The extension and enforcement of Israeli law would do a better job of curbing price taggers than the current status quo.
By AMIEL UNGARamos oz 370(photo credit: Reuters)
Renowned novelist Amos Oz unwittingly performed a service by calling “price tag” perpetrators neo-Nazis. This Israeli national conscience wannabe ended a hysterical verbal bidding war over who could come up with the most extreme epithet to describe an admittedly odious phenomenon.Nobody can top Nazi, but Oz, the winning bidder, made himself ludicrous. Of course random attacks against Arabs are morally wrong and blacken Israel’s name. However, Oz’s critics reminded him that he had dedicated a book to Fatah Tanzim terrorist leader Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences for the murder of Israeli Jews during the five year-long Palestinian terror offensive, a.k.a the second intifada. Oz would never apply such extreme epithets as “terrorist” or “Nazi” to Barghouti and his ilk and, therefore, his righteous indignation about Jewish graffiti scrawlers and tire puncturers rings hollow.I wasn’t surprised by Oz’s cheap shot, as I had personally been victimized by him when, following a visit to the Judean settlement of Tekoa in the 1980s, he used me as a ventriloquist’s dummy for quotations he simply made up to fit his preconception of the typical settler mentality.Around that time I had the good fortune to meet a different type of intellectual opponent – the late Prof. Ehud Sprinzak, an expert on radical movements. Sprinzak believed that Israel hadn’t fully shed a culture of illegality inherited from the days of the British Mandate, when the Jewish community flouted or outwitted discriminatory British laws designed to thwart Jewish statehood. He also made a very solid point: Taking the law into your own hands is dangerous even when the target is identifiable and clearly culpable.Most members of a vigilante group are responsible enough to accept self-limitations, but there will always be a minority that is constantly tempted to probe further till they drag us all into the abyss. Because Sprinzak was intellectually honest and bridled over disingenuous attempts to smear Israeli nationalists, he was persuasive. I miss both him and the era of civilized debate that has been sidelined by cheap talkbacks and gratuitous point scoring.Sprinzak’s thesis about a general culture of illegalism drew no distinction between right and left, and correctly so. The Israeli left has also resorted to illegality. Oslo was incubated at a time when talks with Palestine Liberation Organization representatives were a violation of the law. Some Israeli NGOs see themselves duty-bound to facilitate the illegal infiltration of African job seekers – seasoned lightly with genuine asylum seekers – to Israel. Undoubtedly the left feels it is acting nobly, but the price tag hoodlums can be no less self-righteous.The left deludes itself into thinking that it has an obvious solution to the problem. A law-abiding Israel exists within the 1949 Armistice lines alongside a lawless wild West Bank. If we simply amputate Judea and Samaria, problems such as the price tags would miraculously disappear, it insists. This greatly distorts reality. Indeed, the recently arrested price taggers actually came from pre-1967 Israel.The left, however, has a more sophisticated variation of its argument. The unresolved legal status of disputed Judea and Samaria creates an abnormal and uneasy coexistence between two separate legal systems. Again the left would resolve the anomaly by withdrawal, when annexation would do the trick just as well.In the interim, as the 2012 Levi Commission headed by the late Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levi discovered, the current situation in Judea and Samaria is indeed discriminatory, but it discriminates against the Jews rather than the Arabs. Illegal Jewish homes are bulldozed while, due to diplomatic considerations, rampant illegal Arab construction flourishes. Alternatives to demolition such as compensation are available in Tel Aviv but not in Beit El.Israel’s “temporary” control of Judea and Samaria has now lasted well over twice as long as Jordanian rule, and it is high time that we had a legal system in place that befits this reality.There is no excuse for price tagging, but the extension and enforcement of Israeli law would do a better job of curbing price taggers than the current status quo. Contributor Amiel Ungar is also a columnist for the Hebrew weekly Besheva
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