Media Releases – October 1997
October 1997
October 5, 1997 Now, It’s Up To You, President Weizman!
October 6, 1997 The Cartoon You Were Not Permitted To See!
October 16, 1997 The “Old Boys’ Club”
October 29, 1997 Behind The Pardon of Ilana Podolsky
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Jerusalem, October 5, 1997
Now, It’s Up To You, President Weizman!
There is a certain madness in the criterion set by our
Courts, fixing the permissible extent that a person under
fire is allowed to react to his attackers. There is
little question that the throwing of stones and Molotov
Cocktails at motor vehicles, extensively practiced by
Arabs throughout Judea and Samaria, and elsewhere, has
caused serious physical harm to the occupants of the motor
vehicles attacked. Moreover, it is widely recognized that
such objects being thrown at vehicles are deadly weapons
which cause mortal damage. That at the time of such
grievous assaults, when a person is, so to speak, “under
fire”, he and his loved ones with him are in grave danger
of losing their very lives; no person should be held to a
criterion which does not take into account the actual
tensions, the fear and the anxiety experienced by those
under such a lethal attack. Those sitting in judgment
afterwards must put themselves into the very life-
endangering situation the defendant faced, or reasonably
believed he faced, before they can judge what force the
defendant should have used in any given instance.
Unconsciously bowing to Oslo, our Courts are
preoccupied with keeping a lid on what amount of force can
be used by Jews under attack. They have artificially put
abnormal restraints on those who are attacked, and let
Arabs off the hook lightly. The attackers are thereby not
only encouraged by their leaders to perpetrate violence
against Jews, but the Court’s attitude of shifting the
burden to those attacked to prove that they used only
reasonable force to stave off the attackers, results in a
continuance of such cruel attacks. We are left with the
bizarre and unjust result of punishing those attacked,
while the attackers go unpunished.
Ilana Podolsky, a newcomer from Russia, is the latest
victim of such a miscarriage of justice. The Supreme Court,
on appeal, reduced from three to one year her jail sentence
for “exceeding the necessary self-defense measures,” when
she was attacked by a frenzied Arab mob of stone throwers.
She was on her way with her eighty-year-old infirm mother, to
visit her seriously injured sister, who was hospitalized in
Jerusalem after an accident. For a Court, after the fact, to
judge that, faced with an unruly violent mob, Ilana reacted with
“excessive force”, defies reality. Of couse, had she been
killed, which was not at all unlikely, the Court would not have
had to review the amount of force Ilana used. It has often been
the case that hesitation and restraint on the part of the person
attacked has cost him his life.
Ilana alone is left to care for her aged mother. Her
sister has become severely handicapped as a result of her
accident. Will President Weizman prevent the tragedy of
allowing the incarceration of Ilana, leaving her mother, a
Holocaust survivor, alone and helpless? Ilana is
scheduled to begin her jail sentence in about twenty days,
unless President Weizman has the wisdom and moral courage
to pardon her. All Israel would applaud such a move!
Ruth and Nadia Matar
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Jerusalem, October 6, 1997
The Cartoon You Were Not Permitted To See!
Censorship takes on many forms, some subtle and
others more blatant. Israel pretends to be a democracy,
and its left-oriented media pontificate along those
lines. However, in actual practice the Israeli left
insists on the principles of democracy, free speech,
freedom of the press, etc., as long as views are
expressed with which they agree. However, if such views
are nationalistic or religious, censorship is not only
permissible, but is to be practiced in spades. Thus the
purportedly prestigious HaAretz has no difficulty in
selling space to Uri Avnery’s Gush Shalom, and their
inciteful position that the Jews living in Judea and
Samaria, Israel’s ancient homeland, are the main
obstacles to obtaining peace with Arafat. Similarly, the
media published some months ago a glaringly inciteful ad
by Meretz-oriented groups, viciously attacking the
Haredim, which read “On Saturday Night we will stop the
Haredim.”
HaAretz is ready to receive ads from Avnery’s
Gush Shalom, imploring the public not to purchase from
these “Jewish settlers” any products they produce and
sell. However, it was pointed out by the Women In Green,
who wished to place the annexed cartoon as an ad in the
Jerusalem Post and HaAretz, that such a hopelessly naive
position advocated by Avnery, is exactly the one that the
Nazis adopted when they came to power in 1933 in Germany.
It is a historical and well published fact that the Nazis
actively urged the Germans not to purchase anything from
Jewish merchants; that is exactly what Avnery is
advocating concerning the products of the Jewish
settlers. However, Avnery would go further. He would
not limit this boycott to the Israeli public, but wants
to extend it to the nations of the world as well.
Avnery’s myopic peace views, and his Jewish self-hatred,
have caused him to urge all the Governments of the United
Nations to boycott Jewish goods from Judea and Samaria.
Yet, it does not take any great wisdom to know that such
action arouses a wave of anti-Semitism which can not be
controlled, and will result in such a boycott being
extended to all Israeli goods. The weapon of a boycott
long practiced by the Arabs towards Israel itself, will
become a lethal tool of the nations to threaten Israel’s
very existence. It is no secret that the nations of the
world are opposed to Jerusalem remaining under the
exclusive control of Israel. The traitorous action of
Avnery and Gush Shalom in promoting a boycott of Jewish
products will inevitably lead to the curtailment of
Israel’s sovereignty, but neither HaAretz nor the
Jerusalem Post find anything Avnery is doing amiss or
dangerous. What concerns them, however, is that Women
In Green’s cartoon should not be allowed to be printed to
counter-balance what Avnery is advocating. The narrow
and restrictive views of these papers won out; the
cartoon was not published in their respective papers.
But our ad ironically was accepted in Vesti, a newspaper
published in Russian in Israel, which is a subsidiary of
Yediot Achronot. Israel’s democratic future is
threatened when the public is presented only with
opinions and points of view, which those who control the
media allow them to hear. Such censorship is
unpardonable, anti-democratic and unacceptable.
Ruth and Nadia Matar
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Jerusalem, October 16, 1997
The “Old Boys’ Club”
Ilana Podolsky will be going to jail on October
26 because she, as a new immigrant from Russia,does
not belong to the “Old Boys’ Club.” Simcha Dinitz
does. The former head of the Jewish Agency, was
convicted by a District Court Judge of the crime of
misusing Agency funds for his own personal benefit. He
will not be going to jail, nor will there be a criminal record
against him. The Supreme Court, itself made up of elite
members of the “Old Boys’ Club”, extricated Simcha and
absolved him from all formal guilt. Judge Orr, writing
the majority opinion, did say for posterity that he was
sure from the record that Dinitz had committed a crime,
but the basis for letting him off the hook was that
there was not enough evidence “beyond a reasonable
doubt” that he committed the crime for which he was
charged. The forceful minority opinion of Judge Dorner
was quite clear, however, that there had been such
evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Simcha Dinitz
committed the crimes for which he was convicted. How is
that possible? That Supreme Court Justices would differ
with regard to the clear cut evidence that is in the
Court record? Some other factors must have been at play
in considering the guilt or innocence of Simcha Dinitz!
We contend that the “Old Boys Club” factor played a
prominent role in the final determination.
Thatm, too, is the factor that is sending
Ilana Podolsky to jail. The evidence in the Podolsky
case was far less convincing than in the Dinitz case.
Ilana, after all, was defending herself, her aged mother,
a Holocaust survivor, and two young relatives in her car,
from a lethal attack by an Arab mob, who were throwing
stones and Molotov cocktails at her vehicle. In what was
clearly an act of self-defense, she fired a gun into the air.
The Court found that there was no premeditation to harm
anyone. However, her ricocheting bullet struck one of the
Arabs. When he later died, Ilana was charged and tried for
murder. On flimsy, hostile and unreliable Arab testimony,
she was convicted by the trial Court of manslaughter and
sentenced to three years. Incredulously, according to
the Court, she used more force in her self-defense than
was necessary! On appeal, the Supreme Court reduced the
jail term to one year, and she is to be imprisoned on
October 26, after the Holidays. Had she been a member
of the “Old Boys’ Club”, that group of Labor veterans
who appointed the present Supreme Court, she would be
free today. Promoting Oslo does not permit criticism of
the Arabs; in Labor’s view, any condemnation of Arab
actions when they stone and firebomb Jews, especially
those Jews located in Judea, Samaria or the Gaza Strip,
would be harmful to the peace process. So, unlike
Dinitz, Ilana, the victim of such an Arab attack, is off
to jail. “Justice” becomes a mockery when your chances
of receiving it depends upon whether you belong to the
“Old Boys’ Club” or not.
Ruth and Nadia Matar
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Jerusalem, October 29,1997
Behind The Pardon of Ilana Podolsky
If ever there is need to prove that a public protest
against an injustice can be effective, merely point to the
case of Ilana Podolsky! Ilana, a recent Russian immigrant,
an engineer by profession, was recently pardoned by President
Weizman from serving a one year jail sentence that was
supposed to have begun immediately after the Succoth Holidays.
Members and friends of Women In Green played an important role
in this outcome.
A few years ago, Ilana, with her aged mother, a
Holocaust survivor, and two young relatives was driving in
her car to visit her sister in a Jerusalem hospital; Ilana had just
learned that her sister had been in a serious automobile accident
in which she had been grievously injured. In this extremely
stressful situation, on the road to the hospital, Ilana’s car was
suddenly attacked by an unruly Arab mob, who threw lethal
stones and Molotov Cocktails at her moving vehicle. In an act
of self-defense, Ilana got out of her car, and fired her gun into the
air. Only then did the Arab mob disperse.
On her return to her apartment in Kiryat Arba
that evening, she was arrested by the police; they
claimed that one of the bullets from her gun had
apparently hit a building, ricocheted and struck an Arab,
who later died of his wounds. She was subsequently
charged with murder, and her trial, over a two and one
half year period, emotionally drained her; the
enormous legal expenses involved put her into hopeless
debt. Ilana was found guilty of manslaughter, and
sentenced to three years, half of which was to be an
actual jail term. Such a stiff sentence was given,
despite the fact that the Trial Judge specifically found
from the evidence that the killing had not been
premeditated; that Ilana had not intended to hurt anyone.
However, she nevertheless, unbelievably, held that Ilana
had “used excessive force” in her defense. On appeal to
the Supreme Court, her jail term was reduced to one year.
Women In Green then became involved. Many ads were
taken out in the Hebrew, English and Russian press
strongly pleading Ilana’s cause. Women In Green
demonstrated in downtown Jerusalem; they drew up a
Petition addressed to President Weizman and gathered over
a thousand signatures from passers-by within just a few
hours. The Petition and accompanying signatures were
presented to the Minister of Justice Tsachi HaNegbi requesting
him to act, since the required procedure was that he first
recommend a pardon, in writing, to President Weizman. The
Minister of Justice promptly responded positively.
Thereupon, our members throughout Israel gathered
many thousands of additional signatures on this Petition.
Periodically these signatures were brought to President
Weizman’s home in Jerusalem. We were successful! On
the eve of the last day of Succoth, almost at the last
hour, Ilana was notified by the President’s office that
she had been granted a pardon!
Ruth and Nadia Matar