Wednesday, April 09, 2008
How I Beat Israel's Dual Justice System
How I Beat Israel's Dual Justice System
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By:Steven Plaut Wednesday, April 9, 2008
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Israel has a dual justice system. While operating within a single overall
structure of courts and related legal institutions, two separate justice
systems exist in the country: one for leftists and the other for everyone else.
One of the worst manifestations of this dual justice system involves
protections of freedom of speech. For many years, freedom of speech has been
selectively protected in Israel by courts and legal institutions. Under the
dual justice system, anti-Israel Arabs and Jewish extremists always enjoy
freedom of speech, whether they're defending anti-Jewish terrorism, calling for
Israel's annihilation, championing lawbreaking and insurrection by soldiers, or
even denying the Holocaust. Non-leftists enjoy no such freedom of speech.
Under this system, expressions of non-leftist political opinion by
anti-Oslo dissidents constitute "incitement" and "sedition." After the
assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, dissidents were carted off by
the score (including some rabbis) to face charges of "incitement," and some did
jail time. "Insulting a public official" is defined as a crime in Israel, but
the law is selectively enforced, never against leftist Jews or Arabs.
Israel has an "anti-racism" law, making the expression of "racist
opinions" a crime. But it is only used to ban and criminalize the expression of
opinion by Kahanists. Not a single Arab or Jewish leftist has ever been indicted
under it, even for cheering terrorist murders of Jews. Jewish teenage girls have
been sent to prison without trial by judges for expressing opinions in protests
and Moshe Feiglin was convicted of "sedition" for blocking traffic in an
anti-Oslo protest – while Arab politicians openly engaged in espionage and
treason are never even indicted.
Which brings me to what some are calling the most important Israeli free
speech court case in recent years, one that represents an important victory
over judicial bias and the dual legal system. As many Jewish Press readers may
know, I have been involved in a long court case that has already run on for six
years. It involves the malicious attempt by one of Israel's worst academic
anti-Israel extremists to misuse the dual judicial system to suppress freedom
of speech in Israel – myfreedom of speech.
The case stemmed from my involvement in exposing and monitoring the
anti-Israel extremism of Israeli academics. I work with several websites that
do just that, including IsraCampus (www.isracampus.org.il).
Neve Gordon is a venomously anti-Israel lecturer in political science at
Ben-Gurion University (BGU). Gordon was hired and promoted by BGU largely on
the basis of the prodigious amounts of anti-Israel political propaganda he
churns out and misrepresents as scholarship. He regularly denounces Israel as a
fascist, racist, terrorist, apartheid state, and he openly calls for Israel's
elimination (in what Israeli leftist extremists these days call the "one state
solution," but what should more accurately be called the Rwanda solution).
Gordon led an international campaign of defamation against his own army
commander, which resulted in attempts to indict that man as a "war criminal" in
Europe. Gordon's pieces are carried on neo-Nazi websites, including one run by
Ernst Zundel, the neo-Nazi deported from Canada and now residing in a German
prison cell.
Seven years ago I criticized Gordon for repeatedly endorsing the writings
and opinions of the notorious Norman Finkelstein, who claims Germany is the
victim of Jewish extortion and "Holocaust hoaxsters," who cheers Hizbullah
terror, and who was fired last summer by DePaul University, where he had been
employed as a lecturer. (Unlike BGU, DePaul is trying to impose serious
academic standards on its anti-Israel extremists.)
I also denounced a group of protesters Gordon joined in Ramallah. They
were there – illegally – to interfere with Israeli anti-terror operations and
serve as "human shields," protecting wanted terrorists being sheltered in
Arafat's headquarters. When Gordon was shown on the front pages of two Israeli
newspapers embracing Arafat in solidarity, I took to the Internet and dismissed
him and his "human shield" friends as a group of "Judenrat wannabes."
For those remarks, Gordon filed a harassment "libel suit" against me. It
was a classic SLAPP suit. SLAPP stands for "Strategic Lawsuit against Public
Participation." It is an anti-democratic harassment tactic designed to suppress
freedom of speech. In many parts of the United States there are serious
penalties for filing SLAPP suits. That's not the case in Israel.
Gordon filed his suit in Nazareth court, knowing that many of the judges
there are Arabs, some holding extremist political opinions. Gordon's complaint
was that I "libeled" him and damaged his "good name" by criticizing his
politics. But Gordon is a public figure, and attacking the public political
opinions and activities of anyone in Israel, especially a public figure, is
supposed to be protected speech.
Gordon's entire suit was based on "freedom of speech for me but not for
thee," a fundamental principle in any dual judicial system. Labeling as a
"Judenrat wannabe" a public figure whose anti-Israel articles are published by
neo-Nazis and who proclaims solidarity with Arab terrorists may be impolite,
but it is protected speech in any real democracy.
The suit, which some in the media were dubbing the "Israeli David Irving
Trial" with me in the role of Deborah Lipstadt, was assigned to an Arab woman
judge named Reem Nadaff. Her husband was at the time the party sidekick of Azmi
Bishara, the Arab Knesset member now in hiding outside Israel after having
engaged in espionage and providing assistance to Hizbullah when it was bombing
northern Israel.
While most Arab judges in Israel are responsible and cautious, this judge
simply threw out Israel's entire set of protections for freedom of speech and
imposed her political biases on her ruling. She found I had "libeled" Gordon by
criticizing his opinions. Never mind that everything I wrote about what Gordon
writes or does was factually correct. She essentially ruled that treasonous
pro-terror activities are protected speech, while criticism of them is slander.
In her verdict, she went out of her way to endorse Holocaust revisionism, praise
Finkelstein, and then – to top it all off – wrote that all of Israel is situated
on land stolen from another people.
The dual justice system had struck again, with a vengeance. The judge
ordered me to pay Gordon around NIS 100,000 in "damages" and court costs simply
for exercising my freedom of speech.
That was approximately two years ago. I filed an appeal, which under
Israeli law must be in the same district court (Nazareth). And recently the
appeals panel of three district court judges overturned the ruling by Nadaff.
It was an unparalleled defeat of the dual justice system and a tremendous
near-complete victory for freedom of speech in Israel.
The appeals panel, in overturning the earlier ruling by Naddaf, said that
just as Gordon enjoys freedom of speech when he smears Israel, its leaders, and
even private persons such as his old army commander, so those who criticize
Gordon's politics must enjoy freedom of speech, even if it takes the form of
"impolite" or harsh language.
The panel, however, balked by a vote of two against one from going all the
way toward establishing true freedom of speech in Israel. Basing itself on a
Supreme Court ruling from last year, in which a journalist was ordered to pay 1
shekel in damages to a Kahanist because the journalist had called him a "little
Nazi" on national television, the Nazareth appeals panel ruled that the court
should use its powers to discourage use of Holocaust era rhetoric, and so was
allowing Gordon to retain 10 percent of what the lower court had awarded him.
(The dissenting appeals judge considered use of "Judenrat wannabe" to be
legitimate free speech.)
That last part of the appeals ruling shows that the dual justice system in
Israel is not yet shut down altogether – something that would also require the
firing of Judge Naddaf. Israeli leftists, Arabs, and politicians of all stripes
use "Holocaust era imagery" in political discourse all the time and it is
protected speech. But for my calling Gordon a "Judenrat wannabe," the court was
allowing him to retain NIS 10,000.
To overturn that remaining vestige of Israel's selective protection of
freedom speech, and to inflict a greater defeat on Israel's dual justice
system, I am now appealing to the Israeli Supreme Court to overturn that
clause.
