The reason I devote space on this blog to Israel's abuses of Palestinian human rights is because 2 years ago in Hebron in the house of an Arab who fears for his safety I saw a video of Palestinian girls being attacked and stoned by religious Jewish settlers as these girls tried to make their way to school. As Amnon Aahronson, a member of the tour I was on, said, he wanted to run outside and vomit. (All of us on the tour were Jewish, led by the great Yehuda Shaul of Breaking the Silence.)
Here is a new report by Christian peacemaker teams, allied with an Israeli group, that details this continuing crime against humanity: “A Dangerous Journey: Settler violence against Palestinian
schoolchildren under Israeli military escort”. The report
journey of the children from the [West Bank] villages of Tuba and Maghaer al-Abeed
to and from their school in At-Tuwani under Israeli military escort. It
highlights how settler threats and violence during the journey
undermine the children’s safety and documents the Israeli military’s
violations of its legal obligations to ensure the children’s safe
passage and right to education.
A comparison of the data
collected during the 2007-08 school year and the 2006-07 school year
shows a constant level of settler violence against the schoolchildren
for these two years. … During
the first two months of the 2008-2009 school year, the children made
sixty-eight journeys to and from school. On fourteen of these
sixty-eight occasions (21% of journeys) the children had to wait,
either before or after school, for over half-an-hour for the Israeli
military escort to arrive. On four of these occasions, the children had
to wait for over an hour, and one morning had to wait for one hour and
forty minutes for the escort to arrive.
Again I would say that the failure of Israeli society to honor the rights of these children and the failure of the American Diaspora community to ever discuss this abuse is a failure of Jewish ethnocentrism. Put another way: selfishness. I think at some level I truly love my Jewishness or I wouldn't be so engaged by it; it was how I thought of myself all my growing-up years. And I really think there is a fight on now for the soul of Jewishness. I ask all young Jews in America who cherish their minority rights here, to the point where they don't even think of themselves as a minority, many of them: How can someone be Jewish and tolerate this?
Thank you for this post. The answer is that you cannot be a decent human being — Jewish or not — and tolerate this. It has been clear for years that many in the settler movement are thugs and ideologues who see nothing wrong with using violence to advance their goals. The only way for Israel to redeem itself, the very idea of Zionism, and — as you said — the soul of modern Jewishness, is to once and for all disentangle itself from the settler movement.
Its definitely true that ill treatment of other human beings is despicable, and an example of individuals that have lost their bearing.
I had a conversation with my son, who is a full-time yeshiva student now, in Jerusalem as of next week, and asked him a few "if" questions about harming non-Jews.
He stated assertively, that his understanding is that there is no halachic justification for unilateral harm, or anticipatory harms (except in the rare cases of demonstrable prevention of harms to oneself or those that you are responsible for).
He's not a rabbi, just a really beginning student. My impression is that those that state that they are harming on religious grounds, are rationalizing (which is one of the worst sins possible, to claim to be applying Torah, but to select interpretations for prejudicial and opportunist benefit).
To argue this with religious settlers, REQUIRES knowledge of Torah, the ability to site references, which I don't have.
It is also true, that Jews have been treated harmfully throughout the Arab world, and prominently in Palestine, and a stand for justice would include a stand for the Jewish minority where they exist, or would exist.
Not often that your read such truly inspired bullshit
What do you regard as bullshit, Sword?
Specifically.
While I applaud any efforts for religious Jews to engage the fundamentalist settler movement and attempt to persuade them to abandon violence, this should be thought of as only part of a long-term solution.
In the short term, what is urgently needed is for Israel to enforce its own laws and to arrest and prosecute those who continue to illegally claim Palestinian land and commit acts of violence against Palestinians.
A law-abiding state does not need to argue with those who disregard the law; it simply needs to arrest them. Insofar as arguing Halachah can serve to undermine the ideological roots of the settler movement, then it is worth pursuing, but it's not what is needed to protect these schoolchildren from harm right now.
Agreed as far as actual law-breaking goes.
Your cite ignores that there are multiple diverging nationalist codes that various groups subscribe to. (Varying sharia and national Palestinian codes, varying halacha and Zionist and civil codes).
For efforts at peace, it requires discussion to evolve a consented code of law, whether consented by actual parliamentary representation, or even just bi-lateral accomodations.
Law is only law if consented.
If large groups derive their accountability to law to very diverging but fanatic codes, it is difficult to control.
These Settler Thugs are as representative of Jews as the Mafia is of Italians, the drunks at my local bar of the Irish, the Crips are of African-Americans, and Charles Keating is of WASPS.
Nadav: the issue of "applying the law" and arresting these people is a moot point. These thugs (and even the non-violent settlers) should not have been there to begin with, except with the full consent of the Palestinian state, which does not exist precisely because the world has always rewarded zionists for land theft. The settlers have had the backing (and funding) of the state in "running and grabbing more hills". So your call for the application of the "law" — whatever "law" means in Israeli dictionaries — is utterly ridiculous and hypocritical. You can't call for the application of one set of laws (domestic) while tolerating the violation of another (international).
Anyway, I also want to point out that the settlers' argument for "having it all" and their references to how Israel started out this way is more logical than the argument of the so-called left in Israel (as well as the "center"). All the lands in Israel-proper were settled the same way, by the same type of people (for e.g. read the diary of Ahad Ha'am and his description of the way the new settlers as early as 1900 treated the Palestinians), and stolen through the same kind of tactics, the same kind of thuggish behavior, brutalities, and massacres. And Baruch Goldstein is no worse than Ben-Gurion or Shamir or Sharett or Begin or Sharon. In fact, all the above have much more blood on their hands than Goldstein, and yet somehow their mass-murderous nature is "acceptable". It's like saying there are bad genocides, and then there are good ones. At any rate, the settlers, with their behavior and the kind of arguments they have been advancing, are actually undermining the founding myths of Israel. Which, in the long run, cannot be a bad thing. The settlers may actually be the last nail in the coffin of the zionist ideology, which is doomed to fail.
Some selections from Ahad Ha'am can be found here–
link to palestineremembered.com
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So Phil,
What do you love about your Jewishness in fact?
Values, comraderie, humor, insistence on being a mensch (a good man), food, ritual?
And, Phil,
What do you love about being an American? Values such as equality before the law? Diverse comraderie, humor, insistence on being a good human, food, ritual?
"These Settler Thugs are as representative of Jews as Charles Keating is of WASPS."
What do you mean? The wasps have disappeared, whilst Charles, to our joy, is still with us.
Good question anon.
What do you love about being an American?
I know you thought that you were only ridiculing, but who knew you might actually say something.
Google searhed palestiniaan children killed 2008, 1st result:
Palestinian group says Israelis killed 68 children in Gaza in year …
21 Oct 2008 … A prominent Palestinian human rights group says it has found evidence that 68 children were killed in the Gaza Strip in the 12 months to …
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/21/israel-palestinian-children – 72k –
And that is just in Gaza
And I was in Jericho once, and a child was shot dead, I did not see the shooting, but I saw the mother crying and the body being carried to the morgue, all within half an hour.
Another time I got to a Palestinian village 30 to 40 minutes after a palestinian woman was shot dead by a passing settler, she had been in her kitchen washing dishes. It was a drive by one….
"I think at some level I truly love my Jewishness or I wouldn't be so engaged by it; it was how I thought of myself all my growing-up years. And I really think there is a fight on now for the soul of Jewishness."
That's very honest, Phil.