NOVANEWS

Benny Katsover’s fake ad supporting price tag
There is a brewing media scandal in Israel that has received scant attention. Let’s try to change that. Earlier this week, a fictitious settler group published an ad in Haaretz supporting price tag attacks. One point they made in their support was the claim that price tag attacks are civil disobedience in the same sense that Ilana Hammerman’s group, We Do Not Obey, is. She is the activist who began a protest movement by driving Palestinian mothers and children from the West Bank into Israel in order to take them to the beach, amusement parks, zoos, etc. For her efforts, she’s been rewarded by three police summonses for questioning including a warning of criminal prosecution. It is illegal both for Palestinians to enter Israel without proper permits and it is illegal for Israeli citizens to bring such individuals into Israel.
We Do Not Obey acts in ways that are totally non-violent and designed to promote tolerance and peaceful co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians while price tag is a violent, abusive and illegal form, not of civil disobedience, but of hooliganism and even terror. The very comparison of the two is an act of outrageous chutzpah.
Palestinian children illegally enjoy visit to Israeli zoo
What is even more shocking about the ad than the bogus logic of the argument offered in it, is the fact that the ad purported to be signed by settler women who support the price tag acts of vandalism and defacement of Palestinian mosques, cemeteries, etc. It also listed the purported settlements in which each endorser lived. In reality, every woman’s name included in the ad is a member of Ilana Hammerman’s group of peace activists. In other words, the individual who created the ad engaged in an act of fraud and Haaretz abetted the fraud by accepting the ad and asking no questions to verify the authenticity of those names. Nor did it verify the authenticity of the fake group which purported to sponsor the ad.
Further, after Haaretz discovered it had been duped, it notified Hammerman that it would no longer accept any op-ed pieces by her about her work with We Do Not Obey (as it had in the past). It appears that Haaretz, instead of blaming the person who perpetrated the fraud, is washing its hands of Hammerman and her entire movement. A clear case if there ever was one of blaming the victim. Instead of showing respect for fairness and freedom of speech, and apologizing for their error in helping defame these women, Haaretz takes a typically liberal approach and absconds from the entire controversy.
Benny Katzover, perpetrator of Haaretz hoax ad (photo Nir Keidar)