Israel Matzav

19-year old girl falsely arrested and imprisoned for 'failing' to prevent assassination

In any other country, the establishment would shake over this kind of disclosure. But in Israel, none of the three major English-language newspaper websites (JPost, YNet, Haaretz) even mentions the story at this writing. Haaretz, in fact, claims today that the rift that resulted from expelling the Jews of Gaza is 'healing.' If it is, it's certainly not because the sinners have repented.

I know that most of you think of Israel as a democracy like the United States. It's not. I know that many of you think that the only people who lack civil rights in Israel are Arabs, They're not. If you're a right-wing Jew in Israel, and you're an 'activist' you can be falsely arrested, taken off to 'administrative detention' for months on end without charges and without the right to meet your lawyer. Forget about the Bill of Rights - it doesn't exist. And that's not always out of a 'security necessity.'

At no time were more individual rights trampled than the period between the signing of the Oslo Declaration of Principles in September 1993, and the election of Binyamin Netanyahu in May 1996. Civil rights were trampled on regularly - and 'activists' arrested and locked up without cause - as Yitzchak Rabin and Slimy Shimon Peres rammed the 'Oslo Accords' down the throats of the Israeli people (and note that I am NOT blaming US President Bill Clinton for that - it was NOT his initiative). People at demonstrations were regularly spray painted by trucks so that they could be 'identified' and beaten. I saw the trucks myself, but have too strong an instinct for self-preservation to be a victim.

We have a phrase in Hebrew when we want to say that most of a story has not come out and may never come out - raba ha'niglah al ha'nistar. It literally means that much more is disclosed than hidden, but really it is said b'lashon sagi nahor (literally, as a blind man sees light). In other words, the phrase actually means the exact opposite - that much more is hidden than what has come out. There is no event about which this is more true in Israel than the Rabin assassination.

I have discussed the Rabin assassination before on this blog. In fact, there is another blog on which I was briefly a guest writer, and I was kicked off because I cross-posted one of my posts questioning whether Yigal Amir was truly the assassin.

One of the greatest travesties to come out of the Rabin assassination was the indictment, trial and conviction of a 19-year old girl named Margalit Har-Shefi (pictured above) for "failure to prevent" the Rabin assassination. Har Shefi, then a resident of Beit El in Samaria, was a classmate of convicted assassin Yigal Amir at Bar Ilan law school. She was accused of 'knowing' that Amir planned to assassinate Yitzchak Rabin and 'failing to prevent' the assassination. That the accusation was specious from the outset should be obvious to everyone: Amir was 'encouraged' to assassinate Rabin by Avishai Raviv (follow the links above and you will find out plenty about him too), who turned out to be a General Security Service agent. He's the guy on the right in the picture. Amir is on the left.

Last night, at a campaign rally for his candidacy for the Labor party leadership, Ami Ayalon, who was appointed chief of the General Security Service after Rabin was assassinated, made what would be a shocking admission in any other Western country: He admitted that Margalit Har Shefi was falsely charged and falsely convicted. And that the GSS knew it all along:

Former chief of intelligence (Shabak) Ami Ayalon, now a Knesset Member, revealed Thursday night that Margalit Har-Shefi did not realize that Yigal Amir intended to assassinate Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. She was convicted in 1998 of failing to prevent the murder. In 2001, she began a serving a nine-month prison term, which was terminated by President Moshe Katzav after six months.

Ayalon made the disclosure at a meeting with Labor party supporters in Ashkelon, but he did not explain why he kept silent until now. "Har-Shefi did not know that Yigal Amir wanted to murder the Prime Minister," MK Ayalon said. "I know this from intelligence and was head of the intelligence agency.

"She was part of the crazy reality [at that time]."

How's that for an excuse? 'Part of the crazy reality.'

I have no idea where Margalit Har Shefi is today (I suspect that there will be people in the comment section who will know). I hope that she is happily married and has at least 2-3 children by now. But if I were her - or her father - I would file a lawsuit against every one of these scumbags who knew or should have known that she was falsely accused and sent her to jail anyway. I would sue them for every last cent they have to their name and then some. I would stand up and do everything I could to ruin their political careers starting with the faker Ami Ayalon himself. Because they deserve no better.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:43 PM