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Tikun Olam, December 4, 2010 The worst forest fires ever to have struck Israel are sweeping through the Carmel Mountains surrounding Haifa. 42 prison guard trainees died when their bus was blocked on a highway and burned, thus cutting off their escape. It is the worst loss of life in a natural disaster in Israel’s history. 17,000 have been evacuated. The University is threatened. While it is natural for human beings facing such tragedy to look for villains and scapegoats, it’s unfortunate the direction that attention has turned. Israeli Jews have gravitated to a nasty spate of rumors blaming Palestinian Israelis for deliberately setting the fires as an act of terror and protest. This commenter in a comment thread here writes, linking to the Drudge-like Rotter internet news portal (and rumor-mill):
In fact, this Arab news source says that on Saturday, the residents of the town actually gathered in the soccer stadium to pray for rain. Either the earlier rumor is wrong or Fureidis is massively schizoid. Only a day earlier, the same individual wrote this:
And a different commenter writes about the fires:
Rotter itself fuels the flames with this:
Funny thing that this alleged report hasn’t been confirmed anywhere else in the Israeli media. But now that it’s circulating in the Israel right-wing underworld of rumor and hate, the notion will have a long shelf life. All this reinforces a right-wing nationalist narrative that proclaims that the Palestinian minority is the enemy within, a force that can never be trusted. One that will side with “the enemy” during war or security crisis. There’s only one problem with this line of thinking: it’s wrong. Dead wrong. Except for a few minor exceptions and despite massive levels of hate, mistrust and discrimination, Israeli Palestinians have shown remarkable dedication to the State, which is, after all, their country. Let’s examine the reputable Israeli media reporting on the fires. True, one strain of reporting emanating from the National Police (who tend to follow the Shabak’s lead and be harshly anti-Arab in their views and prejudices) arouses suspicion of arson. But if you read the following carefully you’ll see that the police chief is not claiming the original fires were Arab-inspired arson, but rather that future copy cat fires might be. Also, note how bereft of evidence or proof the police “suspicion” is in the first paragraph and that the police don’t even seem to be basing these suspicions on field investigations:
Further fueling the rumors were reports that two residents of a Druze village were arrested on suspicion of setting the fires. But the suspects were quickly released:
The second strain of reporting seems to derive from fire department sources who are on the scene or in contact with those who are. This strain rejects claims of arson completely:
While it’s too early to know definitively what the final determination will be, I feel safe saying that it’s likely that Israeli racism fueled by great pain and suffering has induced Jews to level yet another form of blood libel against their fellow Palestinian citizens. The wild exaggeration hasn’t been limited to blaming Israeli Palestinians either. Ynetnews blares this headline:
The body of the report says no such thing. It quotes the following Hezbollah statement:
Even most Israelis would agree with these sentiments. So where’s the joy? I might add that among the 42 Israelis who died during the fires were three Druze and one Ethiopian. Instead of falling prey to ethnic division and scapegoating, why can’t Israelis focus on the fact they all (Jewish and Palestinian) have lost something deep and painful with this natural disaster? Why not acknowledge that the PA sent its firefighters to battle the blaze and Turkey too offered help? Instead of finger-pointing at the weakest link in society and blaming them, why don’t Israelis turn their wrath where it belongs–toward an inept government more attuned to building expensive high-tech walls, Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and buying F-35 jets as toys for the IAF; when it could’ve bought or leased a single air tanker that could’ve attacked this fire when it was at its origins, instead of having to wait for nations like Cyprus and Greece to send their equipment after the conflagration went out of control. I write this post in the context of a disturbing survey by the Israel Democracy Institute baring the deep racism inherent in Israel society toward the Palestinian minority. In the ways in which Israeli Jews have contemplated this disaster, the bad news of this poll have been borne out. UPDATE: An up to the minute report from an Israeli reader confirms that the police are now agreeing that the fire was caused by negligence. What are the odds that any Israeli politician or police officer will ever apologize to Palestinian citizens for promoting these rumors?
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:: Article nr. 72509 sent on 04-dec-2010 22:19 ECT
For those of us who live here, it is something we take for granted. But visitors from abroad cannot believe their eyes.
By Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu
October 30, 2010 “Haaretz” — Under the guise of the deceptively mundane name “Amendment to the Cooperative Associations Bill,” the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee this week finalized a bill intended to bypass previous rulings of the High Court of Justice. If indeed this legislation is approved by the Knesset plenum, it will not be possible to describe it as anything other than an apartheid law.
Ten years ago, the High Court of Justice ordered the town of Katzir to accept the family of Adel and Iman Kaadan, Arab citizens of Israel, as members of the community. Seven years later, the court issued a similar ruling against the Galilee village of Rakefet, which, like Katzir, is Jewish. Now, however, the legislature has come up with a proper “Zionist” response to the justices: If it becomes law, the amendment will give acceptance committees of communal villages the authority to limit residence in their towns exclusively to Jews.
Using polished and sanitized language, the bill would allow such committees in small rural suburbs to reject applications from families that “are incompatible with the social-cultural fabric of the community, and where there are grounds to assume that they will disrupt this fabric.”
In other words, if admissions committees were previously forced to exercise some degree of creativity if they wanted to hide their national-ethnic grounds for rejecting Arabs, now, as Rabbi Akiva said, “All is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted” (Pirkei Avot 3 ). Arabs? Not here. Sorry, the law is with us on this.
Those who feign innocence, including some from the center of our political map, will say, “The bill is not intended to keep out Arabs. What’s wrong with supporting the right of communities to protect their unique way of life?”
Indeed, what is wrong with that? There’s no argument that the vegetarians of Moshav Amirim, in the Galilee, have a right to defend themselves against an invasion of carnivores, just as the practitioners of transcendental meditation at Hararit, in the Misgav region, need to be able to meditate without interruption, but those communities are genuinely unique in character. This is not the case for the dozens of yeshuvim kehilati’im (literally, “community settlements” ) all over Israel, whose principal cultural feature is the fact that their residents are Jewish and Zionist – hardly a population under imminent threat, whose unique way of life needs protection.
Several months ago, we were given a glimpse of just how quickly the new law will be implemented, when several such villages, anticipating the Knesset’s action, hurriedly established bylaws that effectively barred Arabs. In the communities of Yuvalim and Manof, in the Misgav area, applicants are now required to declare their allegiance to the Zionist vision, while in Mitzpe Aviv, a bit to the south, applicants must declare their identification with the values of Zionism and the definition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
It’s not as if Arab families are standing in line to move to these gated communities, which were established mainly in the 1970s and ’80s by Zionist organizations like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund for the purpose of “Judaizing” areas like the Negev and the Galilee. No one ever expected these towns to provide the answer to the horrendous housing shortage faced by Israel’s Arab population. For them, not a single new town has been established since 1948, with the exception of a few impoverished Bedouin settlements in the Negev. Nor has the central government seen fit to assist or give approval to the existing Arab municipalities in the drawing up of master plans that would allow them to implement a program of growth and development to meet the needs of a growing population or mitigate their poor quality of life.
And this is without even mentioning cities like Upper Nazareth, Safed or Carmiel, where a variety of statements have been made – sometimes by the most senior municipal officials themselves – that are designed to push Arabs out or prevent their integration into these cities.
Segregation of Jews and Arabs in Israel of 2010 is almost absolute. For those of us who live here, it is something we take for granted. But visitors from abroad cannot believe their eyes: segregated education, segregated businesses, separate entertainment venues, different languages, separate political parties … and of course, segregated housing. In many senses, this is the way members of both groups want things to be, but such separation only contributes to the growing mutual alienation of Jews and Arabs.
Several courageous attempts – particularly in mixed cities and regions – have been made to change the situation, bridge the rifts and promote integration. These range from efforts to develop mixed educational frameworks, to joint economic ventures and other interventions intended to foster good neighborly relations based on equal opportunity. Until now, these attempts addressed a situation of de facto segregation. From today, however, segregation will be de jure, to the shame of Israel.
Amnon Be’eri Sulitzeanu is the co-executive director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives, an organization that promotes coexistence and equality between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens.
Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world-only to serve the People of Israel.”
From Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers.
Shas is a chief coalition partner in the current Israeli government,
Yosef, also a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, was quoted by the right-wing newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, as saying that the basic function of a goy, a derogatory word for a gentile, was to serve Jews.
“Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world-only to serve the People of Israel,” Yosef said in his weekly Saturday night sermon which was devoted to laws regarding actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on the Sabbath.
Yosef also reportedly said that the lives of non-Jews in Israel are preserved by God in order to prevent losses to Jews.
Yosef, widely considered a prominent Torah sage and authority on the interpretation of Talmud, a basic Jewish scripture, held a comparison between animals of burden and non-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 further elucidated his ideas about the servitude of gentiles to Jews, asking “why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap; and we will sit like an effendi and eat.”
“That is why gentiles were created.”
The concept of gentiles being infra-human beings or quasi-animals is well-established in Orthodox Judaism.
For example, rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement, a supremacist but influential Jewish sect, teach openly that at the spiritual level, non-Jews have the status of animals.
Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, was quoted as saying that the difference between a Jew and a gentile was greater and deeper than the difference between humans and animals.
“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.”
Some of Kook’s manifestly racist ideas are taught in the Talmudic college, Merkaz H’arav, in Jerusalem. The college is named after Kook.
In his book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, the late Israeli writer and intellectual Israel Shahak argued that whenever Orthodox rabbis use the word “human,” they normally didn’t refer to all humans, but only to Jews, since non-Jews are not considered humans according to Halacha of Jewish law.
A few years ago, a member of the Israeli Knesset, castigated Israeli soldiers for “treating human beings as if they were Arabs.” The Knesset member, Aryeh Eldad, was commenting on the evacuation by the Israeli army of a settler outpost in the West Bank.
Faced with the negative effect of certain Biblical and Talmudic teachings on inter-religious relations, some Christian leaders in Europe have called on the Jewish religious establishment to reform the traditional Halacha perceptions of non-Jews.
However, while the Reform and Conservative sects of Judaism, have related positively to such calls, most Orthodox Jews have totally rejected the calls, arguing that the Bible is God’s word which can’t be altered under any circumstances.
The Bible says that non-Jews living under Jewish rule must serve as “water carriers and wood hewers” for the master race.
In Joshua (9:27), we read ” That day, Joshua made the Gibeonites woodcutters and water carriers for the community and for the altar of the Lord at the Place the Lord would choose. And that is what they are to this days.”
Elsewhere in the Bible, Israelites are strongly urged to treat “strangers living in your midst” humanely “because you yourselves were strangers in Egypt.”
During a recent appearance on Antiwar Radio author and investigative journalist Max Blumenthal discusses his recent article on the Torat Ha’Melech, or the King’s Torah, a 230 page “guidebook” for Jews who are considering killing non-Jews.
According to Blumenthal:
As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha’Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book’s contents 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 book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, “Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and should be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments… there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”
Read more here.
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