|
There is no need for a commission of inquiry into the Lebanon war of
last summer; Judge Winograd and his colleagues can return to their families and
day-jobs, and the taxpayers can receive back some of the money that was allocated
to the work of that commission. The guilty person has been found.
Neither Prime Minister Olmert nor former Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, will
have to pay the price for the war, because the police, the security services,
the politicians and the media have found the one and only individual responsible
for the whole bloody and shameful fiasco of last summer: Azmi Bishara.
Unlike the government officials and the senior officers, he has been
interrogated by the police, charged by the politicians, the media and soon by
the general prosecutor too, judged by a court, and who knows? Maybe by a martial
court. According to the headlines of the Israeli newspapers, if convicted, Azmi
Bishara can be condemned to death!
The fact that Bishara was one of the most active MKs against a war,
which, today, every single Israeli considers (for different and opposite
reasons) to have been a huge mistake, makes him, today, the only one to be
prosecuted… and persecuted!
All the naives citizens, like me, who were expecting that Azmi Bishara
would receive the prestigious Israel Award for his warnings against the
long-planned war in Lebanon, and the high price the Lebanese, as well as
Israelis, will have to pay for such an irresponsible venture, may be seriously
disappointed: this award may well be given to Ehud Olmert, the worst of the
Israeli prime ministers ever (according to his own ministers, off record of
course).
The media, fed by the Israeli security services, are speaking about charges
of treason during wartime (death penalty), spying, contact with foreign agent,
etc. But they don’t limit themselves to these basically political charges. The
fact that the majority of the Israeli ruling elite is under inquiry (or
charges) of corruption or at least mishandling
large amounts of money, obliges the authorities to link Azmi Bishara too
to such crimes—why only Jewish politicians should be involved in money affairs?
At first, the media were alleging that Bishara received funds for Arab NGO’s in
Israel,
but, even if true, the charge was so absurd that it was replaced by “laundering
money,” a charge which smells bad, but doesn’t mean anything. No doubt, nothing
will remain of such accusations. However, this may not be the case for the
political charges.
The “Bishara affair” reminds one of previous political cases, as the Alternative Information Center
affair in 1987, and, more recently, the Tali Fahima one. The common denominator
among them is the decision to destroy a person or an organization by extremely
severe accusations, leaked by the security services and relayed by the media,
and which gradually lose their gravity: spying or treason, then “contact with
an enemy agent in war time,” then contacts with terrorist groups, then
“services for illegal organizations.” At the end, a political trial, and, maybe,
a conviction for a minor charge, usually connected to “services” for illegal
organizations.
What has to be clear is that the main part of the attack is never the
trial itself, but the campaign before a charge sheet is even submitted, and our
counter-attack should be immediate, at this very first stage. Wrong are all
those who “want to see what it is all about” and wait for the judges to make
their rulings, before they stand firmly against the political campaign against
Azmi Bishara and Balad.
As for those who believe that they may make some political gains from
the government’s attack against a rival party, they have learnt nothing from
history: an attack against one of us is an attack against all of us, and if
this attempt to delegitimize Balad is successful, it will certainly provoke new
attacks against other political parties and organizations that are rooted in
the Palestinian population of Israel.
This is why we have to unite behind Azmi Bishara and Balad now. It is
not only a duty of solidarity, but also of self-defense.
|
