Carlo Strenger is an Israeli liberal that opposes Israel turning into a theocracy. He’s often engaged into talks with Israeli national-Religious Rabbi Uri Sherki. He says he does so because he understands there’s “desperate need for dialogue between Israel’s liberals and the national-religious.” He says “We have come to the point where we live in universes so different that it is becoming questionable how these groups can ever cooperate fruitfully for a common future.”
I post this into my blog so you can see what’s the level of paranoia of messianic Jews in Israel. While you read it, you should keep in mind that this is the discourse driving many Israelis (thankfully not all), especially those 500,000 living in settlements in West Bank, called by Israel ‘Judea and Samaria’ to avoid acknowledging the existence of Palestine. All settlements are illegal under international law.
Israel has long given national-religious leaders like Sherki and their followers a blank cheque. The level of radicalisation Israel is leaving today, not only with the Palestinians but among the Israelis themselves, has been carefully created by several governments that have done nothing but flirtate with their radical ideas and practices, in Israel and in the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
As a result, a polarised society that battles between secularism and an ethnically driven theocracy. One that is not that far away of the always criticised Iran, even if theocratic Israelis will always deny it. And a government complicit with the radicalism of Zionist ultra-orthodox Jews in order to maintain an occupation that the world looks at in silence.
National-religious messianism is endangering Israel
It is time for the majority of Israelis, secular or religious, who think otherwise to take action before it is too late.
Sherki is adamant that the West Bank is part of Israel on theological grounds, and he does not believe that the Palestinians living there should have political rights. He always insists that Jewish law has a solution for this: the category of Ger Toshav, a resident alien, makes sure, he says, that they will have full human rights, but no political rights.
(···) I have, time and again, told him that his long-term vision for the greater land of Israel is an elegant way of describing an apartheid system. His general reaction is that I am stereotyping him. If I tell him that the idea of an ethnic group that does not have political rights is pretty much the definition of apartheid, I generally receive no answer. This is particularly frightening because Rabbi Sherki is mild-mannered and cultivated; in addition to his Rabbinical training, he has a wide secular knowledge, so there is no way of attributing his position to ignorance or lack of culture.
Rabbi Sherki also has an utterly unrealistic view on Israel’s relation to the West: he argues that the West criticizes Israel because it does not take its role of being humanity’s moral beacon seriously. When I ask him what this means, he answers that Zionism has only fully come into its own after what he calls the liberation of Judea and Samaria; and that we need to stop apologizing for this, because the Jewish people will be able to fulfill its historic function: From Zion the teaching shall spread!
When I tell Rabbi Sherki that I happen to speak quite a bit to European politicians, diplomats, journalists and academics; that they in no way feel that Israel should have some special role in the world, but have a much more modest demand: that it adhere to international law, respect Palestinian rights and end the occupation, he tells me that I simply don’t understand the Christian unconscious. No facts will confuse his mind.
Sherki is by no means among the more extreme rabbis of the national-religious camp. And yet there are moments in which he expresses visceral hatred for Arabs, and a degree of disdain for secular Israelis that is breathtaking: a few months ago he said that women working in offices in secular Israel are required to dress like whores.
(···) Beyond the outrage and the disbelief, Sherki’s views profoundly worry me. He has a large followership; many attend his courses throughout the country, and he plays a leading role in one of Jerusalem’s major Yeshivas. Men like him raise a generation of students to believe that the Jewish people indeed has the right to trample the rights of others; who think that the rest of the world should simply bow to the precepts of the Torah as they see it. They are also deeply convinced that their interpretation of Judaism has a monopoly
(···) People like Rabbi Sherki must be taken deeply seriously: The national religious vision has decisively shaped Israel’s history. Their project of settling in the West Bank with the goal of annexing it to Israel has decisively shaped Israel’s history for more than forty years. Their unrelenting ideological and religious conviction that the Jewish people has an eternal right to the West Bank has made them utterly blind to the moral and political disaster that the occupation has become.
(···) since 1974 almost no Israeli politician has risked open conflict with the national religious movement that is doing everything to undermine this democracy. Yitzhak Rabin did so by initiating the Oslo process; he paid with his life for it – and polls have shown that more than sixty percent of national-religious Jews in Israel are in favor of pardoning Rabin’s murderer, Yigal Amir, whose brother was released from prison a month ago.
Now Israel’s democracy is facing possibly the greatest threat in its history: many leaders of the national-religious movement say explicitly that Israeli democracy is no longer necessary and that the country must become a theocracy. It is time for the majority of Israelis, secular or religious, who think otherwise to take action before it is too late.
[من فلسطين] 