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Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel

By Israel Shahak and Norton MezvinskyPluto Press, 2004

The topic of religious fundamentalism and its political impact have been confined lately to the Islamic variety. Christian fundamentalism is beginning to attract scholarly attention, but Jewish fundamentalism has rarely been subjected to rigorous analysis. Several factors account for this, including general Western reluctance to broach such topics which may raise anti-Semitic charges, as well as the inaccessibility of Hebrew-language reference material to the average researcher. Shahak and Mezvinsky are eminently qualified to write on this subject not only because of their religious affiliation, but also, in the case of the late Shahak, because of his extensive commitment to human rights issues.

A study of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel is also overdue because of the undeniable relevance of this phenomenon to the question of Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, the major defining elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, it is the central contention of the authors that this conflict will retain its propensity for obfuscation unless and until the role of Israeli Jewish fundamentalism is clearly understood. The book focuses on the rise of the Haredim (religious fundamentalists) in Israeli politics and society as a result of the Oslo peace process and the tendency of the secular Israeli press to sensationalize these groups’ bizarre ideas and behavior patterns. The authors demonstrate how the Israeli religious camp opposes the prospect of the creation of a Palestinian state because it views this as a weakness at a time when they have acquired great pride in the display of Jewish power. A tough Israeli state, according to this view, is the only compensation for centuries of Jewish humiliation. The fundamentalist attitude to the land of Palestine is summed up in the words of Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, head of a religious school in one of the West Bank’s most militant settlements, namely Kiryat Arba. “The unique attachment of the Children of Israel to the Land of Israel cannot be compared to the ties of any nation to its land,” he wrote. “Our attachment,” he added “originates in the Devine Plan of the Creation of Heaven and Earth.” (p. xi) Haredi Jews who are now concentrated in the Jerusalem area and in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, reject many aspects of the modern Israeli state by refusing to perform military service and to pay taxes, preferring to concentrate on their religious studies in their own yeshiva schools.

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The book, however, sees greater danger in that segment of the religious community that engages in all aspects of Israeli society and government. This includes members of the National Religious Party and the Gush Emunim, the movement of religious settlers in the West Bank and Gaza known as “The Block of the Faithful.” It is here that the authors excel by providing unknown information and fresh insights into this influential group, which includes not only Ashkenazi and Oriental Jews, but also merges with the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum, such as the Likud Party. Thus, while the religious camp may only account for twenty per cent of the Israeli population, its political influence and alliances make it a very important political player. Since members of the National Religious Party and the Gush Emunim do not refrain from performing military service, they become extremely threatening as they bring their strategic religious perspective to bear on their army careers. Some are in the officer ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces and feel obliged to pursue biblical strategic plans, such as when they insisted on retaining control of Lebanese territories because these were “part of the heritage of our ancestors, the tribes of Asher, Naphtali and Zebulun.” (p. 70) Neither do the authors ignore the enormous political and spiritual influence of the army rabbis, whose role exposes the fallacy of regarding Israel as the only democratic state in the Middle East. The extremism of the settler movement is rarely reported in the Western press, which rarely mentions the exploits of groups such as Meir Kahane’s Kach party. Kahane’s two memorable failed Knesset bills, for instance, received little notice although they were enough to make the cheeks of a Southern American racist blush. These called for prohibiting intermarriage between various religious groups, and the denial of citizenship to non-Jewish residents of the state.

Perhaps the strongest and most intriguing segment of this book is that which emphasizes the historical roots of Jewish fundamentalism and the movement’s relationship to the modern ideology of Zionism. We begin to understand what the Jewish diaspora was like and what body of theological thought it spawned after reading about the period of Jewish history stretching from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE until modernity, when Jews begin to gain social and political acceptance in some parts of nineteenth- century Europe. It is pointed out that during these long centuries when Jewish communities, particularly in Eastern Europe, where forcibly isolated from the larger states in which they existed, judicial and administrative autonomy meant rule by the rabbis. It is this imposed autonomy that produced the large body of Jewish writing known as the Cabbala, which in the view of the authors, was basically mystical and religious speculative thought mired in minutia. This same body of writing was so misogynistic as to make listening to a woman’s voice tantamount to a man committing adultery. This was the same worldview

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which prompted the leader of the largest Hassidic sect, the Gur Hassids, to claim that Israel lost the Yom Kippur War in 1973 because the country was led by a woman (Golda Meir). The religious camp still argues that women cannot enjoy even religious equality with men. Some of the most outrageous views of the Haredim claim that the death of one-and-a-half million Jewish children during the Holocaust was divine punishment for the sins of embracing modernity and neglecting Talmudic study. Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph, spiritual leader of the Shas Party, representing Oriental Haredim, declared in 1967 that unlike members of the Gush Emunim and the National Religious Party, he did not believe that the period of redemption has begun which would justify conquering all the land of Israel and justifying massive loss of Jewish life. In messianic times, Yoseph argued, the Jews will be strong and will be able to conquer the land, expel all non-Jews, and destroy all Christian churches on the land, but he insisted that messianic times and the time of redemption were not yet at hand. He also lamented that international law and world public opinion do not allow the destruction of Christian churches yet.

The story becomes more meaningful when the authors explain the conversion of Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, Palestine’s chief rabbi during the British Mandate period, to the Zionist ideology. It was Kook and his son after him, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who infused life into the National Religious Party. Rabbi Kook the younger (d. 1981) is credited with founding Gush Emunim immediately following the shock of the 1973 war. The settlements, which remained limited after the 1967 War because of Moshe Dayan’s preference for reliance on the services of Palestinian village leagues for securing the land while saving the lives of Israeli soldiers for real combat duty, acquired new importance as the village leagues failed to carry out their intended mission. The Israeli public in general was also becoming increasingly enchanted with the settlements, seeing them as pioneering outposts in dangerous territory in the same manner in which the early Kibbutzniks conquered and tamed the land generations earlier. The militant Gush Emunim movement turned out to be the most suitable group to defend the idea of the settlements, combining militancy, nationalism and religious sanction in one movement.

But the story of the settlements and the religious haredim becomes more chilling when the authors place the life and death of Hebron murderer Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, in the proper religio-political context. Goldstein’s attack on Muslim worshipers in the act of prayers and the glorification that he received after his death speak volumes to the power and influence of the religious settlers. Instead of seizing this opportunity to dismantle Kiryat Arba, the most militant of the settlements from which Goldstein came, the Israeli government submitted to popular pressure

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by allowing his burial place to turn into a religious shrine. But Yigal Amir’s murder can only be understood by examining the religious view on justifiable killing. Here, the authors provide an erudite summary of the concept of justice and religiously-sanctioned killing even against fellow-Jews by focusing on the history of communal life during the diaspora. Emphasizing that Amir was a Talmudic scholar, they explain how easy it was for him to justify his deed before the court that tried him.

This is a remarkable book, not only because of the depth of its scholarship, but also because of the courage of its authors. The work reveals an unknown world of zealots, scholars, political opportunists and a deeply troubled society. It goes without saying that this book is a must reading for all students of Mid-East history, politics and religion. It should also be required reading for all members of the US Congress who insist on lambasting Islamic religious education at every opportunity while turning a blind eye to the teaching in Israel’s Yeshivas, the victims of which are invariably Palestinian Arabs and sometimes Israeli secularists. The toughness of this book is reminiscent of the work of Egyptian author Muhammad Said al-Ishmawi on Islamic fundamentalism. Mercifully, with the exception of few statements here and there alleging similarity to Islamic fundamentalism, the authors do not push this argument forward. Indeed, if this book proves anything, it is the unique and unmatched territoriality and racialism of Israeli Jewish fundamentalism. Only in Israel do you hear references to “Jewish blood” as an expression of what is worthy of defending. This brand of fundamentalism is definitely dangerous, especially since it is thriving in the only nuclear-armed country in the Middle East. What is even more frightening is that while fundamentalism usually is an expression of political and military weakness, in this instance it is the ideology of power in an already powerful state.

Ghada TalhamiLake Forest College Illinois

Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence

By Muhammad Hashim KamaliThe Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge, 2003