Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / Caught on camera – Haaretz, August 28, 2008

This is Israeli justice in a nutshell: Lt. Col. Omri Burberg, the battalion commander suspected of giving an utterly illegal order to shoot a bound Palestinian, is wandering free and being considered for a senior training post in the Israel Defense Forces. Meanwhile, Jamal Amira, the father of Salam, the amateur camera operator who filmed the shooting, spent 26 days in an Israeli jail, until a military judge was so kind as to release him on bail last week.

“Although the claim that the IDF sought revenge is weak,” wrote Lt. Col. Yoram Haniel, the military judge, “one cannot overlook the fact that out of all the protestors, only the complainant was arrested.”

Indeed, it can’t be overlooked. Jamal Amira was arrested just after after B’Tselem released the video, filmed by his daughter, of the horrible shooting of the bound Palestinian man. He says that when the Border Police officers arrested him, they called out to one another, “We caught Salam’s father.” Amira, 53, a father of nine, has many Israeli friends, including a senior IDF reserves officer. Amir was thrown into Ofer Prison in what can only be interpreted as an act of revenge by those who presented themselves as “friends of Omri.”

In Na’alin, the village presently embroiled in a resolute and brave civil struggle over the remainder of its land, on which Israel seeks to build the separation fence, celebrated Amira’s release this week.

Gershom Gorenberg, School opens, minds close – Haaretz, August 29, 2008

At the gates of the state religious schools, in many places in Israel, two cultures meet. One, religious and modern, turns over its sons and daughters to the other, more insular, to educate them in its stead. The parents live with their children alongside secular families in mixed neighborhoods. A quick glance at a list of the teachers’ phone numbers reveals that many live in settlements or in neighborhoods known as Haredi or Hardali – religiously ultra-Orthodox, politically ultra-nationalist.

The geographic gap reflects a rift in attitudes toward religion and toward the wider world. It expresses itself in how each side relates to secular culture, to non-Jews, to the limits of rabbinic authority, and to the manner of thinking about politics. The parents are often unaware of the gap. Most lean rightward politically. But their views are based on pragmatic and nationalist considerations – in contrast to the messianic politics of many of the teachers. And the minority of parents who lean leftward? If they pay attention to the right-wing atmosphere in the schools, they accept it as the price of religious education.

My eldest child will be drafted soon. Since he entered kindergarten, I’ve kept a mental list of the “educational” messages he and his sisters have been given in school as if it were impossible to teach someone to be religious without them: The kindergarten teacher who devoted a morning to teaching that “the Tomb of the Patriarchs belongs only to Jews”; the homeroom teacher who spoke daily of approaching redemption and of the new dress she kept in her closet to wear when the messiah comes; the teacher who added psalms to morning prayers to entreat God to stop the “expulsion” of the Gush Katif settlers, and who didn’t understand my complaint that she had injected politics into the classroom. In Shabbat conversations with friends, I sometimes shout, “This isn’t my religion.”

Gideon Levy / The last of the dreamers of peace – Haaretz, August 28, 2008

It was a Saturday afternoon in the late 1980s. We entered The Voice of Peace’s rickety Subaru truck and drove to Gaza to Mahmoud Zahar’s house. Afternoon coffee with the Hamasnik, just imagine. Imagine that once it was possible to visit Zahar on a Saturday afternoon. Just think  there once was a man here who dreamed of peace.

Picture a pilot who never drove a car. All those things sound like hallucinations now, even more than they used to.

Abie Nathan was perhaps the only Israeli who felt guilty about 1948. As a volunteer pilot from overseas he had bombed Palestinian villages and then wanted to make up for it. He didn’t shoot and whine about it but actually tried to make amends.

Today that sounds like science fiction. Israeli? Very doubtful. He lived among us for decades, but Abie dreamed in English and thought in Hindi. He helped Palestinian children, but also hastened to every disaster area in the world. In that, too, he was perhaps the last Israeli who saw compassion and aid as global notions. Our Mother Teresa.

Like another central figure in the Israeli peace movement, Uri Avneri (may he live long), he was both a bohemian and an ideologist. No party was comparable to Nathan’s roof parties in North Tel Aviv’s Zirelson Street. Nobody could be as treacherous as us, who lived it up at his parties and then abandoned him after he became sick and wheelchair-ridden many years ago. There are dozens of people around town who should feel deeply guilty today for neglecting him so criminally, including this writer.