Bassi's job was to facilitate the expulsion this past summer of the Jews from Gush Katif and northern Shomron, and their relocation, while Matar is a co-founder and chairperson of the nationalist Women in Green activist organization. Matar wrote Bassi a letter in September 2004, after she heard that he was planning to write a letter to each of the residents destined for expulsion.
"I read that you have not yet formulated the final wording of your letter," Matar wrote to Bassi, "and therefore I am volunteering to 'help' you formulate it. I am enclosing a document that is chillingly similar to the one you plan to send - and all you have to do is to change the date (from 1942 to 2004) and the place (from Berlin to Gush Katif), and behold, your letter will be ready."
The document she enclosed was a letter from the Judenraat - the local Jewish leadership installed by the Nazi regime in Germany - to the Jews destined for evacuation to the death camps. Matar quoted the Judenrat letter as ending with a "moving call to the Jewish leaders in Berlin to behave calmly and to thus make the expulsion easier" - similar to the requests that the Disengagement Authority had of the Jews in Gush Katif and northern Shomron.
Speaking with IsraelNationalRadio's Yishai and Malkah Fleisher last week,
Matar said,
"I wrote to Bassi that the Judenraat letter reminded me very much of what he planned to write, but I added that he was even worse - because the Jews of then had a Nazi gun to their heads, and therefore we cannot judge them, while he was not being forced by anyone to take part in this crime. If he did it anyway, I wrote, he would be remembered as one of those criminals who lifted their hand against the Jewish people."
"I want to make this very clear, however," she said. "I never compared Jews to Nazis; I wouldn't do that, and in fact, it is the Arabs today who are the Nazis, because they want to kill us indiscriminately. But any Jew who helps the Arabs can be compared to the Judenraat. I would never call Bassi a Nazi, but I can call him a collaborator with today's Nazis."
In a follow-up talk today (Monday), Matar told Arutz-7 that she had still not received a copy of the indictment:
"My lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, received a fax from the Prosecution, saying that they had decided to indict, and then, two days later, the media reported that the courts had received the indictment. But I still have received nothing and have heard nothing, and I don't even know when I'm supposed to appear in court."
Whenever the case begins, she plans to turn it into a high-profile one:
"As my lawyer says, we will use this to make a large case against the entire system. This is a simple case of freedom of speech; they are trying to muzzle the right-wing camp."
"We warned them at the time," Ms. Matar said, "when they first investigated me, that we would bring all the instances when left-wing figures made even stronger statements against the right-wing, and yet were not prosecuted."
One example of the above is when former Justice Minister Tommy Lapid said to then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in 1995, two weeks before the Rabin murder: "Yours is a Judenraat government."
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself made similar comments. When the Rabin government explained that the Oslo Accords were necessary because there was no alternative, then-MK Sharon told the Kfar Chabad magazine,
"It must be understood that this government, and those who head it, have been stricken with madness and have lost all restraint... Though no current situation should ever be compared with the Holocaust, I would still like to mention that before the Holocaust, as well, the Jewish leadership said then: There is no alternative."
Atty. Sheftel wrote a sharply-worded letter to State Prosecutor Eran Shendar over a year ago, asking him to immediately close the case. Sheftel writes that the charges on which Ms. Matar was being investigated are not at all relevant to the case at hand:
"The purpose of Clause 288 of the Penal Code [Insulting a Public Servant] is to prevent a situation in which a citizen who requires the services of a public servant and is not satisfied with the response he received, uses foul language against that public servant. Another example is a motorist who rudely insults a policeman who gave him a ticket. This is the sole purpose of Clause 288. Under no circumstances is it designed to be used by the Prosecution and the police to intervene - and certainly not selectively and discriminately - in an issue of public discourse."
Sheftel then provided some historic background, stating that such "founding fathers" as Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion were among those who "poisoned the public discourse in Israel and within the Zionist movement... by their contemptible and repeated equating of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin not only to the Judenraat who aided the Nazis - but to the Nazis themselves, and to Adolph Hitler in particular." Sheftel then gave specific examples of such "debased and wicked comparisons."
Atty. Sheftel then listed some contemporary Holocaust-connected remarks against the right-wing, "compared with which, my client's remarks against Yonatan Bassi are totally lukewarm." He noted that none of them were the subjects of criminal prosecutions. Examples include:
* the statement by the late Prof. Yeshayahu Liebowitz calling IDF soldiers "Judeo-Nazis,"
* former Meretz-party Education Minister Shulamit Aloni's article accusing former Minister Eli Yishai of Shas as having acted "in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws when he was Minister of Interior,"
* and several others.
Though Matar wrote her letter to Bassi almost a year and a half ago, the indictment was handed down only now. She is not disheartened, however: "It's a compliment to be persecuted by a government like this. It means that I am saying the right things."