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CNN Saturday Morning News

Friend of Rabin Assassin Granted Pardon

Aired July 28, 2001 - 07:08   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BRIAN NELSON, CNN ANCHOR: This morning Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles at a building in Gaza. Israel says the facility was used for manufacturing arms. Amid the continuing violence, another controversy has arisen in Israel, this one due to a recent presidential decision that is opening some old wounds.

And CNN's Jerrold Kessel has more on that.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JERROLD KESSEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A young woman whose troubled future is splitting a nation. Margalit hal-Sheffi (ph), an Israeli settler, is serving a nine-month jail sentence for failing in 1995 to stop her friend assassinating then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Now Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, has granted hal-Sheffi a pardon, and she'll soon go free after serving two-thirds of her term.

MOSHE KATSAV, ISRAELI PRESIDENT: Margalit hal-Sheffi, she's not the main issue. The murder is the main issue.

KESSEL: But the president's decision has reignited divisions smothered by the Palestinian uprising. Outside the president's residence, a spontaneous demonstration of left-wing Israelis, rare in these days of national unity.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was shocked when hearing that, because Margalit hal-Sheffi is more than a person itself, it's a symbol. So by giving pardon to this young lady, he -- it was interpreted as if he gave pardon to a whole movement who incited against the Oslo agreement.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By taking this decision, he almost pushed the left to wake up from his paralysis.

KESSEL: But in hal-Sheffi's home settlement on the West Bank, the decision is hailed.

"It's simply a question of justice finally being done," says one of her neighbors.

Hal-Sheffi's conviction was seen as a collective indictment of the settlers. Now here, they see her as the symbol of their rehabilitation.

This split among Israelis follows months of national unity behind the Sharon government's tough policy towards the Palestinians, a consensus forged by bombs in Israeli cities, by would-be Palestinian suicide bombers caught before they can carry out their missions, by the ongoing Palestinian Intifada.

Ten months of fighting with the Palestinians has changed the left-right equation. The dominant slogan of right-wing demonstrations now is this, the criminals of the Oslo accords must be put on trial, a charge to discredit Rabin's peace process, which the right says was partly responsible for giving birth to the Palestinian intifada.

And that has Israel's battered peace camp in a bind. They're still ideologically opposed to the settlers.

(on camera): But in the midst of the unrelieved confrontation with the Palestinians, critics of the settlers steer clear from their previous charge that the assassination was part of an attempt by the political right to kill the Oslo peace -- a peace in which they too have now largely lost faith.

Jerrold Kessel, CNN, Tel Aviv.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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