Since its founding, the Almagor Terror Victims Organization has sounded the alarm over the relaxed atmosphere terrorists enjoy in Israeli jails. We have even issued explicit warnings that this could lead to jailbreaks.
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But our warnings have never been heeded. This has been painful for the families of victims and has also undermined our security.
The message coming out of our prison system was that as long as prisoners did not go on strike, they would be allowed to manage their lives as they saw fit. Conscientious prison guards and officials have repeatedly tried to sound the alarm along with Almagor, but the response has always been that such a policy prevented a larger crisis within the prison system. We even reported on specific prisons where things could go sideways at any moment.
At some point we even approached Gilad Erdan, who as public security minister was in charge of the Israel Prison Service back then. He went on to establish a committee that imposed more restrictions, declaring that the "parties in prisons" must be stopped.
Although there were some fixes and improvements, senior terrorist figures continued to operate out of prison as if they were still in charge.
At the same time, courts decided they had the authority to set restrictions on prisons. One such ruling said that a prison cell is considered to be the terrorist's home and therefore he is entitled to keep many personal belongings, regardless of the size of the cell.Terrorists took advantage of this in order to make life difficult for the guards who now had to conduct a thorough search of countless of items.
Those who wanted to buy peace and quiet in prison saw reality rear its ugly head on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.Here is a solution that is already being implemented in prisons around the world: Inmates should be held in solitary confinement, as many prisoners around the world are, and as Yigal Amir, who assassinated former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was.
From a moral standpoint, those prisoners should have died as their victims did. Some of them should have been given the death sentence, as we have been demanding for years, and as Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman has long called for. This is the bare minimum required in dealings with the terrorists who made families to lose their loved ones.
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