In 1995, the Purim holiday was an occasion for a special radical right ceremony, the anniversary of the Hebron massacre and the death of Goldstein. A Goldstein cult had emerged and his memory became the rallying point of the disbanded Kahane movement. A 550-page edited memorial was published in March 1995, the Hebrew title of which translates as Baruch, the Man: A Memorial Volume for Dr Baruch Goldstein, the Saint. May God Avenge His Blood. Edited by Michael Ben Horin, a Golan settler, the major theme of the book was conceived by Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg, head of the radical Tomb of Yoseph yeshiva in Nablus. Ginzburg made headlines in 1988 by providing Halakhic support for several of his students who had unilaterally shot Palestinian civilians. It was fully legitimate, he declared, to kill non-combatant Palestinians. Goldstein, he believed, was not a criminal and mass murderer but a man of piety and deep religious conviction. Ginzburg wrote: “About the value of Israel’s life, it simply seems that the life of Israel is worth more than the life of the Gentile and even if the Gentile does not intend to hurt Israel it is permissible to hurt him in order to save Israel.” He called the Hebron massacre “a shining moment”.14
Amir, Rabin’s assassin, avidly read Baruch Hagever. He explained the assassination to his interrogators by saying that, “If not for a Halakhic ruling of din rodef, made against Rabin by a few rabbis I knew about, it would have been very difficult for me to murder. Such a murder must be backed up. If I did not get the backing and I had not been representing many more people, I would not have acted.”15
A Long Tradition
Zionist terrorism is hardly a new phenomenon. The history of pre-Israel Palestine gives ample evidence of the terrorist mindset of many Zionist activists, a mindset that produced acts of violence which took the lives of fellow Jews, Arabs and others who involved themselves in the political debates over the creation of Israel. Consider some of the major examples:
· In 1933, Chaim Arlosoroff, a young Labour politician seemingly destined to be the first prime minister of the future Jewish state, was shot dead while walking on Tel Aviv beach. His murder came at the height of a campaign of personal denunciation conducted by a small group of right-wing Zionists known as B’rith Habirionim (“Covenant of Terrorists”: the original “Habirionim” had been vigilantes who targeted collaborators during the Jewish revolt against ancient Rome). Arlosoroff attracted the wrath of the extreme right because of his attempts to negotiate with Nazi Germany freedom for wealthy German Jews to leave with their money provided they used it to buy German goods and bring them to Palestine. The murder was never proved in court, but it blackened the image of the Revisionist movement, causing it widely to be seen as fascist and terrorist.
· During the darkest days of the Second World War, when Great Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany, Lehi (Israel’s Freedom Fighters), launched in 1940 by Abraham Stern, fought the British. When all other Jewish groups in Palestine declared a cease-fire with the British and prayed that the Allied forces would survive the 1940–2 Nazi offensive, Lehi fighters planted bombs in British installations and killed British soldiers. Their leaders even sent messages of support to the Nazis and offered their co-operation in the future Nazi world order.
· On 6 November 1944, Lehi members murdered in Cairo Lord Moyne, a member of the British war cabinet who served as state minister for the Middle East. The reason for his murder? He was thought to be responsible for blocking the entrance to Palestine of Jewish refugees.
· On 22 July 1946, members of the Zionist terror group Irgun blew up Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which served as the headquarters of the British administration in Palestine. More than eighty civilians were killed, including many Jews.
· On 9 April 1948, the Irgun and Lehi launched an attack on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Situated in the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Deir Yassin was of no immediate threat to the Zionist forces. Its residents were considered passive, and its leaders had agreed with those of an adjacent Jewish neighbourhood, Givat Shaul, that each side would prevent its own people from attacking the other. It was the Muslim Sabbath when the attack by the Irgun and Lehi, with the reluctant acquiescence of the mainstream Jewish defence organisation, the Haganah, took place. All the inhabitants of the village were ordered out into a square, where they were lined up against the wall and shot. More than one hundred civilians were killed. News of the massacre spread rapidly and helped prompt a panic flight of hundreds of thousands Palestinians from their homes.
Most of the victims of the Deir Yassin massacre were women, children and older people. The men of the village were absent because they worked in Jerusalem. Irgun leader Menachem Begin issued this euphoric message to his troops after the attack: “Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest … As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou hast chosen us for conquest.”
David Shipler, Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times from 1979 to 1984, reports that
The Jewish fighters who planned the attack on Deir Yassin also had a larger purpose, apparently. A Jerusalem woman and her son, who gave some of the men coffee in the pre-dawn hours before their mission, recall the guerrillas’ talking excitedly of the prospect of terrifying Arabs far beyond the village of Deir Yassin so that they would run away. Perhaps this explains why the Jewish guerrillas did not bury the Arabs they had killed, but left their bodies to be seen, and why they paraded surviving prisoners, blindfolded and with hands bound, in the backs of trucks though the streets of Jerusalem, a scene still remembered with a shudder by Jews who saw it.16
· There were other massacres of Arabs. One occurred on 29 October 1956, the eve of Israel’s Suez campaign, when the army ordered all Israeli-Arab villages near the Jordanian border to be placed under a wartime curfew that was to run from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. the next day. Any Arab on the streets would be shot. No arrests were to be made. But the order was given to Israeli border police units only at 3:30 p.m., without time to communicate it to the Arabs affected, many of whom were at work or in their fields. In Kfar Kassem, Israeli border troops took up positions at various points and slaughtered villagers as they came home, unaware that a curfew had been imposed. The troops fired into one truck carrying fourteen women and four men. Villagers were hauled out of trucks, lined up and shot. In all, forty-seven Arabs, all of them Israeli citizens, were killed during the early hours of the curfew at Kfar Kassem. Lance Corporal Shalom Ofer, deputy squad leader, ordered that all women and children be shot repeatedly until none remained alive.
Messianic Zionism
There is too little understanding of the nature of the Jewish religious extremism which continues to be so much a part of Israel’s political life. In his recently published study of the similarities between terrorist groups motivated by religion, be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Sikh, Mark Juergensmeyer of the University of California reports on a conversation he had with Yoel Lerner, an activist leader who served time in prison for his part in the attempt to blow up the Dome of the Rock:
Yoel Lerner … believes in a form of Messianic Zionism. In his view the prophesied Messiah will come to earth only after the temple is rebuilt and made ready for him … the issue of the temple was not only a matter of cultural nostalgia but also one of pressing religious importance … In Lerner’s view the redemption of the whole world depends upon the actions of Jews in creating the conditions necessary for messianic salvation … He … told me that there had been a great deal of discussion in the months before Rabin’s death about the religious justification for the political assassination—or “execution,” as Lerner called it—of Jewish leaders who were felt to be dangerously irresponsible and were de facto enemies of Judaism. Thus it was “no surprise” to Lerner that someone like Yigal Amir was successful in killing Rabin. The only thing that puzzled him, he said, was that “no one had done it earlier.”17
The growth in Israel of a form of “messianic Zionism” makes control over all of the biblical Land of Israel a religious mandate. According to Rabbi Yitzhak Kook, the chief rabbi of pre-Israel Palestine, the secular state of Israel is the precursor of the religious Israel to come. Juergensmeyer points out that
This messianic Zionism was greatly enhanced by Israel’s successes in the 1967 Six-Day War … Jewish nationalists impressed with K[ook]’s theology felt strongly that history was quickly leading to the moment of divine redemption and the re-creation of the biblical state of Israel.
Kahane deviated from K[ook]’s version of messianic Zionism in that he saw nothing of religious significance in the establishment of a secular Jewish state. According to Kahane, the true creation of a religious Israel was yet to come … [H]owever, he felt that … he and his partisans could help bring about this messianic act. This is where Kahane’s notion of kiddush ha-Shem was vital: insofar as Jews were exalted and their enemies humiliated, God was glorified and the Messiah’s coming was more likely.18
Jewish extremists, according to Juergensmeyer, are convinced that their violent acts have been authorised as weapons in a “divine warfare sanctioned by God”. Goldstein’s massacre in Hebron in 1994 was thus described as a military act.
New Terrorist Threats
The Jewish Telegraph Agency reported in June 2000 that “threatening letters arrive regularly at the premier’s office. One recently sent anonymously to Moledet Knesset Member Benny Elon read, ‘To the best of my judgement, one should prepare a shelf plan to assassinate Ehud Barak. Just like the Oslo Accord process was slowed down after the annihilation of Yitzhak Rabin, one can prevent withdrawal in the Golan by annihilating Ehud Barak.’ Settler preparations for the ‘final battle’ are strongest in the areas where radicalism is usually most pronounced—Hebron, Beit-El and Kedumum.”
Shimon Riklin, leader of a group of young militant settlers, warned: “If Barak evacuates settlements, he might be murdered.”19 Rabbi Daniel Shilo declared in his settlement’s newsletter that “the transfer of parts of Eretz Israel amounts to treason”. In June 2000, Benny Katzover, a leader in the West Bank settlement movement, called Education Minister Yossie Sarid, head of the dovish Meretz party, “an executioner among executioners” because he is “ready to transfer tens of thousands of Jews to the enlightened regime of his excellency Yasser Arafat”. Katzover suggested that those protesting against the peace process not stick to the “law book” in their demonstrations.
In his book, A Little Too Close to God, David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Report, recalls the atmosphere at anti-Rabin rallies sponsored by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party: “I felt as if I were among wild animals, vicious, angry predators craving flesh and scenting blood. There was elation in the anger, elation bred of the certainty of eventual success.”20 Now, he fears, this extremism is on the march again.
Within the Jewish community itself, violence appears increasingly close to the surface. In June, a Conservative synagogue was set on fire in Jerusalem. Yonathan Liebowitz, a spokesman for the Conservative movement, said witnesses reported seeing apparently Orthodox men, wearing black velvet skullcaps, fleeing as the flames raged. The synagogue had previously been defaced with graffiti that labelled it a place unworthy for worship. The refusal to permit genuine religious freedom for non-Orthodox forms of Judaism fuels such actions.
Unchecked Violence
The response to such religious violence has been minimal in Israeli religious and governmental circles. Barbara Sofer points out that when three synagogues were burned in Sacramento, California, the city’s entire religious community—of Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims—as well as the civic leadership, came together to show solidarity in the face of such a brutal assault. Law-enforcement authorities quickly apprehended the guilty parties. In Israel, she laments, “Where is our religious establishment? Rabbis cannot remain silent … I’m just one observant Jewish Jerusalemite. I condemn violence against any synagogue, any church and any mosque.”21
Synagogue president Hilary Herzberger said that, “If the chief rabbi had come out against such behavior, maybe it could have been prevented.” Rabbi Ehud Brandel, president of the Masorti, the Conservative movement in Israel, said that the lack of a strong response by authorities the last time a synagogue was attacked “sent a message of encouragement to those radical groups”. Legislator Meir Porush of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism bloc accused the Conservative movement of being responsible for burning its own synagogue. This charge led Naomi Hazan of the secular Meretz Party to charge Porush with making “anti-Semitic statements” by blaming the victim for the crime.22
Rabbi Andrew Sacks, director of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly in Israel, said the key to change lies as much with the ultra-Orthodox establishment as with the police, who did not make any arrests after past attacks on Reform and Conservative synagogues. “I have no reason to think that the arson will change anything,” he said. “As longs as there is no punishment meted out, then what incentive is there for an individual not to do this?”23
Israel’s reluctance to take action against Jewish terrorism has a long history. Sprinzak points out that following the 1948 assassination by Lehi terrorists of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, talks were held between Shaul Avigur, aide to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and the leaders of Lehi (including future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir), who were then in hiding:
An agreement of the latter to stop all subversive operations if Lehi’s members would not be discriminated against in the army was achieved. Avigur asked Shamir the names of the assassins, promising that nothing would happen to them, but Shamir refused to give them. Not one member of the hit team would ever spend a night jail or face a court of justice. For years there was a conspiracy of silence about the Bernadotte assassination … In 1960, the most talkative of all former Lehi commanders, Israel Eldad, approached Gideon Housner, the state attorney general, and offered to tell the truth about the assassination. “God forbid!” was Housner’s response. “Do you know the problems you will create for your country?”24
Now, as the secular leaders of Israel and the Palestinians move, however tortuously, towards a final peace agreement, it is time to confront the truth of Zionist terrorism and its long history, as well as the terrorism of Palestinian and other radical Islamic groups. Such terror groups represent small but vocal minorities, yet they have been permitted to exercise influence out of all proportion to their numbers. If history is not properly confronted, it will be impossible for both Israel and the Palestinians to move beyond it. And if the present opportunity for peace is permitted to slip away, few on either side will profit from the resulting chaos and disorder.
Endnotes
1. See Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman, Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin (London: Granta Books, 1998), pp. 4–5.
2. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
3. Donald Neff, “Jewish Defense League Unleashes Campaign of Violence in America”, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July–August 1999, p. 81.
4. Ibid.
5. Ehud Sprinzak, Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 145.
6. Ibid., p. 146.
7. Ibid., p. 153.
8. Ibid., p. 165.
9. Yair Kotler, Heil Kahane (New York: Adama Books, 1986), p. 198.
10. Sprinzak, Brother against Brother, p. 242.
11. Ibid., p. 245.
12. See Karpin and Friedman, Murder in the Name of God, pp. 83–5.
13. Ibid., pp. 105–7.
14. Sprinzak, Brother against Brother, pp. 259–60.
15. Ibid., p. 277.
16. David Shipler, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (New York: Times Books, 1986), pp. 37–8.
17. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 46–7.
18. Ibid., pp. 54–5.
19. Jerusalem Report, 3 July 2000.
20. David Horovitz, cited in the New York Times, 30 June 2000.
21. “Jerusalem Conservative Synagogue Torched”, Jerusalem Post (international edition), 30 June 2000.
22. Ibid.
23. “Not on Its Own”, Jerusalem Post (international edition), 7 July 2000.
24. Sprinzak, Brother against Brother, pp. 46–7.
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