WHAT FUTURE FOR ISRAEL IN THE
GRIP OF RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM?
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
Israel’s Nov. 1
election represents a dramatic turn in the
direction of religious extremism. In 1984,
Israel outlawed Meir Kahane’s Kach Party for
racism and incitement to violence. Now,
Kahane’s followers will hold important
positions in the new government. The Israeli
newspaper Haaretz declared, “Kahane won.
Israel is now closing in on a right-wing,
religious authoritarian revolution.” When he
was in the Knesset, Kahane advocated
Nuremburg-like laws which would would make
marriage—-and sexual relations—-between Jews
and non-Jews illegal.
Few Americans
understand the nature of the religious
extremism which is growing in Israel. The
growth of religious Zionism is, in reality, a
rather recent phenomenon. Traditionally,
Orthodox Jews held that only the Messiah could
bestow Jewish sovereignty in Palestine.
Religious Jews firmly opposed the Zionist
movement. The conventional rabbinic doctrine
maintained that Jews had a duty to wait
patiently until the Messiah led them back to
Palestine. The return, they said, would be at
the end of days. According to this view,
since God sent the Jews into exile to punish
them for their sins, only God had the power to
lead them back.
Rabbi Hayom Eleazor
Shapira, a Hungarian Hasidic leader, argued
that migration to the Holy Land, in abandoning
“faith in miraculous redemption from heaven,”.
pre-emptied the Messiah. Zionism, he
declared, violated Orthodox Jewish law. Rabbi
Shapira called the Zionists “evil forces (who)
have become stronger.” Efforts at “forcing
the End,” he maintained, were “a sacrilege.”
Slowly, there has
been a dramatic growth of religious extremism
in Israel, which has manifested itself in
vigorous opposition to the peace process and
has played a key role in the assassination of
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the murder of
29 Muslims at prayer by the American-born
follower of Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein.
One of the big winners in the Nov. 1 Israeli
election was Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the
Otzma Yehudit (Jewish power) party. For many
years, he had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein
hanging on his living room wall.
In an important
book,”Jewish Fundamentalism In Israel,” Israel
Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky trace the history
of Jewish fundamentalism and identify the
messianic tendency which they believe to be
the most dangerous.
Israel Shahak, a
Holocaust survivor, was a professor at the
Hebrew University and a leading human rights
activist. Norton Mezvinsky was a professor of
history at Central Connecticut State
University who has written and lectured
extensively on the modern Middle East.
The authors point
out that, “The adherents of Jewish
fundamentalism in Israel oppose equality for
all citizens, especially non-Jews. The
respected Israeli sociologist Baruch
Kimmerling declared, “The value of the
(Jewish) religion, at least in its Orthodox
and nationalistic form that prevails in
Israel, cannot be squared with democratic
values. No other variable —-neither
nationality , nor attitudes about security,
nor social or economic values, nor ethnic
descent or education—-so influences the
attitudes of (Israeli) Jews against democratic
values as does religiosity.”
What particularly
concerns the authors is the total contempt
which Jewish fundamentalists show toward
non-Jews. Rabbi Kook the Elder, the revered
father of the Messianic tendency in Jewish
fundamentalism, said, “The difference between
a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews —-all of
them in all different levels—-is greater and
deeper than the difference between a human
soul and the souls of cattle.”
Rabbi Kook’s entire
teaching, which is followed devoutly by, among
others, those who have led the settler
movement on the occupied West Bank, is based
upon the Lurianic Cabala, the school of Jewish
mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late
16th to the early 19th century. “One of the
basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabala,” the
authors write, “is the absolute superiority
of the Jewish soul and body over the
non-Jewish soul and body. According to the
Lurianic Cabala, the world was created solely
for the sake of Jews; the existence of
non-Jews was subsidiary. If an influential
Christian bishop or Islamic scholar argued
that the difference between the superior souls
of non-Jews and the inferior souls of Jews was
greater than the difference between the human
soul and the souls of cattle, he would incur
the wrath of all and be viewed as an
antisemite by most Jewish scholars regardless
of whatever less meaningful, positive
statements he included.”
According to the
ideologies which underlie Gush Emunim, the
militant West Bank settler group, non-Jews
have “satanic souls.” Common to both the
Talmud and Halacha, Orthodox religious law, is
a differentiation between Jews and non-Jews.
The late, highly revered Rabbi Menachem Mendel
Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who headed
the Chabad movement, explained that, “The
difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish
person stems from the common _expression_: ‘Let
us differentiate.’ Thus, we do not have a
case of profound change in which a person is
merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a
case of ‘let us differentiate’ between totally
different species. This is what needs to be
said about the body: the body of a Jewish
person is a totally different quality from the
body of (members) of all nations of the
world…A non-Jew’s entire reality is only
vanity. It is written…The entire creation (of
a non-Jew) exists only for the sake of the
Jews…”
Rabbi Yitzhak
Ginsburgh, who wrote a chapter in a book in
praise of Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29
Arabs at prayer, speaks freely of Jews’
genetic-based, spiritual superiority over
non-Jews. “if you saw two people drowning, a
Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the
Jewish life first.” Ginsburgh states, “If
every simple cell in a Jewish body entails
divinity, is a part of God, then every strand
of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something
is special about Jewish DNA…If a Jew needs a
liver, can you take the liver of an innocent
non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah
would probably permit that. Jewish life has
an infinite value.”
Shahak and
Mezvinsky point out that, “Changing the words
‘Jewish’ to ‘German’ or ‘Aryan’ and
‘non-Jewish’ to ‘Jewish’ turns the Ginsburgh
position into the doctrine that made Auschwitz
possible in the past. …The similarities
between the Jewish political and messianic
trend and German Nazism are glaring. The
Gentiles are for the messianism’s what the
Jews were for the Nazis. The hatred of
Western culture with its rational and
democratic elements is common to both
movements…”
Jewish religious
extremists believe that God gave all of the
Land of Israel (including present-day Lebanon
and other areas) to the Jews and that Arabs
living in Israel are viewed as thieves.
Rabbi Israel Ariel, a fundamentalist leader,
published an atlas that designated all lands
that were Jewish and need to be liberated.
This includes all areas west and south of the
Euphrates River extending through most of
Syria, much of Iraq and present-day Kuwait.
When it comes to
Baruch Goldstein’s murder of 29 Palestinians
at prayer, fundamentalists refuse to
acknowledge that such an act constitutes
“murder” because, according to Orthodox law,
“the killing by a Jew of a non-Jew under any
circumstances is not regarded as murder. It
may be prohibited for other reasons,
especially when it causes danger for Jews.”
When asked if he was sorry about the murdered
Arabs, militant rabbi Moshe Levinger declared,
“I am sorry not only about dead Arabs but
about dead flies.”
In a eulogy for
Goldstein, Rabbi Dov Lior stated that,
“Goldstein was full of love for fellow human
beings. He dedicated himself to helping
others”. Authors Shahak and Mezvinsky write
that, “The terms ‘human beings’ and ‘others’
in the Halacha refer solely to Jews.”
Shahak and
Mezvinsky wrote their book in 2000. For the
future, they feared the growth of such
religious extremism. They note that, “It
should not be forgotten that democracy and the
rule of law were brought into Judaism from the
outside. Before the advent of the modern
state , Jewish communities were mostly ruled
by rabbis who employed arbitrary and cruel
methods as bad as those employed by
totalitarian regimes. The dearest wish of the
current Jewish fundamentalists is to restore
this state of affairs.”
Now, the religious
extremists Shahak and Mezvinsky warned us
about in 2000 are about to come to power. As
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz declared (Nov.
2, 2022): “In recent years, Israel has become
terrifyingly more extreme. Everything we were
warned about is happening right before our
eyes. Kahanism has been legitimized and
spread.”
Moshe Halbertal, a
Hebrew University Jewish philosopher, told
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times that,
“The Torah stands for the equality of all
people and the notion that we are all created
in God’s image. Israelis of all people need to
respect minority rights because we, as Jews,
know what it is to be a minority—-with and
without rights. This is a deep Jewish ethos,
and it is now being challenged from within
Israel itself.”
How will Jewish
Americans react to these developments? And
will the U.S. government reconsider the
billions of dollars of aid it provides to
Israel, a prosperous country? Time will
tell. Those who tell us that Israel and the
United States share “common values” will have
an increasingly difficult time defending that.