Louis Rene Beres
Professor of International Law
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN 47907
Tel (317) 494-4189
Fax (317) 494-0833
Israel, it seems, has now gone far beyond permissible limits, both in terms of longstanding rules of international law and of its own authoritative domestic rules. Leaving aside, for the moment, the Government's apparent use of agents provocateur - a favored instrument of antidemocratic regimes - Jerusalem's increasingly broad definitions of "criminal incitement" are manifestly designed to silence a perfectly legitimate political opposition. As such, they are inconsistent with even the most basic standards of free speech and a free citizenry.
After the Rabin assassination, the Peres Government, and many other private Israelis, blamed opponents of the Government for creating a "deadly climate," an atmosphere that somehow generated the prime minister's murder. Deducible from this position, of course, is the conclusion that "words can kill," and that words, therefore, must now be more carefully controlled. While such an argument may contain a few grains of intellectual merit in principle (e.g., in certain extreme cases, crying "fire" in a crowded movie theater can cause death), in the pertinent Israeli case it is obviously a contrivance. If, in fact, the retroactive Israeli denunciation of "words" were to make any sense, fully half of the American Congress would have been assassinated last week. (The language in official Washington is at least as belligerent as it has been in Israel.)
As Americans, we know that words don't kill, bullets kill. The currently fashionable Israeli notion that words kill is an empty witticism, the kind of cliched "wisdom" that appeals to people and governments who are either unable or unwilling to reason more intelligently. It follows that Israel's post-assassination criminalizations of what is normally free speech and free assembly are not only patently unlawful, but also profoundly misconceived.
Israel is a young country; its democratic traditions are weak and fragile. A recent Haifa University survey of 1000 Israelis reports that most are in favor of additional curbs on free speech and assembly. If, in the United States, the attorney-general would be empowered to approve requests from the FBI (equivalent to Israel's GSS) to place Americans who disapprove of government policies under "administrative detention," the outcry - even after a grave national crisis - would be deafening. Such an idea, which is now a matter of policy in Israel, could never be entertained seriously in a true democracy, especially under the contrived circumstances cited presently by Israeli authorities.If, as it now appears, the Government of Israel chooses to operate under the British emergency regulations of 1945 - regulations permitting banning of demonstrations, curtailed freedom of speech and the press, and preventive arrests/detainment without trial - it might as well declare outright its formalized opposition to democracy.
There is one final matter. Every government under law can seek to protect itself against sedition, but the permissibility of this charge is always contingent, inter alia, on consistent applications. Hence, when the Peres Government levels charges of sedition against Rabbi Benny Alon and other leaders of Zu Artzenu, and simultaneously releases thousands of Arab terrorists from Israeli jails (a release, incidentally, representing egregious violation of international law) - terrorists whose subversive agenda against the Jewish State has never been retracted - the juridical authenticity of these charges cannot be taken seriously. And in what is likely the most astounding irony of all, when the Peres Government continues to turn over pieces of Israel to a Palestinian Authority which refuses to amend a Charter calling for Israel's annihilation - to its "Palestinian partners" - the redefined charge of sedition against Jewish supporters of national security represents the reductio ad absurdum of legal reasoning.
"We will crush you," said Interior Minister Haim Ramon about those citizens who legally oppose Israel's policy of self-destruction. Such language, apart from its intrinsic irony and insupportable logic, is hardly the language of a democratic government seeking to preserve itself from sedition. It is, rather, the anti-law language of a primitive Israeli political subculture, a barbaric subculture that flies in the face not only of binding international law, but also the 3000 year old higher law tradition that was born, of all places, in Ancient Israel.