The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has decided it will no longer submit complaints to the Israeli army regarding human rights violations by its soldiers. In an 81-page report titled “The Occupation's Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism,” the Israeli nongovernmental organization reached the conclusion that their complaints to their own army are mostly a waste of time.

According to the B’Tselem report, since the second intifada, B’Tselem has reported 739 cases of grave human rights violations by the Israeli army. In 182 of them, no investigation was ever launched. The report also states that in nearly half the complaints filed (343), the investigation was closed with no further action. B’Tselem did say that in very rare instances (25 out 739), charges were brought against the implicated soldiers.

The Israeli organization’s conclusions were nothing new to Palestinian lawyers who have been working within the military system for decades. An American-Palestinian attorney who is a member of the New York bar and who has a license to practice in Israel told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that the issue with Israel is that, for many years, people believed there was indeed justice, rule of law and an independent judiciary. “When Palestinians complained about human rights abuses, they were told, ‘If you had a legitimate complaint, why didn’t you go to the courts?’ That worked, as long as Israel had a positive reputation for rule of law.”

The US attorney who practiced law for many years in the Israeli military court system said that even though he gave it everything he could, he was unable to see justice. “My conclusion came after trying the system, and showing how it fails, and why it fails. It is not enough to believe the system produces no justice, unless you can show how and why it does so,” he said.