Israeli rabbis: Don't spare civilians
By Khalid Amayreh in Hebron
Tuesday 07 September 2004,
Israeli rabbis say killing enemy civilians during war is 'normal'
A group of prominent Jewish rabbis have asked the Israeli army not to flinch from killing Palestinian civilians in the context of the ongoing military campaign against armed groups resisting the occupation.
In a letter to the Israeli defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, published on Tuesday, the rabbis said killing enemy civilians is "normal" during the time of war and that the Israeli occupation army should never hesitate to kill non-Jewish civilians in order to save Jewish lives.
"There is no war in the world in which it is possible to delineate entirely between the population and the enemy army, neither in the US war in Iraq, the Russian war in Chechnya, nor in Israel's war with its enemies," the rabbis said.
The rabbis quoted a Talmudic edict, or religious ruling, stating that "our lives come first".
"The Christian preaching of 'turning the other cheek' doesn't concern us, and we will not be impressed by those who prefer the lives of our enemies to our lives," they said.
Geplaatst door Siah
"The Christian preaching of 'turning the other cheek' doesn't concern us, and we will not be impressed by those who prefer the lives of our enemies to our lives," they said. [/B]
Daarom is het joods geloof ook wat primitiever dan het christelijk geloof naar mijn mening.
Dit stuk plaatste ik al eerder:
http://www.maroc.nl/nieuws/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=109151
Invitation to a kulturkampf
By Avirama Golan
Don't look for incitement in the manifesto of the 14 rabbis. It's a shame to waste your energy. It doesn't contain an echo of the brutal din rodef (the religious commandment to kill someone who is trying to harm you, which was used to justify the assassination of the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin), or the hatred of the "Oslo criminals." This is a concise and well-explained manifesto, initiated by "ordinary" rabbis, not rabbis from Joseph's Tomb in Nablus or from a lunatic hilltop in Judea. For that very reason, the manifesto is infuriating and frightening.
Rabbi Yuval Cherlow is considered in the knitted-kippa-wearing community (religious Zionists) as one of the leaders of the liberal stream, which is open to universal culture and discourse. Right-wing extremists and those who are becoming ultra-Orthodox refrain from sending their sons to the hesder yeshiva (which combines Torah study with military service) headed by Cherlow and his friends - David Stav and Shai Piron.
Yehoshua Shapira is one of the most innovative, brilliant and fascinating rabbis of the young "spiritual-Hasidic" stream; Zefania Drori of Kiryat Shmona is one of the rabbis with the most profound influence on young people who seek original social thinking. The common denominator among most of the signers of the manifesto actually lies in their charisma and influence on broad sectors of national religious youth.
Among the admirers of Cherlow and Shapira - who differ from one another in profound nuances, which are completely invisible to secular eyes - are hardalim (ultra-Orthodox nationalists), habkukim (disciples of Rabbi Kook and fans of the singing Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, including Shapira himself), newly repentant Bratslavers, datlashim (formerly religious), settlers and the urban bourgeoisie.
Among this youth, a new Israeli religious culture has been created in recent years: it is varied and open to changes, but mainly those expressed in language, dress and areas of interest. As opposed to the previous culture, that of the founders of Gush Emunim (the original settlers' movement) and their generation, it is self confident and even convinced of its superiority. Even if a significant percentage of the hesder yeshivas gives rise to conservative and narrow-minded young people, lacking in general knowledge, they themselves believe that they are a cultural elite and that their secular contemporaries don't even know Hebrew, not to mention prayer and a page of Talmud.
But make no mistake: The hard core around which this new culture is budding was sown in the settlements. The avant-garde Gush Emunim movement rescued the rejected and shy religious young people - students from modern Orthodox high schools who used to camouflage their religiousness by wearing a beret rather than a kippa - from the margins and brought them to the center of society. The hilltop youth, the avant-garde that is now bringing about the revolution, mocks its parents' ties to the establishment. This youth, rather than any rabbi, whether in Judea and Samaria or in Petah Tikva, is in effect shaping the hard core of the new culture.
And now the image is being shattered and the truth is being revealed: The rabbis are not leading the youth. They are being dragged after it. With one hand they sign the Kinneret Covenant (a document that attempts to reach consensus among various groups in Israeli society) and Siah Ahim (Discourse of Brothers), conduct a moving dialogue with secular people during the Jewish festivals, which receives broad media coverage, warn of a rift, and preach against civil war. With the other hand, the stronger of the two, they nurture the hard core they have received from their teachers, and even more from their students - a core of isolationist, racist and destructive Judaism.
This core is hidden from the eyes of secular Israelis. It hides beneath the colorful wrappings of a renewed Hasidism, Jewish spiritualism, daring feminism (Shapira believes that the faster women release themselves from the bond of subjugation, the nearer the time when Eve's curse "and yet thy desire will be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" will disappear, and the redemption will be accelerated), and energetic integration into all areas of life, mainly the media and creative fields.
The manifesto reveals this core in all its frightful glory: This is a war of nation against nation, said the rabbis, as though there were no occupation. As though it were not the role of a rabbi who wants to be considered enlightened to decry this terrible distortion, which is opposed to any ethical principle, and is destroying Israel and the entire Jewish people. As though this were an eternal war, which began with the divine commandment to destroy Amalek (who attacked the Israelites in the desert after the exodus from Egypt), rather than a conflict of a type to which political solutions have been found in the history of every country and nation. As though we had no sovereign state, no government and no army. As though these were all minor players in the a-historical drama of the eternal Jew against his enemies.
The manifesto of the rabbis, therefore, is a clear invitation to a kulturkampf. On the one side of the barrier will stand all those who are nurturing the isolationist cultural core group. On the other side, all those who want to save Judaism and Zionism and the state of Israel from the regime of the ayatollahs. Forget the pork and the malls on Shabbat (subjects of conflict between religious and secular Jews). They are negligible. Instead, secular Israelis, and you among the religious who refuse to swallow this dangerous cultural core, must reclaim Jewish and Hebrew creativity, Jewish ethics and Jewish philosophy, and restore to the general public something that it has lost: the sense that it belongs to history and to the family of nations. That it is the scion of a developed nation. That it is not willing to allow a fanatic minority to lead it to the destruction of the Third Temple.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/476208.html
Deze follow-up door de Ha'aretz is zeer belangrijk om te lezen voor Nederlandse joden en andere mensen die zich lijnrecht achter Israel opstellen, all is not well in Jerusalem.