The Israeli Attorney General has instructed the police to launch an investigation against Arutz-7’s internet site for incitement to political violence. This is the article that raised the complaint of MK Zahava Gal’on (Meretz) – an op-ed piece by Gil Ronen that called for a popular movement to encourage Palestinians to flee over the Jordan river. This section in particular was cited by Gal’on as incitement:
Transfer is “cold” expulsion. What we need to set in motion is a more hot-blooded version of this: something that is obviously the result of great rage, a temporarily semi-crazed state of a tortured nation that simply cannot bear to suffer any longer. The only way to throw the Palestinians out is to be as crazy as they are – almost…Unlike the Palestinian’s mass madness, which is purposely created by brainwashing from above, our “craziness” will be a temporary state that we enter into deliberately, and it will not be suicidal in nature. The only ones getting killed will be the Palestinians, and whoever doesn’t want to die will have to run.
Arutz 7 responds to the accusation:
Though Arutz-7 does not endorse the opinions it publishes in its op-ed section, it should be noted that the sentence in question was taken out of context, and does not incite to murder. In fact, the author, Gil Ronen, writes in the article, “no one will have to take the law into his own hands.”
This raises a whole host of issues, among them the legal relationship between a news outlet and its op-ed contributors, and defining prosecutable incitement. But one thing’s for certain: if such standards were applied to the Palestinian press, every PA-sponsored newspaper would have been shut down long ago.
