Film screening: The Law in These Parts
Published: October 25, 2013
“My freedom depends on the violation of another’s freedom,” says Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz in his documentary The Law In These Parts.
Alexandrowicz’s film – screened at Victoria College at the University of Toronto on Oct. 22 – asked the audience of more than 80 students and faculty whether a modern liberal democracy can maintain its commitment to the rule of law, while occupying another people. The Faculty of Law event was the only Canadian stop of the director's east coast tour of seven American universities.
The award-winning* film explores the moral and legal dilemmas faced by the men who created the judicial framework for the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It includes extensive and candid interviews with the military judges and prosecutors who developed a legal system unlike any other in the world.
“I thought it was important to start a conversation in Israeli society about this system,” Alexandrowicz explained in a panel discussion with law professors Kent Roach and Markus Dubber after the screening.
The film explores how the military courts – and the Israeli Supreme Court – justified the occupation, while prosecuting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over more than four decades.
“You’re conducting a trial against your enemy,” one of the military jurists explains.
“Order and justice do not always go hand in hand,” reflects another.
The film also includes segments with the former president of the Israeli Supreme Court, Justice Meir Shamgar, and explores the role the high court played in the development of the military legal framework.
“Were we right or not?” Justice Shamgar asks himself in the film. “Historians will decide.”
Alexandrowicz said part of the inspiration for the film came from his time in the Israeli military during the First Intifada.
“I knew this wasn’t just the Wild West, but that there was a legal structure,” he said.
The film is relevant for Canada, too, Professor Kent Roach said.
“This comes home to Canada, when we think of someone like Omar Khadr being tried by a military commission in Guantanamo,” said Roach. "The issue for me is whether the state is having it both ways.
"They want to have military tribunals that don’t have the same independence as criminal courts, but also want to characterize what is going on as a crime as opposed to an act of war."
The film also focused on how the architects of these military tribunals never expected them to last for 40 years.
“Something that I found particularly interesting was the idea that the structure of the military courts was inherently dysfunctional, because they were never meant to be the source of justice for this long,” said a second-year law student at the screening. “Their primary goal was always designed to be helping the [Israeli Defence Force] maintain order.”
The film poses a fundamental question about the role of law, Dubber said: Namely, whether the law ought to be used as a way to control state power or as a tool of state power.
The contradictions between these two visions of law – and the way in which they have come to co-exist in Israel – were the central theme of Alexandrowicz’s film.
*The film won the World Cinema Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, the Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Special Jury Award at the 2012 Full Frame Festival, the Special Jury Prize for an International Feature at Toronto’s 2012 HotDocs Film Festival, and Best Documentary at the 2011 Jerusalem Film Festival.
This story originally appeared on of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.
