Honenu: The legal backbone of Israel’s rapists, assassins and murderers

On July 29, at least 10 Israeli soldiers were arrested from the notorious Sde Teiman prison for ‘gang-raping’ a Palestinian detainee. At least five of them have been released.

The Israeli military generally denies ill-treatment of detainees, and the soldiers’ lawyers defended them by arguing that they acted in self-defence, responding “with necessary force” to the Palestinian prisoner who attempted to “attack” them.

“During the body search of the terrorist, he began to attack them, tried to bite two soldiers, tried to grab the taser gun one of the soldiers was holding. So they had to use force to restrain him,” Nati Rom, an attorney representing the soldiers, said on July 31.

The Israeli attorney dismissed the media’s coverage of the “rape” and asserted that the soldiers “did not strip the terrorist” during the search.

This is despite some of the soldiers' proud statements after their release and reports of a lie detector test falsifying the denials of the two soldiers.

Nati Rom, who defended the soldiers, was a lawyer working for Honenu, a legal organisation known to have a notorious track record of representing Israeli terrorism suspects and illegal Jewish settlers involved in the murder as well as other violent acts against Palestinians.

Money raised for assassin

In 2005, a Haaretz report revealed that Honenu raised donations for the “retrial” of Yigal Amir, the assassin of late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

That was the year Israel’s withdrawal from the territory in 2005, also known as the 'Disengagement Plan', came into effect, and Honenu gained attention for supporting those arrested for protesting against it.

The then Israeli prime minister Rabin had signed the Oslo Accords, which provided for the expansion of Palestinian self-rule in parts of the occupied West Bank.

Amir was strongly opposed to the Oslo Accords and believed Rabin deserved to die for trading away land he believed God gifted to Jews. He assassinated Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 5, 1995.

Asked about donations collected by Honenu a decade later, Larissa Trimbobler, Yigal Amir’s wife, told Haaretz the goal was "stopping political persecution of Amir and the denial of his basic rights; stopping the perverse vengeance of the establishment; carrying out a legal battle for basic rights."

In defence of a mass murderer

Ami Popper, a former Israeli soldier, murdered seven Palestinians at a bus stop in Rishon Lezion, Israel, in 1990.

On May 20 of that year, the 20-year-old in military uniform approached a group of men waiting to go to work in a town south of Tel Aviv.

After checking their identity cards and confirming they were Arabs, he ordered them to line up and opened fire from his service weapon, killing seven. Popper was arrested within the hour.

Popper was initially sentenced to seven concurrent life terms and an additional 20 years. However, in 1999, his sentence was reduced to 40 years. He is expected to be released in 2030.

In 2016, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the organisation sent about 50,000 shekels to the families of Jews convicted of violent crimes against Palestinians, among them the wife of Popper.

Honenu has also provided legal support to Popper, including when he faced issues within the prison system in 2012.

In 2014, a letter worded to Netenyahu and published on the organisation’s website called for Popper's release during a prisoner exchange.

Popper has “already served many years of their prison sentence”, the statement read, listing the convicted murderer among “Jewish prisoners incarcerated for nationalistically motivated acts”.

The letter concluded by seeming to ignore his conviction: “While these Jews are rotting in jail, sitting behind bars, having left their suffering families, some of them bereaved, they see that terrorists, among them despicable murderers, are returning to their people, to their families and to freedom.”

Supporting settler who burned Palestinian child alive

In the summer of 2014, a group of three illegal Israeli settlers, including Yosef Haim Ben David, abducted Mohammed Abu Khdeir from his neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem.

They drove the 16-year-old Palestinian boy to the Jerusalem Forest, where they beat him and burned him alive.

Ben David was sentenced to life imprisonment and 20 years. He was also ordered to pay 150,000 Israeli shekels (approximately $39,630) in damages to Abu Khdeir’s family.

Documents obtained by Channel 10 from Honenu in 2017 revealed that the group provided financial support to Ben David, along with other individuals involved in violent acts, as reported by Haaretz.

Long history in defence of criminals

Honenu’s history of representing and financially supporting terrorists, convicted murderers, and crime plotters extends far beyond these cases.

Bat Ayin Underground, a group convicted in 2002 for plotting to blow up a Palestinian girls' school in occupied East Jerusalem, was also represented by Honenu.

Yaakov Teitel, convicted of murdering two Palestinians in 1997 and attempting to murder Israelis with explosives in 2008, is another criminal who received legal representation from Honenu.

One of the members of Lehava, an organisation known for its anti-Arab stance, who was indicted for an arson attack on the Jewish-Arab Hand in Hand school in West Jerusalem, was also represented by Honenu.

According to its website, Honenu provides legal services to approximately 1000 arrestees a year.

Dark past and present

Founded in 2002, Honenu is based in Kiryat Arba, an illegal Israeli settlement of 7,300 in the occupied West Bank.

As stated on its website, the organisation’s mission is to provide legal assistance to those who “find themselves in legal entanglements due to defending themselves against Arab aggression, or due to their love for Israel.”

The statement also indicates that the non-profit’s work is made possible “thanks to the support of individuals around the world,” which drew significant criticism in the past, particularly due to Honenu’s use of an American nonprofit to funnel donations to Israel in 2014.

The legal aid organisation continues to represent “price tag” suspects in court, the latest being the Israeli soldiers accused of rape in Sde Teiman.

The term "price tag" refers to the cost that extremists in Israel seek to impose as retribution for the dismantling of each unauthorised outpost in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Under international law, all Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are considered illegal.