In March 2004, Ran, supported by the testimony of three of the soldiers, was acquitted of the charges against him. In her ruling, the judge claimed that Nir's allegations were contradictory and lacked credibility. The judge further stated that Nir "was very passionate in his testimony and I fear that his testimony was stained by a lack of objectivity towards the defendant and that he would not hesitate to point an accusatory finger at him even if the defendant was not involved in the incident."

More disturbingly, the judge noted that the state prosecution had called for the three soldiers' testimonies to be discounted "because their behavior at the event is testimony 'to the sympathies of their hearts' and therefore are not worthy of trust." The notion that Israel's state prosecution can argue that a citizen's political sympathies should in any way discount his credibility as a witness is simply shocking to anyone who believes that justice should be meted out in courts of law without prejudice.

But the fact of the matter is that the view of the prosecution, like the actions of Ta'ayush generally and Nir specifically, has not been influenced by the 2004 judgment. On March 20, 2005, immediately after Ran was alerted that two Arabs had entered his clover field with a tractor and were poised to destroy a year's crop two months before the harvest, he went down to deal with the trespassers with three of his workers. According to his indictment, Ran immobilized the tractor by pulling out its electrical cables and punched the tractor's operator. The other three men are accused of hitting the other infiltrator with a rifle butt. Before Ran could say Jack Robinson, out popped Nir with Arik Asherman from Rabbis for Human Rights with a video camera (they now claim that their film mysteriously disappeared), and a detachment of police immediately arrived on the scene and proceeded to arrest Ran for aggravated assault.

Although no one disputed that the land in question was cultivated by Ran, and that he owns the farm, the police never questioned the two Arabs as to what they were doing on his field with a tractor. They claimed that the owner of the field asked them to work it, but they never produced this mysterious owner or named him. Israeli law says that a property owner or leaser may use reasonable force to protect his property, and yet, the question of trespass was never raised by anyone except Ran. Instead, the police, the state prosecution and the Supreme Court have repeatedly stated that pending the conclusion of his trial, which is only set to begin next Tuesday – seven months after the altercation – Ran must be prohibited from entering Judea and Samaria lest he repeat his assaults against Arabs and radical leftists who maliciously trespass his property.

FOR THE past seven months, the question of whether Ran can or cannot be released, and under what conditions, pending his trial has been heard in no less than eight separate tribunals. In the latest ruling last week, Supreme Court Justice Esther Hayut decided in favor of the state prosecution that insists that Ran manifests a danger to the public and must be jailed pending the completion of his trial. In her ruling, Hayut noted Ran's "ideological zealotry" as one of the reasons for her decision to incarcerate him. In this, Hayut shows that from her perspective, there is a legal significance to a person's ideological motivations for his supposedly criminal actions.

In many respects, Ran's trial, like Rosen and Weissman's trial, is supposed to be a forum for determining whether he is guilty of criminal activity. However, given the ideological basis for the prosecution's pursuit of Ran, both in this case and in the case brought against him by David Nir two years ago, and in light of the prosecution's refusal to even look into Ran's complaint of trespass, his trial, like that of Weissman and Rosen, has become much greater than the sum of its parts. The question that will be raised before the magistrate's court next Tuesday will quite simply be whether a Jew in the Land of Israel has a right to defend his land against those who seek to maliciously trespass his property. That is, the entire idea of Zionism is about to be put on trial.

As Ran himself put it in a television interview last July, "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."

No, as in the case of the prosecution of Rosen and Weissman so in the case of Avri Ran, this war is being fought against the Jews by those who have internalized the anti-Semitic view that Jews have no right to defend themselves.