The Effects of Wartime on Discrimination in the Punishment of Arab vs. Jewish Defendants in the Israeli Criminal Law System

Abstract

The present article follows upon a previous one dealing with the discrimination of Arab defendants in Israel. If focuses on the effect of wartime on this discrimination by analyzing the acceptance or rejection of requests on behalf of Jewish compared to Arab defendants to revoke convictions in misdemeanors by Israeli magistrate courts in the past 20 years, as a function of periods of heightened hostilities and the judges’ ethnicity. The findings contradict those of the few and outdated studies conducted in the West, by pointing to the lack of influence of wartime situations, regardless of the judges’ or the defendants’ ethnicity. The conclusion is that particular periods of heightened hostilities do not affect the punitive policy against ethnic minorities in a country that consistently discriminates such minorities and is constantly engaged in war or violent conflict.