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'God Wills It!' by Uri Avnery
One
of them declares that dismantling the settlements in the Gaza Strip is a
“crime against humanity.” It does not mention that they were set up
on the land reserves of a million Palestinians crowded in the tiny
strip, and rob them of their scarce water. Their removal, it says, is an
“expression of tyranny, evil and arbitrariness.” Officers and
soldiers are called upon not to take part in this “ethnic
cleansing.” This
manifesto is signed by the father and brother of Binyamin Netanyahu, as
well as Meir Har-Zion, the favorite pupil of Ariel Sharon, who became
famous in the 1950s for slitting the throats of several innocent Beduins
with his own hands in revenge for the killing of his sister. Two former
Directors General of the Prime Minister’s office also signed. Most of
the signatories are not religious. The
second manifesto declares that the Halakha (Jewish religious law)
commands the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians if this helps to
save Jews. It is signed by the heads of the “Arrangement Yeshivot,”
the I
was not unduly upset by the first manifesto. People of this kind can be
found all over the world. In other countries, they are called fascists
(but, because of the Holocaust, we do not like to use this term in our
country). What unites them is a primitive, atavistic morality that says
that “we” are a superior race, God’s chosen people, a master race
etc., while “they” are inferior races, untermenschen. We may do to
them whatever we please, with a clear conscience; they are not allowed
to do to us anything at all. (In the manifesto, the settlers are
requested not to bodily harm “their own people” – leaving them
free to harm all others.) In
the course of the 20th century, such people have wrought
destruction on many nations, including their own. But healthy nations
overcame them in the end. I hope that we shall manage to do the same. The
second manifesto is far more dangerous. A religious doctrine that calls
for the killing of civilians in the name of God is very serious. Such a
decree signed by the rabbis of the “Arrangement Yeshivot” is tenfold
worse. In
order to understand this, one has to know that these Yeshivot are in
fact military units. They constitute a unique phenomenon in the Israeli
army: whole units formed on an ideological-political basis, obeying
their own leaders. When
David Ben-Gurion created the Israeli army (officially called the Israel
Defense Forces) in the middle of the 1948 war, he was determined to
eliminate all its political groupings. So he disbanded the Palmakh, the
legendary elite force which was based on the kibbutzim and tended to the
left. The
present set-up was created, officially, in order to enable students of
Yeshivot (Jewish religious seminaries) to serve in the army without
interrupting their studies. In practice, they constitute a militia of
the extreme-right wing, especially the settlers. While serving in the
army, the Yeshiva students are nominally under the army chain of
command, but in practice they are also subject to their rabbis, whose
position is reminiscent of the political commissars of the Red Army. If
the orders of the officers and the directives of the rabbis ever
conflict, the great majority of the soldier-students will undoubtedly
obey the rabbis. And in any case, a great number of the officers
themselves now wear kippas, attesting to their belonging to the
religious camp. The
chiefs of the religious-nationalistic wing, and especially the settlers,
have for years now been engaged in a systematic effort to capture the
army from the inside. In the first decades of the IDF, kibbutz members
had a decisive influence on the army command, but nowadays the settlers
and other religious-nationalist people are taking over. They fill the
lower and middle ranks of the officer corps. This development, together
with the deepening occupation, has completely changed the face of the
IDF. It’s a different army now. The
manifesto of the Yeshivot chiefs, calling for the killing of Palestinian
civilians, exposes this situation. Since not one single head of an
Arrangement Yeshiva has spoken out against it, we have to assume that
they are unanimous on this. On
the face of it, it is just an expert opinion. With the hypocrisy typical
for the chiefs of this camp, they say that this is not, God forbid, an
operational directive, but only an innocent effort of the rabbis to
explain to the leaders of the nation what the Halakha says about this
subject. That
is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek explanation. The Arrangement Yeshivot
soldiers are daily engaged in situations where they have to decide
whether to shoot civilians or not. It is quite clear that the
“opinion” of their rabbis will determine their behavior. It is a
sentence of death for many people. Even
today, Palestinian civilians are killed every day. Only a small fraction
of the incidents are reported in the media. An old handicapped man was
recently buried under the ruins of his home by an army bulldozer that
demolished it so quickly that his family had no chance of getting him to
safety. Only yesterday a nine year old boy was killed while sleeping at
his home by shrapnel from a missile fired by a helicopter at an adjacent
building. Almost every day, boys of all ages are killed while throwing
stones at tanks and soldiers (whose bullet-proof vests and helmets mean
they are in no danger). It
is impossible to know how many, if any, of these civilians – men,
women, old people and children – are killed by Arrangement Yeshivot
soldiers, or soldiers commanded by kippa-wearing officers. Nobody can be
accused without incriminating evidence. But it is clear that the
interpretation of the halakha by the rabbis has now put a kosher-stamp
on such acts. It puts an end to any pretence of the “pure arms”
myth. It negates not only the prohibition of murder, but also the shame
for such acts. The
only religious voice raised against this appalling document was that of
a small and courageous group called “Rabbis for Human Rights,” which
opposes the dirty messianic current that has submerged almost the whole
religious camp in Unfortunately,
this statement will have no impact whatsoever on the IDF’s religious
militias, and even less on the settlers, who now set the tone in the
army. Many
of the most heinous crimes in human history were committed in the name
of religion. The Book of Joshua says that God commanded the Children of
Israel to commit a general ethnic cleansing in the May
God protect us from those who would speak in His name.
discuss this column in the forum Uri Avnery is a peace activist.
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