We Should Support Acts of Civil Disobedience Against Barak Government in Israel

In Claude Lanzmann's momumental documentary, SHOAH, one of the surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising remarks: "If you could lick my heart, it would poison you." Sadly, the time will surely come - if Barak continues on his shameless course of unilateral surrender to Yasir Arafat - that a surviving leader of present-day Israel will someday express similarly bitter sentiments. To prevent such a horribly ironic repetition of Jewish history, Israelis who are still able to separate fact from fantasy must now embark upon massive civil disobedience. Such essential democratic behavior should be fully supported by all American friends of Israel.

Soon, throughout Israel, thousands upon thousands of people will likely be engaged in coordinated protests against what is now the Barak government's "Peace Process." Although police authorities, acting upon direct orders of the Prime Minister, can be expected to react with extraordinary harshness (this was, after all, their behavior in the Rabin and Peres years), the protesters should always behave lawfully. In view of pertinent national and international law - which are both based upon notions of a Higher Law - the protesters will be undertaking civil disobedience which is authentically law-enforcing.

The right to civil disobedience is well-established in democratic legal theory. Derived from the idea of a higher law, which originated, of all places, in ancient Israel, this right is especially compelling when the state's very survival is being placed at risk by government. Moreover, the right of civil disobedience can become an outright obligation when a government's actions run counter to the Nuremberg Principles of 1946.

Israel's agreement with the PLO, which lacks altogether the status of a treaty under international law, calls for the surrender of territories that are absolutely essential to survival of the Jewish State. Compliance with this agreement, in particular the ongoing withdrawal of Israel's military forces (IDF) from the heartlands of Judea and Samaria, will open up the entire country to uncontrolled terrorism and to major acts of aggression by enemy states. It follows that Barak is under no obligation to proceed with this agreement, and that Israel's citizens are under an obligation to get Barak to abrogate the agreement. As Thomas Jefferson recognized back in 1793, in his OPINION ON THE FRENCH TREATIES: "The nation itself, bound necessarily to whatever its preservation and safety require, cannot enter into engagements contrary to its indispensable obligations."

Israel's agreement with the PLO also contravenes the binding obligation to punish acts that are crimes under international law. Known formally as Nullum crimen sine poena, "No crime without a punishment,"this requirement points clearly to the multiple acts of terrorism ordered by Yasir Arafat over many years. To not only ignore this requirement, but to actually legitimize the criminality by making Arafat a "partner" in the Oslo agreement, continues to represent an overwhelming and inexcusable violation of Principle I of the Nuremberg Principles. It follows, again, that Israel's citizens who now support and sustain the Oslo agreement are in violation of international law (and therefore of Israel's national law as well, which necessarily incorporates international law), while those who oppose this agreement are in support of both forms of law.

It is important that these informed views of civil disobedience and law become more widely understood in Israel and the United States. Now embarked upon policies that will destroy "certain unalienable rights" for all Israelis, the Barak government should fully expect to be confronted with mounting acts of civil disobedience. Were it not so confronted, citizens of that beleaguered state would have already consented to national dismemberment and annihilation.

In the years before the Civil War, thousands of Americans organized an Underground Railroad to help those fleeing from slavery. At that time, those who participated in this movement were judged lawbreakers by the Federal government, and were imprisoned under the Fugitive Slave Act. Today, however, it is widely recognized that the true lawbreakers of the period were those who had sustained the system of slavery, and that every individual act to oppose this system had been genuinely law-enforcing. Similar patterns of recognition should now emerge in regard to the critical anti-Oslo movement in Israel, and before the Barak government has further profaned the legitimacy of civil disobedience.

Through the centuries, distinguished legal theorists (e.g., Bodin, Hobbes, Leibniz) have understood that security is always the first obligation of the state. Where that state can no longer provide security, it can no longer expect obedience. And where the state actively avoids the provision of security, as is the case today in Israel's incomprehensibly wilful surrender of security to enemy forces, citizens have an obligation to resist state policies. In fact, as the Barak government's idea of "peace" could lead even to another Jewish genocide (war and genocide are not mutually exclusive), this obligation could arguably go far beyond Israel's still gentle forms of civil disobedience to other nonviolent expressions of opposition.

International law, which is based upon a variety of higher law foundations, forms part of the law of all nations, including the State of Israel. This is the case whether or not the incorporation of international law into national law is codified, explicitly, as it is in the Supremacy Clause (Article VI) of the United States Constitution. The government of Israel is bound by authoritative rules of international law concerning punishment of terrorist crimes, the prevention of genocide and physical survival of the state. Where this government fails to abide by these rules, as is very much the case today, civil disobedience is not only permissible, it is required.

"If you could lick my heart, it would poison you." Let us hope that we never again hear such a terrible remark from the victim of yet another great Jewish tragedy - from the self-inflicted disappearance of the State of Israel in "compliance" with Oslo. Let us hope that our brothers and sisters in the Jewish State have learned something important about collective survival from the Shoah.

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