If you are an Israeli citizen living in the West bank towns of Samaria and Judea and you beat up a Palestinian, even kill him or her, there’s a 90 percent chance you will get away with it.

The latest Data Sheet from Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, confirms what many have long suspected to be the case — that the system of law enforcement in Israel treats Palestinians in much the same way as black South Africans were treated by that country’s police force when the apartheid regime was in place.

Yesh Din has tracked police 205 investigation files opened in recent years. 81 of these files relate to attacks on Palestinians by Israeli civilians and this includes two cases of shooting that led to death, and nine cases of serious injury. The remainder deal with incidents where Palestinians were assaulted with sticks, knives, rifle butts, as well as attacks on their houses and vehicles.

Then there are 79 cases of criminal trespass which involve cutting down, uprooting and setting fire to Palestinian crops and stealing olives during the harvest season. The remainder of the cases involve theft and vandalising agricultural equipment.

Yesh Din reports that of these 205 investigations “police processing and prosecutorial review have concluded in 163 files. Out of those 163, only in 13 (8%) of the cases were indictments filed against defendants. One case file was lost and never investigated, and 149 (91%) investigation files were closed without filing any indictments against suspects.”

And what reasons are given for the closure of a staggering 91 percent of files — 91 were closed on grounds of “perpetrator unknown” (61%) and 43 cases were closed on grounds of “lack of evidence” (28%).

The methods used in investigations by the Israeli Police in the Samaria and Judea districts are designed to ensure failure. Yesh Din observes that:

…victims complaints and testimonies were recorded in Hebrew rather than Arabic, the language in which they were given; the police investigators rarely visited the crime scenes, and in the cases when they did arrive on site, defects were noted in documenting the events; in many cases testimony was not collected from key witnesses, including suspects and both Palestinian and Israeli eyewitnesses of the incident; live identification line-ups of Israeli civilian suspects were hardly ever carried out.

The Yesh Din findings are not an aberration. The group reports that when in 2006 it first examined the record of the Israeli Police in the Samaria and Judea districts it found that the rate of closure of files without any further action being taken was 90 percent. In other words, there has been no improvement in the two year interregnum.

One of the loudest claims of the pro-Israel lobby is that it is, as Kevin Rudd wrote on December 10 2004, “a vibrant, democratic state in a region where democracy remains far from the norm.”

But in genuine democracies law enforcement authorities do not discriminate on the basis of race. And Mr Rudd there can be no excuses for a nation that calls itself a democracy allowing so many serious criminal investigations to go into the “who cares, they are only Palestinians” basket.