Steven Plaut: Why Israel Needs to Get Serious about Treason
Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.
Israel recently passed a law that would strip Israelis of their citizenship if convicted of espionage or treason. Condemned for this by countries all over the world, almost all of whom have far harsher anti-treason laws than Israel, the Israeli law has yet to be applied to anyone. Sometimes called the “Azmi Bishara Law,” it was motivated by an Arab member of the Israeli parliament (or Knesset), Azmi Bishara, from one of the Arab fascist parties, who had openly engaged in espionage and treason, including passing on intelligence to the Hezb’Allah terrorist organization while it was firing rockets at Israeli civilians. Bishara is now in hiding and has yet to be prosecuted. The anti-Israel lobby has denounced this law as “racist,” just as it denounces everything Israel does as racist (including rescuing Haitian earthquake victims)....
It is instructive and illuminating to examine the history of what other Western democracies have done with traitors, especially during times of war. It is important to see what sorts of anti-treason laws exist elsewhere in democratic countries.
Some countries have been putting teeth into old anti-treason laws recently because of international terrorism. Britain’s Treason Act, which allowed for the prosecution of British nationals supporting the enemy in time of war, goes back to 1351. It provided for mandatory execution of traitors. Britain executed sixteen traitors under the Act during World War II. The Act was suspended in 1946 and later was repealed. However, Britain has other laws against treason, and these are still being debated well into the 21st century. Under the British Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, the punishment for treason is life imprisonment, but it had been death up until that law was passed....