Israeli Rabbi
Preaches ‘Slaughter’ of Gentile Babies
Settlers Ramp Up ‘Price Tag’ Policy
By JONATHAN COOK
Counterpunch
August 2, 2010
A rabbi from one of the most violent settlements in the West Bank
was questioned on suspicion of incitement last week as Israeli police stepped up
their investigation into a book in which he sanctions the killing of non-Jews,
including children and babies.
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira is one of the leading ideologues of the
most extreme wing of the religious settler movement. He is known to be a
champion of the “price-tag” policy of reprisal attacks on Palestinians,
including punishing them for attempts by officials to enforce Israeli law
against the settlements.
So far the policy has chiefly involved violent harassment of
Palestinians, with settlers inflicting beatings, attacking homes, throwing
stones, burning fields, killing livestock and poisoning wells.
It is feared, however, that Shapira’s book The King’s Torah,
published last year, is intended to offer ideological justifications for
widening the scope of such attacks to include killing Palestinians, even
children.
Although Shapira was released a few hours after his questioning
last Monday, dozens of rabbis, as well as several members of parliament, rallied
to his side, condemning the arrest.
Shlomo Aviner, one of the settlement
movement’s leaders, defended the book’s arguments as a “legitimate stance” and
one that should be taught in Jewish seminaries.
But in a sign of mounting official unease at Shapira’s influence
on the settlement movement, the Israeli military authorities also threatened
last week to enforce a decade-old demolition order on Yitzhar’s seminary, which
was built without a permit.
Dror Etkes, a Tel Aviv-based expert on the
settlements, said the order was unlikely to be carried out but was a way to
pressure Yitzhar’s 500 inhabitants to rein in their more violent attacks.
He said the authorities had begun taking a harder line against
Yitzhar only since Shapira and several of his students were suspected of
torching a mosque in the neighboring village of Yasuf last December.
“Shapira is trying to redefine the conflict with the
Palestinians, turning it from a national conflict into a religious one. That
frightens Israel. It doesn’t want to look as though it is fighting the whole
Islamic world,” Etkes said.
He added that the rabbi and his supporters were closely
associated with Kach, a movement founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane that
demands the expulsion of all Palestinians from a “Greater Israel”. Despite Kach
being banned, officials have largely turned a blind eye as its ideology has
flourished in the settlements.
“It may be illegal to call oneself Kach but the authorities are
more than tolerant of settlers who hold such views and carry out violent
attacks. In fact, what Kahane was doing in the 1980s seems like child’s play
compared with today’s settlers.”
In the 230-page book, Shapira and his co-author, Rabbi Yosef
Elitzur, also from Yitzhar, argue that Jewish law permits the killing of
non-Jews in a wide variety of circumstances. The terms “gentiles” and “non-Jews”
in the book are widely understood as references to Palestinians.
They write that Jews have the right to kill gentiles in any
situation in which “a non-Jew’s presence endangers Jewish lives” even if the
gentile is “not at all guilty for the situation that has been created”.
The book sanctions the killing of non-Jewish children and babies:
“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.”
The rabbis suggest that harming the children of non-Jewish
leaders is justified if it is likely to bring pressure to bear on them to change
policy.
The authors also advocate committing “cruel deeds to create the
proper balance of terror” and treating all members of an “enemy nation” as
targets for retaliation, even if they are not directly participating in hostile
activities.
The rabbis appear to be offering justifications in Jewish law for
collective punishment and other war crimes of the kind committed by the Israeli
army in its attack on Gaza in the winter of 2008.
Pamphlets similarly calling on soldiers to “show no mercy” were
distributed by the army’s rabbinate as troops prepared for the Gaza operation,
in which 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, were killed.
Religious settlers have come to dominate many combat units.
An investigation last year by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights
group, found Shapira’s seminary had received government funds worth at least
$300,000 in recent years. American and British groups have also contributed tens
of thousands of dollars in tax-deductible donations.
According to the Jerusalem Post newspaper, the Yitzhar settlers
have responded to the demolition order against their seminary by threatening to
publish documents showing that the housing and transport ministries were closely
involved in the project too.
The settlers have repeatedly rampaged through nearby Palestinian
villages, most notoriously in September 2008, when they were filmed shooting at
homes in Assira al-Kabaliya, smashing properties and daubing Stars of David on
homes. Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the time, termed the settlers’ actions
a “pogrom”.
The same year a religious student from Yitzhar was arrested for
firing home-made rockets at Palestinian villages close by.
In April, Yitzhar’s settlers marched through the village of
Huwara and pelted a Palestinian family’s home with stones in “reprisal” for the
arrest of 11 of their number.
A settler from Yitzhar was questioned last month over the fatal
shooting of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Aysar Zaban, in May, reportedly after
stones were thrown at the settler’s car. The teenager was shot in the back.
Last week, the settlers attacked Burin, shooting at villagers and
burning fields.
In most of these cases, the settlers who were arrested were
released a short time later either by the police or the courts. In January, a
Jerusalem judge freed Rabbi Shapira for lack of evidence in the arson attack on
the mosque.
Yitzhak Ginsburg, an authority on Jewish law and a mentor to
Shapira, was questioned by police last Thursday over his endorsement of the
book. In the past Ginsburg has praised Baruch Goldstein, a settler who opened
fire in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque in 1994, killing 29 Palestinian worshippers.
In 2003 Ginsburg was accused of incitement for publishing a book
that called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and the occupied
territories, but the charges were dropped after he issued a “clarification
statement”.
A group calling itself “Students of Yitzhak Ginsburg” recently
distributed a leaflet urging Israeli soldiers to “spare your lives and the lives
of your friends and show no concern for a population that surrounds us and harms
us”.
What is Kach?
Kach was founded in 1971 by the late Meir
Kahane, an American rabbi who immigrated to Israel. He won a seat in the Israeli
parliament in 1984 on a platform of expelling all Palestinians from Israel and
the occupied territories. As an MP, he drafted legislation to revoke the Israeli
citizenship of non-Jews and ban sexual relations between Jews and gentiles.
The political party was banned from running for the Israeli
parliament in 1988 and the movement was outlawed six years later. Although the
group is considered a terrorist organization in the United States and most of
Europe, its ideology has been allowed to thrive in the settlements.
Today, dozens of rabbis espouse an interpretation of Jewish
religious law identical to or worse than Kahane’s.
Michael Ben Ari, a former Kach leader, was elected as an MP last
year for the far-right National Union party, which holds four seats in the
120-member parliament.
Avigdor Lieberman, who leads the
parliament’s third largest party and is foreign minister, briefly joined the
party before it was banned. His own party’s anti-Arab “No loyalty, no
citizenship” program includes echoes of Kahane’s ideology.
A
shorter version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.
Share this Article
Here is your
chance to help this article to be read by thousands more people by sharing it on your favourite social networking site. You can also email the
article from here.
