In Israel, The Success of Religious Extremism Is Nothing New: Remembering The
Murder of Yitzhak Rabin
By
Allan C. Brownfeld
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The success of Israel’s far-right religious extremist parties in the November 1 election is being greeted by many observers as something radically new in Israeli history. This is only partially true. In the past, Meir Kahane’s racist Kach Party was indeed made illegal. Now, its successors, who view Kahane as an heroic figure, are not only legal, but are slated to hold Cabinet positions in the new government. We must consider how the forces which murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 are now part of Israel’s mainstream political life.
Rabin’s assassin was not a lone psychotic gunman but, instead, was a young man nurtured within Israel’s far-right religious institutions. After the murder, he was hailed as a hero by many. In the book “Murder In The Name Of God: The Plot To Kill Yitzhak Rabin,” authors Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman present the full story of the people whose words and deeds made Rabin’s assassination possible: the rabbis who condemned Rabin by invoking an arcane Talmudic ruling; the politicians who joined in a sophisticated campaign of incitement against him; the militant West Bank settlers for whom the Oslo peace agreement spelled betrayal; and the security agents who saw what was coming but failed to prevent it.
Two weeks before the assassination, Victor Cygielman, the correspondent for the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateuur, sat down at his computer in Tel Aviv to sum up the developments of the past months. He began by describing the eerie ceremony in which a small group of religious fanatics had stood before Rabin’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur and intoned the mystical Pulsa da-Nura, a Kabbalistic curse of death. He wrote of the explicit “contract” put out on Rabin’s life by rabbis who invoked the Talmudic concept din rodef, the sentence pronounced on a Jewish traitor. Cygielman cited the handbill passed out at a mass demonstration in Jerusalem on October 5 showing Rabin in an SS uniform. “The stage was set for the murder of the prime minister,” he said.
Authors Karpin and Friedman note that assassin Yigal Amir——viewed as a hero by those far-right parties who were victorious on November 1—-“believed that there is only one guideline for fixing the borders of the Land of Israel : the Divine Promise to the Patriarch Abraham , ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates’ (Genesis 15:17). Today these borders embrace a large part of the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq…zealots read the passage as God’s will and God’s will must be obeyed, whatever the cost. No mortal has the right to settle for borders any narrower than these. Thus, negotiating a peace settlement with Israel’s neighbors is unthinkable. After all, the manifest destiny of the Jewish people has not been realized, say the zealots, so what is the basis for making peace?…Yet even after their territorial demands are satisfied, the zealots doubt whether it will be possible to reconcile with the Arabs. ‘Esau hates Jacob,’ says the Talmud, and you cannot make peace with those that hate you.
Among those the assassin Amir held in high esteem is Baruch Goldstein, the follower of Meir Kahane who gunned down 29 Palestinians at morning prayer in the Cave of the Patriarchs on Feb. 25, 1994. Both Amir and Goldstein are revered by those far-right winners in the Nov.1 election. Also admired by Amir was Noam Livnat of the od Yosef Chai yeshiva in Nablus. The yeshiva’s patron, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, repeatedly expressed a doctrine of racism. He declared that, “Jewish blood and gentile blood are not the same.” He defended the act of one of the yeshiva’s students who opened indiscriminate fire on Arab laborers standing alongside a highway near Tel Aviv in 1993, and he subsequently lauded Baruch Goldstein for massacring Arabs in Hebron. He explains that he differentiates between the murder of a gentile and that of a Jew because the Torah places a “light prohibition” on the former and a “grave” one on the latter.
It was Baruch Goldstein’s assault upon Arab worshipers in Hebron that galvanized Yigal Amir. Karpin and Friedman note that, “The Hebron massacre was a milestone for Yigal Amir. From that morning he concentrated his efforts on achieving the ‘spiritual readiness’ that Goldstein had displayed. He too aspired to be an agent of God, an emissary of his people.”
Amir told the authors that he traveled to Kiryat Arba to attend Goldstein’s funeral and meet the community in which he had lived. “I wanted first of all to get to know them…So I went there and saw all the thousands who were at the funeral. I saw the love they had for him, and I understood that this is no simple matter. I spoke with the people and began to understand that they were not simply fanatic extremists. They are people who are fighting very hard for the nation, for whom values are very important…It began after Goldstein. That’s when I had the idea that it’s necessary to take Rabin down.”
Amir came to know the zealots in Kiryat Arba and Hebron. He grew close to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a leader of the settler movement who had been convicted of killing a Palestinian and who had pronounced Rabin responsible for the Goldstein massacre. When the Oslo Agreement was signed in Washington on Sept. 13, 1993, Amir, watching the proceedings on television, thought to himself, “If there’s no choice, it will be necessary to take Rabin down.”
The ultra-Orthodox world from which Yigal Amir came, and which Israeli voters embraced in the Nov. 1 election, has contempt for the idea of Israel as a secular democratic state with equal rights for all of its citizens. Karpin and Friedman report that the Orthodox view on the dichotomy between Israel’s self-definition as both a Jewish and democratic state “has consistently been that a Jewish state must, by definition, be ruled by Jewish religious law as interpreted by rabbinical scholars. Israel’s secular founders had never even entertained that idea…They…undertook, in the Declaration of Independence, to ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’ and to ‘guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.’ But as a concession to the religious parties, they agreed to a certain blurring of the formal division between the authority of ‘church’ and state. Thus in the early 1950s an arrangement was reached whereby matters affecting a citizen’s ‘personal status’—-essentially meaning marriage, divorce and burial—-was controlled exclusively by clerics…Over the years, this arrangement has played havoc with the civil rights of countless citizens.”
The ultra-Orthodox weekly Hashavnah (“The Week”) was used by its publisher, Asher Zuckerman, to wage a vicious crusade against Rabin. The magazine regularly called the prime minister “a Kapo,” “an anti-Semite,” “ruthless,” and “a pathological liar.” The weekly, which was read by nearly 20 per cent of the ultra-Orthodox community, published a symposium on the question of whether Rabin deserved to die and the proper means of executing him.
Members of the Likud establishment expressed similar views, including Benjamin Netanyahu. Hashana published an interview with Ariel Sharon , who spoke of the Oslo peace policy as “graver than what Petain did,” adding, “It’s hard to use the word ‘treason’ when speaking of Jews, but there’s no substantive difference. They’re sitting with Arafat and planning how to deceive the citizens of Israel.” Netanyahu is quoted as saying, “Rabin charges that he’s called a terrible word ‘murderer.’ But with all the unpleasantness (implied by that term) he has no reason to complain. Whoever is aware of the fetters he placed on soldiers’ hands have led directly to the murder of a large number of Jews has difficulty refraining from use of the terrible word ‘murder.’”
At this time, a group of Orthodox rabbis gave religious sanction to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. These rabbis, both in Israel and abroad, revived two obsolete concepts—-din rodef (the duty to kill a Jew who imperils the life or property of another Jew) and din moser (the duty to eliminate a Jew who intends to turn another Jew in to non-Jewish authorities.) By relinquishing rule over parts of the Land of Israel to the Palestinian Authority , these rabbis argued, the head of the Israeli government had become a moser. And by so branding Rabin, they effectively declared open season on his life.
Two students of Rabbi Shmuel Dvir, a teacher in the Har Etzion Yeshiva reported that he had told them it was definitely permissible under the provision of din rodef. Rabbi Nachum Rabinovich, , a respected authority in religious law who headed the Orthodox rabbinical seminary in London before emigrating to Israel, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that the position of the Rabin government was similar to that of the “Judenrate” in Nazi-occupied Europe.
For many in Israel’s Orthodox community, the murder of Rabin was viewed as a miracle. Bar-Ilan University sociologist Nissan Rubin, himself of moderate political views, declared, “There is a feeling among the religious public that Rabin’s death was a miracle. Citing ancient Jewish myths of miraculous rescue…Just as the Jews were always saved from destruction at the last minute—-an allusion to the parting of the Red Sea during the Exodus and to the 11th hour rescue of the Jews from Persia from the wicked Haman, so now people are saying a miracle has occurred.”
As we have seen in Israel’s Nov. 1 election result, the depth of Israel’s cultural divide can be observed in the fact that those who embraced Yigal Amir and his act of murder are not a small, isolated fringe, but a large segment of Israeli society. Hebrew University sociologist Moshe Lissak states that, “Yigal Amir grew out of the mainstream, not the margins. What is referred to as the ‘ideological fringe’ is actually very broad.”
Rabbi Yehuda Amital, the founder of Meimad, a movement of politically moderate religious nationalists, said that, “The murderer came from among us, out of religious Zionism and Judaism, and we cannot say that ‘our hands have not shed this blood.’…Political extremism has been dressed up as religion.”
Discussing the achievement of authors Karpin and Friedman, the respected Israeli author Amos Elon writes, “‘Murder In The Name of God’ does two things: it offers an excellent account of the sinister cabal staged by reckless politicians , bogus rabbis and other mystagogues…that led to the ‘religious’ murder of Yitzhak Rabin…(they) draw a frightening picture of a sick society …that allowed this cabal to mature…”
The people who supported the murder of Yitzhak Rabin and their descendants now have the upper hand in Israeli political life. It is up to the U.S. Government and American Jewish organizations to decide how to respond to an Israeli society which seems to be turning its back on such Western values as religious freedom, separation of religion and state, and democratic values such as “one man,one vote.” Can anyone, at the present time, claim that Israel and the U.S., in any sense, share “common values?” If they do not, what is the basis for massive amounts of foreign assistance? And what is the basis of referring to Israel as a “Jewish state” if it rejects the Jewish belief that men and women of every race and nation are created in God’s image and are equal in His sight?
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Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism (
www.acjna.org).