28-Dec-13: Neither peace nor plan, yet the outrageous release of still more killers is 48 hours away

Protesting tonight against Monday's scheduled re-run
of the shabby and unjustifiable release of convicted murderers
[Image Source: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90]

We're two days away from the release of the third tranche of convicted killers - the third of four imposed on Israel by the US administration (which denies this and says it's 'an entirely Israeli matter') as part of a process defined in the media as Secretary of State John Kerry's peace plan.

We are among those who see neither peace nor plan in what has been done. We are bitterly opposed to releasing the convicted killers. Our principal reason is that this is unjust - a wrongful, poorly conceived interference by politicians in Israel and in the United States in the judicial process that sent these murderers to lengthy and thoroughly just prison terms for what were, in most cases, monstrous crimes.

A Times of Israel report in the past hour says an Israeli "ministerial panel" (it's never clear what the constitutional or legal basis of this formulation is) is sitting tonight (Saturday) and composing the final list of 26 names. (The names of the killers and of some of their victims were posted tonight in this Jewish Press article.) All of the Palestinian Arabs on that list will be set free on Monday night.

The news report refers, not for the first time, to "a legally mandated 48-hour period during which opponents can appeal the release of individual prisoners". But this too is not what it seems. The surviving children of Mordechai and Tzira Schijveschuurder, who were murdered along with three of their children (aged 14, 4 and 2) in the massacre carried out by Hamas agents on a central Jerusalem restaurant in 2001, presented a petition to the High Court of Justice a few days ago, seeking to stop the release. (For the record, our daughter Malki was murdered in the same attack.)

The Schijveschuurder petition asked the court to order the government both to reconsider its decision to free the current batch of prisoners, whose identities haven’t yet been announced, and to set clear criteria for any future release of terrorists. The state said a date for the third release had not yet been set, but this has now been done.

Here's what Deputy Supreme Court President Miriam Naor told them this past Thursday, according to Haaretz, in dismissing their action:

“With all due understanding for the petitioners’ pain, their petition doesn’t raise any legal pretext for our intervention... The arguments it raises have been discussed and decided in the past, with regard to this very same government decision.”

So much for the right of the terrorists' victims to turn to the courts.

A group of families, all of them victims of these and other Palestinian Arab terrorists, are protesting outside the residence of the Israeli prime minister tonight. They say he has refused to meet with them. We can add that, while making decision after decision to free convicted murdering terrorists, he has had no contact with any of us victim families, even while claiming that he has.

Kerry is expected to be back in Jerusalem this coming Thursday. Perhaps intending to sound a welcoming note, the notorious "senior PA official who is close to PA President Mahmoud Abbas" Jibril Rajoub (about whom we have written several times) is quoted in the media tonight, referring to Israeli building activity as “official terrorism,” and threatening yet again, as he has repeatedly in the past, of the consequences of "lost hope" on the Palestinian side:

I hope we don’t get to the stage where neither of us can count the number of bodies in a new upsurge of violence. [Times of Israel tonight]

If any readers out there have close connections to the ever-optimistic Secretary of State, we would greatly appreciate your help in passing this open letter along to him before he turns up in our home town again; we're not getting much in the way of response from our efforts: "5-Dec-13: Welcome to Jerusalem, Mr Kerry. A moment of your time please."