Background
On April 17, 2022, during the Passover holiday, against a backdrop of widespread disturbances in Jerusalem, brothers Tariq Natsheh (then 22) and Naim Natsheh (then 24) joined a group of young Arab men who positioned themselves near the Rockefeller Junction in the city, armed with stones and rocks, with the declared purpose of attacking vehicles carrying Jewish-looking passengers and buses operated by the Egged company. The attack was driven by a nationalist-ideological and racist motive. Tariq played an active coordinating role: he drove his car through the area to track bus movements, then used his vehicle to block a bus lane, slowing the buses to make them easier targets before throwing stones at three separate buses from close range. Naim arrived at the scene with Tariq, threw a single stone at one bus, and remained inside the car while Tariq carried out the lane blockade. Multiple buses suffered heavy damage, and drivers and passengers sustained both physical and psychological injuries.
Both brothers pleaded guilty under plea agreements in the Jerusalem District Court. Tariq was convicted on twelve counts comprising: rioting (§152 of the Penal Law 5737-1977); four counts of the terrorist offense of aggravated assault with intent (§329(a)(1)&(2) of the Penal Law combined with §37 of the Counter-Terrorism Law 5776-2016); four counts of stone-throwing at a vehicle (§332a(b)); and four counts of willful damage to a vehicle on racial grounds (§§413e and 144f). Naim was convicted on a parallel set of nine counts (one count fewer in each category), and was additionally convicted in a joined case of unlawfully employing a foreign worker.
The District Court (Judge D. Cohen-Lakach) sentenced Tariq to 56 months’ actual imprisonment and Naim to 50 months’ actual imprisonment, each with conditional imprisonment terms and an order to pay NIS 1,500 in compensation to each of the eight victims (NIS 12,000 total per defendant). The brothers appealed their sentences, arguing solely on grounds of sentencing uniformity.
The Court’s Holding
Justice Alex Stein, writing the lead opinion, affirmed that the original sentences were substantively appropriate given the gravity of the offenses — he noted having viewed video footage of the attack, which he described as “alarming and repugnant.” He nevertheless found limited grounds for intervention on uniformity grounds. Regarding the appellants’ first argument — that two co-defendants who were minors (approximately 17 years old) and whose conduct was at least as serious as Tariq’s received only 36 months each — Justice Stein agreed the sentencing gap was too wide. He concluded that even accounting for the juvenile rehabilitation principle, the minors’ sentences were lenient, and that an adult committing the same acts could expect five to six years or more. While Tariq’s conduct was no less serious than the minors’, Naim’s conduct was actually less serious yet his sentence (50 months) far exceeded theirs (36 months), a disparity he found disproportionate. As to the second argument — that Jewish defendants who committed similar ethnically motivated violence against Arabs received far lighter sentences — Justice Stein examined several cases, including the “Bat Yam promenade lynching” incident, and concluded that while certain individual sentences were troublingly lenient, no systematic ethnic discrimination in sentencing had been proven, given the individualized nature of each sentence and the existence of cases in which Jewish defendants received substantial terms, including one of 12.5 years for a terrorism-based attempted murder conviction.
Justice Stein proposed reducing Tariq’s sentence by six months (to 50 months) and Naim’s by ten months (to 40 months), solely on grounds of sentencing uniformity and the appearance of justice. He added obiter remarks urging that, as a general sentencing policy, all rioters who commit serious ethnically motivated violence should face five to ten years’ imprisonment, with double-digit sentences where the violence causes serious bodily harm, and signaled that the court might revisit its practice of not maximizing punishment in state-initiated sentence appeals if trial courts persist in imposing unduly lenient terms.
Justice Khaled Kabub concurred on Tariq (50 months) but dissented on Naim, and Justice Ruth Ronen joined Justice Kabub. Both held that the statutory sentencing framework (§40t(a)(2) of the Penal Law) expressly requires courts to weigh a defendant’s “relative share” in a joint offense. Given that Naim’s participation was minimal — arriving with his brother, throwing a single stone at one bus, and remaining in the car during the lane blockade — the majority held it sufficient to reduce his sentence to the period he had already served (approximately 36 months). Justice Kabub also distanced himself from Justice Stein’s broad prescriptive sentencing-range statements, noting that no argument had been heard on the matter, that the structured sentencing framework of the 2012 Penal Law amendments requires offense-specific analysis, and that the court should not issue sweeping sentencing guidelines without full adversarial submissions. Both Kabub and Ronen also disagreed with Stein’s suggestion that it is inherently difficult as a matter of principle to establish systematic discriminatory sentencing, holding instead that a thorough case-by-case comparison can in principle substantiate such a claim. The court unanimously dismissed the appellants’ third argument — that a co-defendant’s release as part of a hostage exchange deal affected the fairness of their sentences — as legally baseless.
Key Takeaways
- The Supreme Court reduced Tariq Natsheh’s sentence from 56 to 50 months (unanimous) and Naim Natsheh’s sentence from 50 months to time already served, approximately 36 months (majority of 2–1), invoking the principle of sentencing uniformity in light of the lighter sentences given to minor co-defendants whose conduct was no less serious.
- The court rejected the claim of systematic ethnic discrimination in sentencing — holding that although some individual sentences imposed on Jewish defendants for comparable nationalist violence were troublingly lenient, the individualized nature of sentencing and the existence of substantial sentences in comparable cases prevented that conclusion — while affirming that the equality principle prohibits ethnicity or religion from influencing the severity of punishment.
- The majority (Kabub and Ronen) required meaningful sentencing differentiation among participants in joint offenses according to their relative individual roles, warning that failure to differentiate could create perverse incentives for participants to escalate rather than limit their involvement.
- Justice Stein’s obiter prescription of a 5–10 year sentencing range for all serious rioters motivated by ethnic hatred was explicitly rejected by the other two justices as procedurally improper and inconsistent with the individualized sentencing framework mandated by the 2012 Penal Law amendments.
- The court held that convictions entered under plea agreements procedurally bar defendants from later challenging on appeal the choice of charges or the number of counts to which they pleaded guilty.
Why It Matters
This decision is a notable exposition of the sentencing-uniformity principle as applied to ethnically and nationalistically motivated violence in Israel. The court navigated the difficult question of whether Arab and Jewish defendants are treated equally by the criminal justice system, acknowledging that certain outcomes in individual cases are “troubling and raise difficult questions about the appearance of justice,” while stopping short of finding proven systemic discrimination. The decision reinforces that courts must apply uniform sentencing norms regardless of the ethnic identity of defendants or victims, and confirms that the principle of equal protection — which Justice Stein explicitly analogized to U.S. constitutional equal-protection doctrine and 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(6) — is embedded in Israeli criminal sentencing law.
The methodological divide between the justices on how to analyze claims of discriminatory sentencing policy is also significant: the majority rejected any suggestion that such claims are structurally unprovable, insisting that rigorous comparative case analysis can in principle reveal discriminatory patterns, while cautioning against broad judicial pronouncements on sentencing ranges absent full adversarial argument. Practitioners in Israel defending or prosecuting bias-motivated crimes will need to grapple with both the substantive holding on uniformity and the procedural guidance that plea-agreement defendants cannot relitigate charge selection on a sentence appeal.