News Analysis: Arab Violence Posing a Challenge to Israeli Security and Democracy

Under the pressure of increasing violence against Israelis, the political divide that runs like a fault line through this society became, literally, a question of life and death for some this week.

The lives on the line, though, were not just Israelis, but also Palestinians, particularly those who have rampaged through the streets or broken into schools.

The right wing, dissatisfied with the government’s response to the current wave of violence, has called for settlers to take the law into their own hands.

But the left, as well as the army and police, have warned the heavily armed population of settlers against using their weapons casually.

The ongoing dispute exploded into agonizing reality Tuesday when a West Bank settler shot dead a Palestinian whose hands and feet had been bound after, he stabbed and lightly wounded another settler.

The settler said he acted after he saw that the Palestinian was concealing a grenade and feared he would use it.

Almost immediately, Israel’s right flank and left flank lined up in defense and in opposition to the settler, who was arrested by police.

For the “left,” a loose term meant to include those aligned with the present Labor-led government and much of the legal establishment, the current spate of Palestinian attacks poses a tough test for the democratic and judicial foundations of Israel.

For the “right,” an equally loose term designating the opposition Likud party, its right-wing satellites and some of the religious parties, the key value in this struggle is the survival of the state itself.

SHOULD RULE OF LAW COME SECOND?

The right maintains that the state’s very survival is at stake and that, when combating Palestinian terrorism, the rule of law must take second place.

Rafael Eitan, leader of the right-wing Tsomet party, defended Tuesday’s killing, setting forth the bald demand that knife-wielding attackers should not be taken alive.

According to the right, the message to the Palestinians must be that Israel’s deterrent strength has in no way been weakened or impaired by the series of attacks on soldiers and civilians in recent weeks.

Rightist leaders were quick to quote the rabbinic saying: “He who comes to kill you, rise up first and kill him.”

But the left saw Tuesday’s killing as an extralegal and extrajudicial murder. They argued that the Palestinian had been overcome and in effect arrested, but denied a trial, something granted by a democratic society to even the most heinous criminals in its midst.

Knesset member Dedi Zucker of the left-wing Meretz bloc said he supported the rabbinic adage of self-defense, but cautioned: “That does not mean that we become a criminal gang instead of a state.”

A would-be killer can and should be killed, Zucker explained, so long as his attack is in progress.

But once the attacker has been overcome, then due process of the law swings into effect, said Zucker, chairman of the Knesset Law Committee.

The alternative would be the law of the lynch mob, he added.

COURT RULES AGAINST SHIN BET AGENT

Coincidentally, minutes after the West Bank shooting, Israel’s High Court of Justice delivered a decision relating to the killing of two terrorists in an incident seven years ago and upheld the principle that any Israeli who sought to get around the law was not to be tolerated.

The court ruled that Yossi Ginossar, a former official of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, could not be appointed director-general of the Ministry of Housing because of his involvement in the 1986 scandal in which two Palestinian terrorists in custody were killed by the Shin Bet.

The terrorists were among those who hijacked a bus from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon. After the bus was stopped, stormed and overpowered by the army, Shin Bet agents led away two surviving hijackers and beat them to death.

At first, security officials claimed the two had died when the army stormed the bus, but well-publicized photographs proved that claim to be false.

Ginossar, who was not present at the incident, led a complex and lengthy Shin Bet effort to mislead an official commission of inquiry and put the blame on a senior army officer.

The court held that Ginossar had “undermined the foundations of the judicial process” and of democratic society.

With the actions of the settler, the response from Knesset members and the court decision, Israelis were confronted this week with starkly different views about the moral essence of their state and society.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, seeking to rally and hearten a demoralized public, urged a return to the spirit of 1948, when the Jewish community of Palestine closed ranks and “became a fighting society” to win its independence and ward off the Arab threat.

Rabin called on teen-agers to learn self-defense and urged older people to volunteer for the Civil Guard.

Rabin’s overall message to the nation was to defend itself with vigor — but within the limits of the law.