rules Palestinians living under occupation in the same territory as Israeli citizens who live under civilian law.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2012
The Law in These Parts 2011
Shilton ha chok
Putting the law itself on trial, this incisive documentary interrogates the framing and persistence of the military legal system that rules Palestinians living under occupation while Israeli citizens in the same territory live under civilian law. The Israeli Defense Force has applied military law in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for 45 years, as if the process had been legitimised by the passage of time. Filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz has persuaded the architects of the system – military judges and attorneys, including a former president of the Israeli Supreme Court – to submit, with varying degrees of sang froid, to interviews in which they are asked to consider the intent of the laws they crafted. He questions their relationship to justice, the rule of law and the problematic notion of a Jewish and Democratic State in which not everyone is Jewish. — BG