Avi Ran is Freed

The Israeli trial of Avi Ran is finally over and he has been acquitted of all charges reports the Arutz Sheva:

Ran was arrested last March at his Gvaot Olam farm, near Itamar in the Shomron, after Arabs from a neighboring village, accompanied by left-wing activists, brought a tractor onto his farmland and began plowing over his crops. Police were waiting nearby, and when volunteers from the farm damaged the tractor, they appeared and arrested Ran together with his workers.

Judge Nava Bechor delivered her verdict at the Kfar Saba Magistrate’s Court Monday afternoon, finding the four not guilty due to lack of evidence. A fifth man had made a plea bargain in order to be released from prison during the lengthy trial process.

Ran's brother Nir told Channel 2 TV that justice had finally been served, albeit way too late, and at the expense of a dedicated Israeli patriot's freedom.

Last April, High Court Justice Edna Arbel had ordered Ran placed under house arrest far away from his farm until the end of proceedings against him. The decision was widely seen as an organized sting operation aimed at keeping Ran out of Judea, Samaria and Gaza during the period leading up to the Disengagement from Gaza and northern Samaria last summer. At the time, Ran said: "In the Supreme Court, I understood that the legal system is willing to take views and a political situation and to manipulate them to advance processes that suit its own interests. I understand that what I am saying is terrible. There is a civil war going on here. But it isn't a war between brothers and it isn't being fought by both sides."

Ran left his brother’s house, where he was being confined, and went into hiding at the various communities which he helped found until the week before his first court date. Knowing that he would be imprisoned, he went on vacation with his family near Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), where he was swiftly arrested and jailed until “the end of proceedings.”

Holding Ran in jail for several months has created a situation in which he was found innocent, but spent months in prison under harsh conditions, regardless. The practice of keeping prisoners in jail until the end of proceedings has been used increasingly against ideological prisoners arrested opposing government withdrawals in the past year.

According to his lawyer, the defense succeeded in proving that all the events transpired due to provocations created by the leftist Ta’ayush extremist group, in addition to members of the Rabbis for Human Rights, funded by the American Reform Movement and the European Union. During the trial, the defense aired an interview with one of the Arabs from the village who testified that the whole episode was initiated by members of the Ta’ayush.

So the light of the middle east’s only democracy still burns but there is a lingering odor to the whole proceedings. I first wrote about Ran last November 2005. Whether one agrees with Ran’s politics is irrelevant but what is not irrelevant is that coercive powers of the state should never utilized to muzzle the voice of a citizen or restrict the freedom of a citizen because their views are not in ideological harmony or even considered politically inconvenient for the State.