"We don’t need The Hague; we have the Kirya."

Gideon Levy

Haaretz's Gideon Levy offers this tough judgment on Israeli military justice in the wake of the Elor Azaria case:

This institution also knows how to richly reward and protect IDF soldiers and officers, just as the people want it to do and as their commanders expect it to do, and to turn its trials into perversions of justice. Only in this court could a senior officer like [Brig. Gen.] Ofek Buchris, who was charged with rape and sodomy, emerge with the draconian sentence of being demoted by one rank. That’s how cruelly the court treated him. 

Just like the IDF Orchestra isn’t an orchestra and Army Radio isn’t a media outlet, this court is not a court. But it is even more corrupting than the first two examples: It sends its demobilized metastases into the civilian justice system. 

Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit came up through this rotten environment, and so did more than a few judges, including some on the Supreme Court, who are convinced that they were doing justice all those years. They carry with them the glorious legal traditions of the prefab buildings at Ofer [Prison], and those traditions remain etched in them forever.

The decision of the court-martial is subject to appellate review.