'This violence is now dripping within the Green Line,' Prof. Sternhell tells Knesset committee.
By SHELLY PAZ, ABE SELIGzeev sternhell 224.88(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Israel Police must do more to fight the recent surge in settler violence and more resources must be allocated to assist them in that endeavor, MK Ophir Paz-Pines (Labor) said on Thursday.
"The Judea and Samaria District is the most neglected [police] district in Israel," Paz-Pines told Israel Radio in an interview. "It's no wonder they struggle in their efforts to bring people to justice throughout the area, when they don't have the adequate means to do so. They are understaffed and under equipped to deal with such problems. What do you expect?"
Paz-Pines spoke after a special session of the Knesset Committee on Internal Affairs and the Environment, which he chairs, that discussed the rise in settler and right-wing violence as well as last week's pipe bomb attack, allegedly by such extremists, against left-wing Hebrew University political science professor Ze'ev Sternhell.
Judea and Samaria Police spokesman Danny Poleg said he had no response to Paz-Pines's comment.
In the committee Paz-Pines said, "There are violent forces in Israeli society that take the law into their own hands and would not hesitate to murder or to try to murder whoever stands in their way.
"Palestinian terrorism is dealt with in a comprehensive manner, but there is a feeling that there's a certain amount of compassion regarding serious violence, and at times terrorism, perpetrated by Jews," he said.
Paz-Pines said the incident early last Thursday morning in which Sternhell was lightly wounded by a bomb outside his Jerusalem home was a terrorist attack.
"That is exactly what it is, particularly when we are talking about an ideological argument," the lawmaker said.
He added that there was a connection between the murder of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and the attack on Sternhell.
Sternhell also addressed the committee, saying, "It is an unbearable situation when violence is allowed against Palestinians but it is forbidden against Jews. We have created a colonial situation here, when two different sets of law are used for the Jews and for the Palestinians."
An attack such as the one he experienced legitimated the worse kind of violence, he said.
"This violence is now dripping within the Green Line," he said. "No nation is immune from the devastating phenomenon we witnessed in Europe [during the Holocaust]. The Jews are capable of anything that any other nation is capable of. The forgivingness is the most worrying sign."
Sternhell said that first there was a need to define "violent crime."
"But a crime is a crime is a crime. I can relate to the situation the Israeli soldiers and policemen are caught in. The police and the army cannot work to eliminate this [settler] violence without the political willingness and the backing of the government and its ministers," Sternhell said.
He added that as far as he could tell, police investigators were doing their best to identify the people who placed the bomb outside his door last week.
Meretz Chairwoman Zehava Gal-On accused the security services of letting their fear of the settlers prevent them from imposing law and order.
She said the settler community had representatives in positions of power who legitimized violence and hooliganism, adding that whoever allowed attacks on Palestinians and soldiers also allowed attacks on intellectuals.
Peace Now director-general Yariv Oppenheimer said it was not just his group that had been threatened, along with those who were loosely associated with it such as Sternhell, but also the more moderate members of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
A number of Knesset members wanted to know why nothing had to been done to charge a rabbi who last month wrote in a weekly pamphlet distributed to synagogues that Peace Now members deserved the death penalty accorded to informers under Jewish law.
The rabbi wrote that members of Peace Now were worse than heretics or apostates. He subsequently asked those who shared his beliefs not to take the law into their own hands.
Paz-Pines called for strengthening the anti-incitement law to make it easier to punish those who called for violence.
Deputy State Attorney for Special Tasks Shai Nitzan said that many of the complaints his office received could not be prosecuted under the law as it now stood.
Still, he said, the law was correct and rational in erring on the side of caution.
To prosecute for incitement was difficult, said Nizan. The criteria were stiff and one had to strike a balance between freedom of expression and public safety and order.
Tovah Lazaroff contributed to this report.
if(catID != 151){
var cont = `Take Israel home with the new Jerusalem Post Store
