Shades of the Shadow

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
28 October '10

Our mainstream media could hardly contain their glee last week when the state attorney flatly rejected pleas to accord Margalit Har-Shefi a retrial. Opinion-molders bristled indignantly at the very suggestion that she might be exonerated. This, they righteously pontificated, would constitute a first step to releasing Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin Yigal Amir.

Just 19-years-old at the time, Har-Shefi was arrested post-assassination in 1995 because she was Amir’s classmate and friend. The prosecution alleged she knew of his intentions yet failed to phone the police. Eventually she was tried, convicted and imprisoned for the rarely prosecuted offense of not preventing a crime.

It was all shades of the Shadow – that icon of old-time radio, comics, pulp fiction and the movies – who knows what evil lurks (or doesn’t) in the hearts of men (and presumably women too). Seemingly only Israeli judges possess Shadow-like infallible preternatural penetrating powers to ferret out a girl’s deepest and darkest secrets.

Har-Shefi’s ordeal lasted years. She lost successive appeals and was imprisoned in March 2001. Throughout, she vehemently denied advance knowledge about the assassination. The majority of judges, presumably having accessed her innermost consciousness, ruled otherwise. It was her word against their opinion. There wasn’t a shred of corroborating evidence against her.

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