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Sadly, racism and religious intolerance are growing in Israel—with targets ranging from Palestinian Muslims and Christians to Africans seeking political asylum to Bedouin tribesmen to non-Orthodox Jews. In response, American Jewish organizations have been silent.
Israeli Jews who lament their country’s escalating intolerance have expressed dismay with this silence upon the part of their American counterparts. Daniel Blatman, a history professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote an article in the March 7 edition of Haaretz headlined, “If I Were An American Jew, I’d Worry About Israel’s Racist Cancer.” The article’s subhead read, “Amid the awareness that Israel is sliding toward an apartheid regime, the silence of Jews worldwide is deafening.”
Writes Dr. Blatman: “If I were an American Jew who held Israel dear, I would view the crisis afflicting the greatest Jewish dream in modern times with despair. When sitting down at Shabbat dinner with my adult children, I would hear that Israel no longer represents the values on which they were raised: human dignity, equal rights, a pluralistic society, and the obligation to fight for the weak and the persecuted. In the eyes of America’s future economic and political leaders, Israel no longer has a place in the family of enlightened nations. It has become the South Africa of the 21st century.”
In Blatman’s view, it is not “the Iranian threat that endangers Israel’s survival, it’s the moral and ethical collapse of its society…The racist cancer after 47 years of occupation and domination of another people has spread deep into Israeli society…World Jewry must help Israel be cured of it. It must speak out and act…and cooperate with the shrinking groups of Israelis who have not yet lost hope that it’s possible to stop this downside toward the abyss.”
Consider the reality of contemporary Israel, which American Jewish groups completely ignore.
The year 2009 saw the publication of Torat Ha’Melech (“The King’s Torah”), which the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv described as “230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew.”
According to the authors, Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and may have to be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.”
The commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” the rabbis argue, refers only to killing other Jews. In their opinion, “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation may be harmed deliberately and not only during combat with adults.”
Torat Ha’Melech was written as a guide for Israeli soldiers and army officers seeking rabbinical guidance on the rules of engagement. According to the authors, all enemy civilians—including women and children—can be killed. The rabbis also justify the murder of Jewish dissidents, a philosophy which emerged from the settlement of Yitzhar in the occupied West Bank, where Shapira helps lead the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva. He studied under Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, who defended seven of his students who murdered an innocent Palestinian girl by asserting the superiority of “Jewish blood.” In 1994, when the American-born Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Ginsburgh lionized Goldstein in a lengthy article entitled “Baruch Hagever” (“Baruch, the Great Man”).
These views are not those of just a few extremists. Instead, Od Yosef Chai has received funds from both the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs and the Israeli Ministry of Education, as well as from a U.S. tax-exempt group called the Central Fund for Israel.
It’s fair to say that extremist rabbis are part of Israel’s religious establishment. Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of Hebron, for example, has achieved considerable influence inside the military. In 2008, when the Israeli army’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Ronski, brought a group of military intelligence officers to Hebron for a special tour, he concluded the day with a private meeting with Lior, who presented his views on modern warfare, which includes support for the collective punishment of Palestinians. Ronski himself has overseen the distribution of extremist tracts to soldiers, including “Baruch Hagever,” and a pamphlet stating, “When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers.”
Ovadia Yosef, the Shas party spiritual leader and Israeli chief rabbi, declared, “It is forbidden to be merciful to Arabs. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”
There is much turmoil in contemporary Israel as the state plans to remove Bedouin from their traditional lands, continues to build settlements in the occupied territories and confronts black African asylum seekers, largely from Eritrea and Sudan, who had heard that there was a Jewish state across the Sinai peninsula that claimed to embrace the lessons of the Holocaust. One of those lessons was that you don’t turn away refugees when they might be slaughtered when they return home.
Today, there are 55,000 asylum-seekers in Israel. Knowing how bad deporting them all would look, Israel instead is “inviting” them to Holot, a desert facility built to “concentrate” refugees claiming status in Israel. Since last December, Israel has ordered more than 3,000 asylum-seekers, all of whom have resided in the country for more than four years, to report to Holot.
Because it is not described as a prison, regular rules involving trials, judges and juries do not apply. According to Allison Deger’s March 28 Mondoweiss report, however, “The facility is a wasteland encircled in a trench of sun-dried sewage, off a dirt road where the only nearby structures are another prison, an army base and a crumbling abandoned gas station…Africans are allowed to leave the jail—comprised of small temporary structures made from shipping containers, resembling trailer-offices on construction sites—for a few hours. Still, the inmates must check in with guards three times a day and are locked in at night.”
American Jewish groups, in the forefront of promoting immigration reform in the U.S., have been silent. As journalist David Sheen, a Canadian living in Israel whose stay there has led to his disillusionment with Zionism, points out, “In all of 2013, from January to December, the Anti-Defamation League did not have one word to say about Israel’s war on African refugees. It wasn’t just ADL—it was every single Jewish American mainstream group across the board. None of them had anything to say in criticism of the Israeli government as it moved to kick out all African asylum-seekers. And it’s so ironic because here in the U.S., these mainstream Jewish groups, there’s wall-to-wall support for immigration reform.”
In the realm of religion, Orthodox Judaism is, in effect, Israel’s state religion. Non-Orthodox rabbis cannot conduct weddings and funerals, and conversions performed by them are not recognized. While few Americans are aware of the fact, there are increasing manifestations of hostility to Christianity. Shimon Gaspo, the mayor of Nazareth Illit, a mostly Jewish community adjacent to Nazareth, the home of Jesus, which has a largely Christian population, announced a War on Christmas, declaring his refusal to tolerate a single Christmas tree within city limits. “Nazareth Illit,” he declared, “is a Jewish city and it will not happen—not this year and not next year, so long as I am mayor.”
In 2012, a group of nationalist vandals set fire to the door of an ancient Franciscan monastery at Latrun, the only remnant of a Palestinian community removed from the area in 1967. “Jesus is a monkey,” read graffiti spray-painted beside the door, along with the names of two extremist West Bank settlements. A month later, graffiti was found on the door of Jerusalem’s Church of the Dormition, a sanctuary built on Mount Zion at the site of the Last Supper. The graffiti read: “Jesus, son of a bitch, price tag.” One ultra-nationalist member of the Knesset, Michael Ben-Ari, tore up a copy of the New Testament on the floor of parliament.
Peter Beinart, a liberal Zionist who is concerned about American Jews ignoring the plight of Israel’s non-Jewish population, notes that, “Groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel. Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well.”
Remaining silent in the face of growing racism and religious intolerance in Israel makes the pronouncements about such questions as separation of church and state and immigration reform by American Jewish groups suspect, as they blindly embrace the opposite values when practiced by Israel. If they think no one is noticing this strange double standard, they are seriously mistaken. ❑
published in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs