Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

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.

Burston, It’s Judeo-Fascism Month in Israel - Haaretz, October 30, 2007

You may have noticed that conservative students and their mentors have just concluded “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on American college campuses. The goal, according to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was to “draw attention to a leading issue of our time, radical Islam and terrorism.”

I mention this only because, for those readers living in Israel, the event would have been easy to miss. Not only because it was taking place thousands of miles away, but because of a concurrent local campaign which is still going on. Inexorable, inescapable, it has reached every home in the nation.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Judeo-Fascism Awareness Month.

The campaign can be seen to be more effective by far than its American counterpart. Perhaps this is because it cannot be ignored. Perhaps it is because it is led by the Judeo-Fascists themselves.

They are a compelling group. You can’t take your eyes off them. There is Larissa Trimbobler, who plays the beloved if dubious Sarah to Yigal Amir’s Shabbatai Zvi. Then there are the apostles. There is singer-screedwriter Ariel Zilber, who appears either to be permanently self-medicated, or in need of being. There is Avigdor Eskin, the prince of pulsa denura. There is Yigal Amir’s mother Geula, the molder of young minds, everyone’s favorite day care provider. And then there are the disciples, the rank-and-defile, the hilltop hopheads, the gunslinger grunge and grange society of the wild West Bank, the Kahane worshippers, the Muslim-baiters.

B’Tselem - 19 Oct. 07: Hebron: The Israeli Settlement in the a-Ras Neighborhood

On 19 March 2007, a new settlement was established, in the heart of the a-Ras Palestinian neighborhood. In the months that have passed since then, despite the decision of the Defense Minister at the time to evacuate the settlement, the settlement has grown. Recently, the settlement was connected to the electricity grid, and construction and renovation work is taking place at the site.

Since the settlement has been established, the harm to the Palestinian residents has increased and they have suffered further infringement of their human rights. Palestinians suffer both from the settlers and from Israeli security forces who have been assigned protect the settlement.

Researchers from B’Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights found that establishment of the settlement and the failure to evacuate it, have led, for example, to the following:

* Extensive abuse and violence by settlers in the new settlement, carried out in front of the eyes of members of the security forces;
* Abuse and violence by security forces posted on or near the new settlement;
* Increased prohibitions on movement enforced by Israeli security forces.

Failure to enforce the law on violent settlers

During the course of the first six months of the new settlement, B’Tselem and ACRI documented scores of cases in which settlers attacked Palestinians in the area. The attacks include beatings, blocking of passage, destruction of property, throwing of stones and eggs, hurling of refuse, glass bottles, and bottles full of urine, urinating from the settlement structure onto the street, spitting, threats, and curses.

Rabin assassin’s wife: Yigal Amir sacrificed himself for his people - Haaretz, October 22, 2007

The pregnant wife of Yigal Amir, the jailed assassin of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, said Monday that she intended to tell Amir’s future child that his father had “sacrificed himself for his people.”

Larisa Trimbobler is in the last stages of pregnancy and is expected to give birth within the next few days….

Amir, who strongly opposed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, gunned down the then-prime minister after a Tel Aviv peace rally on November 4, 1995.

Coinciding with the anniversary and with the immiment birth, Israeli ultra-nationalists launched a campaign this week in an attempt to win Amir’s release from prison.

Asked if she would tell the future child that her father was a murderer, she replied, “I will tell him that his father sacrificed himself for the sake of his people.”

Issacharoff, Bitter olive harvest / Justice falls short in the West Bank - Haaretz, October 18, 2007

Abed Al-Fatah Al-Hindi, a resident of the Nablus-area village of Tal, reaches the main highway between the Hawara and Git junctions, near the Gilad Farm. An International Red Cross crew stands waiting for him. He is bleeding from a large scalp wound, and his left eye is swollen.

A paramedic bandages his head, and a volunteer from Rabbis for Human Rights cleans his face. “Every year there’s a mess,” the villager tells Haaretz. “It’s just the first day of the olive harvest, and six settlers attacked me. There wasn’t much we could do.”

Around seven in the morning, Al-Hindi, his sisters and four other men came to the family olive grove, just 200 meters from Gilad Farm, not far from Nablus, one of the dozens of illegal outposts spread across the West Bank. They harvested for three hours, until 10, when they noticed a group of settlers approaching from the direction of the outpost.

“They shouted, ‘This is our grove, you can’t go near it,’ and threw rocks at us,” says Al-Hindi. “One of them held my arm and another beat my head with a rock. I yelled ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, and they said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ They beat me until they left.”

…Zakhariah Sadah, a resident of the neighboring village of Git and an activist who works with Rabbis for Human Rights, offers his services as a translator…. According to Sadah, after settlers threw rocks at olive harvesters at the nearby Farateh village, he and some Israeli volunteers guarded the groves….

Three days ago, three armed settlers came to the entrance of the village, attacked a group of harvesters and threw everything they had harvested in every direction.

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.

Cartoon spat prompts Shas to quit Knesset religious lobby - Haaretz, October 16, 2007

A new crisis has erupted between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi ultra-Orthodox over the usual bones of contention: racism, money, and politics. The quarrel resulted Monday in Shas announcing its resignation from the religious lobby in the Knesset.

The current round began when Shas’ spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, saw a cartoon in Yeted Ne’eman, the flagship journal of Degel HaTorah, the “Lithuanian wing” of the Ashkenazi Haredim.

The cartoon showed a man dressed in shorts and sandals wearing a skullcap and trimmed black beard, representing a Shas follower, in cahoots with a secular person representing Kadima. Wearing a big grin, the two were dumping a rock labeled “2008 cuts” on the head of a Haredi man.

The symbols appear obvious, lacking sophistication, and according to Shas, loaded with anti-Semitism and racism of the sort Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox feel about Sephardi Haredim. MK Yakov Margi, chairman of the Shas faction in the Knesset, said Ovadia Yosef was deeply offended.

“He saw the caricature and protested strongly, telling us to respond very strongly,” Margi said. The response came Monday, with Shas announcing its resignation from the religious lobby in the Knesset, which is headed by United Torah Judaism.

“Degel HaTorah and its journal Yeted Ne’eman have set out as policy to continue racism and hatred of Sephardim,” the faction said in a statement. “For the first time an anti-Semitic cartoon that would not have shamed any anti-Semitic paper in the world was published. The Degel HaTorah leadership must rid itself from its hatred for Sephardim, from its patronizing attitude for the Sephardi community, which was its habit before the establishment of Shas.”

Ben Simon, The oracle of the right - Haaretz, October 16, 2007

The more time passes, the clearer it becomes that the foreign policy worldview of Shas fluctuates between the right and the extreme right. Eli Yishai, the party’s current leader, has in the past several years laid down a blunt foreign policy that has pushed it from moderation to extremism. Not a day goes by that he does not lay out his red lines and warn against any possibility of compromise with the Palestinians.

Yishai has already threatened Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, telling him that if he dares to address the core issues of the conflict at the Annapolis summit, Yishai and his party will leave the coalition. In doing so, he became one of the main agents who has made the gathering superfluous even before it has begun.

It was not always this way. When Shas burst onto the political scene in 1984, it voiced moderate opinions….

It is a great pity that the party that was born in order to rouse the poor and the disadvantaged and to restore the lost glory of the Sephardim has turned into yet another extremist right-wing party. It forgot its initial motto and is now up to its neck in an unprecedented fever of religious revivalism. One more fundamentalism movement, crazed by religion.

And what of the oppressed, screwed-over poor? Well, since Shas joined the government, they have only become more numerous. It’s enough to look at the shocking poverty figures published each year by the National Insurance Institute to recognize that Shas broke its promise to the poor.

The Israeli Right Has a Peace Plan - by Ran HaCohen, AW, October 16, 2007

While the world holds its breath in anticipation of the Mideast Summit in Annapolis – which, no doubt, will constitute a historic landmark, giving a most significant boost to the economy of that small town in Maryland – the Israeli right wing comes up with a new peace initiative, launched by MK Benny Elon, chairman of the National Union and the Moledet Party, as “The Israeli Initiative,” “a new way of thinking about the conflict, in learning from our mistakes, and in rereading the regional map toward a revitalized and genuine quest to achieve The Right Road to Peace.” Elon also praises his plan in the media as being “beyond Left and Right.” And it has already been endorsed by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback….

To gain support for this ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories, Elon quotes “Independent polls indicat[ing] that half of all Palestinians are considering moving to a different country.” This might be true – thanks to Benny Elon and his fellow settlers. Years ago, when asked to explain what he meant by “voluntary transfer” of Palestinians, Rabbi Elon gave an example from Jewish law. According to the Halacha, a rabbinical court cannot impose a divorce on a refusing husband; but what it can do is use sanctions, including incarceration and even physical penalties, until the husband succumbs. This is what Elon meant by “voluntary transfer”: making Palestinian life in the Territories unlivable, to the extent that they would rather live somewhere else….

‘Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir’ by Shalom Auslander - BOOK REVIEW - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com, october 14, 2007

Auslander…can be a moving writer; many passages describe with great skill the airless, oppressive climate of Monsey. Perhaps the finest chapter recounts the time his father — a carpenter who wanted for respect in the scholarly community — was commissioned by the local rabbi to build a new ark for the congregation’s Torah scrolls, only to be humiliated and ignored upon its unveiling.

And he can be funny: A reminiscence of his first dalliance with non-kosher food ranks with sections of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Auslander watches a Gentile order ahead of him at a poolside hot-dog stand. “Vinnie stood beside me, piling his pig dog high with sauerkraut and thin-cut pickles. I stared, open-mouthed, as he flipped his hair back, cleared a path to his mouth, and took a bite. It was as if he’d never heard of Leviticus 11:7.”