August 2017 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles
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“My impression is that Christian clergymen are being spat at in the Old City virtually every day. This has been constantly increasing over the last decade,” said Daniel Rossing. An observant, kippa-wearing Jew, Rossing heads the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations and was liaison to Israel’s Christian communities for the Ministry of Religious Affairs in the ‘70s and ‘80s. For Christian clergy in the Old City, being spat at by Jewish fanatics “is a part of life,” said the American Jewish Committee’s Rabbi David Rosen, Israel’s most prominent Jewish interfaith activist. “I hate to say it, but we’ve grown accustomed to this. Jewish religious fanatics spitting at Christian priests and nuns has become a tradition,” said Roman Catholic Father Massimo Pazzini, sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa. These are the very opposite of isolated incidents. Father Athanasius of the Christian Information Center called them a “phenomenon.” George Hintlian, the unofficial spokesman for the local Armenian community and former secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate, said it was “like a campaign.” Christians in Israel are a small, weak community known for “turning the other cheek,” so these Jewish xenophobes feel free to spit on them; they don’t spit on Muslims in the Old City because they’re afraid to, the clerics noted. The only Israeli authority who has shown any serious concern over this matter, the one high official whom Christian and Jewish interfaith activists credit for stepping into the fray, is Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger. On November 11, Metzger addressed a letter to the “rabbis of the Jewish Quarter,” writing that he had “heard a grave rumor about yeshiva students offending heaven … [by] spitting on Christian clergy who walk about the Old City of Jerusalem.” Such attackers, he added, are almost tantamount to rodfim, or persecutors, which is one of the worst class of offenders in Jewish law. They violate the injunction to follow the “pathways of peace,” Metzger wrote, and are liable to provoke anti-Semitism overseas. “I thus issue the fervent call to root out this evil affliction from our midst, and the sooner the better,” wrote the chief rabbi. Metzger published the letter in response to an appeal from Armenian Archbishop Nourhan Manougian, an appeal that came in the wake of a September 5 incident in the Old City in which a haredi man spat on a group of Armenian seminarians who, in turn, beat him up. This is not the first time Metzger has spoken out against the spitting – he did so five years ago after the most infamous incident on record, when Manougian himself was spat on by an Old City yeshiva student during an Armenian Orthodox procession. In response, the archbishop slapped the student’s face, and then the student tore the porcelain ceremonial crucifix off Manougian’s neck and threw it to the ground, breaking it. Then interior minister Avraham Poraz called the assault on the archbishop “repulsive” and called for a police crackdown on anti-Christian attacks in the Old City. Police reportedly punished the student by banning him from the Old City for 75 days. Seated in his study in the Armenian Quarter, Manougian, 61, said that while he personally has not been assaulted since that time, the spitting attacks on other Armenian clergy have escalated. “The latest thing is for them to spit when they pass [St. James’s] monastery. I’ve seen it myself a couple of times,” he said. “Then there’s the boy from the Jewish Quarter who spits at the Armenian women when he sees them wearing their crosses, then he runs away. And during one of our processions from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre this year, a fellow in a yarmulke and fringes began deliberately cutting through our lines, over and over. The police caught him and he started yelling, ‘I’m free to walk wherever I want!’ That’s what these settler types are always saying: ‘This is our country and we can do whatever we want!’” Where are the police in all this? If they happen to be on the scene, such as at the recent procession Manougian described, they will chase the hooligans – but even if they catch them, they only tell them off and let them go, according to several Christian clergymen. “The police tell us to catch them and bring them in, but then they tell us not to use violence, so how are we supposed to catch them?” asked Aghoyan, a very fit-looking 68-year-old. “Once a boy came up to me and spat in my face, and I punched him and knocked him down, and an Armenian seminarian and I brought him to the police station [next to the Armenian Quarter]. They released him in a couple of hours. I’ve made many, complaints to the police, I’m tired of it. Nothing ever gets done.” Said Rosen, “The police say, ‘Show us the evidence.’ They want the Christians to photograph the people spitting at them so they can make arrests, but this is very unrealistic – by the time you get the camera out, the attack is over and there’s nothing to photograph.” Victims of these attacks say that in the great majority of cases the assailants do not spit in their faces or on their clothes, but on the ground at their feet. “When we complain about this, the police tell us, ‘But they’re not spitting on you, just near you,’” said Manougian. Sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, Pazzini recalled: “Early this year there were about 100 Orthodox Jewish boys who came past the church singing and dancing. The police were with them – I don’t know what the occasion was, maybe it was a holiday, maybe it had to do with the elections. There was a group of Franciscan monks standing in front of the church, and a few of the Jewish boys went up to the monks, spat on them, then went back into the crowd. I went up to a policeman and he told me, ‘Sorry about that, but look, they’re just kids.’” Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby refused to provide an official comment on the situation on behalf of the Old City police station. “We don’t give interviews on relations between Jews and Christians in the Old City,” he said. “We’re not sociologists, we’re policemen.” The Jerusalem municipality likewise refused to be interviewed. “We have not received any complaints about this matter and we do not deal with things of this nature,” said assistant city spokesman Yossi Gottesman. … Rosen recalls that in 1994, after Israel and the Vatican opened diplomatic relations, he organized an international Jewish-Christian conference in Jerusalem, “and the city’s chief rabbi called me in and said, ‘How can you do this? Don’t you know it’s forbidden for us? How can you encourage these people to meet with us?’ “He told me that when he sees a Christian clergyman, he crosses the street and recites, ‘You shall totally abhor and totally disdain …’ This is a biblical verse that refers to idolatry.” Rosen noted that the Jerusalem chief rabbi of the time, like the more insular Orthodox Jews in general, considered Christians to be idolators. The people doing the spitting, according to all the Christian victims and Jewish interfaith activists interviewed, are invariably national Orthodox or haredi Jews; in every attack described by Christian clerics, the assailant was wearing a kippa. The great majority of the attackers were teenage boys and men in their 20s. However, the supposition was that they came not only from the Old City yeshivot but also from outside. Hintlian and Aghoyan noted that the spitting attacks tended to spike on Fridays and Saturdays, when masses of Orthodox Jews stream to the Western Wall. … Only a tiny proportion of the spitting incidents are reported to police. “When somebody spits at our feet, or at the door to the monastery, we don’t even pay attention to it anymore, we take it for granted,” said Aghoyan. We have no suspect or evidence to give the police, nor any reason to think the police care, he said. Pazzini, the vice dean of the seminary at the Church of the Flagellation, said the dean of the seminary had his face spat upon, but he rejected Pazzini’s urgings to file a police complaint. “He told me, ‘There’s no point, this is the way things are around here,’” Pazzini said. Even outrageous incidents, one after another, go unreported to the police and unknown to the public. About a month ago, when a senior Greek Orthodox bishop was driving into the Jaffa Gate, a young Jewish man motioned him to roll down his window, and when he did, the young man spat in the bishop’s face, said Hintlian. Father Athanasius says that about a year ago, he witnessed the archbishop of Milan, which is one of the world’s largest Roman Catholic dioceses, get spat at in the Old City. “The archbishop was with another Italian bishop and a group of pilgrims, and a class of about a dozen adolescent boys in crocheted kippot and sidecurls came by with their teacher. They stopped in front of the archbishop and his guests, the boys began spitting at the ground next to their feet, and then they just kept walking like this was normal,” said Father Athanasius. “I saw this with my own eyes.” Rosen, Rossing and Hintlian say the most frustrating thing is that there’s no longer anyone in authority who’s ready to try to solve this problem, and the reason is that the Christian community in Israel is too small and powerless to rate high-level attention anymore. “In the old days there were ministers and a mayor in Jerusalem who took the Christian minority seriously, but now virtually everyone dealing with them is a third-tier official, and while these individuals may have wonderful intentions, they have no authority,” said Rosen. As far as the current cabinet ministers go, he said the phenomenon of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian clergy “is at most distressing to some of them, while there are other ministers whose attitude toward non-Jews in general is downright deplorable.” Among Christian victims and Jewish interfaith activists alike, the consensus is that two steps are needed to stop the spitting attacks. One, of course, would be much stronger law enforcement by police. The other would be an educational effort against this “campaign,” this “phenomenon,” this “tradition” – although it may be that there’s nothing to teach – that a person, even an adolescent, either knows it’s wrong to spit on priests and nuns or he doesn’t. “We can’t tell the Jews in this country what to do – they have to see this as an offense,” said Father Athanasius. “There’s only a small part of the population that’s doing it, but the Jewish establishment has to bring them under control.” 533 A nun in her 60s who’s lived in an east Jerusalem convent for decades says she was spat at for the first time by a haredi man on Rehov Agron about 25 years ago. “As I was walking past, he spat on the ground right next to my shoes and he gave me a look of contempt,” said the black-robed nun, sitting inside the convent. “It took me a moment, but then I understood.” Since then, the nun, who didn’t want to be identified, recalls being spat at three different times by young national Orthodox Jews on Jaffa Road, three different times by haredi youth near Mea She’arim and once by a young Jewish woman from her second-story window in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter. But the spitting incidents weren’t the worst, she said—the worst was the time she was walking down Jaffa Road and a group of middle-aged haredi men coming her way pointed wordlessly to the curb, motioning her to move off the sidewalk to let them pass, which she did. … News stories about young Jewish bigots in the Old City spitting on Christian clergy—who make conspicuous targets in their long dark robes and crucifix symbols around their necks—surface in the media every few years or so. It’s natural, then, to conclude that such incidents are rare, but in fact they are habitual. Anti-Christian Orthodox Jews, overwhelmingly boys and young men, have been spitting with regularity on priests and nuns in the Old City for about 20 years, and the problem is only getting worse. “My impression is that Christian clergymen are being spat at in the Old City virtually every day. This has been constantly increasing over the last decade,” said Daniel Rossing. An observant, kippa-wearing Jew, Rossing heads the Jerusalem Center forJewish-Christian Relations and was liaison to Israel’s Christian communities for the Ministry of Religious Affairs in the ‘70s and ‘80s. For Christian clergy in the Old City, being spat at by Jewish fanatics “is a part of life,” said the American Jewish Committee’s Rabbi David Rosen, Israel’s most prominent Jewish interfaith activist. “I hate to say it, but we’ve grown accustomed to this. Jewish religious fanatics spitting at Christian priests and nuns has become a tradition,” said Roman Catholic Father Massimo Pazzini, sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa. These are the very opposite of isolated incidents. Father Athanasius of the Christian Information Center called them a “phenomenon.” George Hintlian, the unofficial spokesman for the local Armenian community and former secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate, said it was “like a campaign.” Christians in Israel are a small, weak community known for “turning the other cheek,” so these Jewish xenophobes feel free to spit on them; they don’t spit on Muslims in the Old City because they’re afraid to, the clerics noted. … Seated in his study in the Armenian Quarter, Manougian, 61, said that while he personally has not been assaulted since that time, the spitting attacks on other Armenian clergy have escalated. “The latest thing is for them to spit when they pass [St. James’s] monastery. I’ve seen it myself a couple of times,” he said. “Then there’s the boy from the Jewish Quarter who spits at the Armenian women when he sees them wearing their crosses, then he runs away. And during one of our processions from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre this year, a fellow in a yarmulke and fringes began deliberately cutting through our lines, over and over. The police caught him and he started yelling, ‘I’m free to walk wherever I want!’ That’s what these settler types are always saying: ‘This is our country and we can do whatever we want!’” Where are the police in all this? If they happen to be on the scene, such as at the recent procession Manougian described, they will chase the hooligans—but even if they catch them, they only tell them off and let them go, according to several Christian clergymen. … Sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, Pazzini recalled: “Early this year there were about 100 Orthodox Jewish boys who came past the church singing and dancing. The police were with them—I don’t know what the occasion was, maybe it was a holiday, maybe it had to do with the elections. There was a group of Franciscan monks standing in front of thechurch, and a few of the Jewish boys went up to the monks, spat on them, then went back into the crowd. I went up to a policeman and he told me, ‘Sorry about that, but look, they’re just kids.’” … Yisca Harani, a veteran Jewish interfaith activist who lectures on Christianity to Israeli tour guides at Touro College, likewise says the change for the worse came about 20 years ago. She blames the spitting attacks on the view of Christianity that’s propagated at haredi and national Orthodox yeshivot. “I move around the Old City a lot,” she said, “I come in contact with these people, and what they learn in these fundamentalist yeshivot is that the goy is the enemy, a hater of Israel. All they learn about Christianity is the Holocaust, pogroms, anti-Semitism.” Rosen recalls that in 1994, after Israel and the Vatican opened diplomatic relations, he organized an international Jewish-Christian conference in Jerusalem, “and the city’s chief rabbi called me in and said, ‘How can you do this? Don’t you know it’s forbidden for us? How can you encourage these people to meet with us?’ “He told me that when he sees a Christian clergyman, he crosses the street and recites, ‘You shall totally abhor and totally disdain…’ This is a biblical verse that refers to idolatry.” Rosen noted that the Jerusalem chief rabbi of the time, like the more insular Orthodox Jews in general, considered Christians to be idolators. The people doing the spitting, according to all the Christian victims and Jewish interfaith activists interviewed, are invariably national Orthodox or haredi Jews; in every attack described by Christian clerics, the assailant was wearing a kippa.534 When this practice was exposed in the liberal Israeli media, the reaction of Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yona Metzger was not grounded in so much in moral outrage as in a concern over adverse publicity and possible repercussions for Jews outside Israel. Had rabbis been exposed to a fraction of such abuse in any Christian country, it would have made headline news and resulted in diplomatic interventions led by the United States of America. In this case, however, the information has been hushed up. Haaretz returned to subject again in November 2011 when it reported: Ultra-Orthodox young men curse and spit at Christian clergymen in the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City as a matter of routine. In most cases the clergymen ignore the attacks, but sometimes they strike back. Last week the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court quashed the indictment against an Armenian priesthood student who had punched the man who spat at him. Johannes Martarsian was walking in the Old City in May 2008 when a young ultra-Orthodox Jew spat at him. Maratersian punched the spitter in the face, making him bleed, and was charged for assault. But Judge Dov Pollock, who unexpectedly annulled the indictment, wrote in his verdict that “putting the defendant on trial for a single blow at a man who spat at his face, after suffering the degradation of being spat on for years while walking around in his church robes is a fundamental contravention of the principles of justice and decency.” “Needless to say, spitting toward the defendant when he was wearing the robe is a criminal offense,” the judge said. When Narek Garabedian came to Israel to study in the Armenian Seminary in Jerusalem half a year ago, he did not expect the insults, curses and spitting he would be subjected to daily by ultra-Orthodox Jews in the streets of the Old City. “When I see an ultra-Orthodox man coming toward me in the street, I always ask myself if he will spit at me,” says Narek, a Canadian Armenian, this week. About a month ago, on his way to buy groceries in the Old City, two ultra-Orthodox men spat at him. The spittle did not fall at his feet but on his person. Narek, a former football player, decided this time not to turn the other cheek. “I was very angry. I pushed them both to the wall and asked, ‘why are you doing this?’ They were frightened and said ‘we’re sorry, we’re sorry,’ so I let them go. But it isn’t always like that. Sometimes the spitter attacks you back,” he says. Other clergymen in the Armenian Church in Jerusalem say they are all victims of harassment, from the senior cardinals to the priesthood students. Mostly they ignore these incidents. When they do complain, the police don't usually find the perpetrators. Martarsian left Israel about a year ago. He was sent back home by the church, as were two other Armenian priesthood students who were charged after attacking an ultra-Orthodox man who spat at them. The Greek Patriarchy’s clergymen have been cursed and spat on by ultra-Orthodox men in the street for many years. “They walk past me and spit,” says Father Gabriel Bador, 78, a senior priest in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. “Mostly I ignore it, but it's difficult. Sometimes I stop and ask the spitter ‘why are you doing this? What have I done to you?’ Once I even shouted at a few of them who spat at my feet together. They ran away,” he says. “It happens a lot,” says Archbishop Aristarchos, the chief secretary of the patriarchate. “You walk down the street and suddenly they spit at you for no reason. I admit sometimes it makes me furious, but we have been taught to restrain ourselves, so I do so.” Father Goosan Aljanian, Chief Dragoman of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, says it is often difficult for temperamental young priesthood students to swallow the offense. About a month ago two students marching to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre beat up an ultra-Orthodox man who spat at them. They were sent away from the Old City for two weeks. “I tell my students that if they are spat at, to go to the police rather than strike back,” says Goosan. “But these are young kids who sometimes lose their cool.” A few weeks ago four ultra-Orthodox men spat at clergymen in the funeral procession of Father Alberto of the Armenian Church. “They came in a pack, out of nowhere,” said Father Goosan. “I know there are fanatical Haredi groups that don’t represent the general public but it’s still enraging. It all begins with education. It’s the responsibility of these men's yeshiva heads to teach them not to behave this way,” he says. Father Goosan and other Patriarchy members are trying to walk as little as possible in the Old City streets. “Once we walked from the [Armenian] church to the Jaffa Gate and on that short section four different people spat at us,” he says.535
The antipathy towards Muslims runs even deeper because of the political strife with the Palestnians that has mired the State of Israel since its inception. Responding to the question, “How should Jews treat their Arab neighbours?” in the May–June 2009 issue of Moment magazine, Manis Friedman, the Lubavitch rabbi from St. Paul Minnesota, wrote: I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle). Friedman, who is the dean of the internationally renowned Bais Chana Women’s Institute in West St. Paul, argued that “the first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East.” The Israeli military has been flooded with pamphlets authored by various nationalist rabbis and approved by senior officers inciting hatred toward Palestinians and, more recently, accusing the Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican of helping to organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews.539 Jewish settlers have also been compiling lists of Jewish businesses that employ Arabs with the intention of lauching a nation-wide boycott of “traitors” who allow “enemies” to earn money. Another group launched a campaign to issue “kashrut certificates” to businesses that do not employ Arabs.540 A shocking revelation was news of the publication, in November 2009, of a compendium of religious commentary that reads like a rabbinic instruction manual outlining acceptable scenarios for killing non-Jews. According to an article by Daniel Estrin entitled “Rabbinic Text or Call to Terror?” in the January 29, 2010 issue of the New York Forward: “The prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’” applies only “to a Jew who kills a Jew,” write Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and attacks on them “curb their evil inclination,” while babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.” “The King’s Torah (Torat Hamelech), Part One: Laws of Life and Death between Israel and the Nations,” a 230-page compendium of Halacha, or Jewish religious law, published by the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva in Yitzhar, garnered a front-page exposé in the Israeli tabloid Ma’ariv, which called it the stuff of “Jewish terror.” … Yet, both [Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona] Metzger and his Sephardic counterpart, Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, have declined to comment on the book, which debuted in November, while other prominent rabbis have endorsed it—among them, the son of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Sephardic Jewry’s preeminent leader. Also, despite the precedent set by previous Israeli attorneys general in the last decade and a half to file criminal charges against settler rabbis who publish commentaries supporting violence against non-Jews, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz has so far remained mum about “The King’s Torah.” … In 2006-2007, the Israeli Ministry of Education gave about a quarter of a million dollars to the yeshiva, and in 2007-2008 the yeshiva received about $28,000 from the American nonprofit Central Fund of Israel. … But the book’s wide dissemination and the enthusiastic endorsements of prominent rabbis have spotlighted what might have otherwise remained an isolated commentary. At the entrance to Moriah, a large Jewish bookstore steps from the Western Wall, copies of “The King’s Torah” were displayed with children’s books and other halachic commentaries. The store manager, who identified himself only as Motti, said the tome has sold “excellently.” Other stores carrying the book include Robinson Books, a well-known, mostly secular bookshop in a hip Tel Aviv shopping district; Pomeranz Bookseller, a major Jewish book emporium near the Ben Yehuda mall in downtown Jerusalem; and Felhendler, a Judaica store on the main artery of secular Rehovot, home of the Weizmann Institute. … Prominent religious figures wrote letters of endorsement that preface the book. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, blessed the authors and wrote that many “disciples of Torah are unfamiliar with these laws.” The elder Yosef has not commented on his son’s statement. Dov Lior, chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and a respected figure among many mainstream religious Zionists, noted that the book is “very relevant especially in this time.” … Previously, Israel has arrested settler rabbis who publish commentaries supporting the killing of non-Jews. In addition to Ginsburgh, the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva head, in 1994, the government jailed Rabbi Ido Elba of Hebron for writing a 26-page article proclaiming it a “mitzva to kill every non-Jew from the nation that is fighting the Jew, even women and children.” “The atmosphere has changed,” said Yair Sheleg, senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, who specializes in issues of religion and state. Previous governments took a tougher stance against such publications, he said, but “paradoxically, because the tension between the general settler population and the Israeli judicial system…is high now, the attorney general is careful not to heighten the tension.” In their book The King’s Torah, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, and Rabbi Yosef Elizur-Hershkowitz describe how it is possible to kill non-Jews according to halakha (Jewish religious law). They say it is permissible to kill young children if it is foreseeable that they will grow up to be mortal enemies of the Jews, or to put pressure on an enemy leader. The book gained the exlplicit and implicit endorsement of hundreds of rabbis. According to Shapira, it is permissible to kill a non-Jew who threatens Israel even if the person is classified as a Righteous Gentile. His book says that any gentile who supports war against Israel can also be killed. Killing the children of a leader in order to pressure him, the rabbi continues, is also permissible. In general, according to the book, it is okay to kill children if they “stand in the way—children are often doing this.” “They stand in the way of rescue in their presence and they are doing this without wanting to,” he writes. “Nonetheless, killing them is allowed because their presence supports murder. There is justification in harming infants if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us. Under such circumstances the blow can be directed at them and not only by targeting adults.”541 Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba and the head of the Rabbinical Committee of the Council of Jewish Communities, and Rabbi Ya’acov Yosef, son of Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef, provided endorsements for the book, and refused requests by the police’s National Serious and International Crimes Unit to arrive for questioning at the unit’s Lod Headquarters earlier this month. Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, head of the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva who wrote a three-page endorsement for the book, used his police questioning to say that the book’s conclusions are not practical Halacha, but rather in the realm of hypotheses and principles of Halacha. Hundreds of primarily national-religious rabbis took part in a convention “in honor of the Torah and its independence” on Wednesday, following Lior and Yosef’s summoning by police. Without endorsing the content of the book, the participants maintained that police should not get involved in matters pertaining to halachic discourse. Senior figures such as Ramat Gan Chief Rabbi Ya’acov Ariel and Rabbi Haim Druckman, head of the Ohr Etzion Yeshiva, were also present at the event.542 In August 2010, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel’s leading ultra-Orthodox party, renewed his venom against the “evil” Palestinians and said that they should all “perish.”543 His teachings in a Saturday sermon in an Israeli synagogue on October 16, 2010 represent an extension of his beliefs. They were not pulled out of thin air—Rabbi Yosef is an accomplished scholar of the Torah—but rather are part of a longstanding tradition that is not generally revealed to outsiders. The Jerusalem Post reported: The sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews, according to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the head of Shas‘s Council of Torah Sages and a senior Sephardi adjudicator. “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat. According to Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews. “In Israel, death has no dominion over them... With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant... That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew,” Yosef said. “Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [lord or master] and eat. That is why gentiles were created,” he added.544 The same message was reinforced when, in December 2010, more than 300 rabbis and religious figures, many of them state-employed, signed a public statement calling on Jews not to rent or sell properties to non-Jews—a move particularly aimed against Arabs—and calling on the community to ostracize those who do so. The document warned: “It is forbidden in the Torah to sell a house or a field in the land of Israel to a foreigner.” “After someone sells or rents just one flat, the value of all the neighbouring flats drops … He who sells or rents [to non-Jews] causes his neighbours a big loss and his sin is great. Anyone who sells [property to a non-Jew] must be cut off!” The manifesto quotes extensively from Jewish writings, including the Bible. It cites Exodus 23:33, which reads: “Do not let them live in your land or they will cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you.”545 The immediate problem started several months earlier: Usama Ghanaiem was at home with a group of friends when the mob attacked. It was a Friday night in late October, and about 30 young ultra-Orthodox Jewish men walking home from synagogue began throwing rocks at the apartment building where several Arab students rent accommodation in the northern city of Safed. One of the attackers eve fired a gun; another left a message “Death to Arabs” scrawled on the front door. … Mr. Ghanaiem and his friends, all college students from a number of Arab communities in Israel, have found themselves caught up in a nationwide campaign against Israel’s 1.2 million Arab citizens. It began with an edict issued by Shmuel Eliahu, chief rabbi of Safed, that prohibits Jews in the city from renting or selling property to gentiles, by which he really means Arabs. Close to 300 rabbis across the country now have signed onto Rabbi Eliahu’s original statement or onto similar statements.546 On the heels of the rabbis’ letter urging Jews not to sell or rent properties to non-Jews came a letter published by a group of wives of 29 Haredi rabbis calling on Jewish women not to date Arabs, work with them or perform national service in the same places where Arabs work: The letter was organized by the organization Lehava, which claims to “save daughters of Israel” from what it calls assimilation. Lehava also took part in the recent demonstrations against selling or renting homes to non-Jews. The group operates a shelter for women who leave their Arab partners and educate the public on what it calls the dangers that arise from contact between Jews and Arabs. The organization also called for the boycott of the Gush Etzion branch of the supermarket Rami Levi, where Arab and Jewish workers are on shift side-by-side. In the last few weeks, Bentzi Gopstein of Kiryat Arba, the director of Lehava, convinced the wives of important rabbis in the religious Zionist movement to sign on to the letter. Among the signatories were Netzhiya Yosef, wife of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, Esther Lior, wife of Rabbi Dov Lior, Shulamit Melamed of Beit Alon and Starna Druckman of Kiryat Motzkin.547
Lior added identified Jews as merciful, shy and charitable – qualities that he claimed could be inherited. “A person born to Jewish parents, even if they weren’t raised on the Torah – there are things that are passed on (to him) in the blood, it's genetic,” he explained. “If the father is a gentile, then the child is deprived of these things. “I even read in books that sometimes the crime, the difficult traits, the bitterness – a child that comes from these traits, it's no surprise that he won't have the qualities that characterize the people of Israel,” he added.548
Hasidic Jews have been responsible for quite a bit of violence directed at fellow Jews and non-Jews, in Israel and abroad. Shops in Jerusalem have been repeatedly vandalized for selling Zionist literature or “immodest” clothing. The most savage beating of a rabbi in Poland in recent years was in fact perpetrated by Hasids who attacked Moishe Arye Friedman, an anti-Zionist rabbi from Vienna, on March 11, 2007, while attending commemorations for an 18th century Hasidic rabbi buried in Leżajsk.552 Hundreds of Hasidic pilgrims visiting the grave of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine, have been repeatedly involved in violent clashes with the police and locals and were responsible for the the stabbing of a non-Jew.553 These thugs are emboldened by the reluctance of the Western media to report such incidents and the support they receive from Jewish circles who rally to defend them against “anti-Semites.” When a story broke in a Swedish newspaper in August 2009 that the Israeli army may have secretly removed organs from Palestnian youths killed in clashes, the reaction was predictable and typical: blanket denials, demands by the government of Israel for official Swedish condemnation of the article, and accusations of blood libel and anti-Semitism. (Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman railed, “It’s a shame that the Swedish Foreign Ministry fails to intervene in a case of blood libels against Jews. This is reminiscent of Sweden’s stand during World War II, when [it] had failed to intervene as well.” He was seconded by finance minister Yuval Stenitz, who said, “This is an anti-Semitic blood libel against the Jewish people and the Jewish state.”) The reluctance of the Swedish government to interfere with the freedom of its country’s press even led to Israel imposing sanctions against Sweden. After an American academic released an interview conducted in the year 2000 with the then-head of Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute admitting to the harvesting of skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Palestinians and foreign workers, without permission from relatives, and possibly from Israeli soldiers as well, the Israeli military reluctantly confirmed the practice took place. The organs were used in Israeli hospitals for transplants and human tissues were sent to a special military skin bank for the benefit of injured Israeli soldiers. Doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies by gluing the eyelids shut. Allegedly the practice had stopped a number of years ago, but no one was ever charged or sanctioned. The Israeli government never distanced itself from its baseless attacks against the Swedish reporter, newspaper or authorities.554 In November 2014, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet passed a bill enshrininig Israel as the national state of the Jewish people only, even though about a quarter of the country’s citizenry is non-Jewish. Netanyahu’s pre-election pledge to never allow a Palestinian state and to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, coupled with his anti-Palestinian rhetoric, gave him a stunning victory in the March 17, 2015 elections. A Zionist Union MP, Sheli Yachimovich, responded aptly to Mr Netanyahu’s comments on her own Facebook page: “No Western leader would dare utter such a racist comment.” If any Western politician were to act in this manner, they would be soundly and universally denounced, and their electorate lambasted. Unfortunately, the double standard of which many Jews complain usually works to their advantage. Writing in the New York Review of Books in March 2015,555 David Shulman, Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership, stated ominously: Benjamin Netanyahu has won again. He will have no difficulty putting together a solid right-wing coalition. But the naked numbers may be deceptive. What really counts is the fact that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases proto-fascist, figures. It is in no way inclined to make peace. It has given a clear mandate for policies that preclude any possibility of moving toward a settlement with the Palestinians and that will further deepen Israel’s colonial venture in the Palestinian territories, probably irreversibly. … First, the notion that there will someday be two states in historic Palestine has been savagely undermined. We have Netanyahu’s word for it. If he has his way—and why shouldn’t he?—Palestinians are destined for the foreseeable future to remain subject to a regime of state terror, including the remorseless loss of their lands and homes and, in many cases, their very lives; they will continue to be, as they are now, disenfranchised, without even minimal legal recourse, hemmed into small discontinuous enclaves, and deprived of elementary human rights. Take a mild, almost innocuous example, entirely typical of life in the territories. Last weekend I was in the south Hebron hills with Palestinian shepherds at a place called Zanuta, whose historic grazing grounds have been taken over, in large part, by a settlement inhabited by a single Jewish family. Soldiers turned up with the standard order, signed by the brigade commander, declaring the area a Closed Military Zone; the order is illegal, according to a Supreme Court ruling, but the writ of the court hardly impinges on reality on the ground in south Hebron. Within minutes, three of the shepherds and an Israeli activist were arrested. The people of Zanuta live with such arbitrary decrees on a daily basis, as they live under the constant threat of violent assault by Israeli settlers, acting with impunity. In short, these Palestinian villagers are slated for dispossession and expulsion. We are doing what we can to stop the process, but it isn’t easy. The situation in the northern West Bank is considerably worse. Secondly, we may see the emergence in the West Bank of a situation like that in Gaza, with Hamas or other extremist organizations assuming power. It seems ridiculous to have to write this, but in case anyone has any doubt: there is no way a privileged collective can sit forever on top of a disenfranchised, systematically victimized minority of millions. We can expect mass violent protests of one sort or another (maybe, with luck, some large-scale nonviolent protest as well). Sooner or later, the territories will probably explode, and the Palestinian Authority may be washed away. At that point Netanyahu will complain loudly that you can never trust the Arabs. … Fourthly, and most important, the moral fiber of the country will continue to unravel. Already for years the public space has been contaminated by ugly, violent voices coming from the heart of the right-wing establishment. As Zvi Barel has cogently written in Haaretz, “Netanyahu has succeeded in overturning the principle that the state exists for the sake of its citizens and putting in its place the Fascist belief that the citizens exist for the state.” In accordance with that belief, there will be more hypernationalist, antidemocratic legislation, more deliberate and consistent attempts to undermine the authority of the courts, more rampant racism, more thugs in high office, more acts of cruelty inflicted on innocents, more attacks on moderates perceived as enemies of the state, more paranoid indoctrination in the schools, more hate propaganda and self-righteous whining by official spokesmen, more discrimination against the Israeli-Arab population, more wanton destruction of the villages of Israeli Bedouins, more war-mongering, and quite possibly more needless war.
What happened next is emblematic of how the occupation works throughout the West Bank. On November 17, the Ayyub Bedouins, their homes and sheep pens now destroyed for the second time, decided to set up a protest tent not far from the new outpost. The fate of a Palestinian tent, old or new, is unlike the fate of an illegal Israeli outpost. Within a few hours soldiers arrived and quickly went through their standard repertoire—tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets, and pepper spray (from my own experience, I can tell you that the pepper spray is the worst if it gets you in the eyes). Interestingly, all eyewitness accounts agree that among the soldiers, the women recruits were by far the most savage. The tear gas and stun grenades were aimed directly at the activists, a potentially lethal practice officially banned by the army. Six Palestinians were hospitalized, and two Israeli activists were arrested, one of them seriously beaten by the police while in custody. Not to put too fine a point on it: Israeli settlers have free license to steal more and more land, and the rightful owners of these lands are brutally driven away. The process is set out in precise detail in a recent report by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, dealing with the West Bank as a whole. Noting that Israeli policies have been particular devastating to the semi-nomadic communities in Area C, the authors observe: As years of monitoring by B’Tselem and other organizations has shown, Israeli security forces regularly allow settlers to assault Palestinians and damage their property. In fact, soldiers sometimes safeguard the settlers in such situations, providing them support and at times even taking part in the assault. All this is compounded by an ineffectual law enforcement system that takes no action against the offenders and does not achieve justice for the victims. According to figures collected by Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, some 85 percent of all investigations into incidents of harm caused to Palestinians (physical assault, arson, damage to property, vandalizing trees, and taking over land) are closed due to flaws in police procedure. There is only a 1.9 percent chance of a police complaint filed by a Palestinian leading to the conviction of an Israeli citizen. … A bill now before the Knesset, supported by all the right-wing parties and already past its first vote (out of three), aims to legalize the many dozens of so-called illegal outposts scattered all over the West Bank as well as thousands of housing units built in Israeli settlements that sit on privately-owned Palestinian land. The bill is a transparent attempt to enable what can only be called large-scale governmental theft.556 The systematic indocrination of Israeli students is something that cannot be found, and would not be tolerated, in any other democratic country. It has a very long history. Moshe Menuhin recalled the following from his own experience in Palestine before immigrating to the United States in 1913 and the typical anti-Christian upbringing imparted to young Jews. I know whereof I speak, because I was reared in the Hebrew Gymnasia Herzlia. I was one of the first graduates of this unique school of “Jewish” nationalism. And it took me a long time to rid myself of all the hate-filled, asphyxiating xenophobia toward Gentiles, including, of course, the Arabs of Palestine, that was implanted in our young hearts. The time has come for the Jews to discard the absurd and wild prejudices of the East European ghettos against the Gentile world. Take that inveterate and pathetic prejudice against goyim—a sort of neuroticism stemming from a twisted superiority complex acquired during the long tortured and hedged-in ghetto life—“a goy bleibt a goy” (A Gentile always remains a Gentile). It has many connotations and applications. “What can you expect of a goy? He has no saychel (wisdom, sense). He has no heart. He has no Torah (Old Testament). He is dumb.” Therefore, “a goy bleibt a goy”; once a goy, always a goy. As I write these lines, I recall my long-forgotten childhood days, or rather nights, when my heder and yeshiva (elementary and higher Talmudic Hebrew schools) in Jerusalem called a complete halt to the study of the Torah and Talmud one night every winter. It must have been the birthday of Joshua of Nazareth. The Rebbeh (not “rabbi”)—the teacher—used to indulge in slighting traditional stories about the Acher (“Strange One,” “Other One”), or Yoshkeh Pandreh, as we kids were made to call the Acher, Jesus.557 The following leaves no doubt that Israel continues to be hotbead of nationalism. Students who want to take part in delegations going abroad are obliged to take an online government course which some parents and teachers say has a “blatant political agenda.” The course consists of film clips in which several speakers address the students and coach them about the messages they should express overseas. Arab students are also required to take the course. “The messages are simple and repetitive,” a mother of an 11th grade student from the central region says. “All the Arabs hate us, in fact almost the entire world hates us.” In June 2016 the Education Ministry sent detailed instructions to schools about preparing delegations for trips abroad. “Students and youth in delegations overseas represent Israel and its society and serve as its ambassadors,” it said. “The students will represent Israel using the main messages taught in the course,” the directive says, noting the goal is “cultivating Israeli pride and a sense of calling among those going abroad.” The directive is directed at 9th through 12th grade students slated to take part in delegations abroad, whether to conferences or international contests in mathematics, science and technology. It is also meant for delegations participating in programs for relations with Jewish communities in the world, twin cities and youth exchange and others. The courses do not apply to delegations to Poland.
The course, which is part of a more comprehensive compulsory training session of 30 hours, consists of 11 study units, each made up of a film clip lasting several minutes. Advancing from one stage of the course to the next is conditional on passing a short test of four to five questions. At the end of each film clip the students must answer a multiple choice test. If they fail or abstain they will be disqualified from going on the trip. The first speaker in the online course is Education Minister Naftali Bennett. He stresses entrepreneurship and innovation. (“Israel is a power of doing good to billions of people worldwide.”) He says the Arabs vote and are elected to the Knesset, noting “only in Israel is there such democracy. Emphasize this, because sometimes [they] throw out a word like apartheid. What apartheid?”
Asked what the most important part of advocacy for Israel is, Bennett says, “People think the content counts. I dispute that. It’s not the content but the smile, the politeness, the listening.” But at the end of the unit, when the students are asked, “According to Bennett, what’s the most important thing in advocacy?”—the smile and politeness are not an option. The correct answer, taken from another part of the clip, is “framing, the way in which we frame the story.” In the chapter “Israel in the Middle East,” Dr. Uri Resnik, legal adviser for deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotevely, says “… Israel’s story in this region doesn’t begin in the 20th century but in the ancient era, in the time of the Bible and the patriarchs, about 4,000 years ago.” The Bible also plays a central role in the unit dedicated to anti-Semitism. Gideon Bachar, the Foreign Ministry’s director of the campaign against anti-Semitism, tells the students “anti-Semitism definitely exists from the dawn of Christianity some 2,000 years ago, but it existed before that too. Some claim Haman’s desire to destroy all the Jews—think about it—is also a sort of anti-Semitism. Other cite Pharaoh’s hatred of the nation of Israel, that nation of slaves—as a kind of anti-Semitism.”
Bachar says the main roots of modern anti-Semitism are “Muslim anti-Semitism, radical right and extreme left.” The link he makes between “radical left organizations in Europe” and “radical Islam” is one of the main points in a lecture about BDS by Tali Gorodos from the Reut Institute. In another unit, “Israel in the international media,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nachshon says, “They poison children with hatred for Israel and for Jews. … They suckle this poison from age zero.” Later Nachshon speaks of the so-called lone-wolf intifada, on the background of a mixture of Israeli security footage from stabbing sites, Hamas broadcasts and ISIS executions. Some of these clips and pictures appear again in other parts of the course. Apart from the emphasis on Arab-Muslim hatred (including the purported Iranian threat), the lecturers tell the students to stress Israel’s “creative energy” and developments and inventions in high-tech, medicine agriculture and other fields. One of the test questions, “What challenges are you dealing with in Israel?” has four answer options—the Iranian threat, delegitimization, terror organizations from West, East, North and South, and all of the above. The correct answer is all of the above. Another question is “Against whom is anti-Semitism directed?” and the right answer is: only toward Israel. “The messages say everyone hates us already from the era of the Bible, which is also the only legitimization for Israel mentioned in the course,” an 11th grade student’s mother says.
Another parent says, “We’re used to the rightist worldview reflected in civics and history. … Now we have to agree to a blatantly political agenda so that the child can go to a science competition.” A teacher accompanying delegations abroad says, “It’s hard to imagine what Arab students and parents feel. The Arabs appear in almost only negative contexts. There’s no reflection of coexistence. Bennett’s message in his clip is—the Arabs must be grateful for the right to vote and should keep quiet.” An Education Ministry official said, “Many of the lessons play on students’ fears and prejudices and intensify them.” Ministry spokesman Amos Shavit didn’t answer questions about the course, saying, “It was built with a view to the variety of populations in Israel, intending to train the students for going abroad. The claim that the course reflects a political view is groundless.”558
Lehava’s Benzi Gopstein tells yeshiva panel that the Rambam’s ruling for destruction of idol worship is still valid. Chaim Levinson, Haaretz, August 6, 2015 The leader of the extremist anti-assimilation group Lehava allegedly called for churches to be torched, at a panel held this week for yeshiva students. Benzi Gopstein said he is prepared to spend 50 years in jail for doing so, according to a report by the Haredi website Kikar Shabbat. … The panel was debating whether Jews are commanded to eliminate idol worship, as the Rambam (Maimonides) states. After Gopstein responded affirmatively, Klein [Rabbi Moshe Klein, the rabbi of the Hadassah Medical Centers] hastened to interject, “It is a mitzvah according to the Rambam, but in our times the answer is no.” The issue generated an argument on the panel, with Gopstein defending his position that churches should be burned. In response to a question by Rabinovich as to whether he “is in favor of burning churches in the Land of Israel,” Gopstein answered, “Did the Rambam rule to destroy [idol worship] or not? Idol worship must be destroyed. It’s simply yes – what’s the question?” Rabinovich pressed the issue, saying, “Benzi, I must say I’m really shocked by what you’re saying here. You are essentially saying we must go out and burn down churches. You’re saying something insane here.” Gopstein replied, “What’s the question? Do you doubt it?” When Klein warned him the panel was being filmed, and that if the recording should get to the police he would be arrested, Gopstein replied, “That’s the last thing that concerns me. If this is truth, I’m prepared to sit in jail 50 years for it.” As the panel discussion unfolded, Rabinovich tweeted a message on his Twitter account: “I’m shocked to the core. I’m sitting at a panel right now with Benzi Gopstein, who says outright it’s a mitzvah to burn churches, and he is prepared to sit in jail 50 years for this.” Some of the yeshiva students who saw his tweet called him a “moser” (informer). … “For many months, we have waited for a decision by the attorney general regarding complaints against Gopstein for incitement to racism,” said Rabbi Gilad Kariv, director of the Reform Movement. “If even these remarks don’t lead to a quick decision to prosecute him, we can publicly declare that Israeli law allows incitement to racism and violence. What else has to happen for the State of Israel to seriously fight those who have decided to ignite the fire of hatred and fanaticism?”
Benzi Gopstein, head of Lehava, calls to ban Christmas in the Holy Land: 'Let us remove the vampires before they once again drink our blood.' Yüklə 2,4 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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