A Jerusalem judge handed down a conviction Tuesday against Neria Ofan, a pro-Land of Israel activist from Shomron (Samaria), for driving a car that sported a bumper sticker with the slogan “No Arabs – no terror.”
The Attorney General decided in 2002 that the slogan constituted incitement to racism and was therefore a criminal offense.
The slogan “No Arabs – no terror” was coined by nationalists after the start of the massive terror wave which swept Israel from late September 2000 onwards.
According to the charge sheet against Ofan, police detectives identified him driving a car with the offending stickers near Tapuach Junction in 2004.
“The call ‘No Arabs – no terror’ is tainted with racism,” Judge Shulamit Dotan determined, “because it makes a connection between the entire Arab populace, without any differentiation among its members, and the execution of terror acts. It thus shows hostility and enmity toward an entire populace, only because of its national-ethnic origin.”
“The slogan also suggests a solution to the ‘problem,’” Judge Dotan went on to say, “in the form of collective punishment of the Arab population by making it disappear, either by expulsion of by other means, which the reader need only imagine, as long as the country remains ‘clean’ of Arabs.”
Acts of incitement to racism, the judge ruled, “connect between racist ideas and their execution through violent offenses.”
Ofan is the second person to be convicted for using the slogan. The first, David Ha’ivri of Kfar Tapuach, was sentenced to six months’ community service for distributing T-shirts with the slogan on them.
A defense witness at Ha’ivri’s trial, Michael Ben-Horin, claimed credit for inventing the slogan and having the first stickers printed. Ben-Horin told the judge that his business – renting out vacation homes in the Golan – was hurt after 2000 because people were afraid to drive north through Arab areas.
Ben Horin used to tell the prospective vacationers that they had nothing to fear in the Golan, because there were no Arabs there and thus no terror attacks. That was how the slogan was born, he said.