Perhaps in a move exhibiting the court’s realization that Defense Minister Ehud Barak overextended his authority, a Jerusalem court has permitted Ephraim Hantzis, 21, from North America to return to his country of origin for three months rather than spending three months in administrative detention in Israel.

A right-winger, Hantzis has elicited the ire of the defense minister and left-wing community for praising and speaking out in support of the so-called Jewish terrorist Yaakov Teital, and Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Arabs in the Machpelah on Purim in the 1994.

His heinous crime, the expressed support for persons perceived as “terrorists” has prompted Barak to sign a three-month administrative detention order against Ephraim, a move generally permitted to neutralize what the Shin Bet calls a ‘ticking time bomb’, that is to say to prevent an imminent terror attack.

Administrative detention means the recipient is not charged with a crime and therefore, may not defend himself, used in extreme cases in the ongoing war against terrorism. Administrative detention has also been used in the past against a small number of Jews, those affiliated with the “extreme right-wing” to neutralize their anti-government activities.

The precedent for using administrative detention against Jewish political activists was set by a right-wing administration, by the late Menachem Begin, who locked up Rabbi Meir Kahane and Baruch Ben-Yosef to silence their voices of opposition and criticism of his government’s conciliatory policies, which led to the expulsion of Jews from Yamit in Sinai as a result of the Camp David Accord, the first expulsion of Jews in the history of the modern State of Israel.

In any event, Hantzis is permitted to fly to N. America and he may not return to Israel for three months.

(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)