Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2007, pages 50-51
Israel and Judaism
Dismay Grows Among U.S., Israeli Jews Over Expressions of Intolerance and Bigotry
By Allan C. Brownfeld
On a number of different issues, dismay is growing among Jews, both in the U.S. and Israel, about manifestations of what many perceive to be intolerance and bigotry. This relates to the treatment not only of Palestinians, but of non-Orthodox branches of Judaism as well.
In Israel, only Orthodox rabbis may perform weddings and funerals. In fact, non-Orthodox rabbis have fewer rights in Israel than in any country in the world which maintains that it practices religious freedom. The hostility to other strains of Judaism is always beneath the surface, and often finds expression in the highest places.
Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, who for a decade served as Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, recently declared in an interview on a private ultra-Orthodox radio station called “The Voice of Truth” (Kol Ha’emet) that Reform Judaism was to blame for the Holocaust.
“The Reformers started in Germany,” he declared. “Those redactors of the Jewish faith began in Germany. We learn from this that it is forbidden to attempt to change Judaism.”
The Holocaust, Rabbi Eliyahu charged, was divine punishment meted out to Jews as a result of the “sin” of Reform Judaism.
In a front-page article in the May 14 issue of The Forward, Rabbi David Ellenson, president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, lamented that, “There is unfortunately nothing particularly novel about this obscenity. I heard this charge made from the pulpit of my Orthodox synagogue by a rabbi when I was a teenager, and all students of modern Jewish intellectual history and thought are aware that the Satmar rebbe issued this charge against Reform and secular Zionism in the years immediately after World War II.”
Thus far, Rabbi Ellenson reported, the Orthodox rabbinate has been silent with regard to Rabbi Eliyahu’s attack. “Were Orthodox and other Jewish voices to be raised in protest against those obscene thoughts and deeds,” he concluded, “it would truly be an act of decency that would sanctify God’s name.”
“Hateful speech seems to have no end,” editorialized Washington Jewish Week. “To blame the Holocaust on any Jews is unconscionable. The Reform movement is no more responsible for the destruction of European Jewry than it is for the genocide now taking place in Darfur...The Talmud speaks against lashon hara, evil speech. A Chasidic tale tells us that you can no more make amends for your hurtful words than you can collect the feathers from a pillow that has been cut open. Surely, Eliyahu knows that, too.”
Intolerance in Israel
In Israel, more and more Jews are challenging what they consider an expression of unacceptable intolerance.
Israel’s parliament currently is considering a law that would reserve almost one-seventh of the nation’s land area for Jewish ownership. The land, comprising almost 1,000 square miles scattered throughout the country, is owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a public trust which the Zionist movement set up a century ago to purchase land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. For nearly 50 years, JNF land has been made available for purchase through the government-run Israel Lands Authority (ILA), which has given the JNF nearly half the seats on its board and honored the fund’s policy of selling only to Jews. Israel’s Supreme Court will soonhear three petitions from civil rights groups challenging the government’s compliance with that policy, arguing that it discriminates against the 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish. The bill moving through the Knesset is an attempt to pre-empt the court, which is expected to rule against the JNF policy.
The Supreme Court case challenges a 2004 ILA decision forbidding a real estate transaction and a public land tender that would have transferred ownership of JNF land to Israeli Arabs. The ILA said it was under an obligation to honor a commitment to the JNF not to sell its land to non-Jews.
Yoav Loeff, a spokesman for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, one of the parties to the court petition, argued that “the obligation of the Israel Lands Authority, as a governmental agency, to the principle of equality is absolute and much stronger than any other commitment to the JNF.”
The Arab civil rights group Adallah argued in a brief for the Supreme Court that the lands authority’s policy encourages segregation between Jewish and Arab Israelis. Passage of the JNF bill would mark the first time Israel has ever enshrined anti-Arab discriminatory practice in law, argued Adallah legal advocate Suhad Bishara. “This would be the first law in Israel that basically legalizes segregation,” she said. “This would be really what prevailed in South Africa.”
America’s largest Jewish denomination, Reform Judaism, has issued calls for the Israeli Knesset to reverse course on the legislation endorsing the sale of JNF lands only to Jews, which passed in July in a vote of 64-l6 in its first reading. To become law, it must come before the Knesset two more times. “It’s very hard to imagine any circumstance where a Jewish minority in any...Diaspora country would accept with equanimity a bill that would forbid Jews from purchasing land,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “Therefore, it is essential that when the Jewish majority in Israel exercises power, it extend to others the rights it always demanded for itself when we were in the minority.”
“How can such a prospect be justified?” asked Forward columnist Leonard Fein. “How can it be reconciled with the pledge of the State of Israel articulated in its Declaration of Independence, to ”˜ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.’ One way: Forget the talk about Jewish and democratic.”
Defenders of the policy of selling JNF land to Jews only already are denigrating the notion of democracy and equal rights, Fein pointed out. He finds unacceptable the double standard inherent in arguments in favor of the policy.
One such argument is made by Russell Robinson, CEO of the JNF in the U.S. “For 2,000 years I don’t remember that we were praying and dreaming that we can’t wait to re-establish a democratic state in the Middle East,” he said, “but we did say that we can’t wait to re-establish a Jewish homeland.”
“Israel is not America,” declared Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America. “It was created first as a Jewish state, where America was created first as a democracy.”
Nevertheless, many voices in Israel are being raised against the mistreatment of Palestinians. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has charged that Israel has used concrete, fences, checkpoints and other measures to impose restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank “that are unprecedented in scope and duration.” The group called on Israel to remove the parts of its 456-mile separation barrier that dip into the West Bank, evacuate Jewish settlers from the territory and eliminate restrictions on internal movement. As it is, B’Tselem said in its l00-page report issued in July, restrictions imposed since the September 2000 outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising have made Palestinian freedom of movement “a privilege that Israel grants or witholds as it deems fit.”
B’Tselem, also known as the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, is planning to open an office in Washington, DC by January and hopes to inject human rights into the Washington debate on the Middle East, as well as to educate American Jews on such issues.
Writing in the August 2007 issue of the Jewish magazine Moment, Letty Cottin Pogrebin noted that American Jews are in the process of distancing themselves from Israel, in large part because of what they perceive as behavior they cannot support: “Many of us are uncomfortable with the government’s kowtowing to the Orthodox rabbinate; many take issue with Israel’s military and political response to the Palestinians. While every nation has the right to defend itself, we find it impossible to Jewishly justify collective punishment, illegal settlements, house demolitions, systematic humiliations of Arabs at checkpoints, inadequate public services to Israeli-Arab villages, a 20-foot wall that divides Arabs from their fields, schools and jobs.”
The July 2007 edition of The Progressive features an article about Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the executive director in Israel of Rabbis for Human Rights, which describes itself as “the rabbinic voice of conscience in Israel, giving voice to the Jewish tradition of human rights.” The group’s mission is to “promote justice and freedom, while campaigning against discrimination and inhumane conduct.”
In the spring of 2003, reported author Robert Hirschfield, Ascherman planted his body outside Palestinian homes slated for demolition in Issawiya and Beit Hanina. The occupants, neither terrorists nor suspects, were merely Palestinians unable to obtain legal permits from the Israeli authorities. Legal permits, according to Ascherman, usually are not given to Palestinians unless they agree to pay bribes or become informers. Rabbis for Human Rights has gone to court to challenge this policy. Israel has demolished more than 2,500 Palestinian homes and thereby rendered homeless more than l6,000 Palestinians in the past two decades.
Asked if there is a debate among Israeli rabbis over human rights, Ascherman—who has said his mission is to “save the soul of Judaism”—lamented that, “The vast majority of rabbis don’t get involved in such issues. Certainly not in defense of Palestinians. They don’t regard them as rabbinical issues. Most of the rabbis who are activists are rabbis on the right. They tend to be part of the settler movement.”
Institutional Intolerance
A widely discussed article in the July 22 New York Times Magazine by Professor Noah Feldman of the Harvard Law School sheds light on the institutional intolerance of Orthodox Judaism—even that form of Orthodoxy which characterizes itself as “modern”—in the United States. Feldman described his attendance at the 10th high school reunion of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Massachusetts, a “modern” Orthodox Jewish day school. “Nearly everyone remained Orthodox,” he wrote. “I brought my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from the first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, and looked again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked her for an explanation. ”˜You’re kidding, right?’ she said. My fiance was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that, from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law, could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. The hint was reason enough to keep us out.
“Not long after,” Feldman reported, “I bumped into the photographer in synagogue on Yom Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what I already knew. ”˜It wasn’t me,’ he said. I believed him. Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school’s alumni director, who was known to me since I was a child. I say ”˜in contact’ but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him several updates about my life, for inclusion in the ”˜Mazel Tov’ section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When my son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The more recent news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of my reports made it into print.”
Feldman lamented that, “Some part of me still expects—against the judgment of experience—that the individual human beings who make up the institutions and community where I spent so many years of my life will put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries.”
For Jews, who have been victimized by so much intolerance, to act in an intolerant manner themselves is, of course, one of the tragic ironies of history. It is therefore a hopeful sign that so many Jewish voices are rising to speak out against such intolerance. Hopefully, in the long run, they will prevail.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
