Last update - 00:00 11/09/2006
Matar won't face charges for calling pullout official 'kapo'
By Nadav Shragai, Haaretz Correspondent
Charges against right-wing activist Nadia Matar, who had compared the head of the Disengagement Administration Yonatan Bassi to the Judenrat of Holocaust infamy, were dismissed yesterday by Jerusalem Magistrate's Court Judge David Mintz.
Matar, head of the group Women in Green, wrote to Bassi at the start of the opposition to the disengagement plan for the pullout from the Gaza Strip, and called him a modern-day member of the Judenrat (essentially a collaborator in the deportation of Jews).
She was charged with insulting a civil servant.
In his ruling Judge Mintz quoted former attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein in saying that "the criminal court cannot be the solution to all the ills of Israeli society."
Mintz wrote that "when it is a matter of freedom of speech, criminal law does not constitute a correct or effective tool."
Matar refused to rescind her statements after charges were brought against her and added that the term Judenrat was insufficient to describe the suffering Bassi and "the other criminals of the expulsion" had inflicted on settlers from the Gaza Strip.
She added that the words "kapo [concentration camp guard], traitor and collaborator, are also too moderate."
Attorney Yoram Sheftel, representing Matar, said yesterday that this is a precedent-setting decision that overthrows charges because the law was enforced to the letter for purely political purposes.