Shoot the Rest of the City By Sarah Honig (April 27) We all make mistakes. Some of them wee and some whoppers, some regrettable and some rib-tickling, some reparable and some irreversible, some inadvertent and others reckless. That's what convicted murderer Aviva Granot stressed when she was recently released after serving 14 years for the cold-blooded bludgeoning of American tourist Mela Melavsky, which she and her accomplice Hava Ya'ari perpetrated to cover up their embezzlement of the Holocaust survivor's savings. Granot was mildly repentant, contending that "people make mistakes, but that's no reason to hang them." Not in this country for sure - not in the land of those Archie Bunker, with his inimitable finesse, identified as "Jewish pinko bleeding-heart lawyers who get sentimental over killers." Elsewhere, however, as the loud-mouthed spokesman for the common working stiff pointed out: "it's a proven fact that capital punishment is a known detergent [sic] for crime." As perhaps life without parole might be. But in our kindly judicial system even premeditated homicide, motivated by greed, cannot keep killers behind bars for long. So when the two celebrity slayers were set free no civil rights groups raised their usual indignant squawk, and even Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On didn't rush to the High Court to petition against the reduced sentence, as she had in the case of Yoram Skolnik (who shot a captured terrorist in a fit of rage without pre-meditation). But Gal-On almost went to the High Court again last week when she heard Ehud Barak contemplated instant legislation to circumvent the court's release of Lebanese captives. Her alacrity critically dampened his determination. He had every reason to assume the court would side with her. It's no accident that his still projected alternative slow-track bill isn't the only one proposed to sidestep what are seen as rulings inimical to the state's security and basic Jewishness. Thus, there's talk about legislation allowing the GSS to resort to force, thereby at least partially untying its hands, which the court itself admitted to cuffing despite the ongoing battle against terror. There are also ideas for legislative measures to set aside land for Jewish settlement, something else the court nixed in a recent precedent-setting controversial decision. The religious parties cheer any attempt to curb judicial over-zealousness and overbearing. A significant segment of society plainly sees the court as mad, while others brand its critics as bad. Yet those who consider the court above reproach, if not infallible, must wrestle with the fact that only a few years back Supreme Court President Aharon Barak favored keeping the Lebanese locked up. Now, he announces, he has changed his mind. By his own present admission his earlier ruling was nothing but a mistake. Because the local high priests of political correctness conditioned us to regard every pronouncement by the Supreme Court president as sacrosanct, his mistake becomes no less troublesome than Granot's. His can involve life and death no less than hers did. Which of his decisions should be placed on a pedestal - the past or the current? How do we know he's not mistaken now? Is it OK for him to change his mind and expect us to change ours in response? Shouldn't our democratically elected legislative and executive carve out policy and is the judicial not treading dangerously on their turf? Not that our executive is mistake free either. The 1996 Grapes of Wrath arrangements in Lebanon, which virtually rendered our troops there sitting ducks, were the outcome of a fumbled campaign by then prime minister Shimon Peres and his eager foreign minister Ehud Barak. No wonder Syria and the Hizbullah insist on every letter of the agreement concocted by Barak. But now that wiggling out of its constricting confines is becoming increasingly bothersome, our present prime minister has deemed his previous deal a mistake, which he seeks to correct by pulling out of Lebanon in a hurry and in the hope that a miraculously reformed Hizbullah won't pursue us. So will the real Barak stand up? Is he the Ehud who gave us the Grapes of Wrath or the one who is now trying to escape the consequences of his mistake? And who for that matter is the real Aharon Barak - the one who allowed the government to hold on to its Lebanese detainees or the one who now rues that as a mistake? To err is human but some mistakes are real spine chillers. Half-baked security arrangements kill and there's no telling how long they'll continue taking their toll. There's also no telling where the High Court's unchartered course will take us, especially with the justices reluctant to slow down and drive extra carefully. They might soon collide head-on with the Law of Return, a prospect which has led some wits to predict (not totally in jest) that the court might one day declare the Jewish state illegal. That would per force become Their Honors' last decision and they would then empower themselves to switch off the light, shut the door on the Zionist enterprise, and hand the keys to the Arabs. If anything, such black humor attests to a deepening sense of despair and dismay. Mistakes are too numerous for comfort. Ordinary citizens are liable to be rattled and lose what's left of their peace of mind when they hear that their top political leaders were mistaken, that their High Court justices were mistaken, and even that Aviva Granot merely slipped and made a mistake. The fact that she's at large and that the two Baraks can carry on vacillating with impunity at our expense doesn't inspire much more confidence in the system than Archie expressed in his role as vox populi. Bitter banter here about turning the Jewish state over to Arabs isn't all that different from his suggestion that "if society is at fault that we got killers running around murdering innocent people, then it's simple. We turn the killer loose, give him a pension for life, and shoot the rest of the city."