Traitor? What are you talking about? He's one of ours!
By Lily Galili
Haaretz, December 16, 2003
How does the right deal with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Industry and Trade Minister Ehud Olmert speaking about `painful concessions' and `unilateral withdrawal'?
The handout distributed last week that was signed by "The Hilltop Youth" is one of the more bizarre broadsheets to be seen in these parts. "Sharon will betray us," it says, adopting the future tense. Not "Sharon is a traitor," a formula to which we have already grown accustomed regarding other "traitors." The choice of the obstacle-circumventing language had the effect of largely dimming the message. From this wording, one gained the sense that its authors had imposed great caution on themselves and were deterred, perhaps out of fear, from explicit use of the emotionally loaded word "traitor."
"The thing is that they are afraid of saying `traitor,'" says Moshe Feiglin, head of the Zo Artzeinu movement, who during the Oslo period was convicted of insurrection and incitement to riot, and is now a member of the Likud Central Committee. "If they feel he is a traitor, they should say so up front. Why shouldn't they? It's dangerous when people are afraid to say what they think."
Rabbi Yisrael Rozen, a member of the forum of Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) rabbis and head of the Tzomet Institute in Alon Shvut, disagrees with Feiglin's interpretation of the unusual phraseology. "Maybe it isn't fear, maybe it's a tactic of whoever wrote the handout saying to Sharon, `You're still one of ours until you betray us,'" he says.
Rozen himself did not seem to have taken any vow to guard his tongue in his regular column in "Shabbat Beshabbato," a weekly handout that is distributed through the nation's synagogues (80,000 copies). His column carried a punchy title that invoked a theme of the forthcoming festival of Hanukkah: "The Antiochus Accords." The subject of the column was the Geneva Accord, of course. In the column, Rabbi Rozen explicitly invokes the word "treason", as well as "hatred" and "Satan" in reference to the proponents of Geneva. Yossi Beilin is simply labeled "Yossi B."
Reminiscent of other times? Not exactly. The words may be the same, but this time Rabbi Rozen says he mulled over the use of these terms, and even consulted with others. Yes, he definitely thought long and hard about it, due to the Rabin assassination and the ensuing stirring-of-the-hornets'-nest atmosphere, and ultimately decided it was acceptable only because of a High Court of Justice ruling from 1992 that differentiated between the handover of territories by the government, an act that is not considered treason, and the handover of territories by an unauthorized individual or group.
Nevertheless, he argues that the limits of freedom of expression do not necessarily have to be decided in court. "The dilemma is not a legal one. I agree that there is room for some sort of subjective boundaries, but I am not willing to accept the Rabin assassination being perpetually invoked as a means of stifling free expression."
A matter of tribalism
There is something to what Rozen says. Whenever a member of the right says something that has a bit of an edge to it, he is called up before the media and asked in a didactic tone, "Didn't you learn anything from the Rabin assassination?"
As if everyone else had internalized the full significance of political assassination. Conversely, those on the right deny having created the verbal atmosphere to the assassination, so much so that it sounds that if not for the smoking gun, Rabin might have actually committed suicide. The boundaries of freedom of expression that the right takes upon itself become especially interesting and complicated at this time, when the person speaking about "painful concessions" is a prime minister from the right, and the father of the unilateral withdrawal plan is Ehud Olmert from the right.
Could Rabbi Rozen ever imagine Olmert shown in Nazi uniform?
"I have no formula," he says, "I feel that in the framework of subjective inhibitions, it is wrong to use the term `traitor' for a person who changes his opinion or who `see things differently from the inside than from the outside,' as Sharon has said. At most, I could say that he's been broken. It isn't the same as the Geneva people bringing the anti-Semitic EU into an internal Jewish argument, and I would also label as traitors people from the right if they would bring in the Chechnians to help them conquer the Temple Mount. But if the hilltop youth waved a `Olmert is a traitor' poster, I would look at it as a sort of joke, over which there is no need to call the legal system into action."
This distinction, which makes Beilin an automatic traitor but absolves Olmert from having to bear the same description, has a decidedly tribalist infrastructure.
"I have an article against Olmert, but the reflex response is indeed different," acknowledges Professor Ayeh Eldad of the National Front. "When my friend does something bad, I will be slow to denounce him, and when my political opponent does something bad, I rush to denounce him. Sometimes it is a matter of tactics. I have no doubt that by explaining what is for the good of the state, I could influence Olmert, but I could not influence Beilin. So there is indeed a tribe of the national camp here, although by addressing it, I would only be able to dictate the rate, not the final position. The nuances also exist within the other camp. With Sneh, with Mitzna and even with Sarid, I can still argue, but not with Beilin, about whom I have no doubt that he has no intention to fortify Israel's independence and security. I will not get up and say `Sharon is a traitor,' but I can say that handing over parts of the land of Israel is treason."
As opposed to others in the right, Eldad believes that words can kill, but the same holds true for words "from the other side." For instance, anyone who says that he, as a settler, caused the deaths of more than a thousand people in the latest intifada, "is spilling my blood."
But more than anything else, he is insulted by the words "occupation" and "occupier."
"Describing me as a `fascist' really doesn't worry me," says Eldad. "I was raised on that word in my father's house [Professor Israel Eldad - L.G.] But when someone who calls me an occupier, it is as if he is saying that I don't belong here. Its goes even deeper than `traitor,' because being treasonous is variable behavior, but `occupier' in the Land of Israel is a permanent situation and does harm to the basis of my existence." As long as we are talking about nuances, Eldad argues that as opposed to "traitor," the word "treason" is not a fiery, passionate definition, but the a word borrowed from the criminal code.
What about expressions like "Nazi"? "Nazi is a meaningless curse, like `ben-zonah' [literally `son of a whore'], which two parties can hurl at one another without any real intent," says Eldad. "In principle, you do not draw any metaphors from the Holocaust. Say `collaborator,' don't say `kapo.' But even here people exaggerate. Once I mentioned the name `Hitler' at a session of a Knesset committee, when I was talking about the agreement he made with Chamberlain, and right away they jumped on me - `Here we go with the Holocaust again.'"
No more self-censorship
Eldad says about himself that he has mechanisms of self-censorship, and thus he makes sure to write in advance the speeches that he gives in Knesset. "Self-restraint is the most effective mechanism of all," he says. "What is really frightening is the judicial dictatorship that shuts the mouth of the national camp. The High Court of Justice has been harnessed in this effort. The Supreme Court of the State of Israel is politically biased, and acts to shut the mouths of the right and open the mouths of all those who disparage and blaspheme. See the example of permitting the screening of "Jenin,Jenin," as opposed to the closure of Arutz 7. Some people say that closing Arutz 7 us a mistake for democracy, because it will give the right the sense that it had back in the days of Rabin and the `propellers,' which may be summarized in `you can turn round and round - in any case no one is listening to you."
Feiglin feels the same way. He sees the unlimited freedom of expression as an obstacle to violence. "Rabin was the safest so long as Zo Artzeinu blocked the roads and people could express themselves," he says. "As soon as they cleaned the streets, all of the frustration was drained into one psychopath who got up and killed." The price of that period is still being paid by Feiglin. The crimes of which he was convicted and for which he served six months of community service, prevented him from being included on the Likud's Knesset list, on which he was given 39th place.
Throughout the entire conversation, Feiglin places the two words "Israeli democracy" in quotation marks, and calls it "mobocracy" - democracy of the mob. Conversely, the word "traitor" does not appear in his lexicon; not because of high-mindedness or linguistic purity, but because he sees Israel as a country that has lost its values. He claims that prior to the assassination, he didn't call Rabin a traitor or murderer, as has been alleged, and that he would not speak of Beilin in this way, either. "In order to say `traitor,' the person also has to be `betrayed,'" he claims. "I have only bad things to say about Beilin, but he is not a traitor because there is nothing to betray. Like him, I too undermined the government, although I did so with the people, and he is doing it with the enemies of the people."
And Olmert? "The nuance between Beilin and Olmert is truly negligible," says Feiglin. "And to a certain extent, Olmert is the most acute phenomenon, because of his nationalist background. I have particular scorn for the people like him. There is no easier way to make progress than to spit on friends in the right and on the religious and then to be embraced by the left."
In his arrogant style, Feiglin also speaks about how he views the term "rule of law." "The words `rule of law' are in my eyes a loathsome term," he states. "It is a totalitarian, tyrannical term. I am in favor of rule of justice, and if the law is not just, it is okay to rise up against it and violate it." Feiglin describes the law against incitement and insurrection as a "confused, scrambled law," and joyfully announces that he would "happily violate" the law as it is currently worded.
Feiglin ridicules the notion that his sort of approach could lead to another political assassination, this time of a prime minister from the right. "You really have to be psycho to even think of the idea of assassinating Sharon. Mainly I feel sorry for him; he has no direction, and no objective. He is compelled to invest all of his energy into survival and producing visual displays about the evacuation of settlement outposts, just to survive."
And where, if at all, is the boundary of freedom of expression?
After some thought, Feiglin replies that perhaps in a Jewish state, the word "Nazi" should be forbidden; beyond that, "everything goes."
Rabbi Rozen also feels that "everything goes." "The ability to express oneself in acute fashion is sublimation of actions. If there were KGB-style legal impediments, you would end up with actions instead of talking," he says. Rozen claims that all those that have underground potential in any case are not looking for legitimacy in newspaper columns by rabbis and political columnists from the right. Nevertheless, use of halakhic concepts such as "din rodef" and "din moser" (rabbinical decrees calling for the execution of anyone persecuting Jews or handing over Jewish land) to which the secular public was exposed at the time of the Rabin assassination, seems to him like taking the Lord's name in vain.
Aside from that, he has a hard time understanding the meaning of "incitement."
"I would not term fervent talk incitement, no matter what the degree," says Rozen. "Incitement is an explicit call to action. Calling Beilin a traitor - that is not incitement; a call to damage the property of the Geneva people would be incitement. Beyond that, I am in favor of open skies."
Given the emotionally charged reality, "open skies" does not sound like a promise so much as a threat.
