Israel Matzav

The Shin Bet claimed that Shternberg was hindering the investigation because he refused to come to an interview, to which he was invited in order to clarify suspicions of incitement to illegal and violent action against security forces and minorities. For the record, miniorities = Arabs, and if they really wanted to interview him, they could (and did) arrest him and bring him in for questioning. Of course, in this country, if you refuse to incriminate yourself in an investigation, they say that you are "not cooperating" and practically assume your guilt!

Shternberg denied the allegations, saying that he had "always been against violence" and had "spoken out against violence at every opportunity." My guess is that the violence is a trumped up charge, and that what he really did was (as will be seen below) to discourage religious Zionist youths from joining the army.

At a post-disengagement conference entitled "Never Forget, Never Forgive," Shternberg called for "refusal to join the IDF right now before we face another evacuation." After the evacuation of the Amona settlement, he said that he "wasn't talking about one operation or another, but rather about a whole army that educates its soldiers in an ethos of total destruction."

This morning, several policemen knocked at his door and put him on a train to Rehovot, where a Shin Bet officer interrogated him for about half an hour upon his arrival at the station.

"Orange [anti-disengagement] youth have nothing to look for in the army, since it peels away their personality without them feeling it," said Shternberg in an interview Tuesday with Army Radio. "My call is to send out a potent message to a military system that is in my opinion rotten, and that we should not agree to be a part of a future destructive process [i.e. evacuation]. The orange public's mission is to fix the army in all fields and to force it to protect the citizens of the State of Israel."

And why am I calling this "selective law enforcement"? Because if you go here, you will find the following petition online:

"We, candidates for service and soldiers in the IDF, men and women, as responsible citizens, hereby declare that we will take no part in the continued oppression of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, and we will not participate in policing actions or in guarding the settlements."

Isn't that calling for widespread refusal to serve in the army? Why aren't they being prosecuted? (For the same reason why Nadia Matar is being prosecuted for calling Yonatan Bassi a Judenrat, while Dana Olmert will not be prosecuted for calling Dan Halutz a murderer: because there are different rules in this country for the left and the right).

At least in America, the ACLU is sometimes honest enough to protect its opponents rights of free speech. You won't see any of that here.