Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

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.

Shtrasler, Herzl is turning in his grave, Haaretz, March 14, 2008

Shas once understood that it was undesirable to impose its worldview on the majority, that it was preferable to use friendly persuasion. Today Shas wants to change the country’s image. Yishai has become an expert at extortion, and Olmert is willing to pay. He is buying Shas with money and benefits, as well as laws and regulations that are changing the country’s character.

About two months ago Olmert agreed to reestablish the Religious Affairs Ministry for Shas. A few days ago he transferred NIS 450 million to Shas, a political gift to fund the yeshiva students, and recently he gave Rafael Pinhasi, one of the Shas strongmen (a former MK, with a criminal conviction) the position of chair of the Tel Aviv cemeteries council. More power, more money and more appointments.

Recently there was a dangerous proposal made in cooperation with Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog of Labor - which almost passed in the cabinet - to expand the powers of the rabbinical courts, according to a demand by Shas. Recently a Shas draft bill to restrict surfing the Internet passed its first reading, and the Shas minister of communications, Big Brother Ariel Atias, will be the chief censor. Just like Saudi Arabia.

Shas is currently promoting a draft bill that will restrict the right to an abortion, and an arrangement to censor billboards so that “immodest models” will not be seen on them.

Olmert also agreed to establish a team of ministers headed by Yishai to examine an increase in child allowances, and recently the government decided to establish a state conversion authority. By demand of Shas, the government allowed it to appoint its own dayanim (rabbinical court judges) to the conversion courts.

We are gradually and systematically losing the modern Western country in which we were educated. Olmert is selling the principles of humanism, tolerance, freedom and civil rights to Yishai in a liquidation sale.

Brian Hendler
Mercaz Harav students at funerals on March 7, 2008 grieve for their slain classmates.

Attack cut religious Zionists deeply - JTA, March 9, 2008

TEL AVIV (JTA) — The one with glasses and a wide smile was the brother of a friend, the one with blue eyes and side curls the son of another.

In the close-knit world of religious Zionism, no one feels far removed from the grief for eight young people gunned down while studying Talmud in their Jerusalem yeshiva.

The images of blood-soaked prayer shawls and glass doors riddled with bullet holes, then the eight coffins lined up in a row, have horrified an entire country. But the pain cuts especially deep in the national religious Zionist community, which feels it was specifically targeted.

Its members now are searching for a way their faith can guide them through the mourning.

“Since the attack there is a sense that a darkness has fallen over Jerusalem when usually there is joy in our neighborhoods,” said Tal Weider, 17, a high school student and leader in the local Bnai Akiva youth group.

It was not by chance that the attacker targeted Mercaz Harav, the main yeshiva of national religious Zionism and a birthplace of the settler movement, many here believe.

The Jewish Week News, March 5, 2008

Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, issued an apology today for a statement he made that appeared to advocate shooting the Prime Minister of Israel should the government “give away Jerusalem.”

The statement, part of a 39-second clip posted on YouTube this week, is from a discussion the rabbi had in Israel with American students learning at Yeshivat HaKotel in Jerusalem. It is not known when the statement was made.

In what appears to be a response to a question about serving in the Israeli army, the rabbi, a leading decisor in the Orthodox community, says: “First you have to know what the army is going to do. If the army is going to destroy Gush Katif, there’s no mitzvah to destroy Eretz Yisrael.

“If the army is going to give away Yerushalyim [Jerusalem], then I would tell everyone to resign from the army - I’d tell them to shoot the Rosh Hamemshalah [Prime Minister],” which prompted laughter from his audience.

The national-religious camp’s flagship yeshiva - Haaretz, March 8, 2008

The Mercaz Harav rabbinic college is the most prominent yeshiva in the religious Zionist world. It trained the movement’s leading rabbis as well as many yeshiva heads, city rabbis, and teachers in religious colleges and high schools.

The school was central in shaping the evolution of religious Zionism. As the flagship of national-religious yeshivas, the religious right is bound to attribute greater symbolic meaning to a terrorist attack here than anywhere else.
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Founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, then chief Ashkenazi rabbi during the British Mandate, it is seen as the first yeshiva to be Zionist in spirit.

Rabbi Kook called it “the central world yeshiva,” wishing to set it as a model for a new yeshiva concept, integrating traditional Talmud studies with Jewish philosophy, Bible and even Jewish history, geography and literature. The last three subjects were never actually taught there.

After its founder’s death in 1935 it was named Merkaz Harav after him, and became synonymous with Rabbi Kook’s teachings.

In its first decades the college had few students and at times it was not clear whether it would survive. The turning point came in the ’50s, when graduates of Bnei Akiva religious schools and high-school yeshivas seeking higher religious education flocked to Merkaz Harav, the only Zionist yeshiva.

The prominent Bnei Akiva rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria, a student of Rabbi Kook’s, encouraged students to go to Merkaz Harav, which was headed from 1952 by Rabbi Abraham Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, until his death in 1982.

The foundations for the religious settlements in the West Bank were forged in Merkaz Harav, whose student Hanan Porat set out to restore the Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion immediately after the Six-Day War.

The founders of Gush Emunim, a religious political movement that encouraged Jewish settlement of land they believe God promised the Jews, came from Merkaz Harav after the Yom Kippur War.

Israeli MP blames quakes on gays, BBC, Feb. 20, 2008

An Israeli MP has blamed parliament’s tolerance of gays for earthquakes that have rocked the Holy Land recently.

Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave “legitimacy to sodomy”.

Israel decriminalised homosexuality in 1988 and has since passed several laws recognising gay rights.

Two earthquakes shook the region last week and a further four struck in November and December.

In attack-conscious Israel, even a crematorium needs protection - Haaretz, February 6, 2008

In terrorism-conscious Israel, security has been beefed up even for the crematorium of a company providing Israelis a choice of burial services, but the potential assailants are apparently Jews.

The firm, called Aley Shalechet (”Autumn Leaves”), was the first company in Israel to offer “alternative burial services,” notably cremation.

In August 2007, a day after the location of the company’s crematorium was revealed in an ultra-Orthodox newspaper, unknown assailants broke into the grounds of the firm on Moshav Hibat Zion and torched its facilities, causing serious damage to the crematorium, and igniting a public debate on burial services outside the Orthodox Jewish norm.

No one has been charged in the relation to the arson, though Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, founder and public face of the ultra-Orthodox ZAKA rescue service an the self-styled operations officer of the Eda Haredit religious organization, was temporarily detained by police after reports surfaced that he was seen at the site the morning of the crime.

The company had kept a low profile until the attack, its offices situated at the end of a hallway in a nondescript mall in central Israel. Since its operations were publicized, however, Aley Shalechet has been the subject of concerted efforts by religious authorities to have its activities banned, saying that it violates Jewish law and desecrates the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whose bodies were incinerated in Nazi ovens.

Haredi sect brands Chief Rabbi Metzger ‘Zionist stooge,’ wicked - Haaretz, February 5, 2008

The strongly anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect of ultra-Orthodox Jewshas attacked Ashkennazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger as a “very well paid Zionist stooge” and a “a wicked emissary of evil” who should be expelled from Israel, following Metzger’s reported comments proposing that poor Gazans be moved to a Palestinian state established in the Sinai.

The statements, reported in Haaretz last week, spurred an angrily worded response from Neturei Karta, which has often taken vocally pro-Palestinian stances against Israel.

Denouncing Metzger’s Sinai proposal, the group refered to him as the “so-called Chief Rabbi of the so-called State of Israel” and as a “very well paid Zionist stooge”.

Referring to Zionism as an “idolatrous cult,” Neturei Karta called for Metzger to “removed from the Holy Land,” describing him as “a wicked emissary of evil”.

Metzger had said that his plan would be to “take all the poor people from Gaza to move them to a wonderful new modern country with trains buses cars, like in Arizona - we are now in a generation where you can take a desert and build a city. This will be a solution for the poor people - they will have a nice county, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace.”

Avirama Golan, Splintering into tribes in the name of unity - Haaretz, February 6, 2008

An emotional advertisement in the newspaper Hamodia this week urged ultra-Orthodox Jews to come to Jerusalem en masse yesterday. The Haredi community knew that this would be a political-diplomatic demonstration, but the official pretext was an injury to Haredi educational institutions. Only for that is it permissible to abandon Torah study and take to the streets.Representatives of the national religious community also took part in the “mourning.” Seemingly, this is a new alliance. In reality, it is a process that has gained strength in recent years and has made the Zionist rabbis superfluous, split the national religious movement and created new political splinter groups.

Professor Yisrael Aumann, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, recently joined one of these splinters. Ahi (literally, “my brother,” but also a Hebrew acronym for “land, society and Judaism”), is a movement established by MKs Yitzhak Levy and Effie Eitam. It plans to hold a membership drive and then allow its members to directly elect its Knesset slate, because the negotiations it held on a joint list with two other factions, Moledet and Tekuma, failed. Levy and Eitam argue that the registration drive will redefine the leadership of the religious right, and in the end, everyone will reunite. But Tekuma, Moledet and the National Religious Party all protested the move in an angry letter to leading rabbis.

It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the resentment percolating through the religious right. The only common denominator among the various splinters is the claim that all are working to unify the nation. In the name of this unification - and after the NRP was swallowed up in the National Union faction, along with Moledet (a party of religious and secular rightists) and Tekuma (a religious faction headed by rabbis) - Ahi is now threatening to shed the old NRP, headed by MK Zevulun Orlev, like a discarded skin.

Shragai, Hilltop youth say they no longer believe in ‘the rule of heretics’ - Haaretz, January 20, 2008

The past three weeks have further exacerbated the recourse to isolation and feelings of alienation from the institutions of the state, which part of the National-Religious youth have felt ever since the evacuation of Gush Katif [in 2005], and all the more forcefully following the major clash over Amona, some two years ago.

It was enough to view a few days ago the dozens of girls, most students at religious girl’s high schools in the West Bank’s Benjamin region, who protested outside the Jerusalem Magistrates Court and sang with hoarse voices - almost unbelievably - the anthem of anti-Zionist Haredi sect Neturei Karta:

“In the rule of heretics we don’t believe, and their constitution we don’t acknowledge. In the way of the Torah we will go, in fire and in water. In the way of the Torah we will go sanctify the name of the heavens.”

Amos Harel, Experts: Extreme rightists will use violence if settlements are evacuated - Haaretz, December 20, 2007

Extreme right-wing activists are expected to use severe violence to disrupt any move to evacuate outposts or settlements, even the destruction of a few homes, according to an evaluation recently presented to the government by the security establishment and law enforcement officials in the territories.

The evaluation states that the violence during any attempt at evacuation would be more serious than that seen during the evacuation of Amona two years ago.

However security officials do not at this stage foresee an increased threat to the lives of senior politicians, because the extreme right does not appear to believe the Annapolis process will succeed and therefore the settlements are not in danger.
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After the evacuation of Amona two years ago, the ideological foundations and plans of actions were reformulated against future evacuations. In a booklet distributed at one of the extreme-right rallies, the message was that violence might deter the government from additional evacuations.

“The war must be brought to the field of the enemy,” the booklet said. “In this matter and in this situation [evacuation], the IDF is the enemy.”

The security establishment believes that any attempt to evacuate settlements will result in violence against the security forces, large-scale disturbances, and endangerment of human life. The experts also see widespread refusal of orders in the IDF.

Religious party leader: Same-sex families undermine Judaism - Haaretz, December 10, 2007

Judaism does not recognize same-sex parents and therefore, the High Court decision to recognize their adoptions undermines the foundations of a Jewish state, National Religious Party Chairman Zevulun Orlev said on Sunday.

“There is no choice but to fix the legislation to determine that a family comprises a man and a woman,” Orlev said.

The panel reopened Sunday the debate on a lesbian woman’s right to adopt her partner’s son, in response to the state’s petition against a previous court ruling in 2000.

Nicole and Ruthie Brenner-Kadish formalized the adoption in California, and then petitioned the High Court, asking it to instruct the state to recognize the adoption.

As opposed to Orlev, Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On said that “the decision is one more step toward the annulment of the institutionalized discrimination of same-sex couples. It’s about time the state recognize these couple as they do adoptions completed by couples that are not of the same sex.”

In its 2000 ruling, a three-justice panel sided with the Brenner-Kadish couple, and ordered the Population Registry to list both of them as the child’s mothers. An Interior Ministry official refused, however, saying that “biologically speaking the existence of two parents of the same gender is impossible.”

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

In the outpost of Shvut Ami, next door to Palestinian village of Funduq, settler youth plastered the walls of a building owned by a Palestinian family.

Isabel Kershner, Young Israelis Resist Challenges to Settlements - New York Times, December 8, 2007

SHVUT AMI OUTPOST, West Bank — For two months, Jewish youths have been renovating an old stone house on this muddy hilltop in the northern West Bank. The house is not theirs, however. It belongs to a Palestinian family. And their seizure of it along with the land around it for a new settlement outpost is a violation of Israeli law. The police have evicted the group five times but they keep coming back.

Yedidya Slonim, 16, one of the renovators here, who grew up in another West Bank settlement, Tzofim, said of the police: “We come back straight away, as soon as they’ve gone. They come every week for half a day. It doesn’t bother us so much.”

The cat-and-mouse contest here lays bare a key dilemma of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute: Israel has pledged that it will permit no new settlements in the territory it has occupied since the 1967 war, no more expropriation of Palestinian land and the dismantling of unauthorized outposts — like this one — erected since March 2001, but it has never applied the muscle needed to do so.

“Shvut Ami is a chronicle of failure of law enforcement,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer who represents the Palestinian owners of the house on behalf of Yesh Din, an Israeli volunteer organization that fights for Palestinian rights. In this respect, he said, the area is “a jungle.”

Avraham Burg: Time to attack - Haaretz, August 28, 2007

There is no theological difference between certain rabbis from Hebron, the former Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the evangelical preacher hoping for Armageddon at the site of our Megiddo. Those who say that “God’s law is first” are no different from one another, whether they wear a rabbi’s skullcap, Hezbollah’s turban or the cloak of a North American spiritual leader. They are all engaged in a cruel battle against me. They are the enemies of freedom and democracy, and are hostile to liberty, equality and the status of women.

In a world like this, we must form new coalitions. The division between “us” and “our enemies” cannot be based merely along national or familial lines, or in beliefs and genetics. The world is divided into a coalition of some Jews, some Christians and some Muslims, versus other members of their nations and religions. Democracy versus theology.

This is not a “gentle” argument, but rather war - the rabbi against the sovereign, the “Jewish” against the “democratic,” halakha and sharia against civil law, the church against the state. They cannot live under the same roof, and they are currently fighting the most ancient and most modern war - religion versus state.

And in war, like in war: The legal standing of the inciting rabbi is the same as that of the inciting sheikh, because both are equally hostile. One wants to see me dead physically, and the other wants to see me dead democratically and morally. Since I oppose the death sentence in all cases, I cannot thus condemn my domestic enemies. But the army of the democratic state, as well as its systems of governance, must purify itself from all the enemies planted by theocracy. The “army of God” must not be permitted to gain control of the institutions of state power.

Shtrasler, The donkey’s burden - Haaretz, Dec. 4, 2007

“Secular teachers are not teachers, they are donkeys,” declared Shas’ spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, in his weekly sermon Saturday night. They are donkeys because they do not teach the Torah, he explained to his audience.

But it seems not only the teachers are donkeys. Israel’s entire secular population takes pains to ensure its children study mathematics, English, science, history and Torah, so they can become productive citizens living by their labor and paying high taxes - which are then divided among Yosef’s followers. They also enlist in the army, are wounded and killed - in part, to protect Yosef’s home. Whoever behaves this way must truly be an ass.

One of the teachers’ demands is for fewer pupils per classroom. The public school system is home to the greatest overcrowding, which is less prevalent in the public-religious system and least felt in the Shas and United Torah Judaism religious schools. The reason for this stems from the division of public-religious and ultra-Orthodox education into dozens of different offshoots, each with its own school.

Thus, tens of millions of shekels are wasted on these small, inefficient schools, which are convenient for the sheep in Yosef’s flock; they benefit daily from longer school days, lunches and transportation - all paid for by the state, which lacks the funds to offer the same conditions in the public school system. In other words, to offer the donkeys the same.