The deja vu of 'incitment,' on a New Year's eve

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Such a ceremony was conducted a few weeks before the Rabin assassination. And when the rabbi is asked if he really wants to see Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dead, he answers, ‘yes, of course.’ Meanwhile, the police are reporting a surge in phoned and mailed threats against the prime minister; a petition terming Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan a ‘crime against humanity’ is circulating through the Right’s leadership; and Sharon is openly being called a ‘dictator’ by people inside his own party.

It’s that season again in Israel, when a few hundred or a few thousand people on the far Right, convinced they know best what’s good for ‘the nation of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the Land of Israel’ openly scoff at democratic rules and equally openly declare that they are determined to use every means possible to bring down – or stop -- a prime minister who more than ever appears determined to go ahead with his disengagement plan.

Woman Crucified # 13 by Silvia Rosenberg, mixed media on recycled paper, 20x30 cm.

hings aren’t yet at the fever pitch they were in the weeks leading up to Rabin’s assassination. Zu Artzeinu, which was led by the same Moshe Faiglin who now controls a couple of hundred votes now in the Likud central committee, isn’t sending people into the streets to block highways, burn tires, chase after the prime minister heckling him wherever he goes. There aren’t crowds outside his home every night chanting he should be hanged like Mussolini, and dead cats aren’t being delivered in cardboard boxes. His image is not being dressed up in an SS uniform or a bloody keffiyeh, the way Rabin’s was at a rally that Sharon addressed in Jerusalem’s Kikar Zion less than a month before Rabin was shot dead at a peace rally ten times the size of the anti-Rabin rally in the fall of 1994.

But the reports are consistent and insistent, like a drumbeat. Somewhere, inside Israel or the territories, a lone gunman is probably already making preparations, perhaps consulting with rabbis from the fringe, the way Yigal Amir did, or maybe just listening to his (or her) friends, convinced they are doing the right thing. Sharon, of course, says he is not afraid and counts on the security services to keep him safe.

hus Israel goes into the Jewish New Year of 5765: Five senior Fateh gunmen are killed in a shootout in Nablus; Five conscientious objectors are released from a year’s sentence in prison, saying they will continue to refuse to serve in the occupied territories, if called up.

One Right winger, Noam Federman had his home arrest extended by another three months (after spending nine months in administrative detention), and one Leftist activist, Tali Fahima, was sent into admninistrative detention, the first Israeli women ever so detained by the Shin Bet. It's alleged she was an accomplice of Zakariye Zbaidi, the leadng Fateh gunman in Jenin. She syas she was trying to promote peace.

At last 100 families of the estimated 1,200 families slated for evacuation from Gaza and northern West Bank, have applied for their compensation; the government’s security cabinet approved the compensation plan (and a plan to seal off Gaza settlements in the weeks leading up to the final date of evacuation, to prevent Faiglin and his ilk from filling the abandoned houses).

Vicki Knafu, the single mom whose march from Mitzpe Ramon to Jerusalem last summer briefly sparked the start of a special revolt against the government’s neo-Thatcherite policies, a revolt that fizzled out under the weight of Palestinian terror in the streets and Finance Minister Netanyahu’s rhetoric about how things would get better, appeared on a web site in the nude, with slogans against the government written on her body. She told interviewers that her last recourse was to try to shock people. Feminists said she was not the only woman forced to sell her body in Israel. Social activists disassociated themselves from what they called pornography.

And while Yasser Arafat sent President Moshe Kastav new year’s greetings, saying he hopes this year will see a breakthrough to peace, that gets much less attention than Madonna’s arrival tonight as part of a delegation of Hollywood stars and others who are followers of a uniquely pop version of kabbala, Jewish mysticism, promoted by a Los Angeles based rabbi, or tonight’s European Champions League football game between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Bayer Munchen.

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