Demolition of houses

[Hazir]

Appearantly Israel has a policy of demolishing the houses where people who engaged in attacks on Israel/Israeli citizens.

I am wondering how they can justify doing something like that under any legal system. To me it seems very much like punishing family members for acts they didn't commit. I don't know the niceties of the latest attack on that synagogue (The NY Times does a great job of putting down a narrative of the attack happening out of the blue in an otherwise peaceful neighbourhood without giving any real information) but isn't Jerusalem supposed to be the undivided capital of Israel?

[wiggin]

There's a very interesting history about house demolitions in Israel and elsewhere; I'd encourage you to read up on it. The Brits first brought it as a punitive action against the families of terrorists during the Mandate; Israel has continued it to no small controversy, using the British emergency law to that effect that they inherited. Notably, the IDF uses demolitions for a wide variety of purposes, most of which are unrelated to deterrence - they are used to tear down illegal structures, to enter homes where terrorists are hiding without exposing themselves to fire (used extensively in urban combat in places like Jenin and Gaza), or other military purposes (buffer zones, combating weapons smuggling, etc.). The legality and due process involved in these sorts of demolitions are open to debate, but they all at least theoretically have a reasonable argument supporting their use - even if one applies the 4th Geneva Convention to the territories, one can argue said demolitions are still legal, and possibly justified. Demolitions in Israeli-annexed territory are subject to different due-process rules (by Israeli law) than those in Israeli-occupied territory, but that doesn't preclude the government from demolishing land for pressing security, legal, or public needs. In fact, large numbers of illegal structures in Green Line Israel are routinely demolished for reasons completely unrelated to deterrence. It's a big issues for other reasons - many of the illegally built structures are Bedouin villages in the south, as the government continues to develop the southern desert. There are attempts to retroactively recognize them and connect them to utilities, but it continues to be a difficult domestic political issue that has no connection to security concerns vis-a-vis the Palestinians. So the status of Jerusalem would not preclude the demolition of an illegal structure, or its demolition for security needs.

The real debate revolves around the minority of house demolitions that are used as a deterrent against future terrorist attacks, where there is no direct security advantage or legal support for the demolition other than a hope that demolishing the home of a terrorist (and the resultant effects on his family) will deter future terrorism. This is a very controversial practice, and one I personally find pointless. The IDF and much of the Israeli public often agrees - the IDF in 2005 decided after studying the matter that it had little effect on deterrence, and tried to discontinue the practice - the demolition that just happened was the first in Jerusalem since 2009, and they were rare before then - since 2005, it's at most a couple a year in all of the West Bank. In reality, it still happens from time to time, generally as a political move to make the public feel the PM is doing something in response to a particularly nasty attack. Tellingly, the IDF or Israeli police have not to my knowledge demolished the homes of those few Jewish terrorists (and generally refrain from demolishing the homes of Israeli Arab terrorists), though they do demolish the homes of settlers in illegal outposts on occasion and the like. This suggests that the punitive demolitions have a largely political dimension that has little to do with effective deterrence, as evidenced by the IDF's reluctance to continue the practice (and the Israeli Supreme Court's occasional interference in the practice).

The legality of these demolitions is murky - one would have to argue that the deterrence is a real gain in security, which would then justify it on the grounds of military necessity (and still pass the relatively low bar set by the Geneva Convention). In Israel, the courts have addressed it a few times and have generally upheld the practice based on the 1945 British law, though they have placed some restrictions on its use. I think that legal arguments become a bit useless if one accepts that deterrence in such a circumstance is limited at best (as is the position by the MOD for most cases), so there's no pressing argument in favor of its use.