Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

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.

Gideon Levy, Longing for Deri, Haaretz, December 2, 2007

In a tailored suit, his beard well groomed, and no longer bespectacled, Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai shuttled from interview to interview: “Nothing will emerge from Annapolis.” This minister of nothing now constitutes the government’s right-wing benchmark, competing with Avigdor Lieberman over who is more extreme and who will be first to quit the government.

These two ministers represent ethnicity, and both paint their ethnic focus in strong nationalist colors. But while Lieberman represents a party that was founded on racism, Yishai received a relatively moderate party and took it to the extreme right. Seeing him makes one long for the party’s founder, Aryeh Deri. Deri’s Shas was not a left-wing party, but it expressed relatively moderate political positions and even refrained from undermining the first Oslo agreement (although it opposed Oslo II).

The new Shas, on the other hand, acts and talks as if it is seeking war, and is doing its utmost to undermine the prime minister’s efforts - which seem sincere - to end the conflict. This is not just a matter of ideological oscillation. The problem is that Yishai is leading a broad public - some of whom are moderate - to racism, extreme nationalism and hatred of Arabs. He has restored the old status quo to its glory: Mizrahim, versus the Arabs and peace. His views, therefore, are disastrous.

Completely lacking the charisma and personal charm of his predecessor, Yishai has benighted views: He recently spoke about “medication” for homosexuality. He has said he finds the sale of pork, civil marriages and workshops for Jewish and Arab teenagers equally disgusting, which brings him in line with his uncivil spiritual mentor, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

AMONA, West Bank/Feb. 2006
A Jewish settler struggles with an Israeli security officer as authorities evacuate a West Bank settlement near the Palestinian town of Ramallah after Israel’s Supreme Court cleared the way for the demolition of nine homes at the site. This photo won first prize in The World Press Photo awards. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Teibel, Subject of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo says God on her side, ap, 4/19/07

AMONA, West Bank (AP) — The photo caught the world’s attention: a lone 15-year-old girl holding back a wall of riot police moving in to demolish Jewish homes illegally erected in the West Bank.

Speaking for the first time since The Associated Press image won a Pulitzer prize this week, the girl, who would identify herself only as Nili, said God was on her side during the confrontation.

“In the photo you see me — one person as it were — against many. But that’s only an illusion,” said Nili, now two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, as she stood amid the ruins of the nine homes demolished in Amona in February 2006.

“Behind the many stood one man — (Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert,” who ordered the demolition. “Behind me stood the Lord Blessed Be He, and the people of Israel.”

Nili, a shy, gangly teen born in Israel to American parents, was one of several thousand Jewish protesters who barricaded themselves behind barbed wire and on rooftoops in an unsuccessful effort to keep club-wielding riot troops from demolishing the homes built on private Palestinian land.

Former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu speaking in Jerusalem in 2002. (Eyal Warshavsky / BauBau)

Israel’s Conservative movement threatens to sue ex-chief rabbi - Haaretz, November 20, 2007

Israel’s Masorti (Conservative) Movement is threatening legal action against former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu for saying that “the reek of hell wafts” from Reform and Conservative synagogues, and it is therefore forbidden to walk by them.

Eliyahu, a leading religious Zionist rabbi, made the remark last week during his weekly Torah lecture. It was later reprinted in the bulletin Kol Tzofayich, which was distributed in synagogues throughout Israel over the weekend.

In his lecture, Eliyahu related that he was once invited to a circumcision in a building that contained three synagogues, one Orthodox, one Conservative and one Reform. The Orthodox synagogue, he said, was on the top floor, “and I wondered how I would enter and pass by these synagogues, from which the reek of hell wafts … They told me that there was a sort of side kitchen through which one could go up without passing those synagogues, and I told them that I would only go up via that kitchen, and only if I would not pass the entrances to those forbidden synagogues.”

Attorney Yizhar Hess, secretary general of the Masorti Movement, responded that “Rabbi Eliyahu crossed the border of good taste, and his hateful, malicious words scorned an entire community. It is inconceivable that a religious leader should use expressions that constitute a call for civil war. The rabbi would do well to retract his statements and apologize to the millions of Jews whose honor he impugned.”

Avishai Margalit, A Moral Witness to the ‘Intricate Machine’ - The New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 2007 issue

“I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” This is the opening line of David Shulman’s powerful and memorable book, Dark Hope, a diary of four years of political activity in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is a record of the author’s intense involvement with a volunteer organization composed of Israeli Palestinians and Israeli Jews, called Ta’ayush, an Arabic term for “living together” or “life in common.” The group was founded in October 2000, soon after the start of the second Palestinian intifada.

“This book aims,” Shulman writes,

at showing something of the Israeli peace movement in action, on the basis of one individual’s very limited experience…. I want to give you some sense of what it feels like to be part of this struggle and of why we do it.

Struggle with whom? Shulman explains:

Israel, like any society, has violent, sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise. Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach, and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorize the local Palestinian population; to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill—all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews’ exclusive right to it.

His diary proceeds to show how this happens.

Shulman speaks of “the last four decades.” It is forty years since the Israeli victory of 1967 brought the West Bank under occupation.

Dalia Karpel, My god, what did we do? - Haaretz, November 10, 2007

One night, Tamar Yarom was awakened by one of the soldiers in her unit. He said he wanted to show her something in the basement of the abandoned building where they were staying. “Before we opened the door, I heard this awful noise from a generator and there was a strong smell of diesel fuel. I saw a middle-aged Palestinian detainee lying with his head on the generator. His ear was pressed against the generator that was vibrating, and the guy’s head was vibrating with it. His face was completely messed up. It amazed me that through all the blood and horror, you could still see the guy’s expression and that’s what stayed with me for years after - the look on his face.”

Yarom, now a film director, made two films following her army service as a mashakit tash (welfare officer) in an infantry company in the territories. She was drafted in 1989 and served at a basic-training base near Jerusalem until her unit was transferred to Gaza. She accompanied the recruits from their first day in the army and felt close to them, and they told her about what they did in the territories. “I tried not to judge them. Mostly I was glad that they were feeling good and finally had self-confidence.” That’s how it works, she adds: “When you’re told things that you don’t see with your own eyes, you can prettify them in your mind.” But then she was taken to that basement.

Why did the soldier take her there? “He wanted to share the horror with me,” she says. “Maybe he hoped that I’d do something, that I’d raise an outcry. I don’t remember how we left there or what happened afterward. The next day I asked one of the commanders what happened in the basement and he politely explained to me that I mustn’t interfere in things that were none of my business. That detainee I saw taught me something about myself that I would never have learned in years of university. And he’s imprinted in my memory, engraved in every cell of my being.

A Palestinian farmer selects and sorts olive during the harvest

James Hider, Olive branch blossoms amid harvest of fear - Times Online, November 9, 2007

In an olive grove on the edge of Nablus, Fuad Amr and his sons keep one eye on the branches they are stripping and the other warily on the Jewish settlement that overlooks their land from a hilltop.

The settlers could descend at any time to intimidate them or even beat them and steal the fruit of their labour, as happens every year across the West Bank in the olive season.

The Palestinian farmers, however, have found unlikely allies - Jewish activists, some of them Orthodox rabbis, who risk violence to protect them.

“I am afraid,” Mr Amr said, as he flung black olives on to a plastic sheet, from which his wife gathered them into a sack. “I’m picking the olives and all the time I’m looking out for settlers. They come in buses, sometimes 20 or 30 of them.”

Last year one of his neighbours was hit on the head by a rock thrown by settlers, who cite the biblical-era Jewish settlements in the area as a claim to the land.

Every year, however, Israeli and foreign peace activists come to protect the Palestinians during the harvest and help them to pick their crops. Some of them have also been beaten by settlers, but they say that their presence prevents the Palestinians from being driven off their fields.

One of the Jewish groups is Rabbis for Human Rights, which aims to promote religion as a point of harmony and justice between Jews and Arabs.

MJ Rosenberg, Israel Policy Forum, November 9, 2007

Last week in Haifa during a major league soccer game between Beitar Jerusalem and Maccabi Haifa, a moment of silence to commemorate the Rabin assassination was interrupted when half the stadium hissed and booed Rabin’s name and sang songs extolling the virtues of his assassin.

Most Israelis were appalled. Many commentators said that these fans were a small minority of soccer hooligans. But many observers disagreed, including Prime Minister Olmert who said that the assassination cheerleaders were “not a small group, as some would like to minimize it, but a large, loud, influential and raging group. . .”

By no means are these people a majority of Israelis or even a substantial number. But they are a loud and vocal minority, and most Israelis–who despise Amir and venerate the memory of Rabin–seem too weary to stand up to them.

Olmert linked the obnoxious fans with the people who virulently oppose any agreement with the Palestinians. This is not to say that all peace opponents admire Rabin’s assassin but rather that the Amir admirers (and those who prayed publicly for the death of Sharon for giving up Gaza or attack random Palestinians) come from the extreme right. That is a fact.

To be fair, these extremists have their counterparts here too. Just as Rabin’s murderer is a hero in certain parts of Israel, he is also a hero in parts of New York and Los Angeles. There are people among us who believe that all is fair in the effort to preserve the settlements and keep the Palestinians under occupation.

In a sense, it is not surprising that occupation produces this kind of ugliness. By definition, occupation coarsens the occupier.

Furthermore, an occupation that started as the retention of lands won in a defensive war evolved, once the settlement movement began, into a fierce religious nationalist movement that is less about love of Israel than hating those perceived as Israel’s enemies, especially fellow Israelis and Jews. These new nationalists, for the most part, have little use for the State of Israel and its leaders. Their attachment is to the Land of Israel, a place located in the Bible, in their hearts and in the West Bank settlements. They have as little use for Tel Aviv and Haifa as they do for Cairo and Damascus.

These are the Israeli counterparts of the much ballyhooed Islamo-Fascists–although the people so up-in-arms about Arab crazies tend not to see the similarity with their Jewish brethren, and vice versa. That is one of the remarkable things about extremists. They never recognize their mirror image in the people they hate most.

One of the many things these fanatics have in common is that their biggest fear is Arab-Israeli reconciliation. That is nothing new. Following Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995, the far right in Israel organized to defeat Prime Minister Shimon Peres in order to ensure that the Oslo process had died with Rabin. At the same time, Hamas terrorists began a campaign of suicide bombing to achieve the same goal. Hamas succeeded when Peres lost the election.

Yoel Marcus, In cold blood - Haaretz, November 6, 2007

Many of those who took part in the memorial rally for Israel’s slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin showed up this year mainly to protest the circumcision ceremony of Yigal Amir’s son, being held on the anniversary of the day that Amir shot Rabin in the back. We saw people at the rally who were boiling mad - at a legal system with no death penalty for the murder of a prime minister; that allows an assassin to sit in jail, marry, shack up with the missus and bring a child into the world; and at having religious laws requiring baby boys to be circumcised when they are eight days old, and that day falling on the same day that the proud father murdered an Israeli prime minister in cold blood.

That day, the walls of Jerusalem were covered with posters showing Shimon Peres wearing a keffiyah, with the words “Liberator of terrorists, president of the Arabs” plastered across a black background - the handiwork of right-wing activists Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Twelve years ago, posters of Rabin in a Gestapo uniform were held high at Jerusalem’s Zion Square. The forces of darkness and the potential political assassins are here today, organizing openly and in secret to disrupt, in blood and fire, any moves taken to evacuate more settlements.

“As a religious person, I know nothing in life is mere chance,” says Amitai Amir, Yigal’s brother. “On November 4, Yigal made a covenant with the people of Israel and sacrificed himself for all of us. He saved us from the Oslo Accords and Rabin. Twelve years have passed, and the covenant continues. The Oslo Accords are dead.”

In the videotape of Amir’s first interrogation after the assassination, aired on television two weeks ago, we saw a devious and determined man with no qualms about the killing. Asked by the interrogator whether he regretted his actions, he didn’t beat around the bush: “God forbid,” quoth he.

Yigal Amir’s thousands of sons - Haaretz, November 6, 2007

It is no coincidence that the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies stands deserted, while on the soccer fields, the murderer is cheered and the victim is booed.

The real Rabin legacy should be sought on the soccer fields, in the classrooms, the outposts, the yeshivas, among the secular, the religious and the traditional; in fact, everywhere in the country where - according to surveys - 38 percent of the religious public view Yigal Amir as a hero. The Rabin legacy is in fact the anti-Rabin legacy. At the present time, ahead of talks with the Palestinians, the legacy will be updated to become an anti-Olmert legacy.

The rally in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square was a protest against Amir and his growing status. The preoccupation with the circumcision of his son has resulted in an unfortunate deviation from the main issue, because the problem is not Amir’s biological son, but rather his spiritual sons, who walk among us by the thousands.

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.

Gideon Levy, ANALYSIS: Rabin memorial offers pop stars and empty cliches - Haaretz, November 4, 2007

Banot Nechama, this year’s pop music discovery, was not there last year, but this year the group joined Aharon Barnea, Shimon Peres, Aviv Gefen, Achinoam Nini (”Noa”) and Sarit Haddad, these memorial rallies’ house bands. Last year the writer David Grossman, then a newly bereaved father, was at the podium, crying out against our hollow leaderships, and hearts were briefly stirred. Last year not a single speaker - neither the authors nor the the intellectuals - had anything meaningful to say at the hollow memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin, which resembled a late-summer Caesarea reunion of the legendary Israeli group Kaveret more than anything else.

The audience was, as always, the same: self-described Ashkenazi, secular, leftist and peace-loving. How good and pleasant it is to stand in the square once a year and feel a part of this warm family, with these excellent Hebrew songs in the background, with the last-minute decision to have the newly bereaved Hagashash Hahiver member Shaike Levy singing “Shir Hare’ut.”

For a moment last night, everyone awoke from a year-long coma: Peace Now, the Labor Party, Meretz, Hashomer Hatzair and the Noar Ha’oved youth movement with their blue shirts. Journalist Aharon Barnea once again put on the angry-prophet suit he wears once a year in early November: “We shall not forget and we shall not forgive,” he thundered, uttering the slogan that was once the province of Holocaust memorial assemblies.

The cliches washed over the square, the “hope,” the “legacy,” the “victory,” the “peace” - no one knows what they really mean.

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.