The Commentator

Issue date: 12/27/04 Section: Editorials/Op-Ed

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Amid British Prime Minister Tony Blair's visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah, and the parliamentary debate over amending Israel's Basic Law to allow Labor chief Shimon Peres to be appointed Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, this past week offered two other significant political developments in Israel. Both were initiated by the anti-disengagement camp, those that protest Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision, approved by the parliament in October, to evacuate Israelis from the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank next year.

First was the call by Pinhas Wallerstein, a council member of the umbrella organization representing the settler movement, ordering his West Bank constituents to hinder the disengagement process through civil disobedience. The organization, the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, endorsed his statement, which called for resistance against "the anti-democratic, immoral and rights-trampling Jewish deportation law." The council was careful to insist that it would not condone any violence on the part of constituents resisting disengagement.

The council, otherwise known by its Hebrew acronym YESHA, is certainly entitled to a dissenting opinion, although the disengagement plan can hardly be called "anti-democratic," as it passed a parliamentary vote despite staunch opposition from the settler camp. And while it certainly seems that the PM's mind will not be changed at this point, the council is also entitled to its democratic right to passively disobey the law, so long as it realizes that its constituents run the risk of imprisonment - as they rightly should be.

Much more disturbing was the call by at least a faction of Gaza settlers for opponents of the disengagement to don an orange Star of David. The idea was apparently prompted by the notion that the settlers, like Jewish victims of the Holocaust, are a persecuted lot. Condemnation, from Yad Vashem in Israel and the Anti-Defamation League in New York, quickly followed. As a statement by the Holocaust museum noted, the orange Star of David "perverts the historical facts and damages the memory of the Shoah (Holocaust)."

In his "Washington Diarist" entry in late September, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, cut right to the heart of the matter. "[Is] the evacuation of settlements on the West Bank a "crime against humanity"?" asked Wieseltier rhetorically. "Jews should not be so wanton with the term. We have more than a rough idea of what a crime against humanity looks like."

Continued...

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