This Tuesday, the second round of elections were held in Beit Shemesh after the court accepted the request of the losers in a petition presented on the basis of so-called irregularities in the voting procedure. The court's decision was accompanied by a blasting media attack against the chareidi public in Beit Shemesh. Now, however, other tunes are being sung.
One of the retractors is the journalist, Kalman Leibskind, who publicized a critique last week in Ma'ariv in an article with the title: "The Chareidim are Right. There was no Reason to Disqualify the Elections in Beit Shemesh To Begin With."
Leibskind is the journalist who wrote an article immediately after the elections in which he first exposed a list of inconsistencies in the elections, as he saw them. His column got as far as the Interior Committee of the Knesset and evoked a media storm. Today he admits that even if there were some irregularities, there was no legal basis for annulling the elections, and had it not been the chareidi public involved, the court would not have related to those irregularities at all.
In his opening remarks, he writes very openly that he personally hopes that Eli Cohen, the candidate who lost the first election, will be elected as mayor. "I am a Zionist, and I am interested in Beit Shemesh being a place for secular citizens as well, as it has been throughout the years."
Immediately, he continues, "I was the first to write an inquiry about the falsification in the elections in the city, and after reading the Jerusalem district court's very clear-cut ruling annulling the elections, I also wrote an incisive report about the severe picture it painted. In the wake of that article, representatives of the chareidi public in Beit Shemesh came to me and said, `Forget about that court ruling. Read the material of proofs which led to it. It is the real story. Only one who reads it in its entirety can understand to what extent the judges are removed from reality.'
"I pushed them off a few times but they almost forced me to read the material. There are hundreds of pages of arguments, police investigative material and dozens of testimonies of various witnesses.
"A careful study of the material led me to the one hard conclusion: The court ruling which nullified the elections was one of the strangest documents written in recent years. The three judges who signed it: David Cheshin, Moshe Sobol and Yigal Merzel, tacked on to it an unprecedented conglomeration of speculations, fragments of quotations and unbased and unproven presumptions on their way to their bottom line.
"This ruling presented no proofs. It is important to me to again declare: there is no doubt that there were vote frauds in Beit Shemesh, and that their perpetrators must pay for their deeds. But the underlying question in this issue is how many votes were actually invalidly placed in the ballot boxes, and if it can be proven that the extent of these falsifications justify such a drastic step as nullifying the elections." And that's not all.
In his article, Leibskind grapples with all the arguments, and proves from the police investigations that the irregularities were not examined, and that the court rushed to tack on labels of falsifications upon entire groups of hundreds of citizens, in spite of the fact that the court could have checked things out definitively.
"These are obvious facts that any objective eye could have exposed if it had sought to arrive at a true evaluation."
After he enumerates the facts, one by one, Kalman Leibskind arrives at his conclusion:
"So what have we here? We have a court which determined that there were 1,400 false votes, despite the fact that it has no definite proof of any more than 36 invalid votes. We have judges whose stereotyped vision propelled them to regard in every chareidi suspected of forgery, definitive proof that the entire Chassidic community he is affiliated with are forgers. We have here a ruling that is a libelous, generalizing and unprecedented in its severity, against Chassidim and entire communities, which, without proof, were turned, via the signatures of three judges, into factories of forgeries which included one and all the members of those communities — man and woman, young and old — every single one, relying on the mathematic presumptions of one single man from Bnei Brak, whose identity is uncertain, and the basis of whose involvement in the case is altogether not clear.
"There is another unpleasant truth hiding here behind all of this babble: It is hard to believe that there is another group, aside from the chareidi community, towards which the court would feel so free to disqualify an electoral victory on the basis of such fluky evidence."
