ToI’s choice of stories to cover, its reporting angle and its editorial opinion are relentlessly progressive.  Here I will try to provide an alternative view for readers who would find a conservative counterpoint refreshing.  I will try to select and respond to materials weekly, as well as addressing topics of my own.  Look for my comments in the talkbacks, which will direct you to more comprehensive treatments in this blog.

Yitzhak Amit’s Reckless Decision

In a reckless decision, Supreme Court judge Yitzhak Amit and two of his colleagues set aside the instructions of Rear Area Command to permit mass outdoor demonstrations in the midst of a war in which Iranian missiles have inflicted (so far) eighteen fatalities and thousands of injuries.  Sure enough, in the midst of a demonstration held outside Habima theater in Tel Aviv Saturday night the Iranians launched a missile.  Not all the demonstrators could fit safely and in time in the parking garage that the police designated as a bomb shelter. One person crammed into the overcrowded garage apparently suffered a heart attack.

Rear Area Command limits outdoor gatherings to fifty people, but the judges in their wisdom decreed that 600 people could attend this demonstration.  When the number of people present exceeded 600, the police ordered the demonstration to disperse.  ToI coverage emphasizes that the police arrested people and applied force.  What it doesn’t mention is that none of the police wanted to be there; they knew they were risking their lives and one may assume most of them had no interest in the demonstration they were forced to accompany.  One can understand and excuse them if their primary concern was to get the hell out of the streets, and get the demonstrators out, as soon as decently possible.

What were these judges thinking?!  Their decision was foolish, selfish and violated the law.

It was foolish because it needlessly endangered the lives of hundreds of people in wartime, including the lives of the police.

It was illegal because the judges scheduled an “emergency” session on the Sabbath.  We can assume that the particular judges who adjudicated this case couldn’t care less about the Jewish Sabbath.  But convening a session of the Supreme Court requires employees of the Court – recorders, transcribers, security – to be present, violating the laws regarding days of rest that are supposed to protect the interests of people who observe the Sabbath from employers who don’t share their concerns.

The judges not only decided that the law didn’t apply to them but they made that decision for their employees.  One doesn’t have to be religiously observant to prefer to spend one’s Sabbath at home.  Nothing dire would have happened if the demonstration had been put off to Sunday evening to allow the court to meet on a weekday.  (One can wonder whether the decision to hear the case on the Sabbath was meant to ensure that those of Amit’s colleagues who are Sabbath-observant couldn’t participate; Amit has a long record of manipulating the composition of judicial panels to ensure that he gets the judgment he prefers).

It was selfish because it demonstrated, not for the first time, the judges’ contempt for Israelis whose values they do not share, in ways that have nothing to do with the law and indeed contravene the law.

Here is the reaction of the mayor of Arad, a city in Israel’s south, which has had more than its share of missile alerts:

“In accordance with the decision of the High Court of Justice to permit demonstrations of 150 people [outside of Tel Aviv] without appropriate shelter, beginning tomorrow we will hold a daily demonstration at the city country club from 8 am to 6 pm, despite the lack of adequate shelter.

“Demonstrations will be held as well at the city civic center between 3 and 7 pm.

“On Monday a demonstration will be held at the weekly garden market between the hours of 9 am and 6 pm.

We thank the High Court of Justice for permission to endanger the lives of residents of Israel despite the directives of Rear Area Command.”

The Right of Protest is Not the Issue

The issue at dispute here is not the right of citizens to protest government policy.  The Court is right to insist that it is especially important to permit citizens who oppose government policy in wartime to make their opposition heard.  War does not render government policy unchallengeable, nor does it suspend the right to publicize exactly what one thinks about it.

But we live in the 21st century, a digital age, not in the 18th.  There are any number of ways to organize people, register their protest, make their opposition known to their fellow-citizens and the government, without putting lives, including lives of people who have no interest in the protest, at risk.  To flout safety instructions whose validity have been demonstrated again and again, to put not only protesters but security and rescue forces at needless risk of their lives, demonstrates a distorted set of priorities and a reckless disregard for reality.

To make matters worse, Judge Amit tried to fend off criticism of his actions after the fact by claiming that permitting public demonstrations in wartime was “an issue of life or death.”  This is a piece of nonsense of a sort we are more used to hearing from brainless politicians.  The entire episode calls into question the judgment, the “judicial temperament,” of Amit and those who participated with him in this folly.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)