Legal and legitimate are two closely related terms, although they should not be confused Not everything that is legal is just. Not everything that is legitimate is legal. Political philosophers and public ethics experts have been arguing and debating these issues for hundreds of years. A citizen, faced with a conflict over wither a concern is legal, must also consider whether the issue is also a legitimate one. If there exists a counterpoint to its legitimacy, even if it is a legal matter, that citizen is then faced with a decision: what is his right and obligation as dictated by his own conscience?
These philosophical underpinnings of social action are important when one reflects on recent actions in Israel by various ideological and political groups, from both the Left and the Right, who have come under criticism for crossing a fine line of legality while claiming for themselves legitimacy. Persons have entered areas closed due to a military order or have tried, evenly forcefully, to cross roadblocks; off-limits olive groves turned into photo-ops; houses that were destroyed following due judicial procedure were rebuilt. These have been left-wing activities. The more radical post-Zionist elements have for months been advertising in the country?s newspapers sometimes explicit, but mostly implicit, calls for citizens to violate several laws dealing with the refusal to perform military service.
Most of the media attention, though, due to the former Minister of Defense?s pronouncements, was fixated on the attempt by police and soldiers to dismantle Gilad?s Farm in Samaria. This media framing element became an additional factor in the public debate over tactics and goals.
I would maintain that ?legal? refers to a lawful or unlawful situation or act as defined by the penal code. In the southern states of the United States, there were laws that effectively excluded blacks from registering, thereby disenfranchising them. Those laws were infracted by demonstrators who were subsequently arrested. The civil rights activists sat-in, sat-down and otherwise non-violently disrupted the general order. They were no less ?violent? in the essence of their acts than those at Gilad?s Farm, although personally, I would have preferred not to have seen any stone throwing, name calling or the pushing and shoving that I observed. Moreover, those in America violated other ancillary laws, dealing with disorderly assembly, unlicensed marches and other disruptive actions in the streets and in stores, all in service of their campaign to denounce these laws and alter them.
It was the assertion of those demonstrators in the first instance that there was a higher law that allowed them, even obligated them, to do what they chose to do. That higher law was either the Constitution or a moral law derived from the Declaration of Independence. It behooved them, they explained, to act legitimately in protest against a law that was unjust.
In the second instance, their legitimate basis for protest was limited to non-violent, non-destructive behavior. In addition, when being arrested, they acted in a passive manner with no active resistance. As espoused by Martin Luther King Jr., who studied Mahatma Gandhi and others, the protest activity was conducted on a moral and even spiritually higher plane than the wrongdoers they were acting against.
In Israel, as many, such as Ron Dermer (?Uncivil Disobedience?, Jerusalem Post, Oct. 25), have observed, there is little understanding of the proper mechanics of non-violent protest and even less of the rationale that accompanies such acts, a staple of university students world-wide. Civil disobedience is a democratic tool, if utilized democratically and with responsibility.
Some media outlets have exploited the contretemps at Gilad?s Farm in a most sensationalist fashion. The Boston Globe?s headline on October 23 was ?Settlers Defying Israeli Law? and the lead paragraph managed to overload on hyperbole, with Charles Radin penning that ?Jewish settlers? have suddenly broken into open defiance of the government? threatening the stability of the ruling coalition and creating an environment that some Israelis compare to that which led to the assassination of? Rabin.? Of course, one can only agree with Ron Dermer when he writes that ?the first rule of civil disobedience is that it be civil.? But I would question another of his propositions, that the Gilad Farm protestors were ?opposing a law they believe to be immoral.?
David Newman, though, in criticizing the recent ruckus at the Gilad's Farm site ("The Settlers' Self-Destructive Stand", Jerusalem Post, October 23), argues that the Jewish population in Judea and Samaria has "played a double game." He writes that while they "proclaim the legitimacy of Jewish communities established with government approval... at the same time, they refused to recognize any government decision which calls for a settlement freeze or evacuation".
Yet he misses an important point, one that the post-1967 Israeli Left as well as post-Zionists have been seeking to obliterate. The State of Israel is predicated, through its 1948 proclamation of statehood, on the goals of the Zionist movement. One of the most central and critical goals of that movement, supported by the British governments of 1917-1922 and by right of internationally recognized law at the 1920 Versailles Peace Conference and the League of Nations in 1922, as set forth in the Mandate it granted, is to "encourage close settlement by Jews on the land." (Article 6)
Incidentally, Article 5 stipulates that "no Palestine territory shall be ceded... to, or in any way placed under, the control of the Government of any foreign Power." That stipulation is critical, for in 1939 the Geneva-based mandates Commission actually rejected the British Partition Plan, but the outbreak of World War II dashed Zionist hopes to reverse that course, which was to be later adopted by the 1947 UN General Assembly.
On this background, any political science major will grasp that a social movement such as Gush Emunim or its offshoots on the hills are well within parameters of this country's "constitutional" consensus to demonstrate vigorously, but not violently, for their right to be able to settle the Land of Israel, on the one hand, while on the other, to protest any government edict to dismantle communities. The government, I would suggest, is acting in disregard of its own fundamental principals in negating the right to settle.
It is this dissonance which not only provides a moral backing for attempting to prevent the dismantling of a Jewish community or property, and not only a legitimate cause for doing so, but even encroaches into the arena of law.
--------------------------------------------------------
Yisrael Medad comments on political, media and cultural affairs.
These philosophical underpinnings of social action are important when one reflects on recent actions in Israel by various ideological and political groups, from both the Left and the Right, who have come under criticism for crossing a fine line of legality while claiming for themselves legitimacy. Persons have entered areas closed due to a military order or have tried, evenly forcefully, to cross roadblocks; off-limits olive groves turned into photo-ops; houses that were destroyed following due judicial procedure were rebuilt. These have been left-wing activities. The more radical post-Zionist elements have for months been advertising in the country?s newspapers sometimes explicit, but mostly implicit, calls for citizens to violate several laws dealing with the refusal to perform military service.
Most of the media attention, though, due to the former Minister of Defense?s pronouncements, was fixated on the attempt by police and soldiers to dismantle Gilad?s Farm in Samaria. This media framing element became an additional factor in the public debate over tactics and goals.
I would maintain that ?legal? refers to a lawful or unlawful situation or act as defined by the penal code. In the southern states of the United States, there were laws that effectively excluded blacks from registering, thereby disenfranchising them. Those laws were infracted by demonstrators who were subsequently arrested. The civil rights activists sat-in, sat-down and otherwise non-violently disrupted the general order. They were no less ?violent? in the essence of their acts than those at Gilad?s Farm, although personally, I would have preferred not to have seen any stone throwing, name calling or the pushing and shoving that I observed. Moreover, those in America violated other ancillary laws, dealing with disorderly assembly, unlicensed marches and other disruptive actions in the streets and in stores, all in service of their campaign to denounce these laws and alter them.
It was the assertion of those demonstrators in the first instance that there was a higher law that allowed them, even obligated them, to do what they chose to do. That higher law was either the Constitution or a moral law derived from the Declaration of Independence. It behooved them, they explained, to act legitimately in protest against a law that was unjust.
In the second instance, their legitimate basis for protest was limited to non-violent, non-destructive behavior. In addition, when being arrested, they acted in a passive manner with no active resistance. As espoused by Martin Luther King Jr., who studied Mahatma Gandhi and others, the protest activity was conducted on a moral and even spiritually higher plane than the wrongdoers they were acting against.
In Israel, as many, such as Ron Dermer (?Uncivil Disobedience?, Jerusalem Post, Oct. 25), have observed, there is little understanding of the proper mechanics of non-violent protest and even less of the rationale that accompanies such acts, a staple of university students world-wide. Civil disobedience is a democratic tool, if utilized democratically and with responsibility.
Some media outlets have exploited the contretemps at Gilad?s Farm in a most sensationalist fashion. The Boston Globe?s headline on October 23 was ?Settlers Defying Israeli Law? and the lead paragraph managed to overload on hyperbole, with Charles Radin penning that ?Jewish settlers? have suddenly broken into open defiance of the government? threatening the stability of the ruling coalition and creating an environment that some Israelis compare to that which led to the assassination of? Rabin.? Of course, one can only agree with Ron Dermer when he writes that ?the first rule of civil disobedience is that it be civil.? But I would question another of his propositions, that the Gilad Farm protestors were ?opposing a law they believe to be immoral.?
David Newman, though, in criticizing the recent ruckus at the Gilad's Farm site ("The Settlers' Self-Destructive Stand", Jerusalem Post, October 23), argues that the Jewish population in Judea and Samaria has "played a double game." He writes that while they "proclaim the legitimacy of Jewish communities established with government approval... at the same time, they refused to recognize any government decision which calls for a settlement freeze or evacuation".
Yet he misses an important point, one that the post-1967 Israeli Left as well as post-Zionists have been seeking to obliterate. The State of Israel is predicated, through its 1948 proclamation of statehood, on the goals of the Zionist movement. One of the most central and critical goals of that movement, supported by the British governments of 1917-1922 and by right of internationally recognized law at the 1920 Versailles Peace Conference and the League of Nations in 1922, as set forth in the Mandate it granted, is to "encourage close settlement by Jews on the land." (Article 6)
Incidentally, Article 5 stipulates that "no Palestine territory shall be ceded... to, or in any way placed under, the control of the Government of any foreign Power." That stipulation is critical, for in 1939 the Geneva-based mandates Commission actually rejected the British Partition Plan, but the outbreak of World War II dashed Zionist hopes to reverse that course, which was to be later adopted by the 1947 UN General Assembly.
On this background, any political science major will grasp that a social movement such as Gush Emunim or its offshoots on the hills are well within parameters of this country's "constitutional" consensus to demonstrate vigorously, but not violently, for their right to be able to settle the Land of Israel, on the one hand, while on the other, to protest any government edict to dismantle communities. The government, I would suggest, is acting in disregard of its own fundamental principals in negating the right to settle.
It is this dissonance which not only provides a moral backing for attempting to prevent the dismantling of a Jewish community or property, and not only a legitimate cause for doing so, but even encroaches into the arena of law.
--------------------------------------------------------
Yisrael Medad comments on political, media and cultural affairs.