The
Stripping of Israel
Zev Golan, IASPS Associate Director
In
order to free Arye Deri, in jail for accepting bribes, the Knesset passed a
law allowing all prisoners to be freed after serving half their sentences.
It would have been bad enough had the president of Israel pardoned Deri. It
would have been bad enough had the Knesset passed a special law freeing Deri.
But the people of Israel got the worst of all possible worlds: the Knesset
members, in order to cut a few months off Deri’s sentence, decided to free
thousands of other prisoners with him. They also had to ensure the law would
be retroactive, since Deri has already been sentenced.
Israelis
watching the proceedings live on television were watching the rape of the
law.
And
perhaps the worst part of this travesty was the joyous, back-slapping
laughter that viewers were forced to watch after passage of this
get-out-of-jail-free law.
They
not only made a mockery of the law, of the courts, of the legislative
system, of crime victims, of the Israeli people – they enjoyed doing so.
They were enjoying their power. They were lording it over their victims.
But
the Shas party MKs who just stripped the legal code of all meaning, are not
alone. (Indeed, Shas could not
have passed the law without help from co-conspirators.) The
governing elites, the socialist statists, the entrenched bureaucrats, the
state-created and state-backed monopolists, are all involved in this crime.
Shas isn’t the only party stealing money from taxpayers. They learned the
art from the kibbutzim, the farmers, the monopolies, the electric company
employees, the bankers, the Histadrut, all of whom steal as much as they can
from taxpayers. The Labor party prime minister who called yesterday’s Free
Deri vote a “shame” himself stripped Israel’s Basic Law of meaning
when he expanded his cabinet from the legal limit of 18 ministers to 24, in
order to provide jobs for his friends and bribe others to join his
coalition.
Israelis
have become victims of their own government. Cabinet ministers and Knesset
members strip Israelis of their hard-earned income every day, in order to
finance Big Government and state bureaucrats’ salaries.
Mekrorot
Water Company and Israel Electric Company employees strip Israeli taxpayers
of their income every day in order to fund their own benefits.
Army
commanders and politicians strip young Israelis of their lives every day in
order to maintain their own positions. Young soldiers and innocent civilians
cannot even be called cannon fodder, since their commanders and political
leaders are not sacrificing them for any military ends. They are not dying
to achieve any goal. They are not fodder, they are merely chaff discarded so
that opportunist politicians can attain or remain in power.
These
opportunists strip Israelis of their safety, allowing first soldiers in
Lebanon, then settlers in Gaza, and finally residents of the capital and
teenagers waiting for busses, to be shot, run over or blown up; chaff,
nothing more.
The
state strips individuals of their right to speak, right to worship, right to
engage in business, eventually of their right to live.
The
elites, the politicians and professors and journalists and poets, strip
Israel of its moral rectitude. Israelis are not only stripped of their
safety, they are stripped of their dignity, they are told they have no right
to expect safety.
The
law passed in the Knesset freeing hundreds of prisoners in order to free
Deri is part of the rape of Israel. The decision of the Legal Advisor to
decide himself who will serve in the cabinet, to charge people with crimes
and when unable to bring them to court, to call them guilty because they
haven’t been found innocent, is part of the rape of Israel. The denial of
access to high-speed Internet is part of the rape of Israel. The attempt to
appoint a man who lost the recent elections by the widest margin in the
history of Israel to the post of defense minister is part of the rape of the
voters. The establishment of a unity government with over two dozen
ministers, maybe as many as thirty, which by removing parliamentary
opposition creates a government so big it goes beyond fascism, socialism and
communism, and allows the bureaucrats and politicians to raise Opportunism
to new heights, to do whatever they want unopposed, is a rape of freedom.
And
when Israelis are “starving, hysterical, naked,” the State will be there
to save them.
