Holy orders

Posters reading “Kahane was right” have been plastered all over West Bank roadways in recent weeks (October 2013), this one on the side of an Israeli military post at Etzion Junction, West Bank, October 23, 2013. Photo by Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org

Who are the radical rabbis inspiring Israel’s most violent Jewish settlers?

Those seeking justification for violence may find in the sometimes quiet but always menacing words of rabbis just what they are looking for.

By Annie Slemrod, The Independent
July 31, 2015

While Israeli politicians have roundly condemned the deadly arson attack on a West Bank Palestinian home, no conciliatory words are to be expected from the extremist rabbis who have spent years inciting such violence.

The Hebrew words “revenge” and “long live the messiah” spray-painted on the charred building suggest extremist settlers are to blame, and the Israeli army deemed the incident “Jewish terror”.

This will come as no surprise those who have been following the West Bank’s radical rabbis. In 2009, Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, leaders at a seminary in the settlement of Yitzhar, drew controversy with The King’s Torah, a book on the permissibility of killing non-Jews.

The authors claim Jewish law allows the killing of non-Jewish children because of the future threat they may pose. “There is reason to harm children if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us,” it says.

The authors were arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after the book’s publication but were released and were never charged. In 2011, Elitzur was banned from entering Britain because of the book. [continued below photo inset]

Above, Yitzhak Shapira, below Yoseph Elizur, co-authors of the ‘King’s Torah’. Both were arrested but the Attorney General decided to drop the case.

The main theme of the book was that pretty much everything goes; in a notorious paragraph, Shapira and Elizur – rabbis in the infamous Od Yosef Hai yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, which the ISA (Shin Bet) tried to close down – claimed that

“there is reason to believe harming children, if there is reason to think they will grow up to harm us, is permitted; and in such a case, the harm should be directed specifically at them, and not just while harming grown-ups.”

Baruch Goldstein,an American-born Jew, belonged to the Jewish Defense League started by Meir Kahane. It quickly became associated with terrorist acts. In February 1994 Goldstein shot dead 29 Palestinians at prayer. He was then beaten to death with iron bars at the site of the Cave of the Patriarchs. Hence, ‘a martyr’.

“During a visit to Israeli settlers on 30 September in the occupied West Bank, Rabbi Dov Lior [above] said that Israel “must strive to cleanse the entire country” of Palestinians, ostensibly referring to present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

“Lior, who is the chief rabbi for Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron and in the Kiryat Arba settlement, was speaking at an event at Givat Oz Vgaon, an “outpost” colony recently established in the Etzion bloc of settlements in the central West Bank.”  Electronic Intifada, October 2014

Rabbi Ginsburgh: “The New York Times has described Yitzhar as “an extremist bastion on the hilltops commanding the Palestinian city of Nablus … The inhabitants of Yitzhar have a reputation as being among the most extreme Israeli settlers and regularly clash with members of the Israeli security forces and local Palestinian civilians. The settlement is at the forefront of the settler movement’s so called “price tag” policy which calls for attacks against Palestinians in retaliation for actions of the Israeli government against West Bank settlements In May 2014, Shin Bet said the price-tag hate crimes were mainly attributable to about 100 extremist youth, mostly from Yitzhar, acting on ideas associated with rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg at the community’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva.” From Wikipedia

But they are hardly the only religious leaders to use religion as justification for racism and violence. Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, the president of the Yitzhar religious school and the authors’ teacher, drew fire in the 1990s for praising Baruch Goldstein, the settler who in 1994 massacred 29 Palestinians as they were worshipping in a mosque at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs. He justified Goldstein’s actions by saying they fulfilled the Jewish legal principle of “revenge” – the very phrase marked on the house burned down in the early hours of yesterday morning.

Palestinians commemorate the first anniversary of the Cave of Patriarch’s massacre. Photo from Getty

Rabbi Dov Lior, the former chief rabbi of the settlement of Kiryat Arba, is said to have personally counselled Mr Goldstein. After his death, the rabbi deemed him “a holier martyr than all the holy martyrs of the Holocaust”.

As a municipal rabbi, Mr Lior received a government salary and since his retirement last year collects a government pension. Last year he said Israel should “cleanse” its territories of Arabs, who he calls “camel riders”. Statements by these rabbis fall far outside the norm of Jewish opinion. And the mainstream settler movement is careful to dissociate itself from its fringe elements. To the casual onlooker, the religious leaders may not appear dangerous at all.

There is little fire and brimstone and more seemingly logical argument. But those seeking justification for violence – vandalism, the torching of a church or murder – may find in the sometimes quiet but always menacing words of rabbis just what they are looking for.

A poster reading “Kahane Was Right” appears on the side of an Israeli military post at Al Nashash Junction, West Bank, October 22, 2013. Photo by Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org