Moshe Feiglin - Where There are No Men - The Totalitarian Fascist Nature of Israel

I just read Feiglin's Where There are No Men.

This book is actually a better summation of the fifty years of the reborn state of Israel than all the albums prescribed by the ministry of education and the gauleiters of the mass media." - Hillel Weiss, Professor of Hebrew literature.

The appendix by Lecturer Re'aya Epstein shows how Israeli "democracy" is more indebted to Soviet totalitarianism than it is to the West. She notes how Israeli politicians use the word "democracy" as a justification to quash popular dissent. In other words, she says, Israeli Leftist leadership is still true to its pre-state socialistic roots, even as it has coopted Western democratic terminology for its own purposes.

Parts of Feiglin's book were actually pretty hilarious, in a sardonic way. For example:

1) Feiglin was charged with sedition for his mass rallying for civil disobedience, such as blocking traffic and the like. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declared that he didn't care about the public's dissent with his policies (!), that he wasn't impressed with the public's disapproval with his actions (!).

2) Rabin demanded that Feiglin's civil disobedience be quashed in the name of democracy (!). At the sedition trial, the prosecuting attorney claimed that civil disobedience was appropriate only "unsavory regimes", and certainly not in democratic Israel; civil disobedience, according to the prosecution, was appropriate only in totalitarian non-democratic dictatorships (!).

3) Throughout the entire affair, the General Security Service (GSS), the Attorney General's office, and the media all worked very closely with each other. In fact, when Feiglin was charged with sedition, he didn't find out until two weeks after the media had all been given full details, including the detailed list of charges, which Feiglin himself hadn't received yet! Every single appropriate office of the government, it was clear to Feiglin, was in cahouts, all towards a very political end, and not an impartial judicial one. At one point, the court's judge held Feiglin's trial ten hours after his arrest - Israeli law requires 48 hours, so that the accused can gather evidence, witnesses, and an attorney - and yet the very same judge, a few years later, let an Arab terrorist go free without trial on the grounds that his trial was held too soon, before the 48 hours had yet elapsed since arrest! If that weren't enough, Avishai Raviv of the GSS is responsible for deliberately inciting Yigal Amir to murder Rabin (in order to incite the Left against the Right, as were his official GSS orders), and when a prominent journalist revealed this fact, he later regretted performing his journalistic duty and revealing this truth, because this fact was a potent tool in the hands of the Right against the Left; this journalist felt it was more important to strengthen the Left than to reveal the truth, by his own explicit admission.

4) When Feiglin's partner Shmuel Sackett was brought to the trial as a witness, he testified regarding his personal experience with civil disobedience in America, when he protested for Soviet Jewry. (Ironically, at one point in Israel, Sackett was jailed with Dr. Yosef Begun, who had once been imprisoned by the Soviets.) There in America, said Sackett, the police went to each and every single protester individually, one-by-one, and read them each their rights thrice, three times!, before arresting. By contrast, with Feiglin, said Sacket, the Israeli police used batons and brass knuckles on unarmed protestors who had already handcuffed their hands behind their backs themselves. At one point, the police chased after fleeing Israelis and beat them as the Israelis tried to escape. Women pushing baby carriages and elderly men of seventy years of age weren't beyond being beaten, and neither were the babies in the carriages! All this is without the police reading off a single right, or issuing a single warning. They just came on the scene and started bashing heads, literally (the X-rays were available as evidence).

5) Feiglin noted that Rabin is responsible for the murders on the Altalena, and the court took this as evidence of Feiglin's inciting Amir to murder Rabin. But whereas only right-wing fringe extremists with no prominence whatsoever ever actually advocate and voice support for Rabin's murder, by contrast, notes Feiglin, prominent and well-known Leftist journalists - and we're talking public journalistic pronouncements on television and in the newspaper - included explicit calls to murder Sharon and use guns on the "settlers". One prominent professor referred to all IDF soldiers as Nazis, and another referred to them as Hitler youth, and yet another referred to the settlers as collaborators with Hamas (??). (That collaborators with Hamas" accusation deserves attention. Rabin and his Labour party, before their election to government office, illegally met in Egypt, to talk with the PLO, and pre-arrange the Oslo conditions, and Rabin indeed later shook Arafat's hand. And yet, he's not a collaborator with Hamas. On the other hand, the right-wing "settlers", those who support annexing the West Bank, they, they are the collaborators with Hamas??!!) And yet, none of these Leftists - i.e. who explicitly called for the murder of Sharon and the "settlers" - were charged with incitement to murder. But all Feiglin has to do is cite an objective historical fact - viz. that Rabin, by his own proud admission, was directly responsible for murdering innocent passengers of the Altalena - and he was charged with incitement to murder. In other words: the people of the Right don't have the same civil rights as the people of the Left.

Much of Feiglin's book is thus devoted to two central topics:
1) How the entire government, as well as the media, is a Leftist propanda machine, regardless of who holds the actual reigns of power. Feiglin details how government officials and the media put all objectivity and judicial equity aside when it came to dealing with the right;
2) How the concept of democracy is foreign to the Israeli Left, how they beat unarmed civil protestors without provocation, and then claim that this quashing of free speech was necessary for the sake of democracy, and how civil disobedience has no place in Israel, but only in unsavory totalitarian regimes. (Feiglin sarcastically noted in his trial that apparently, the United States (MLK, Jr.), Britain (Ghandi), and France (freeing Algeria) were all unsavory totalitarian regimes justifying civil disobedience, but that good free Israel is far more democratic than fascist America!)