THE Israeli judicial system has long flaunted its liberal credentials against Binyamin Netanyahu's right-wing coalition. But in his documentary, "The Law in These Parts", Israeli film-maker Ranaan Alexandrowicz offers an uglier portrait of the jucidiary, arguing that it has sanctioned many of the more insidious aspects of Israel's 44-year military rule of the occupied territories, from the construction of Jewish settlements to the long-term detention of Palestinians without trial.

Mr Alexandrowicz's film opens with an assistant erecting a makeshift court out of a desk and a black chair, echoing Israel's construction of military courtrooms after its conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. For the next 90 minutes he subjects nine retired military judges to a dead-pan, close-up cross-examination as each take a turn in the chair.

As Mr Alexandrowicz acknowledges, much of the justice he inflicts on the judges is as rough their own. Their trials are brief; as one judge notes, his court was so swamped during the first Intifada (between 1987 and 1993) that he could hear 200 cases a day. And the evidence, as in many in camera courts, is partial. "The defendant has an interest to lie," says one judge, explaining why he preferred the word of interrogators and collaborators to that of the accused even when he could see evidence of confessions extracted under torture.

Many of the judges would make sophisticated dinner-party guests. Some are octogenarians proud of a lifetime of government service. In their wheelchairs, they evoke sympathy. Yet Mr Alexandrowicz chips away, exposing how they compromised their notions of equality before the law to grant Jewish settlers in the occupied territories full rights while subjecting neighbouring Palestinians to military decrees. To deal with the workload, one judge obtained a military ruling to extend detention without trial from 4 days to six months, with no access to a lawyer for a month and a half. "Military amendments are a bit easier than passing a bill through three readings in parliament," he chuckles. In similar ways, these men and their counterparts creatively interpreted international law to sanction house demolitions, deportations, extra-judicial killings and the classification of Palestinians returning home as infiltrators.