The Prevention of Terror Ordinance (, Khok Sikul haTerror; ) is the statute used by the prosecution in most trials in Israel against suspects arrested by the Shabak, Israeli Police, Magav/Border Guard, or the Israel Defense Forces for security offenses. The PTO has been used in both military and civil courts, though they are applied in different ways. Generally, Arab residents of the West Bank or Gaza, being as they are subject to the Military Administration, are tried in military courts due to the lack of citizenship of a sovereign state. (The Palestinian National Authority [PNA] has only an administrative function, as the responsibility of Palestinian representation in the international community is still controlled by the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]). The PTO is also used very rarely in the case of Israeli residents who committed terror attacks, such as members of the 1980s Jewish Underground, as well as Arab Israelis who collaborate with Palestinian terror groups.
The Ordinance
The Ordinance was promulgated in September 1948 in the wake of the assassination by the Jewish underground group Lehi of the United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte. It was used to forcibly disband not only Lehi but also the larger group the Irgun.
Famous Defendants
Early Years
Since the prosecution of fedayoun leaders in the 1950s, many landmarks have been made in the use of this controversial statute. Kozo Okamoto, a member of the Japanese Red Army who committed the 1971 Lod Airport machine gun attack on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was given a life sentence and was released in 1997, long after the JRA itself had faded from the spotlight in Japan.
Convictions under the law increased exponentially throughout the 1970s, though most of the defendants were low-ranking PLO insurgents caught by patrols.
Domestic and Foreign Terror
The Gush Emunim Underground became the first Israeli organization to be charged with offences under the act. In the mid-1980s they were convicted for a series of car bombing attempts against Arab mayors in the West Bank, all of whom survived but were severely maimed. The Makhteret legal procedures coincided with the detention of many members of the Hizbullah organization, a Lebanese Islamist group that committed numerous attacks against IDF forces in southern Lebanon as well as civilians within Israel. Though it is unverified whether any Hizbullah members were convicted in civil courts, senior members of the group, including Mustafa Dirani and Sheikh Hassan Obeid, were convicted of security offenses in military courts due to the group's policy of kidnapping Israeli soldiers to ransom for captured comrades. Machteret legal teams used the Israeli policy of releasing senior Hizbullah officials and other terror convicts as justification for their own release, a process in the end succeeded, as by 1992 none of the group's suspects were still behind bars.
In the 1990s, as the Shabak began to warn against the proliferation of right-wing, messianic Jewish groups that rejected the authority of the Israeli government as heretical, the Attorney General's Office and Ministry of Justice considered using the law to prevent the growth of violent tendencies within Israel's Jewish population. In 1994, when Kach activist Baruch Goldstein committed the suicidal Hebron massacre, the Rabin government cracked down on the group's activities, as the Shabak increased its surveillance of activists, and leading figures such as Noam Federman, Baruch Marzel, and Itamar Ben-Gvir were put under house arrest. Though the legality of these measures has always been in question, the results have passed the test of time, as the effectiveness of Jewish terror groups in carrying out coordinated or group operations has been minimal, except for "lone wolf" attacks such as the 2005 Shfaram massacre.
Modern Enforcement
The eruption of the First Intifada in 1987 created the first situation where many residents of the West Bank and Gaza were brought to trial under the law. This situation was even more controversial than the 1970s trials of PLO terror suspects, because there were even defendants convicted of offences such as stone throwing.