A judge in Tel Aviv on Monday sentenced a septuagenarian woman to 45 days in jail for unlawfully protesting illegal immigration into Israel and immigrant criminality—prompting prominent politicians to accuse the court of discriminating against right-wingers.
Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court Judge Miri Hart-Rich sentenced activist Sheffi Paz, 72, after convicting her of “behavior that could violate public order and trespassing” and “conspiring to deface real estate” as well as “real estate defacement” in connection with several unlawful protest actions by Paz. These included graffiti that Paz drew in 2019 on E.U. offices to protest their alleged involvement in facilitating illegal African immigration into the Jewish state. The graffiti read: “German money kills Jews.”
The judge noted in her sentence what she described as Paz’s abrasive and unrepentant attitude during the trial.
“I cannot ignore that defendant #1 declared to me during the hearing that she is neither sorry nor remorseful. In fact, she interrupted the hearing and the prosecutor’s arguments and demonstrated disregard,” for the court, the judge wrote, adding that Paz had said she wished she’d “done more” and the court lacks the authority to convict her.
Right-wing politicians pointed to the relatively heavy sentencing of Paz as fresh evidence of what they said was the judiciary’s left-wing bias and the need to make it more accountable and impartial.
Two other defendants were handed suspended sentences and community service, but Paz, a strident representative of residents who suffer from rampant crime by African immigrants in southern Tel Aviv, declined to submit to the procedure that would get her out of jail, the judge also said.
The heavy sentence coincides with weekly riots in Tel Aviv by left-wing anti-government protesters who routinely start fires on the street, as well as deface public property on a massive scale. None of the so-called Kaplan Street protesters have been indicted in 2024.
“The Israeli public knows that it has a two-tiered justice system. Class A citizens can trample the law brazenly, run amok, paint roads, set property on fire and ruin infrastructure with impunity,” said Yitzhak Wasserlauf, a Cabinet minister for the right-wing Otzma Yehudit Party of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Others, Wasserlauf added, “will be persecuted mercilessly for any violation and given 45 days in jail for graffiti.”
Ben-Gvir accused the judiciary of “selective enforcement” and praised Paz, a lesbian and self-professed former liberal. She has devoted years to speaking out on behalf of the Jewish residents of Tel Aviv’s poor southern neighborhoods, who’ve endured for decades the effects of the arrival of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants—most of them military-age men—from Eritrea, Sudan and beyond.
“I wish to express my support for Sheffi Paz in her fight to ensure the deportation of the illegal infiltrators who terrorize the neighborhoods of southern Tel Aviv,” said Ben-Gvir. “Sheffi’s fight is our fight.”
Simha Rothman, chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee and a leader of the judicial reform effort, described a reality in which “in Israel, you’re punished for belonging to the wrong side. If you’re on the right one, you can document yourself spraying graffiti from multiple angles, featuring incitement, knowing you’re safe. Because in Israel, what matters is not what you did, but who you are – which side are you on.”
