After five years, the taboo against incitement has become so entrenched that vast segments of the population are plainly afraid to speak openly for fear of arrest. There have been a few cases where people were in fact arrested for speaking their minds, and even sentenced to criminal punishment. But such people belong, as a rule, to the group of Zionist Jews referred to in common parlance as "the right wing". Should a leftist, or an anti-Zionist, ever engage in incitement, the entire country turns a blind eye.
A classic example of the Orwellian world that Israel has become took place last week. Yossi Beilin, Israel's Justice Minister of all things, is the star of the show. Beilin also serves as the Director of Ehud Barak's re-election campaign among the Arabs. Last week, he placed in advertisement in Arab newspapers featuring a picture of Likud leader Ariel Sharon surrounded by the dead bodies of women and children, in reference to Sharon's position as Defense Minister at the time of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in Lebanon in 1982.
A little while before that massacre, the Christian Lebanese Prime Minister of the time, Bashir Gemayel, was gunned down in his car by Palestinian terrorists - the very same breed of creature that today carries out similar attacks against Jewish motorists in Israel, orphaning countless children without so much as a flinch. The massacre was a revenge attack against a known nest of terrorists, and carried out by followers of Gemayel.
At the time, the world condemned the attack, and Israel under whose control the Christian Lebanese supposedly operated. Following a commission of inquiry, Sharon was ousted from his position.
Rather than the incident coming back to haunt Sharon, however, all of Israel is now scared to act in its own defense. Israeli "leaders" such as Ehud Barak openly state that world acceptance is more important to them than retention of the Jewish Heartland or defense of Israel's strategic interests. After all, if Lebanese Christians can't defend their own leaders, who are we to even try?
Which brings me back to Yossi Beilin, one of the prime architects of the Oslo suicide pact. Beilin broke Israeli law in 1992 by meeting with PLO representatives - then still considered terrorists even by the Israeli left - in order to make a deal with them. If they convinced Israeli Arabs to support Labor, he would guarantee that the government would accede to their demands for Israeli territory in the Jewish Heartland. He would initiate a scenario that would give Israeli arms to anti-Semitic murderers and grant independence to a terrorist state in the heart of Israel. Today, instead of being prosecuted for breaking the law, he sits as Justice Minister in the Israeli government.
Well, Ehud Barak has perhaps given the citizens of Israel - those who really do uphold the law - another chance to put Beilin on trial. If any Zionist Israeli had published such an ad in the Arab press with Barak's picture in place of Sharon's, that Israeli would have been arrested within the hour and put on trial within the week. And there is, after all, plenty of reason such an ad would be well-received. After all, hundreds of Arabs have committed suicide at the hands of Barak's army in the past three months. The world media even says so. And we all know that impressions created in the media, even in the Arab media, are what rule.
In fact, I have an idea. Rather than put Yossi Beilin on trial for the crime of incitement, we should take a page from his book. The Israeli Justice Minister has now said that incitement against rival political leaders is not a crime. After all, he engages in it himself. Instead, Zionist Israelis should take out advertisements of their own. These should tell the truth, that Ehud Barak is to blame for abandoning the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, and the Jewish Heartland, that Yitzchak Rabin, with the help of Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, began this process of national suicide, and that none of the people who still believe in this policy have any place in the leadership of the Jewish State.
And then, Yossi Beilin should be put on trial. But rather than incitement, the charges should be treason, conspiring with the enemy, and aiding and abetting terrorism. That this man serves as Justice Minister is, perhaps, the best indication that in Israel, crime is just and history is unimportant.
It is time Israel returned to the reality of non-hypocritical, non-apologetic, proud Judaism.
Copyright 2001. Yehuda Poch is a writer living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.
