Amos Carmel
The shoe demagogues
Hoopla around attack on Supreme Court president exaggerated, reckless
Something terrible has been seemingly happening here for a week, yet the people refuse to get overly excited about it. The masses are not coming out to protest at Rabin Square. No politician is urging them to do so. No artist has volunteered to perform at the rally. Nobody has demanded that precious classroom hours be dedicated to the subject.
In short, there is in fact no continuation to the raging sea of words that overwhelmed us last week, after Pini Cohen hurled his shoes at the Supreme Court president, hitting her with one of them.
A Different View
Eitan Haber
Shoe attack on chief justice another indication of Israel’s deterioration
Yet now, in practice, we see silence. It is very difficult to see any indication that Israeli society is facing a nadir; it is no less difficult to spot any significant changes in its mentality or any great sense of unrest as result of the affair.
Among other things, this is so because the lifespan of any case of “much ado about (almost) nothing” is apparently limited by its very nature. However, this is also the case because the public, including the parts of it that consider themselves “enlightened”, cannot stomach some clichés. It cannot, for example, stomach the reference to the courts, or to the Supreme Court, as a “Holy institution.”
The importance and essence of the judiciary, and the respect we are supposed to hold for it and its rulings, stem from its being part of a democratic system and from the assumption that it acts based on common sense, and not based on the rules of sanctity and defilement. Harming the legal system is a blow to an important institution that is flesh and blood and it requires proper punishment; however, it is not about harming an institution that is immune to criticism and protected by a mystical protective layer.
No red line crossed
The public also cannot stand the chatter around the court’s agenda and the need to change it. In the specific case of the shoe attack, the thug was detained immediately, his interrogation was completed rapidly, and he will be facing justice soon. It is clear that he has no ideological partners or a supportive environment that may continue in his flawed footsteps. What else should have been done to him and had not been done because of our collective inability to grasp something? Or alternately, what kind of nadir have we supposedly deteriorated to because of a violent and reckless individual who acted alone?It is even ridiculous to claim that this man crossed a red line. If such line was indeed crossed in respect to violence against judges, it was crossed on July 19, 2004 when Justice Adi Azar was murdered outside his home. Even in that case we cannot be certain that a red line was crossed, as even that terrible act did not signal a social trend, but rather, two individuals who targeted the judge randomly.
This time, on the other hand, we are also dealing with wild and reckless demagoguery. We cannot refer to the attempts to enlist Pini Cohen to the cause of settling the score with the previous justice minister by any other name. There is no other way to characterize foolish claims, like the ones made by a renowned journalist, that “the de-legitimacy caused by (former Minister) Friedmann to the entire legal establishment prompted the genie out of the bottle,” or to a claim by his colleague that Friedmann “granted his approval to murder at the Supreme Court.” There was no such de-legitimization or approval of murder. But will anyone be curbing freedom of speech now?
