Prop guillotine at Tel Aviv rally
Not everything is incitement
Op-ed: Pretentious protest artists, who harm their own side much more than they harm the other side, exist both on the Right and on the Left; the problem is we also have people in both camps who keep crying out ‘incitement’ over every bit of nonsense, as if we have lost our sense of proportion.
The prop guillotine display
at Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard on Saturday evening joined equally delusional displays like the hangman’s noose
at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and the golden statue
of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.
All these displays, and others we have already forgotten, can be seen as a final indication that neither side on the political map has a monopoly over political protest displays of particularly poor taste.
Pretentious protest artists, who harm their own side much more than they harm the other side, exist both on the Right and on the Left, probably in a pretty similar distribution. The problem is that we also have people in both camps who keep crying out “incitement” over every bit of nonsense. Every poster is incitement. Every display is a call for murder. It’s as if we have lost our sense of proportion, forever.
The Left, which has raised the banner of democracy, has lost its faith in the ballot boxes and replaced them with a vision of guillotines
Our sense of proportion was slightly restored Sunday by a judge of all people, and it actually had to do with an allegedly different issue. Before the disengagement from Gaza and the first Amona demolition, a few soldiers were jailed for initiating a somewhat creative protest against the evacuation of outposts during a swearing-in ceremony at the Western Wall. Two rabbis from a right-wing organization affiliated with Chabad decided to give the protesting soldiers generous grants. The IDF didn’t like it, and neither did law enforcement authorities. Several years later, the two rabbis were prosecuted on charges of “incitement to insubordination.”
On Sunday, many years after they committed the act and quite a few years after they were indicted, the two rabbis were acquitted. They weren’t acquitted for not doing what they were accused of. Judge Joya Skappa-Shapiro actually accepted the full version presented by the State Attorney’s Office and rejected the rabbis’ version. She simply reminded all of us that in the State of Israel there is a thing called freedom of speech, which means that only incitement with a high likelihood of leading to an act—regardless of the particular act in question—can be considered criminal incitement. Acts of poor taste, as disgusting as they may be, are not incitement.
So now that we have taken the incitement nonsense off the table, we can wonder what this odd guillotine display means, and I hope we no longer have to address the foolish claim that it was a model of a cigar cutter. Unfortunately, I have to say that this display represents the desperation of large parts of the Left when it comes to the basic idea of democracy. The Left, which has raised the banner of democracy, has lost its faith in the ballot boxes and replaced them with a vision of guillotines. The guillotine symbolizes a period in which—in the name of noble values of freedom, equality and brotherhood—thousands of people were decapitated in town squares.
I am convinced that none of the protesters on Saturday evening actually wants to see guillotines in the town square. It seems, however, that a growing number of left-wing protesters favor their group values over the democratic rules of the game which we all share.
