Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

The Magnes Zionist: When Clerics Say Outrageous and Offensive Things, April 4, 2008

What do Pastor Reverend James Wright, Rabbi Mordecai Eliyahu, and Imam Sheik Yunus al-Astal share in common? Well, among other things, a penchant for making outrageous and offensive comments. Here is Chief Rabbi Eliyahu’s latest pearl :

“Even when we seek revenge, it is important to make one thing clear – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs.

“The Talmud states that if gentiles rob Israel of silver they will pay it back in gold, and all that is taken will be paid back in folds, but in cases like these there is nothing to pay back, since as I said – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs,” added Rabbi Eliyahu.

And Sheikh Yunis al-Astal, from Steven Erlanger’s piece on Hamas’s anti-Judaism in the Times .

“The reason for the punishment of burning is that it is fitting retribution for what [the Jews] have done,” Mr. Astal wrote on March 13. “But the urgent question is, is it possible that they will have the punishment of burning in this world, before the great punishment” of hell? Many religious leaders believe so, he said, adding, “Therefore we are sure that the holocaust is still to come upon the Jews.”

And as for the Reverend Wright…well, I don’t have to cite his statements, do I?

The reactions to these statements range from enthusiastic support to unrelenting condemnation of the statement and the speaker, including calls for silencing him in some way. Somewhere in the middle, trying to juggle conflicting values and conflicting loyalties, thinking people may be found. How should they react to hatred and to offensive statements?

As somebody who defines himself as liberal and orthodox (hence, a fundamentalist), here are some of my thoughts:

1. Don’t assume that the speaker is articulating a well-thought-out and consistent ideology. Religious folks, like everybody else, hold inconsistent beliefs. That is because they are generally not that sophisticated and because their sources speak with many voices. The Talmud teaches “Righteous gentiles merit a place in the World-to-come” as well as “Kill the best of gentiles.” What you hear depends on what best serves the immediate interests of the speaker.

2. Religious rhetoric is particularly inflammatory — but don’t assume that the cleric buys into the implications what he is saying, even when he says it. “Rabin is an informer”; “The Arabs are Amalek”; “The Jews are apes and pigs,” etc., are not harmless statements; they can lead others to kill. But they are said all too often in the way reserved for unthinking people (or politicians.)

3. Try to find out about the context of the remarks. There is a big difference between a Palestinian making an anti-Semitic remark during the Second Intifada and a German making the same one during the Holocaust. Both are to be condemned, but the second is to be condemned more. It is one thing for Eliyahu to stand up at a funeral service and make an anti-Arab racist slur. That is bad — but it could be worse were he not to make it at a time of stress, but at a time of relative peace and coexistence. I am not saying that anti-Semitism is hating Jews more than is strictly necessary (the bon mot attributed to Isaiah Berlin). But I do believe that what is particularly invidious about German anti-Semitism, besides its racism, is that in no way could the Jews be objectively viewed as responsible for the troubles of the Germans.

4. Avoid the human tendency to self-righteousness and smugness. Haaretz used to regularly feature on Sunday mornings some of the outrageous pearls of former Chief Rabbi Ovadyah Yosef in his public lecture the night before. Such statements reaffirmed the moral values and Jewish identity of the secularists, but were counter-productive in trying to engage his community in dialogue.

Henry Siegman: Grab more hills, expand the territory, LRB, April 10, 2008

Lords of the Land and The Accidental Empire reveal the massive scale of Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands and the involvement of every part of Israeli society in advancing the settlement enterprise in clear and deliberate violation not only of international law but of Israel’s own laws. Gorenberg reports that when asked by the foreign minister, Abba Eban, in 1967 about the legality of settlements, Theodor Meron, the foreign ministry’s legal counsel, responded: ‘Civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.’ The prohibition, he stressed, is ‘categorical and is not conditioned on the motives or purposes of the transfer, and is aimed at preventing colonisation of conquered territory by citizens of the conquering state’.

The settlements were carefully investigated in 2005 by a commission headed by Talia Sasson, who was cynically appointed by Ariel Sharon to uncover the illegal activities that he himself had orchestrated. Sasson found that the settlements – illegal according to Israel’s own laws – were established with the secret support of virtually every government ministry, the IDF and Shin Bet. Feigning shock when Sasson presented her findings, Sharon and his ministers promptly buried the report.

Zertal and Eldar make clear that the settlers lord it not only over the Occupied Territories and their subject population but over the state of Israel as well. It is important to remember that the majority of Israel’s settlers are driven not by ideology but by economic and quality-of-life considerations, and are attracted by the heavy subsidies the government supplies to the settlements. Some of these ‘non-ideological’ settlers are secular Israelis, while others are members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that are deeply ambivalent if not opposed to the Zionist national enterprise. But the driving force behind the settlements is a small religious-nationalist group, whose members are widely considered the most savvy, well connected and effective political operators in Israel. Their ideology combines an intense form of religious messianism with an extreme nationalism that has far more in common with the religious and ethnocentric nationalism of the Serbian Orthodox militias of Mladic and Karadzic than with any Jewish values I am familiar with. That Sharon and some of his settler friends were virtually the only politicians in the West (other than Serbia’s Slavic supporters) who opposed military measures to prevent Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo was not an accident.

The religious-nationalist leadership now seems to have lost much of its authority with the far more radical younger generation born and bred in the settlements. This new generation draws inspiration from the ‘hilltop youth’, young people who responded to Sharon in October 1998 when, as foreign minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, he called on settlers to ‘grab’ hilltops in the parts of the West Bank from which he and Netanyahu had agreed to withdraw, as stipulated by the Oslo Accords. ‘Grab more hills, expand the territory,’ Sharon urged on Israel Radio. ‘Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.’

The ‘hilltop youth’ reject the authority of the Jewish state and its institutions. They run around in what they imagine to be biblical dress, assaulting Palestinians, stealing and destroying their homes, crops and orchards, occasionally beating them and every so often killing them. Occasionally the IDF intervenes, but their efficacy is undermined by their belief that their main job is to protect the settlers, not the population under occupation.

الحياة - اشتباكات متقطعة في البصر April 4, 2008

اشتباكات متقطعة في البصرة والجيش الأميركي يقصف مواقع بالطيران … المالكي يهدد الخارجين عن القانون بـ«صولات فرسان» والصدر يدعو الى تظاهرة مليونية في ذكرى سقوط بغداد

اعتبر رئيس الوزراء العراقي نوري المالكي مواجهات البصرة مع «جيش المهدي» التابع لرجل الدين الشيعي مقتدى الصدر «بداية المنازلة ضد الخارجين عن القانون»،

الى ذلك، جدد قياديون في تيار الصدر رفضهم تسليم سلاح «جيش المهدي»، فيما دعا الصدر أنصاره الى الاعتصام اليوم بعد صلاة الجمعة للمطالبة بـ «فك الحصار عن مدن شيعية»، وتنظيم تظاهرة «مليونية» في النجف لمناسبة الذكرى الخامسة لسقوط بغداد في قبضة الاحتلال الأميركي، في 9 نيسان ابريل عام 2003.

في غضون ذلك، استمرت الاشتباكات متقطعة بين القوات الحكومية والميليشيا الشيعية في البصرة، وشن الجيش الأميركي غارات جوية على مواقع في المدينة وفي الحلة قُتل خلالها مسلحون وعدد من المدنيين. وأكدت مصادر الشرطة ان قتالاً نشب خلال دخول جنود اميركيين يرتدون ملابس مدنية منطقة الجمعية وسط الحلة، حيث خاضوا اشتباكات مع مجهولين واستدعوا طائرة هيليكوبتر لمساندتهم.

More Than 1,000 in Iraq’s Forces Quit Basra Fight - New York Times, April 4, 2008

BAGHDAD — More than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen either refused to fight or simply abandoned their posts during the inconclusive assault against Shiite militias in Basra last week, a senior Iraqi government official said Thursday. Iraqi military officials said the group included dozens of officers, including at least two senior field commanders in the battle.

The desertions in the heat of a major battle cast fresh doubt on the effectiveness of the American-trained Iraqi security forces. The White House has conditioned further withdrawals of American troops on the readiness of the Iraqi military and police.The crisis created by the desertions and other problems with the Basra operation was serious enough that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki hastily began funneling some 10,000 recruits from local Shiite tribes into his armed forces. That move has already generated anger among Sunni tribesmen whom Mr. Maliki has been much less eager to recruit despite their cooperation with the government in its fight against Sunni insurgents and criminal gangs.

A British military official said that Mr. Maliki had brought 6,600 reinforcements to Basra to join the 30,000 security personnel already stationed there, and a senior American military official said that he understood that 1,000 to 1,500 Iraqi forces had deserted or underperformed.