ISRAELI DEMOCRACY (Continued from p.6) right to free speech be respected. (And how do we know that there have not been murders of "settlers" by terrorists inspired by these vile statements?) Indeed, at the risk of speaking ill of the slain, even Rabin himself constantly compared the Israeli democratic opposition with Hamas. Is this not vile incitement and agitation? The argument that rightist "incitement" does in fact produce violence is of course corroborated by nothing except conjecture. There is no empirical proof of this proposition, and ample reason to suspect that it is patently false. The assassin was also a law student; yet no one has proposed that law schools be regarded as morally responsible for the assassination or be suppressed in order to prevent further violence. It is true that there have been several murderers who committed their crimes apparently out of rightist extremist ideology. The assassin of Rabin is not even the worst of these; that title belongs to Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre. While it is true that leftist extremists and fringe elements have not produced similar murderers, it is not the case that leftist extremism has failed to produce ideological criminals, some quite dangerous. A terrorist and espionage ring organized by a far-left kibbutznik named Udi Adiv in the 1970s failed to produce violence only because it was captured in time. Nuclear spy Mordecai Vanunu had strong ties with the anti-Zionist wing of the Israeli left and is still a folk hero of the far left around the world (and especially in Great Britain); so did other These are the same people who cheered on the Hebrew University professor who compared Jewish settlers to Nazis. convicted spies now in Israeli prisons. Moreover, the Israeli left has conducted more than its fair share of violent and illegal abominations. The left was the originator of the idea of Israeli army service resistance, itself a serious crime, and hailed Colonel Eli Geva as a hero when that leftist colonel simply deserted his men in the heat of battle during the "Peace for Galilee" military campaign in Lebanon. During the years before the 1992 election of Rabin and subsequent Oslo Accord, when meeting with PLO officials was a crime for Israelis, Israeli leftists made illegal weekly hajj openly to the PLO leadership. They also lobbied openly in Washington and elsewhere in favor of anti-Israel sanctions in order to force the democratically-elected government of Israel to abandon its policies. The point is that the smug denunciations by Israeli leftists of the "criminal tendencies" of all anti-Oslo dissidents are worse than hypocritical. The Likud may

have many things to answer for, including 15 years of incompetent and bungling rule from 1977 until 1992. But in a democracy, it is the moral obligation of the opposition to oppose. The attempts to criminalize the Likud for doing so in fact point to the shallowness of the commitment to democracy by so much of the left. The murderers who emerged from the lunatic fringe of the right should, of course, be regarded as worse criminals than these leftists. But holding the anti-Oslo right to be collectively "culpable and guilty" with respect to the assassination is sheer demagoguery. The cries of "The Likud is guilty of murder" and "Bibi Netanyahu killed Rabin" make exactly as much sense as would the claim that because Abraham Lincoln was killed by a Democrat, then Clinton and all the Democrats share the guilt and should be banned. Or demands to delegitimize Protestantism because some evangelical fanatics bombed abortion centers. Moreover, these slogans are themselves no less repulsive than the worst things spouted by the worst rightist hotheads at anti-Oslo protests. The difference, of course, is that the spouters of these leftist verbal atrocities are not getting carted off to court and prison as "inciters." And how will the new "rules of speech" deal with the Arabs? What about Arabs who said "Good!" after the Rabin assassination? What about Arab college students who chant, "In fire and blood, we will redeem Palestine!"? What about Arab Knesset members and other politicians who called on Saddam Hussein to exterminate the Jews of Israel or who called for escalating intifada violence? What about Arab demonstrators in the territories whose standard chant is "Slaughter the Jews!"? The proponents of the new "speech codes" have always argued that these forms of speech by Arabs should be tolerated with equanimity and are no more than empty rhetoric. How many Jews have been murdered by terrorists inspired by these forms of speech? Finally, it is conceivable that abridging the freedom of speech of extremists could inflame violence--and not suppress it. In recent months, it has become evident that some extremists in the U.S. were driven into the militias by the FBI's actions in Waco, Texas and in Idaho. The U.S. Congress itself has been holding hearings on those actions and asking this question. The bomber of Oklahoma City claims he was inspired by FBI actions. In Israel, the extremists from Kach have been driven underground because their opinions were criminalized. Kach was banned from running for election, and the leaders of Kach were arrested for "belonging to a terrorist group." The latter actions were cheered by the American administration, even though they would violate the First Amendment if carried out in America, where Kach operates openly and legally. The assault on dissent by the Israeli leftist establishment, including the Israeli Labor Party, cannot be explained except by the shallowness, the flimsiness, and the conditionality of its commitment to fundamental (Continued on p.11)

February 1996               - 7 -               Outpost