Marianne Azizi writes:

While the world’s attention is focused on the violence sweeping across the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and Israel itself, another war is being fought, out of the media limelight.

It is the war being waged by the Israeli state, in the form of the Ministry of Welfare and Social Services, against Israel’s own citizens – the Jewish ones.

So, it’s no surprise that amid the upheavals, while many people stayed at home to avoid the violence, Israel’s juvenile courts were busy tarnishing the future of young Israeli teenagers.

The phenomenon of kids escaping from institutions is well known in Israel. The authorities coerce and condition children, using the juvenile courts to bring them into line.

One “offence” which would land a child in a juvenile court is escaping from the custody of an institution. The kids then get a police arrest record and have to beg probation officers and judges for their lives. Mothers, fathers and teachers become involved with the “troubled” children – children who were stolen by the state from those parents in the first place. It is a nefarious trick in the state’s bag of tricks against children.

On one fatefully quiet day a court case was being held against a 17-year-old Israeli boy, Israel Ambash (pictured above). He had suffered over three years of abuse in an institution after being kidnapped by Welfare and Social Services Ministry against his will and that of his parents.

Eighteen months previously Ambash had escaped from an institution but was hunted down and caught approximately 5 kilometres from the institution while walking along a railway track. Upon being caught, his bags were searched and a Swiss army knife was found inside, which he swears he had won in a competition inside the institution. Nevertheless, he was accused of possessing a dangerous weapon.

Israel Ambash was taken back to the institution and an order was made immediately to have seven psychiatrists examine him to see if he was suffering delusions – for why else would he want to escape abuse in an institution!

The suspicion was that Ambash was suffering from paranoia. Without even waiting for the psychiatrists’ reports, the judge, Shimon Leybo, ordered that Ambash be given 90 days of treatment involving the immediate use of psychotropic drugs. This happened even though the law stipulates that a child can be given a maximum of only 14 days’ observation for a diagnosis.

In Israel, there is a psychiatrist, Tanya Shecter, whose trademark is removing children from their parents after diagnosing them with folie a deux – a delusion or mental illness shared by two people in close association, in this case meaning a parent and child causing each other harm. Although this is an extremely rare condition, in Israel it is regularly used by the state to kidnap children.

Israel Ambash’s lawyer immediately appealed to the district court to rescind the decision made to drug the traumatised child. It was granted and this summer the boy was released. Social workers fought to put him in a summer camp for children aged seven to eight years. The lawyer fought again to prove that this was an outrageous attempt to keep a 17 year old incarcerated.

In retaliation for losing their case, one social worker, Ruth Matut, asked the district attorney to open a case against the child for carrying a knife, and the request was duly accepted.

Last week the case was heard. The juvenile criminal lawyer did not show up for the case. Without any defence lawyer present, the judge ruled that the boy was a fugitive and ordered that he be placed under arrest.

Not content with wrenching a boy from his family against his will, forcing him to speak against his parents, filling him with psychotropic drugs, and veering between cruelty and kindness which many thousands of children endure in Israel, the Israeli court decided that the boy who was running back to the arms of his mother had escaped from the custody of the state. At the tender age of 17, completely traumatised from three years of horror at the hands of social workers, Israel Ambash is now tarnished with a criminal record and is considered a fugitive.

In unreported Israel, the system secretly continues to abuse the human and civil rights of its own Jewish citizens while publicly declaring them victims.

Years of secrecy and censorship have resulted in the Israeli people having no choice than to tell their stories to the world to expose what is really happening to them in Israel.

So, please sign this petition appealing to the United nations to investigate human rights abuse inside Israel.