Why are extra rights needed?

The double murder at the gay center in Tel Aviv was a traumatic event. When this kind of incident takes place, a community’s leadership is tested in its ability to cope with the trauma and leverage it for the benefit of its members. In this respect, leaders of the homo-lesbian community deserve much praise: They formulated a strategy and clung to it.

The solidarity rally held at Rabin Square Saturday night was the zenith of a wise campaign whose declared aim was to bring the community to the heart of the consensus, put its head in the lap of the political establishment, and normalize its public image. The campaign was successful.

The homo-lesbian community has come a long way from the eccentric and blatantly provocative pride parades to the warn familiarity with Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu. The process of the community’s move into the mainstream – or more accurately perhaps, the process of it becoming more bourgeois – started a long time before the murder, in various areas, and was politically manifested in the last elections in the homo-lesbian campaign on behalf of Tzipi Livni and Kadima. The current connection to the president and prime minister closes the circle.

We are different, says the homo-lesbian community, but not abnormal. We are a part of a society replete with differences. This is a message that many groups within Israeli society can adopt, ranging from the haredim in Jerusalem to the Christians in the Galilee. The melting pot era has come to an end. We are all members of minority groups who wish to live in peace alongside each other.

During the Saturday rally, master of ceremonies Gal Uchovsky praised Prime Minister Netanyahu for visiting the murder scene and embracing the community at this time. Netanyahu’s hosts asked him to recognize the killed and wounded as victims of a so-called “hostile act.” Netanyahu promised to do so, Uchovsky reported. The crowd responded with cheers.

Murder is murder

What is a “hostile act?” The National Insurance Institute’s website quotes the law: “A hostile act is direct harm caused by a hostile act of enemy forces, or harm as result of an act of violence aimed at harming a person because of his belonging to a national ethnicity, as long as this stems from the Israeli-Arab conflict or committed by a terrorist group.”

This is the law. As the murder at the gay center apparently did not stem from nationalistic motives (and if it did, it empties of substance the reference to the murder as a hate crime,) its victims cannot be considered to have been hurt by a hostile act. Netanyahu said “yes” because in his current term in office he learned to say yes to everyone: To the labor union federation and to the employers, to the settlers and to the Americans. I promised, said Levi Eshkol, who was among our greatest prime ministers. I didn’t promise to deliver.

This brief paradox attests to the briefness of the sense of goodwill provided by Israeli society to those who were harmed. In a day or two news headlines will be dedicated to another murder, and Peres and Netanyahu will proceed to embrace other people and other communities. We may have seen a change in perception here, yet a change in policy or legislation is a matter of a lengthy and exhausting struggle.

Perhaps it would be good to ask, at this grim moment, whether there really is a need for a special law for the victims of hostile acts stemming from the Israeli-Arab conflict. Murder is murder, regardless of which hatred it was committed on behalf.

Last week, we saw an innocent young man, Yiftah Mor-Yosef, murdered in Ramle after finding himself in the midst of an assassination attempt involving criminals. His death is no less outrageous than the death of a Sderot residents hit by a Qassam rocket. Indeed, why doesn’t Netanyahu convene his learned advisors and propose a law that would match the rights of victims hurt by non-personal motives, whoever they are.

It sounds weird and it was certainly not the original intention, but it’s a good basis for a public campaign: The war on hatred can start by matching the rights of its victims.