A bill granting amnesty to protestors arrested during Israel's 2005 Disengagement from Gaza passed its first reading in the Knesset plenum Tuesday night. During the session, MK Zahava Gal'on (Meretz) infuriated her colleagues when she equated the opposition nationalist parties with the Nazis.
In denouncing the bill, Gal'on declared, "I want to tell you, and you better internalize it, even if it's unpleasant – the State of Israel's problem is that for years it has been turning a blind eye to the crimes of the right-wing parties. For years. So the role of democracy…is to learn the lessons of the Weimar Republic's collapse. I remind you that democracy in Germany collapsed because it enabled its enemies on the radical right to exploit it…and it undermined its basic powers."
This remark, equating Knesset members from the nationalist parties with Nazis, incensed a number of MKs. Zevulun Orlev (NU-NRP) stood up and angrily yelled, “You have gone crazy. You crossed all the red lines. It is unthinkable that an Israeli Knesset member will stand at the Knesset podium and say that the nationalist public in Israel conducts itself like the Weimer parliament that brought Hitler to power."
Orlev’s sentiments were shared by his colleague, Uri Ariel, who told Gal'on, "What you did is an abomination." Fellow MK Aryeh Eldad added, "As a doctor, I’m telling you – sickening self-hatred is a serious mental disorder…the self-hatred of the Israeli left is sick and reflects a deeply rooted mental disorder – it has no cure."
The new legislation, if passed in subsequent readings, would apply to 400 of the 482 criminal cases that were opened in the period before and during the expulsion of 9,000 Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005.
The bill would effectively halt all pending legal proceedings against Gaza expulsion protestors and expunge the criminal records of all those arrested. The new law would also promptly suspend any sentences handed down in court against anyone convicted of a crime whose motive was to stop the expulsion. The bill was submitted by MKs Reuven Rivlin (Likud) and Eli Gabbai (NU-NRP), together with a third of all MKs in the Knesset.
The law would mainly exonerate those who incurred no risk of personal injury or loss of life. This category includes the majority of those arrested for their protest activities.
Commenting on the vote after its passing, one of its supporters praised the initiative. "There are days when democracy needs to forgive and leave the past behind. The disengagement was a national trauma, and it cannot be compared to any other social crisis," said MK Rivlin.
"The clemency law will assist in mending the rift within Israeli society and correcting the injustice done to families of the evacuees, those who paid the price of democracy in the harshest manner," he said.