First, in Nazareth, Magistrate’s Court Judge Rim Nidaf ruled that Prof. Steven Plaut of Haifa University was guilty of libeling Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben Gurion University for publishing articles referring to Gordon as a pro-Hitler Jew and likening him to the Judenrat. The first instance related to the positive review Gordon published in Haaretz of Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry.
In his book Finkelstein accuses the Jewish people of exploiting the Holocaust in order to force the world to support Israel and ignore its “crimes” against the Palestinians. In his own commentary, Plaut argued that by supporting Finkelstein, Gordon was abetting a type of Holocaust denial where through comparisons of the German-led genocide of European Jewry to actions Israel has taken against the Palestinians, the Holocaust itself is effectively reduced to justified act of war.
In the second instance, Plaut condemned Gordon for going to Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah with his associates in the anti-Zionist organization Ta’ayush during the height of the 2002 Operation Defensive Shield in order to protect the terror leader from IDF attack.
Nidaf ordered Plaut to pay Gordon NIS 85,000 in damages and an additional NIS 15,000 in court costs. In her decision, she attacked what she referred to as “the phenomenon where anyone who dares to investigate the events of the Holocaust or its dimensions, in any fashion…immediately becomes a target of attacks and accusations as an anti-Semite or a Holocaust denier worthy of the title Judenrat or Jew for Hitler.”
Nidaf wrote, “This phenomenon is incomprehensible and is in my opinion unjustifiable, and opposes the principles of democracy… It is impossible and unacceptable to turn the subject of the Holocaust into a ‘taboo,’ a subject that cannot be studied or analyzed outside of the consensus and the ‘acceptable.'”
She also defended Gordon’s defense of Arafat and Gordon’s defense of Finkelstein’s accusation that Israel has used the Holocaust to force international support for the establishment of the Jewish state “on another nation’s lands.”
So for Judge Nidaf, Gordon is within his legal rights to obstruct IDF operations in times of war and to support Finkelstein’s marginalization of the crimes of the Holocaust but Plaut is guilty of libel for opining that it is wrong for Gordon to do so.
The same topsy-turvy logic informed the State Prosecution in its case against right-wing activist Nadia Matar of Women in Green which opened in the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court last week.
In The State of Israel vs. Nadia Matar, Matar is being tried for the crime of “insulting a public servant.” The insult in question involves a letter Matar faxed last year to Yonatan Bassi the head of the Government’s Disengagement Authority where she likened him to the Judenrat for his role in organizing the government’s expulsion of 10,000 Israelis from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria.
While the presiding judge, David Mintz, ended the court session last week by suggesting that the prosecution review its decision to pursue the case, the fact of the matter is that the damage to Israel’s democracy has already been done. By indicting Matar the prosecution showed that it will apply anti-democratic laws in a prejudicial fashion. Not only is the law itself draconian, the cases in which leftist activists could, yet are not indicted for similar statements, (as in the case of Gordon) occur on almost a daily basis.
Just a few days ago a group of radical leftist activists including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s daughter Dana Olmert demonstrated outside IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz’s home and held signs calling him a “murderer” for the deaths of members of Raliya family in Northern Gaza. They called him a murderer even though it was Hamas, not the IDF, that caused the deaths.