That said, I cannot pretend that the evidence of torture in Israeli prisons does not concern me deeply. It is inevitable that a practice which might be necessary in extraordinary cases or even routine terrorism investigations is likely to become the standard in all interrogations, once it is formally made legal. Though the Israeli attempt to shoe-horn tactics for special circumstances into a code of law is a typically Jewish response to a difficult question, it is fundamentally flawed. One cannot insulate the criminal justice system which deals with non-security cases from these atrocities once they are made legal in some instances. Nor can such brutality, once it is considered OK against some, be confined only to those cases involving terrorism.
Human nature dictates that it is bound to spill over into the rest of the system.
Witness the brutality of the Israeli police when dealing with demonstrators who opposed the Rabin administration's peace policies. The same sort of behavior was exhibited by Israeli army troops earlier this month when they were ordered to dismantle homes created by Jews living in the administered territories. Ironically, the acceptance of a policy of brutality against Arab terror suspects may lie at the heart of this dismaying trend. When physical abuse of hostile Arabs becomes the norm, it is not that much of a jump from there to thinking that physical abuse of one's domestic political foes is also acceptable. Much like the biblical injunctions that lessened the harshness of slavery in ancient Israel and even put regulations on that evil institution which sought to make it less prevalent, the Israeli physical pressure code is based on good intentions.