The Shomron Residents Committee and Attorney Doron Nir-Tzvi have been successful in an old-new approach to left-wing incitement: Libel suits.
Attorney Doron Nir-Tzvi, a resident of the Shomron community of Yakir, is currently handling three such suits against journalists, following a series of others in which he has either won or achieved a satisfactory compromise.
“One case is on behalf of the small El-Natan neighborhood [near Maaleh Shomron, in western Samaria] against Akiva Eldar of Haaretz newspaper,” Nir-Tzvi told Arutz-Sheva's Hebrew newsmagazine. “Eldar wrote that El-Natan is built on Arab-owned land, which is totally false; the land is state-owned, and some of it even has a zoning plan… He had a chance to apologize or retract, but he chose not to.”
No evidence
A second case involves residents of Har Bracha and Yitzhar against another Haaretz reporter, Gideon Levy, and his newspaper: “Levy accused them of burning olive groves and carrying out illegal acts against the Arab village of Burin – once again without any evidence at all.”
Nir-Tzvi explained that while one cannot be held responsible for maligning a general group, maligning a community is another story: “To say that ‘settlers attacked an Arab’ cannot be considered libel, but if a specific town or official organization is mentioned, that’s something else…”
A third suit has been brought against the newspaper Yisrael HaYom (Israel Today) and former Peace Now head Moriah Shlomot: “She wrote in her column that the people of [Shomron community] Avnei Hefetz steal lands and resources of a particular nearby village – even though Avnei Hefetz is not near the village, and the lands are not Arab-owned, but have been purchased by Jews or are state-owned…”
Nir-Tzvi said that he personally doesn’t read Haaretz – jibing that “I don’t speak Arabic well enough” – and that he relies on others to point out for him problematic articles there and in other papers.
A list of victories
Nir-Tzvi said that his recent victories in the media-legal war include the following: “Peace Now had to pay 23,000 shekels, or more, and apologize in two papers to the Land Redemption Fund of the town of Revavah for reporting that the lands were stolen from Arabs and that 70% of the town was Arab-owned... Another time, TV journalist Benny Liss was ordered to pay something like 10,000 shekels and was proven to have lied in a report from Maon, south of Hevron… The Maariv newspaper once wrote that Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira, head of the Joseph Still Lives yeshiva, was interrogated by police in connection with the possible firing of a Kassam rocket by Jews; he was not interrogated, and the paper ended up paying 18,000 shekels… There were others as well, though sometimes the case ends with a compromise; Razi Barkai of Army Radio has just received a letter of warning from me, on behalf of the towns of Yitzhar and Tapuach, for saying that it was likely them that burned a nearby mosque…”
The grassroots Samaria Residents Committee explained that the goal is to have “left-wing people not feel so free to incite against and malign the settler public. They will realize that we in fact do have the ability and public tools to fight them. For years there have been one-sided and false reports against us, regarding violence, land grabbing and the like, leading to hostile public opinion against us and the de-legitimization of this wonderful Zionist enterprise that our public leads.”