LEGAL PROSECUTION OR IDEOLOGICAL PERSECUTION?
Letter from Ruth Matar (Women in Green) Jerusalem
September 7, 2006
Dear Friends,
I am starting this week’s Letter from Jerusalem by reproducing Caroline Glick’s article published in the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, September 5, in its entirety. Ms. Glick has won numerous prestigious awards for her integrity in journalism, not only in Israel but worldwide.
Our World: Shimshon Cytryn and Aharon Barak
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST
September 5, 2006
Sunday Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy presided over a hearing on a petition submitted by one Shimshon Cytryn requesting to be released from Dekel prison and placed under house arrest. Justice Levy deferred his ruling to a later date.
Cytryn, 19 a yeshiva student from the community of Nachliel in the Binyamin Region, is accused of attempted murder. Last June 28, two groups of teenage boys pelted one another with rocks on the Muwassi beach area in Gaza adjacent to the Israeli community Shirat Hayam. As the fight raged for three days without IDF intervention, the Israeli press set up shop near the boys and waited.
On June 28 the media sprang into action. Channel 1 filmed a series of narrow lens video clips which showed only the Israeli youths – including Cytryn — throwing rocks. Then Yediot Aharonot reporter Yitzhak Saban “heroically” inserted himself into the drama. He jumped before the cameras and “saved” a Palestinian youth whom he and his fellow reporters claimed had been critically wounded by the Israeli youths in a manner that recalled “a lynch.” The next morning a photo of Saban’s “intervention” was on the front page of Yediot. Television and radio news broadcasts led with stories about the “lynching” carried out by “right-wing extremists.” They reported that the Palestinian “victim” was hospitalized in Gaza and fighting for his life.
Yet that Palestinian “victim” was in and out of the hospital in the space of two hours. The picture of health, he gave multiple interviews to Arab and European reporters where he expounded on the “heroic battle” he and his friends fought against the “Jewish settlers.” The fact of the “victim’s” miraculous recovery from his life threatening wounds was not reported in the Israeli press until several days later and then the story was hidden in laconic reports on the inside pages of the papers.
The “lynch” story was manufactured against the backdrop of a steady drop in public support for the Sharon government’s plan to expel all the Israeli residents from Gaza and northern Samaria. Polling data showed that less than 50 percent of Israelis supported the plan. But the “lynching” story reversed the trend. In the space of 24 hours, the public’s support for the withdrawal rose to over 60 percent.
After the expulsions were completed last August, IDF commanders, including then OC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Dan Harel admitted that there had never been anything even vaguely resembling a lynching. But the crime’s fabrication did not prevent the police from arresting Cytryn nor did it did stop the state prosecution from charging him with attempted murder. So now Cytryn sits in prison awaiting trial for a crime that was never committed.
THE LEGAL environment that enabled situations like Cytryn’s to arise is part of the judicial legacy of retiring Supreme Court President Aharon Barak.
Barak has presided over the Court for 11 years. As a self-declared “judicial-statesman,” he used his position on the bench to reshape Israeli society and politics in his own image through his “constitutional revolution.”
Barak’s revolution placed the judicial branch above the legislative and executive branches. The elevation of the high court was enacted in four ways: First, the Court gave standing to petitioners who were neither directly nor indirectly affected by the matters they brought before the Court. Second, by cleverly interpreting a series of new Basic Laws to say something their drafters had never dreamed of, Barak was able to gain the power to overturn lawfully promulgated legislation. Third, the Court empowered itself to intervene in government decisions by raising the standards of “permissible actions” by the government and the Knesset in a manner that constricted the freedom of elected officials to set policy and legislate laws. Finally, Barak insisted that “everything is justicible.”
The consequence of all these actions was the effective transfer of executive and legislative authority to the judiciary. As a result, private and public behavior that has traditionally been seen as the realm of morality and prudence; military decisions regarding Israel’s national security that had previously been under the exclusive authority of the executive; ideological questions that had been the preserve of private citizens and state bodies; and religious questions that had been the exclusive reserve of religious authorities, now all came under the authority of the Supreme Court.
As he was establishing his power to overturn government and legislative decisions, Barak also consolidated his control over the judiciary. Using his control over the judicial selection process, over the past 11 years Barak transformed Israel’s judiciary into a near unitary organism whose members are overwhelmingly united in their support for Barak’s political agenda and his use of the judiciary as a means of forcing his political agenda on the Israeli public.
Barak’s political agenda is one of leftist, post-Zionist multiculturalism and radical secularism. Barak used various methods to advance his agenda. While refusing to ever consult Jewish legal traditions, he has given anti-Israeli, non-binding UN General Assembly documents and International Court of Justice advisory opinions the weight of international law and has incorporated these “international laws” into Israeli law.
HE PUSHED the idea that elected leaders are not allowed to make their best faith judgments about Israel’s defense, economy or ideological foundations. Working indirectly with far Left special interest groups that have eagerly embraced Barak’s throwing open of the Court’s doors to politics and flocked to the Court to gain through judicial fiat what they cannot hope to gain at the ballot box, Barak has ruled lawful, good faith government decisions regarding the defense of Israel and other national policy issues to be illegal.
Aside from that, through a legal precedent he himself established, Barak rendered our elected officials subject to blackmail by the legal bureaucracy. Barak’s Court ruled that all ministers indicted for any crime must resign their offices. As a result, the police and state prosecution, backed by the Court, can effectively fire political leaders by indicting them on the basis of flimsy or non-existent evidence. Such charges led to the resignations of Justice Ministers Ya’acov Neeman and Haim Ramon and former Internal Security Minister Rafael Eitan, all of whom expressed opposition to some aspects of Barak’s policies. Former Justice Minister Tzahi Hanegbi was neutralized in office by a criminal probe against him which remained open throughout the course of his tenure.
THROUGH HIS rulings, Barak made clear that some people’s human and civil rights are more equal than others. He barred the IDF from utilizing certain tactical measures that protect the lives of the troops because Barak said those measures impinged on the human rights of civilians who sheltered wanted terrorists. Barak ruled that Arab farmers’ free access to their crops outweighs the right of Israelis to defenses capable of protecting them from terrorist infiltration.
Retired justice Mishael Cheshin explained that Barak’s support for the expulsion of all Israelis from Gaza and northern Samaria made Ariel Sharon and his son Gilad immune from indictment for what appeared to be clear acceptance of bribes. In his words, “If Sharon had stood trial, there would have been no disengagement.”
And of course, under Barak’s rule, religious Israelis could expect little to no legal protection for their human or civil rights. Last year Barak’s Court enabled the abrogation of their freedom of expression by approving the police decision to prevent buses from traveling to licensed demonstrations; he indirectly approved police harassment and violence against demonstrators; he enabled unindicted citizens to be barred from their homes and prohibited from seeing their families. He ruled that they could be divested of their property rights without due process and without equitable restitution by the government; could be divested of their livelihood without due process or equitable restitution; could be prevented from running for office; and could be held for months in administrative detention.
All of these decisions are part of the means through which Barak’s “enlightened society” is cultivated and his “democracy” is protected.
UNFORTUNATELY for Shimshon Cytryn and the 65 percent of Israelis who in a poll last week said they believe that the Court’s rulings are motivated by political interests rather than law, the guard will not change when Barak retires next week.
His hand-picked successor Justice Dorit Benisch not only subscribes to his judicial philosophy, during her 31 years in the State Prosecution, Benisch stacked the prosecution with what she referred to in a recent interview with Yediot as attorneys who “worked in accordance with the same values” that she ascribes to. As she has made clear through her actions and words, Benisch’s “values” are post-Zionism; hostility towards the military; hostility towards religious Zionists; support for the Palestinians; and support for anti-religious social forces and pressure groups.
As Benisch replaces Barak next month she faces a situation where only 32 percent of Israelis think that she is qualified for office, and only 33 percent of the public has full faith in the Court. This is in contrast to the 85 percent of Israelis who had full faith in the Court in 1995.
Since it is clear that she will continue and attempt to widen Barak’s usurpation of governing authority in Israel, the question that arises is whether our political leaders will have the courage to curb the court’s power.
Unfortunately, given our current crop of politicians, there is every chance that Shimshon Cytryn will be tried and convicted of a crime that was never committed.
* * *
The last paragraph in this article is very disturbing: “Unfortunately, given our current crop of politicians, there is every chance that Shimshon Cytryn will be tried and convicted of a crime that was never committed.”
Interestingly enough, in today’s Jerusalem Post there was a scathing critique of Caroline Glick’s article by Larry Derfner entitled, Shimshon Cytryn and other ‘innocents’.
Nadia and I were incensed at the venom he injects in his article. We want you to determine for yourself whether his writing is an example of the media’s ideological persecution of innocent victims. Therefore, we have enclosed Derfner’s entire article and also a letter which we wrote to the Jerusalem Post in response.
Rattling the Cage: Shimshon Cytryn and other ‘innocents’
Larry Derfner, THE JERUSALEM POST
September 7, 2006
I don’t like to take issue in print with other Jerusalem Post journalists, but I have to make an exception now for the column “Our World: Shimshon Cytryn and Aharon Barak,” written by Caroline Glick on Monday.
The column gives the impression that Cytryn, 19, a religious settler on trial for the attempted murder of a Palestinian teenager in Gaza during the summer of last year, is the innocent victim of a political frame-up by the media and Barak’s Supreme Court.
In Glick’s telling, all that took place at Gaza’s Moassi beach in late June 2005 was an extended rock fight between two groups of teenagers, yet the media “manufactured” the tale of a near-fatal lynching of a Palestinian boy by a group of young settlers, when the boy spent only two hours in the hospital and emerged “the picture of health.” The media’s motive, the column indicates, was to make the Gush Katif settler movement look bad and thereby buck up public support for the impending disengagement.
Cytryn’s case is now before the Supreme Court, which Glick accuses of having a leftist political agenda just like the media’s, so she concludes that “there is every chance that Shimshon Cytryn will be tried and convicted of a crime that was never committed.”
I’m writing about this because I was one of the reporters on the Moassi beachfront on that June 28 that the column describes, and the behavior of the young settlers there that day wasn’t innocent at all, which is what readers of Glick’s column would conclude. One of those settlers did in fact try to murder that Palestinian teenager, and he had help. I don’t know if it was Cytryn who hit the Palestinian boy in the head with a rock thrown full force from a few feet away, but I know that one of those Jewish marauders did, and others tried to join in the attack. And while this was the worst violent crime they committed during those three days on the Gaza beachfront, it was by no means the only one.
The media, Aharon Barak and the Supreme Court are not the villains in this story. The villains were those 25 or so radical settler thugs at Moassi, including Cytryn.
Glick’s column doesn’t mention how the rock fight began. Yet it was big news at the time: Those young settlers, who were among the many right-wing youth pouring into Gush Katif to try to stop the disengagement, invaded a three-story beachfront house owned by a Palestinian family, chased the family out and took it over.
They went up on the roof and wrote the words “Muhammad is a pig” in huge letters on the wall facing the house next door where the Palestinian evictees were gathered with their neighbors. For three days, the settlers and Palestinians threw rocks at each other while Israeli soldiers did little but watch.
WHO WERE these young settlers? Glick quotes the media’s characterization of them as “right-wing extremists,” her implication being that this is the sort of knee-jerk, settler-bashing terminology that can be expected from the media.
But from what I saw of those young people on the roof, I’d say “right-wing extremists” was too polite a term. I’d call them “Judeo-fascists” instead.
They were a bunch of Kahanists, they were flying banners of Kach and the like-minded messianic wing of Chabad. A graffito on the stairway wall read “We’ll murder Sharon, too.”
I recognized one boy on the roof from the recent Purimspiel-cum-yahrzeit for Baruch Goldstein at Goldstein’s grave in Kiryat Arba. The boy, a West Bank settler named Pinhasi Bar-On, then 15, had been one of the most high-spirited revelers that Purim, singing songs of praise to Yigal Amir and shouting gleefully for Sharon’s death.
On the rooftop in Gaza, I asked him how he thought the battle over disengagement would play out. “In the end,” he said, “Sharon will either be sitting home or lying in his grave.”
I got to the beachfront a little after the incident for which Cytryn is standing trial, so I didn’t see it with my own eyes. But a TV cameraman showed me the raw footage he’d shot, and I watched it a few times. The images still in my memory are fleeting, but I remember seeing an IDF soldier with a rifle standing with a Palestinian boy – Halil Mejeida, 18 – in his custody behind a wall. I remember seeing a boy hoisting himself atop the wall and hurling a rock at Mejeida, and another boy trying to get at Mejeida, who was lying on the ground as the soldier tried to protect him.
To fill in the lapses in my memory, here is the relevant excerpt from the news story written by the Chicago Tribune’s Joel Greenberg: “One Palestinian youth was wounded in the head by a rock, and as he lay senseless on the ground, young settlers ran up and stoned him at close range while an Israeli soldier tried to shield him. ‘Don’t touch him, let him die,’ shouted one settler in footage of the assault shown on Israeli television.”
“Manufactured”? I don’t know how long Mejeida stayed in the hospital, and I don’t know what kind of condition he was in when he got out, but was the media account of that incident a “fabrication” of “a crime that was never committed,” as Glick’s column has it?
No, it was an attempted lynch of a Palestinian in IDF custody by a handful of young settlers.
The standoff ended at sundown when Israeli soldiers stormed the house, dragging out the squatters who, in their parting gesture, had set the place on fire.
That was Shimshon Cytryn and his friends. Remember them the next time you read or hear about how the Israeli justice system is victimizing some purely innocent Jew who – wouldn’t you know it? – has been branded by the media as a “right-wing extremist.”
* * *
LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE JERUSALEM POST
September 7, 2006
Dear Sir,
We were incensed to read Larry Derfner’s article, “Shimshon Cytryn and other ‘innocents'”, in today’s Jerusalem Post. It seems that once again Mr. Derfner is playing havoc with the truth. In addition, Mr. Derfner attacks the veracity of Jerusalem Post Columnist Caroline Glick.
Caroline Glick is one of the most honest political analysts today. She is also a world-renowned, courageous journalist, who during the recent Iraq War was embedded with US troops, joining the infantry unit that was first to reach Baghdad.
Derfner’s column gives one the impression that he passionately hates the religious settlers. In his article, he expresses his opinion that these settlers, Shimshon Cytryn and others, are nothing but “Jewish marauders” and “right-wing extremists”. Furthermore, he even refers to them as “Judeo-fascists”. He states that “one of those settlers did in fact try to murder that Palestinian teenager, and he had help.”
Larry Derfner has not done his homework! Its one thing to be opinionated, but another to write according to the facts. The facts of this incident, according to the alleged Arab victim of the so-called “lynching”, Hilal Majaida himself, are as follows: “A soldier came and took me from there to an isolated spot, hit me in the stomach and in the head. The soldier beat me with the butt of an M-16 rifle. It was a soldier who beat me, not a settler.” (This information is from a radio program aired on Reshet Bet, Israel Radio 2, on July 4, 2005 at 10:36:21. Ha-Kol Dibburim (Its All Talk) Avi Yisakharov Interviews Hilal Majaida.)
Larry Derfner owes all of your readers an apology.
Ruth and Nadia Matar
Women in Green
* * *
It is difficult to escape the feeling that the case of the State of Israel vs. Shimshon Cytryn is one of ideological persecution by the legal system and the media rather than purely legal prosecution.
If you are as incensed as I am about this injustice perpetrated on Shimshon Cytryn, please express your sentiments to Israel’s Attorney General, Menachem Mazuz, fax number 001-972-2646-7001.
Also, email the editor of the Jerusalem Post at letters@jpost.com and express your opinion about Larry Derfner’s article.
With Blessings and Love for Israel,
Ruth Matar
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