Apparently not satisfied with the closure of Arutz-7 Radio, Attorney-General Elyakim Rubenstein has instructed the police to launch an investigation against the managers of the Arutz-7 website.
Rubenstein said he had looked into and found valid a complaint by MK Zahava Gal'on (Meretz), who claimed that an article entitled, "Expulsion, not Transfer" constituted a violation of laws against incitement.
Gal'on honed in on a sentence in an op-ed on Arutz-7's Hebrew site, which she said was a call to "murder hundreds of thousands of Palestinians." Though Arutz-7 does not endorse the opinions it publishes in its op-ed section, it should be noted that the sentence in question was taken out of context, and does not incite to murder. In fact, the author, Gil Ronen, writes in the article, "no one will have to take the law into his own hands."
The article's basic assumption was that as there is no chance for reaching peace with the Arabs of Yesha (Judea and Samaria), there is therefore no alternative but to "remove this 'nation' from our midst." Ronen wrote that he does not support transfer, as "the Palestinians are not European Jews, and we are not Germans." Instead, he suggests a "gradual deterioration" in which the war against terrorists expands, including more targeted killings, more house demolitions, and more air raids.
"No one will have to take the law into his own hands," Ronen writes. "It's enough that officers and soldiers interpret their instructions as broadly as possible and employ maximum force," noting as an example that if a Jewish neighborhood is fired on, the military response should not be limited to one specific window or house, but to the entire row of houses from where the attack emanated. The sentence quoted by MK Gal'on reads, "The only ones who will die will be Palestinians, and whoever doesn't want to die, will be forced to run away."
Gal'on implied that Ronen's exhortation to abandon dangerous house-to-house searches for terrorists in favor of air-bombings is a form of incitement "to genocide of hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians." The house-to-house searches have claimed many Israeli soldiers' lives in the past.
As is well-known, Ronen is not the first one to have called for a "stronger arm" against the Arabs of Yesha since the onset of the Oslo War over three years ago. Following a wave of Palestinian terrorism in Dec. 2001, for instance, MK Eliezer Cohen (Yisrael Beiteinu) said, "This is war, not just terrorism, and we must fight back accordingly. They are fighting us with all of their resources and weaponry, and we must do the same. Our army knows exactly what to do, and it is time to do it."