06 August 2010
By Jonathan Cook
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 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
spiritual 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
neighbouring 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 organisation 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” programme includes echoes of Kahane’s
ideology.
Jonathan Cook
is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel.
His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East” (Pluto
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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