Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

PM: I’m Beitar fan, but I detest violent brutes who booed Rabin, Haaretz, November 5, 2007

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Monday condemned Beitar Jerusalem soccer fans for booing during a pre-game moment of silence Sunday marking mark the 12th anniversary of the assassination of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Fans also sang songs of praise to Rabin’s assassin Yigal Amir, later telling an Army Radio audience that they strongly supported the murder and that it was “good for Israel.”

Olmert, a diehard Beitar supporter since childhood, said Monday that he “detests these brutish and violent people who, I’m sorry to say, are a sizable sector of the fans.”

Speaking to a convention of business executives, Olmert said “I want to state in the clearest, angriest terms, that this behavior - not of a small group, as some would like to minimize it, but of a large, loud, influential and raging group - was wicked and unbearable.”

Protesters scuffle with supporters of Rabin’s assassin outside jail - Haaretz, November 4, 2007

Leftwing and rightwing activists scuffled Sunday outside the Rimonim Prison where the killer of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is slated to hold his son’s bris later in the day.

Members of the left-of-center Meretz party gathered outside the Rimonim penitentiary where YigalAmir is incarcerated for the 1994 shooting of Rabin to protest the court’s decision allowing him to hold the Jewish rite behind bars.

In response, rightwing extremists organized a counter-protest outside the jail’s gates.
“All these years they told us court decision should be respected, and here comes along decision that isn’t comfortable and they attack it,” said Itamar Ben Gvir, a rightwing extremist….

The birth of Amir’s son comes at a time of growing sympathy for commuting Amir’s sentence. Right-wing extremists and Amir’s family have launched a campaign to have him released from prison and a recent newspaper poll indicated about a quarter of Israelis, including almost half of religiously observant Jews, think Amir should be pardoned in 2015 after serving 20 years.

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, among the approximately 800,000 in Israel, heading off to pray last week in Jerusalem’s Old City.

A Modern Marketplace for Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox - New York Times, NYT, November 2, 2007

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — When Larry Pinczower switches on his cellphone, the seal of a rabbinate council appears. Unable to send text messages, take photographs or connect to the Internet, his phone is a religiously approved adaptation to modernity by the ultra-Orthodox sector of Israeli life.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, among the approximately 800,000 in Israel, heading off to pray last week in Jerusalem’s Old City.

More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and the like are blocked, and rabbinical overseers ensure that the lists are up to date. Calls to other kosher phones are less than 2 cents a minute, compared with 9.5 cents for normal phones. But on the Sabbath any call costs $2.44 a minute, a steep religious penalty.

“You pay less and you’re playing by the rules,” Mr. Pinczower, 39, said. “You’re using technology but in a way that maintains religious integrity.”

A community of at least 800,000 people — out of 5.4 million Jews living in Israel, a country of 7.1 million — the ultra-Orthodox, though comparatively poor, form a distinct, growing and important market, and Israeli companies are paying attention. While there are rabbinical strictures against watching television, using computers for leisure, immodest attire and unsupervised mixing of men and women, the Israeli market economy has adjusted in creative and surprising ways.

Some 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men do not work regular jobs, preferring religious study. More than 50 percent live below the poverty line and get state allowances, compared with 15 percent of the rest of the population, and most families have six or seven children, said Momi Dahan, an economist at the School of Public Policy at Hebrew University.

Is the (Haredi) party over? - Haaretz, October 16, 2007

Deri believes that the existence of ultra-Orthodox parties antagonizes the secular public, bringing about “phenomena like Shinui, that makes secular people think that the ultra-Orthodox want to force their lifestyle on them.” In short, said Deri, the ultra-Orthodox parties “create hatred and confrontation without being very useful.” As long as the ultra-Orthodox continue to operate within sectarian political parties, Deri stressed, the usefulness of such parties in terms of serving Haredi interests “will be small and the damage, in my humble opinion, will be great….”

According to Deri, the main internal struggle that Israeli society will face after “the implementation of the disengagement puts an end to political debate,” will be “the cultural struggle for the general character of the state. On the one hand are Shinui and others who want a completely Western and totally free country, and on the other hand, the whole public, that wants the country to be - to one degree or another - a Jewish state.” The ultra-Orthodox, he said, have got to get involved in this struggle together with traditional Jews in the Likud and other parties.

No room for ‘misfits’ - Haaretz - Israel News, September 21, 2007

“Zman yehudi hadash” is a white project that corresponds with Europe and North America while casually erasing entire Jewish histories, those lived by the Jews of the Islamic countries.

As I pointed out last week, the encyclopedia’s editorial board consists of 14 learned members, among them only one woman (Shulamit Volkov) and one Mizrahi (Michel Abitbol). And what about the contributors? The five volumes contain some 380 entries written by about 240 different authors. Of the 380, 67 were written by women (about 18 percent), three by Arabs (on “Arab topics”), and 15 at most were written by Mizrahim (about 4 percent).

This bias, which is even more severe than the outrageously low representation of these groups among Israeli university faculty members - where the numbers are 20 percent women, 7 percent Mizrahi and about 1.5 percent Arabs - is also evident in the contents of the different entries. It is astonishing to see, for example, how for most of the writers, Mizrahi Jews simply do not fall within their field of vision.

Les ultra-orthodoxes israéliens exigent le respect de la shmita, année sabbatique pour les cultures, Le Monde.fr, le 14 septembre 2007

A l’occasion du Nouvel An juif, jeudi 13 septembre, jour où débute la 5 768e année du calendrier hébraïque, la question de l’année sabbatique se pose à nouveau. Jusqu’à présent, les arrangements étaient facilement acceptés. Il suffisait, en fait, de procéder à des ventes fictives de terrains à des non-juifs et le tour était joué. Cela permettait aux juifs de continuer à cultiver leurs champs et surtout d’obtenir le certificat de kashrout nécessaire pour vendre les produits et les consommer en accord avec les préceptes de la religion juive. L’année suivante, les terres étaient restituées aux propriétaires et personne n’y trouvait vraiment rien à redire. Sauf quelques orthodoxes ultras qui estimaient que ces tours de passe-passe ne respectaient pas la lettre des textes.

“LES LOIS DE LA TORAH”

Cette année 5768, les choses sont différentes. Les orthodoxes juifs, les haredim, font une énorme pression sur le grand rabbinat d’Israël pour que ces petits arrangements cessent et que l’on s’en tienne à la Halakha, le droit rabbinique. “Pas question de contourner les lois de la Torah même si l’on a beaucoup de sympathie pour les difficultés des paysans”, explique le rabbin Meir Bergman, chef d’un groupe ultraorthodoxe. Et d’ajouter : “Dieu pourvoira à leurs besoins.”

An incomplete sketch of secularism - Haaretz, September 14, 2007

In 2000 Eliezer Schweid, a professor of the history of Jewish thought, defined Israeli society as “post-secular,” arguing that, according to self-definition, the secular make up some 10-15 percent of the Jewish population in Israel, Orthodox-religious Jews of various stripes account for 20 percent, and the rest label themselves as “masorti” (observant of Jewish tradition) - a group that includes most Mizrahi Jews and members of the Conservative and Reform movements.

It is true that one can turn the tables and argue that only 20 percent define themselves as Orthodox-religious Jews; but the power of the post-secular argument lies precisely in the fact that it makes it possible to recognize both possibilities at once, along with movement in the space between secularism and religiosity, a space that defies clear distinctions. Also, political scientists Charles Liebman and Yaacov Yadgar have shown in their joint research that “secularism” as a self-definition is a default position, not an independent category of identity. They also showed that the “ideologically secular” account for only about 8 percent of the population.

Lau, Observing shmita sensibly - Haaretz, September 10, 2007

The seventh year, the shmita (sabbatical) year, is approaching. The country’s major merchants are preparing: Here is a golden opportunity for organizing the mass sale of produce untouched by Jewish hands and “free of any fear of the violation of the laws governing the shmita year.” Ultra-Orthodox bodies specializing in supervision of kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) are mobilizing to encourage Israeli consumers to purchase agricultural produce only from non-Jews.

Neo-Nazi violence flourishes - in Petah Tikva - Haaretz, September 9, 2007

As chronicled in Haaretz, Petah Tikva’s ultra-Orthodox community of 5,000 households has been under attack for several years from neo-Nazi gangs, made up of teenage immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Married yeshiva students have been beaten up and synagogues desecrated.