Security, Law, and Structural Discrimination

Series Preface

Understanding Jewish and Palestinian Equality in Israel explores how questions of law, belonging, justice, and identity shape everyday life between the river and the sea.

Written from my perspective as an African-American Christian who also practices Judaism, the series seeks understanding rather than ideology—beginning with equality among Israel’s citizens (Part I), comparing civilian and military law (Part II), analyzing how security structures shape discrimination (Part III), tracing how bias reinforces inequality (Part IV), examining historical parallels (Part V), exploring long-term consequences of occupation (Part VI), highlighting grassroots hope (Part VII), and concluding with a theology of repair (Part VIII).

Together these essays ask:
How does the pursuit of security reshape equality, and what happens when law protects some while controlling others?

Abstract

This essay examines how Israel’s security framework—laws, policies, and administrative practices designed to protect Israeli citizens—produces unequal treatment of Palestinians, particularly those in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, but also Palestinian citizens inside Israel.
While Israel faces legitimate and ongoing security threats, decades of emergency powers, military orders, and permit-based regimes have acquired a permanence that transforms security policy into structural discrimination.

Drawing on Israeli government documents, UN reports, Israeli and Palestinian human-rights analyses, and comparative global models, the essay argues that Israel’s security paradigm creates differentiated rights and experiences based not only on behavior, but on identity, geography, and political belonging.
The result is a system in which equality exists in principle but is narrowed, suspended, or denied in practice—especially under military jurisdiction.

Background

As in earlier essays, I write as an African-American Christian who practices Judaism.
My own experience—formed by the American civil-rights tradition, Black–Jewish historical solidarity, and encounters with both antisemitism and anti-Black racism—shapes how I approach questions of law, oppression, and security.

I recognize the real fears that shape Israeli society, including terrorism, war, and regional hostility.
I also recognize the real consequences of policies that rely on control rather than equality.
This essay attempts to hold both truths together.

Introduction

Security frameworks are often temporary.
But in Israel-Palestine, systems created as emergency responses have become long-term structures shaping everything from mobility to land use to political representation.

This essay explores how Israel’s security policies—civilian and military—impact Palestinian lives across three contexts:

1. Inside Israel (1948 borders):
   Palestinian citizens experience legal equality but face expanded policing and surveillance during crises.

2. East Jerusalem:
   Palestinians hold permanent-resident status, not citizenship, and face a hybrid system of municipal law and national-security regulation.

3. West Bank (Area A/B/C):
   Palestinians live under military rule, governed by security orders that regulate movement, building, assembly, and due process.

Security, then, becomes more than protection—it becomes a classifier, determining who is trusted and who is managed.

1. Security and the Legal Framework

Emergency powers that never end become structures, not safeguards.

Israel maintains that its security regime in the West Bank is lawful and temporary, rooted in the 1967 occupation and justified by threats from armed groups.¹
Military orders (1–1,800+) regulate nearly all aspects of Palestinian life: movement, speech, building, commerce, zoning, and residency.²

Inside Israel, emergency regulations dating back to the British Mandate remain on the books, enabling enhanced surveillance, administrative detention, and restrictions on assembly—tools sometimes applied disproportionately to Palestinian citizens during conflicts.³

Structural effect:
What began as short-term security measures has grown into a multilayered system in which different populations experience different rights depending on their legal classification.

2. Policies and Practices Justified by Security

Security logics shape everything from roads to residency.

Even legitimate security concerns can produce discriminatory outcomes when applied unevenly.
Across Israel and the occupied territories, several domains consistently show the effect:

Security is the rationale; structural disparity is the result.

3. International and Israeli Human-Rights Assessments

The world sees a pattern: security is real, but discrimination is systemic.

A wide range of institutions—Israeli, Palestinian, international—conclude that security laws, while legitimate in intention, produce unequal treatment:

• Human Rights Watch (2024):
  Security justifications “systematically privilege Israeli settlers while constraining Palestinians across all areas of life.”⁷

• Amnesty International (2024):
  Israel’s use of emergency powers “creates a tiered system of rights,” especially in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.⁸

• UN OCHA (2025):
  Movement restrictions “increasingly function as a governance system rather than a temporary security measure.”⁹

• Israeli NGOs (ACRI, B’Tselem):
  Argue that security has become an “administrative logic” shaping policing, planning, and due process.¹⁰

Even Israeli state bodies, such as the State Comptroller, acknowledge persistent disparities reinforced by bureaucratic structures.

4. Balancing Perspectives

Security threats are real—but security alone cannot justify permanent inequality.

A responsible analysis must affirm:

• Israel lives with genuine threats—terrorism, rockets, organized armed groups.

• Palestinian civilians live with genuine harms—limitations on movement, land, housing, and political agency.

Both are true.

Israel argues that military rule is required to prevent attacks and protect civilians.¹¹
However, international law holds that occupation must be temporary and exercised for the benefit of the occupied population.

After nearly six decades, temporary structures become permanent conditions, and security rationales obscure civil, political, and economic rights.

Security without equality becomes domination.
Equality without security becomes fragile.
A durable future requires both.

5. Summary — Security as Structure

Israel’s security regime creates a layered reality:

The pattern is clear:
Security determines rights as much as citizenship does.

Conclusion — Security and the Future of Equality

Security is essential, but security frameworks that endure for decades without reform become structures of inequality, not tools of protection.
The comparison across Israel’s legal regimes reveals not only differing levels of rights, but differing theories of personhood:

• one rooted in citizenship,

• the other in control.

History shows that dual systems of law—civilian for some, military or emergency-based for others—are never stable.
From the American South to South Africa to Northern Ireland, such arrangements generate grievance, resistance, and a crisis of legitimacy.

Israel’s challenge is not merely strategic but moral:
Can a democracy grounded in equality sustain a system in which one people enjoys full rights while another lives under conditional rights defined by security?

Palestinians face an existential challenge as well:
How can a community flourish when the core mechanisms of life—movement, land, political agency—depend on permissions rather than rights?

Ultimately, security that is not paired with justice becomes self-defeating.
Control without liberty produces resentment; fear without hope produces despair.
The spiritual traditions of the region—Jewish, Christian, Muslim—teach that justice is relational, covenantal, and indivisible.

A democracy cannot fully embody its calling while one people lives under the law of rights and another under the law of orders.
Nor can reconciliation begin until legal frameworks reflect the dignity of all who live under them.

The path forward does not require abandoning security—it requires reimagining security so that justice, mobility, representation, and dignity are shared.
Only then can law become not a mechanism of control, but a bridge toward coexistence, binding citizens and non-citizens alike in a future rooted in both safety and equality.

Footnotes 

1. Israel Ministry of Justice, Legal Framework of the Security Regime, 2023.

2. B’Tselem, Military Orders in the West Bank, 2024.

3. ACRI, Emergency Regulations and Civil Rights in Israel, 2024.

4. UN OCHA, Movement and Access in the West Bank, 2025.

5. UN OCHA, Area C Planning Restrictions, 2024–2025.

6. HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, East Jerusalem Residency Revocations, 2024.

7. Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed, 2024.

8. Amnesty International, Israel and OPT: Country Report 2023, 2024.

9. UN OCHA, Movement Regimes, 2025.

10. ACRI, The Inequality Built into Security, 2024.

11. U.S. State Department, Human Rights Report: Israel, West Bank, Gaza, 2024.

Bibliography (Chicago Style)

ACRI – Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Emergency Regulations and Civil Rights in Israel. Jerusalem, 2024.

ACRI. The Inequality Built into Security. Jerusalem, 2024.

Amnesty International. Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Country Report 2023. London: Amnesty International, 2024.

B’Tselem. Military Orders in the West Bank. Jerusalem, 2024.

B’Tselem. Discriminatory Planning in Area C. Jerusalem, 2024.

HaMoked. Revocation of Residency in East Jerusalem: Annual Report 2024. Jerusalem, 2024.

Human Rights Watch. A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. New York: HRW, 2024.

Israel Ministry of Justice. Legal Framework of the Security Regime. Jerusalem, 2023.

U.S. Department of State. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Israel, West Bank and Gaza. Washington, DC, 2024.

UN OCHA. Movement and Access in the West Bank: 2025 Update. Jerusalem: OCHA, 2025.

UN OCHA. Area C: Demolitions and Displacement Report 2024–2025. Jerusalem: OCHA, 2025.