|
|
About
Contact Donations | ||
 Today'sSituation News |
 EducationalResources for Peace |
 Pleasure:Arts & Letters | |
 AOL users, please note -- due to anti-spam measures by AOL, you sometimes do not receive your update. Please inform abuse@aol.com that Ariga mail is not spam.
| |||
Books and Prints for Sale
Text by
Robert Rosenberg Photo of the Day by BauBau Paintings by Silvia Rosenberg Today's SituationRising rhetoric on the Israeli Right
Monday, July 05, 2004
Channel 10 last night provided some audiovisual evidence seemingly backing up Dichter's claims that the rhetoric is turning practical. Three prominent radicals from the Right, all affiliated with the outlawed Kach organization, facing about two dozen kippa-clad men in a synagogue in Gush Katif, lectured, indeed harangued the Gush Katif men about how to 'make Sharon's life miserable – be there, wherever he goes, with loudspeakers,' 'how to tie up traffic for hours in Tel Aviv – two cars driving at 40 kph on the highway, passing each other and not allowing others to pass.' As far as it went, it sounded somewhat childish, and certainly within the realm of legitimate free speech protest. The problem is that what starts as legitimate free speech protest quickly can spiral into something else entirely. 'We know that words kill, that terms like din rodef' give legitimacy to murder,' former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon told Israel Radio. Ayalon spoke vehemently against Elitzur and his ilk, pointing out that Yigal Amir 'has thousands of supporters in Israeli society' while Elitzur, a former bureau chief for then-premier Binyamin Netanyahu, 'shirks responsibility for how his language can be used by those who want to use it.' Elitzur, by the way, said bluntly this morning that the prohibition against evacuating settlements takes precedence over the prohibition on striking soldiers.
Woman Crucified # 3 by Silvia Rosenberg, mixed media on recycled paper, 20x30 cm.
Kach spokesman Noam Federman, not atypical of the radical Right, says that Dichter's comments are an attempt to lay the groundwork for 'pinpoint assassinations of me and my friends' and that 'Dichter and his gang are laying the ground work for the assassination of Arik Sharon and then to blame it on me.' Federman spent nine months in administrative detention – jail without indictment or trial. 'I don't plan to be a sucker and to greet with flowers someone who has come to do something brutal to me, evacuate me, banish me from my land, when they should be fighting the Arabs who every day kill Jews, just like yesterday … I want to put Sharon on trial for treason, which the law says deserves at least a life sentence. The law says anyone who takes action to hand over the land of Israel to foreigners is a traitor and traitors deserve treason. And the punishment for treason is death.' Attorney General Menachem Mazuz is planning a meeting this week with police, Shin Bet, and IDF officers to discuss ways to deal with the rising tide of rhetoric. The Shamgar Commission, which investigated the reasons for Baruch Goldstein's Hebron Massacre of 1994 warned in its conclusions that threats to deal with the radical Right, without any action being taken, 'only encourages' those on the far Right. Mazuz is already under attack from the far Right (as well as many in the Left) for his decision not to indict Sharon on bribery charges. Merely by calling for the meeting to discuss the potential for lawbreaking among the most militant of the settlers and their supporters, has compounded the anger against him in those circles. But it is clear that with each passing day that the government continues its preparations for withdrawal from Gaza and the northern West Bank – even if nothing is being done yet on the ground – the far Right feels more cornered. And people like Federman have nothing but scorn for such figures as Effi Eitam, the former brigadier general now heading the National Religious Party, who keeps saying that he is in favor of passive, non-violent resistance to evacuation but opposes any violence against troops sent to evacuate settlers.
And the Quartet is meeting tomorrow in Jerusalem to discuss the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, specifically, a recent World Bank report on the impact of the withdrawal on the Gazan economy. The World Bank report said that if Israel does not allow the Gazan economy to trade freely with the outside world – as Israel is threatening, with Sharon and Mofaz explicitly stating that Israel will continue to control the entrances and exists from Gaza after the Israeli evacuation – the economic crisis in the Strip will become a catastrophe.
Recommended articles Welcome to World War III by Robert Rosenberg Suicide bombing is the weapon of choice in what has turned into World War III, and wherever you are, it's coming to a neighborhood near you. It's as old as Samson pulling down the pillars on the Philistines, and emerged in the early 1980s as a strategic weapon for the Lebanese Hezbollah, which used it to force American and French troops out of Lebanon. Since then it has been copied by Palestinian, Kashmiri, Chechen, Turk, and Tamil terrorists, used in places as far flung as Argentina and Tanzania, Kenya and Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, India, Israel, Spain and of course, in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. [an error occurred while processing this directive] in Frosties, the anthology of quotations
Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation
|
Ariga: Today's Situation, 2006
Painting Please check out our Google advertisers
Make a donation to Ariga  The People's Voice Petition for Peace for Israel and Palestine
Don't miss:
|
hin Bet chief Avi Dichter's report to the cabinet yesterday was routine: after covering the state of the secret service's battles against Palestinian terror, he commented that there is a significant rise in the rhetoric of the radical Right. He cited comments by Nekuda Editor Uri Elitzur, who recently said that he expects settlers to respond with violence against soldier sent to evacuate them – and he understands that violence. He mentioned Old City Rabbi Avigdor Nebenzal, who brought up the din rodef rabbinical ruling that justifies the preemptive killing of a fellow Jew if that Jew is going to give up any part of the Land of Israel to gentiles. Assassin Yigal Amir used din rodef as his explanation for why he killed Yitzhak Rabin. And he reported to the ministers that an army lieutenant colonel was recently beaten up in a religious neighborhood in Jerusalem because he was recognized as being one of the officers who took part in the dismantling of a Kach-affiliated outpost-synagogue in the West Bank.
ike many, Ayalon is worried by the possibility of civil war. The radical Right's terminology is now focused on three ramifications, as it sees it, of the Sharon disengagement plan: first, that it is legitimate to 'transfer' Jews (the settlers) and not legitimate to transfer Israeli Arabs, for the sake of peace; secondly, that by virtue of issuing warnings about extreme, incendiary rhetoric, combined with Sharon's 'undemocratic' firing of two National Union ministers who openly opposed his disengagement plan, the establishment – 'the Left, the Sharon government, the media, the courts' – are denying democracy to the Right and have given up democracy for the state; since they are being denied their democratic right to free speech and the government and courts have assumed the right to evict them from their homes, they can do 'what any normal, healthy people would do,' as the Rightist rhetoric puts it. And according to Elitzur, that means 'fight the transfer with all means available.'
nd the preparations are continuing for the withdrawal. The Defense Ministry's Amos Gilad, the controversial ex-major general who still insists that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, that he was absolutely correct to predict that Saddam Hussein would launch chemical warheads at Israel, and that Yasser Arafat never intended to make peace with Israel, now heads the ministry's new 'political-security branch' a position invented for him by Minster Shaul Mofaz. Gilad was in Cairo this week, for meetings with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who is handling the Egyptian mediation efforts between the Israelis and the Palestinians ahead of an Israeli withdrawal. Gilad, who gives the impression of being preternaturally suspicious of everyone, reportedly discussed with Suleiman the planned Egyptian role in Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal that Sharon has promised by the end of next year. Meanwhile, Suleiman is said to be working on a new hudna ceasefire with the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other armed factions in Gaza.
