Strikes and questions of morality

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Bloodline, acrylic on canvas, 35x50 cm, Painting by Silvia Rosenberg

A second day of civil service and public sector workers striking against the government's plans for cutbacks and firings in the public sector workforce was costing at least $50 million a day for businesses because of port strikes. Workers in ministries, state agencies and the tax offices were all refusing to deal with the public, customs clerks were checking every incoming bag at the airport, and there were threats of more strikes on the way. It was all turning the first week of the month-long New Year holidays into a nightmare.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called for the strikers to go back to work. Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the ports workers had no reason to strike. A Shinui MK asked the attorney general to conduct a criminal investigation against the customs union heads. Meanwhile, Education Minister Limor Livnat claimed today the treasury cut NIS 1.3 billion, nearly twice than what the treasury announced, and demanded her colleague, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu take action -- noting that the treasury has three times as many administrative officials as the Education Ministry.

Netanyahu has made clear he won't back down on his economic program and is determined to privatize the nation's ports in Haifa, Ashdod and Eilat. Some say that he regards his showdown with the port workers like President Reagan's showdown with air traffic controllers or Margaret Thatchers's showdown with miners; an attempt to break all the unions in Israel.

The letter by the 27 pilots about refusing to fly assassination missions over populated Palestinian areas continues to make waves. Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuval Steinitz pushed a resolution through his committee calling on the army and air force to prosecute the pilots. Steinitz has called the pilots 'mutineers' and wants JAG to prosecute them as rebels.

Meanwhile, Yesh Gvul, the draft resister's group, backed by some of Israel's leading authors -- Natan Zach, Amos Keinan, Sami Michael, Ronit Matalon, among others -- petitioned the High Court to order a criminal investigation into the decision making process in the air force that led to the decision to drop a one-ton bomb in a crowded Gaza neighborhood in July 2002, to kill Hamas military leader Saleh Shehadeh. The petition says the air force commanders indicated after the event they were aware that the bomb would also kill innocent civilians, and therefore made a patently illegal decision. Settler MK Zvi Hendel, called on the education minister to pull any of the authors who signed the petition out of the school curriculum. Speaking of illegalities, Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein announced yesterday evening that there won't be any investigation of the editor of the Jerusalem Post , who wrote an editorial calling on the government to assassinate Yasser Arafat.

In Nazareth, meanwhile, the prosecution went ahead with its indictment of three lower Galilee Bedouin for the murder of a soldier earlier this summer, even though the indictments are based almost entirely on a confession by one of the suspects, who announced today in court that the confession was coerced out of him under pressure from the police. According to the police, the three wanted to steal the soldier's rifle, to sell it, but the robbery got out of control and ended up as murder. In another court proceeding, two settlers from the so-called Bat Ayin gang, were sentenced to 15 years in prison and a third defendant was sentenced to 12 years, for plotting to blow up a trailer full of explosives, propane gas and shrapnel outside an East Jerusalem girls' school. The defense attorney said it would appeal the sentences, “based on the circumstances” of the event.

Inside the West Bank, the IDF destroyed the Hebron home of Mohammed Hamedan, the Palestinian gunman who killed 2 people at the settlement of Negohot on Rosh Hashanah, while a senior Hamas official was arrested by IDF troops on the outskirts of Jerusalem. And on the Egyptian-Israeli border, police caught five people attempting to smuggle 130 kg. of marijuana into Israel.

Inside Israel, some 1,350 Palestinians inside the country illegally, were rounded up by police and sent back to the West Bank. The separation/security fence was also in the news, with a settler group arguing that it should include the area between Modi'in and Jerusalem. Meanwhile, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, made an uncharacteristically blunt remark about how Israel's refusal to halt settlements may endanger its future as a Jewish democratic state, since it would make a division of the country impossible and lead to a binational state where within a few years the Arabs would have a majority.

Finally, Ron Arad's family continues its legal fight against the prisoner exchange with the Hezbollah, while Maariv reported that the negotiations were snagged, apparently Israeli refusal to hand over leading Palestinian prisoners. The High Court of Justice has postponed its ruling on whether the prisoner swap can go ahead without Arad included in the deal.

Ariga Recommends

The Other Israel

[an error occurred while processing this directive] in Frosties, the anthology of quotations

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation