Politics & Diplomacy
Haaretz blames Israel's government after mob beats man removing Amir banner
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Ten young men beat 76-year-old Ilan Mens so severely that he now awaits brain surgery, after he tried to take down a banner calling for the release of Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Haaretz wrote in its lead editorial Thursday.
Mens told Israeli radio he was kicked and struck across his whole body, even after he lay motionless on the ground, at a bridge over Route 1. He said the policewoman who arrived cared less about the assault than about where he had parked. More than a week later, the paper noted, not one attacker has been arrested.
The editorial set the beating inside a longer arc: thirty-one years after a far-right assassin stopped the peace process and succeeded, the demand to free him is no longer marginal, and the fact he remains jailed is treated almost as an anomaly.
Street violence of this kind, Haaretz argued, does not lift its head without a tailwind from the government and the police — a chain that runs from unauthorized outposts in the occupied territories to a national security ministry headed by the convicted Kahanist Itamar Ben Gvir.
The paper closed with Rabin's own words, that violence is the undermining of democracy's foundation.
