While I very much admire your restraint in meddling in Israel's sovereign affairs - you are severely misinformed about the legitimacy of the expulsion policy.

Ariel Sharon ran on a hard-line platform. Unilateral withdrawal was the Labor party's platform - and they were trounced. By electing Sharon in a landslide, the Israel public decisively rejected the Oslo-era policy of unilateral withdrawal.

Sharon then turned around and implemented the policy Isreali voters rejected.

To get this far, he has trashed the considerable parliamentary majority with which he began, and is now running a government propped up by Arab and far-left parties - hardly the natural allies of his center-right Likud constituency.

He has fired cabinet ministers and completely ignored internal votes of the ruling Likud party - in effect he now rules as a dictator, estranged from his own party and from the Israelis who elected him.

Over the past year, voices have called for a public referendum on the pullout. This has been flatly rejected.

The broadcast media in Israel are run by the government - and they have consistently diffused misinformation, demonizing the settler movement and all who opppose Sharon and the left.

The increasingly blatant curtailing of citizen's rights to protest and dissent - and the heavy-handed use of police force - are taking place against this backdrop. The item I sent you is not just an isolated incident of a hot-headed cop roughing someone up.

Consider: over the past week, a force of 20,000 uniformed corps - enlisted army and police - were brought to bear on a peaceful protest march. That is more personnel than were used in some of Israel's most famous battles - in its capture of Iraq, the US initial force contained just about 20,000 combat troops!

To stop people from participating in the march, police boarded privately chartered buses and confiscated the drivers' licenses. Other bus companies were threatened by police and warned that they would be shut down if they transported protesters.

Despite that, the march drew 80,000 people down to the Negev for the kickoff ceremony, and another 40,000 marched in the desert heat - men, women, and children.

Minors have been arrested for giving out literature at street corners - and are being held in what amounts to solitary confinement, rather than being released on bail.

I would normally hail you for not butting in to Israel's internal affairs, but in this case there is real cause for concern about the democratic nature of our country - and a real need for pressure from American Jews who know what a healthy democracy looks like.

The situation here parallels that in the US - after several decades of socialist hegemony, a leftist minority elite is fighting its democratic loss of power. As in the States, the left is entrenched in the courts, academia, and the media.

Unfortunately, we do not have as open or resilient a democratic structure as the US - and nothing like a culture of democracy.

I recommend that you and your readers check out some of the articles in the weekend edition of ynetnews.com - it's the English website of a major Israeli daily newspaper - which describe some of the government's heavy-handed responses over the last week.

To sum up:
- the expulsion is NOT a policy reflecting the will of the Israeli people.

- those opposing the expulsion are not fanatics or rabblerousers, but Israel's silent majority, which has rejected Oslo's spiral of self-immolation.

- Sharon's efforts to impose this policy have run roughshod over Israeli democracy, and over the rights of its citizens.

- This is part of a larger abuse of power by the socialist elite, which claims it is defending Israeli democracy from religious fanatics - but in reality hasn't a democratic bone in its body.

Ben-David