To be sure, the actions of police and IDF troops needs to come under very close and exacting scrutiny. There have been far too many instances in the past of police bruatlity in crushing demonstrations by the Israeli right. Scenes like yesterday's, with mounted police wielding batons and injuring scores of people, took place in September 1993 at demonstrations opposing the Oslo Accords, and in the summer of 1995 when demonstrators opposing the imprisonment without charge of right-wing leaders were assaulted near the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. There have been dozens of other such instances in the past decade, some large scale and some small.
But any commission of inquiry will need to examine the roles played by our politicians in the circumstances that have made such demonstrations necessary. A perfect example of this was provided this morning by Foreign Minister (and Justice Minister) Tzipi Livni in an interview with Israel Radio. "The message being sent to the children, whether consciously or not, is that this is a foreign rule."
But Livni, and others, have it all wrong. Israeli society has long viewed the residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza as foreign elements. Labor MK Yuli Tamir even went so far as to say, on the same Israeli Radio program this morning, that all the Israelis in Judea and Samaria "should be brought back home, where we can welcome them, and provide them with the same benefits we gave the people who were evacuated from Gush Katif."
Many of the expellees from Gush Katif have not yet received one agora of their promised benefits, largely due to an active rejection of them by the government. Such criminal negligence on the part of the government sends a loud and clear message to the left fringes of society -- people like Tamir -- that their worldview is correct, and that the Israeli right is not at all legitimate.
Yitzchak Rabin and Shimon Peres made the same mistake in the mid-90s, with Rabin telling the Yesha Council that they could "spin like propellers", and Peres telling Women in Green leader Ruth Matar to "Go back where you came from". Back then, the complete indifference, and even active hostility showed by the government to the right-wing community was a large part of the circumstances that led to Rabin's assassination.
Since that assassination, the left has been very loud in demanding that the right wing come to order and cease all "incitement", pointing to the assassination as a result of right-wing fanaticism. But the left has not for one minute ceased its endless potrayal of the right as lawless animals and violent anarchists. Tamir slaps them in the face now in much the same way that Yael Dayan did in the immediate aftermath of Oslo, when she appeared on CNN and told Beit El residents to "come home". And Livni can't understand why the right views the Israeli government as a "foreign rule". Did it ever occur to her that the Israeli government and establishment view the right as a foreign element whom they would rather simply leave?
This should be the focus of an official commission of inquiry into yesterday's violence.
But another inquiry should also be launched -- an internal right wing inquiry into the failures of Amona and how future such expulsions can be handled very differently, and far more successfully. The images of young demonstrators hurling cinderblocks onto the heads of security forces do everything to further entrench the idea in left-wing minds that these people are criminal anarchists. They do nothing to convince anyone of the truth of right-wing claims, and even serve to drive away many who could have supported them. There are many mainstream right-wingers in Israel who could not stomach yesterday's scenes, and for whom the people on the rooftops do not represent them.
What yesterday showed more than anything else is that the Israeli right has no political program, no body of ideas upon which they are basing their actions or opinions, and no overall guiding ideology. This is not Right, it is mindless. And for a group pledged to settle, build, defend and strengthen the Jewish nation and the Jewish homeland -- this is a tragedy.
Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
